Open veins

Bolivia provides resistance and hope at Brokenhagen

I have just published this article on TNI about my experience of working with the Bolivian government at the UN Copenhagen Climate Conference.

It was 3am on Saturday morning – a time you might expect to be heading home from a good party, certainly not waiting for a international diplomatic meeting to begin. Yet that was the reality on 19th December, as I sat with the Bolivian delegation in the main plenary of the UN Conference on Climate Change. Bolivia's negotiators however did not seem tired; rather furious and incredulous. For whilst we waited, the US and EU were out at press conferences celebrating a global UN accord on climate change that Bolivia and most of the world had not even seen.

The accord had been drawn up in a private meeting by the major powers with the token participation of a few other developing countries but had no mandate from the whole UN. To make matters worse, when the Danish Chair of the Conference eventually opened the session, he asked everyone to read the Accord and clearly expected everyone to approve it. Commotion broke out on the floor. Rene Orellana, the normally quiet-spoken Bolivia's Minister for Water and the Environment, angrily denounced the Copenhagen Accord in no uncertain terms: “This is no way to decide the future of humanity and the planet. We can not in one hour  decide on the future of millions of people. We will not accept a document imposed by a small minority that does not respect consultations over the last two years with peoples and amongst governments.”

Thanks to the courage of Bolivia and a few other nations – and against huge pressure and threats to sign the deal -  the UN did not endorse or adopt the accord but instead were forced to use the much weaker and vacuous language of “noting” it.

UN undermined by G20

Here is a blog I wrote for the San Francisco Bay Guardian after attending the UN Conference on the Global Economic Crisis in New York last week....

Maybe I was being a naïve activist, but I thought I would be covering an important and consequential event. The world is facing a devastating economic crisis, accompanied by a toxic mix of crises of climate chaos, food prices and even flu outbreaks, so surely the world's eyes would be on the UN as 192 nations gathered this week to supposedly develop a smart, effective response to these pressing and interconnected issues.

Yet, here I am on the second day of the UN conference on the Global Economic Crisis and its Impact on the development, and for the press it is as if the meeting did not exist. Until Michael Jackson’s death, the latest dull exploits of US celebrity misfits Jon and Kate - famous mainly for their ability to reproduce- were the only stories staring out at me on most front pages.

Why are top Democrats shielding Goni?

I have had the following post published in the weekly, the San Francisco Bay Guardian. My final edits didn't get through into the final piece so if you want to use it, please use the version below.

Top Democratic Party pollster Stanley Greenberg rolled into San Francisco last month to promote his latest book, Dispatches from the War Room – In the trenches with five extraordinary leaders (2009, St. Martin’s Press). The slight, bespectacled man spoke at the Commonwealth Club, sharing what he hoped were “honest and frank” accounts of working with leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton.

While he happily pontificated on the lessons these experiences held for President Barack Obama, he was a bit more defensive on why he had proudly featured in the book Gonzalo “Goni” Sanchez de Lozada, former President of Bolivia who is currently wanted for his role in a massacre of 67 people in October 2003.

Piracy and the digital revolution

I have written the following piece for Red Pepper and the Networked Politics project of the Transnational Institute. The latest on the trial which the article covers can be seen on Wired Magazine's blog.

There isn’t an eye patch or hook in sight, but three young computer geeks and a businessman have recently made piracy very sexy in Sweden. The four founders of a popular file-sharing service called Pirate Bay, become instant underdog cyber-heroes as they took the stand in court in February 2009 against US media giants such as Sony and Warner Brothers. The four potentially face up to two years in prison and fines of up to $180,000 dollars if they are found guilty of infringement of copyright laws.

Cross and bone flags flutter outside the court, every utterance is blogged and twittered and new members are flooding to a Pirate political party that has overtaken the Green Party in terms of members. The contentious file-sharing website – www.piratebay.org – continues to taunt the music industry reps with insults and the spectre of lost profits as an estimated 22 million users swap files from U2’s latest album to Oscar-winning films like Slum Dog Millionaire.

Bolivia's new constitution

I have had the following piece published for TNI on the approval of Bolivia's new constitution. The photo is by Ben Dangl of upsidedownworld which has some good coverage of the build-up to and the day of the referendum.

On 25 January, three days before the world’s business and political elites gathered for the World Economic Forum in Davos, a very different crowd was forming in the Andean capital of Bolivia. Whilst Davos’ leaders appeared bereft and lost at the failure of their prized economic model, Bolivians danced to mark its defeat. The occasion was the celebration of the country’s new constitution, which in its opening words “puts behind us the colonial, republican and neoliberal state” and which commits itself to building a state “based on principles of sovereignty, dignity, complementarity, solidarity, harmony and equal distribution and redistribution of social goods.”

Against a barrage of opposition media propaganda funded by Bolivia’s elites, the new constitution was approved with 61% of the popular vote. Given the extent of the financial crisis in the US and Europe, the clear lack of popular confidence in Bolivia in the free market model is unlikely to have ruffled many feathers, but it is none the less very significant. Bolivia was once the prized pupil for its wholesale application of policies encouraged by the IMF and the World Bank. Now it is one of the countries articulating an alternative.

