When Ecuadorians went to the polls on Nov. 26 they collectively said no to neoliberalism as they voted overwhelmingly for maverick candidate Rafael Correa over billionaire banana tycoon Alvaro Noboa. The choice between Noboa and Correa was a choice between the past and the future, a future that undoubtedly makes Washington very uneasy as yet another country in Latin America elected a left-of-center candidate.
"They [the heavily armed Mexican federal police] began to hit us indiscriminately as they moved in. I was carrying my friend who'd fainted from the tear gas they shot at us. Seven police were hitting me with their billy clubs. They took my wallet and my cell phone, then threw me on top of a mountain of people. They took off everybody's shoes and tied our hands behind our backs. For an hour and a half they spit on us, kicked us, tortured us, then they grabbed me and threw me in the back of a pickup. I was covered with blood. They questioned us, kicked us, jumped on us. We drove for two hours. I lost all feeling in my body. When they finally stopped they pulled me out of the pickup by my hair. 'Drag yourselves like the dogs you are!' they reviled us."
The motto of the United States of Consumption is "In More We Trust." The contribution of American culture to humanity is consumption obsession. Our epidemic of obesity, our land gluttonous suburban sprawl, our monster-size environmental footprint, our ravenous automobile addiction, and our heartless greed are symptoms of a deep-seated, sick mental state that keeps the economy humming. And it keeps increasing economic inequality and apartheid.
Source: WW 4 Report
When Alvaro Noboa, Ecuador’s richest man, won enough votes during the October 15 first round of the presidential election to advance into the final runoff on November 26, rural and urban social movements throughout the Andean nation mobilized in a campaign against him. The prospect of the presidency falling into the hands of the Bonita banana magnate, notorious for the violent repression of workers’ attempts to unionize and even for the use of child labor on his plantations, sparked a nationwide mobilization by indigenous, environmental, youth, anti-militarist, and other social justice groups-not necessarily out of a belief in electoral politics, but in repudiation of Noboa’s neoliberal platform plans to establish free trade agreements with the United States.
"Honest hope derives from a belief that positive change is possible in the world. And we will only believe this if we experience ourselves changing. The key is risk, doing that which we thought we could not do."-Frances Moore Lappe
Hope and risk. For those of us committed to transformative change it is this combination that fuels our actions-the belief that change truly is possible and that we are willing to take risks to create a better society. But sometimes the risk is too great. All too often those actions which would accurately reflect our values are compromised or avoided simply to maintain survival. This is particularly common in situations that directly affect our lives.
Silvestre Saisari, a bearded, soft-spoken leader in the Bolivian Landless Workers' Movement (MST), sat in his office in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. The building was surrounded by a high cement wall topped with barbed wire. It looked like a military bunker. This made sense given the treatment Saisairi and other like-minded social and labor organizers received from the city's right wing elite. In 2005, the young MST leader was attacked while giving a press conference on landowners' use of armed thugs to suppress landless farmers. To prevent him from denouncing these acts to the media, people reportedly tied to landowners pulled his hair, strangled, punched, and beat him.(1) Sitting in his well-protected headquarters, Saisari explained, "Land is a center of power. He who has land, has power .we are proposing than this land be redistributed, so their [elites] power will be affected."(2)
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019