Water birth

I am happy to announce the safe arrival of Sumaya Elyse Buxton, born on 18 October 2008. Click on the photo for a gallery of some images. Below are some words that the birth inspired me to write:

Water Birth

For Sumaya Elyse Buxton

I sit like a fisherman expectant,
Gazing at her rose-pink surface,
Which quivers, ripples out,
One arm flickers, a faint egret cry,
Her body returns to stillness.

I see mirrored reflections
Of the eddying
That rolled across Juliette’s watery womb.
Our attempts then at imagined connection
Touching limbs through gossamer-thin skin.

Through a canal of a few inches
Her and our world turned inside out.
The ghostly black-white of ultrasound
Exposed in raw light into
The flushed-red of a perfectly detailed being.

Our imaginings have become the
Reality of nurturing new and vulnerable life.
We have become extensions of her reflexes,
Reacting instinctively
To the crumpling and softening of her face.
Future and past reduced to the present moment.

On my first outing
I find myself walking,
Sumaya cocooned in my sling,
To a nearby nature reserve.
Autumnal dusk feathers the sky,
Flocks of geese arc so close,
Their wings compress the air around us.
We look out at the water’s edge
Squinting towards a shared future.

28 October 2008

Environmentalism: Last nail in the miners' coffin?

This post is a bit old because it was waiting to be published elsewhere which didn't happen so am posting it here. Its relevance about not forgetting the workers as we fight against fossil fuels has relevance though for future struggles. The slightly "cheesy" slogan on my partner's pregnant belly with the coal power plant behind (which featured in the Guardian newspaper) links through to a gallery of my photos from climate camp. You can also see more including a piece that Juliette published on Yes Magazine. 

I was barely out of primary school, let alone politically conscious, but images of police clashing with miners in the mid-80s still ricochet in my head. The images have been reinforced more recently by films such as “Brassed off” that gave an insight into the way Thatcher’s war on the miners divided and destroyed strong working class communities and culture.

If I had been ten years older in 1984, there is no doubt I would have been on the side of the miners. Yet as we approach the 25 year anniversary of the miner’s strike, I have joined the growing movement of activists who are calling for “No New Coal” and want to see coal power stations shut down to stop climate chaos. The contradiction has sat with me ever since deciding to go down to Climate Camp last week – and was brought to fore by the arrival of the renowned trade union fighter Arthur Scargill at the camp on Monday. 

Peace returns but issues unresolved

I don't have much time to blog right now, but recommend the following pieces for updates on what has happened recently: Reactionary rampage: the paramilitary massacre in Bolivia by Forrest Hilton, Brewing Civil war in Time Magazine, and the Machine Gun and the Meeting Table in Upside Down World.

Of course these stories are accompanied by personal ones of tragedy that you usually don't hear, except perhaps in countries like Bolivia because of their size. It was brought home to me, the costs of struggle in Bolivia, when I heard news that a friend of a friend  lost her cousin in the massacre in Pando. I can only imagine how devastated she is.

There are a huge number of websites and blogs to check up on Bolivia nowadays. But these are some of the English-speaking ones I have been checking recently:

Upside Down World: great site run by a friend Ben Dangl on political developments in Latin America

Abiding in Bolivia: amusing caustic blog attacking the Right in Bolivia and exposing the generally ignorant international press coverage

Missionary Man: Another friend from Cochabamba, who when he writes does good analysis of what is happening

Bolivia Information Forum: Does some good briefings on developments

Machetera: does translations of key articles

Ukhampacha: Tends to be more updated in Spanish than English, but recently there has  been a burst of activity on the website

Elite backlash

What do you do if you are living in a country where a government looks like taking back thousands of acres of your land (most of which you stole but hey you have been allowed it up to now)? Or perhaps you are a business leader who has proudly had government in your pocket, yet now they pay little attention to you and keep doing things that just don't make "good business sense." Or perhaps you are white and a small minority in a largely indigenous country but have always had members of your family in power, and suddenly the government is taken over by loads of ignorant people who look frighteningly like your sweet housemaid.

Well I guess you might look at changing the national government, but they have received more votes than you ever did, so you opt to take control of local government which is a bit easier. Then you push for more power and autonomy. When the government doesn't look like giving you what you want, still keep their money on the purse strings on which your local power depends, and worse of all threaten to deepen their programme of changes, you start to get desperate. Maybe you decide to organise some strikes, marches, pay bands to write cheesy lyrics about freedom, hope bit by bit you can make the central government's work impossible and that their supporters will start to wane.

Then you have a referendum, and you can't believe how stupid your own countrymen are because they vote in ever larger numbers for the government - even goddamit from your own region. Hey, isnt democracy meant to be on my side? Isn't that what Bush promised? What is one to do?

Changing lives

A boy weaves down a road bordered with neat gardens and pitches a newspaper onto the front lawn of a house. There is a sound of a click and the automated sprinkler system starts up, soaking the newspaper. A middle-aged man pulls out of his driveway. “Bye daddy,” chirrup some girls cutely. Nope, it’s not a scene from a movie. It’s a scene from my new life.

And yes, for those forlorn ten loyal blog readers who have faced months of silence from this blog, it is a bit of a jump from my former existence in Bolivia. I did warn you a few blogs ago, but never had a chance to properly explain myself.

I blame it all on Goethe and a Venezuelan brothel.