Hi there, back again. I will now make a turn in my blog posting and make it much more focused, regular and in-depth as I am beginning my new long-term project on migration in Europe. In about a week’s time I will be making a first research trip southern Spain, where I will visit the provinces of Cadíz –on the Strait of Gibraltar– and Almería where I will be briefly reuniting with Simca, who is doing some undoubtably great work on an organic farm there, and Lucas with whom I am making plans for collaborations in Spain and beyond. I am also looking forward to cook up a storm with Simca from her organic produce. But first of all the excursion is for seeking out places and people and getting some more direction on this project. This also means I will be writing a lot more in the near future, but also will be shifting focus to developing a project site, which currently sits at thomaselsted.net. Alongside an exhibition I am having in May-June, this site will be the site of investigation of migration across and around the external border of the European Union, with a geographic focus on migrants from North Africa into Spain via the Mediterranean. More on that soon.

Still from We Feed The World (2005)

On the subject, I just watched the really terrific documentary We Feed The World on global vs. local food production and the internal logics of global foodstuffs corporations. The movie can be watched online for free here. It features a vital interview with Jean Ziegler, the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, and some frank statements by the CEO of Nestlé. Here’s Ziegler:

“The absurdity of the situation in the agricultural markets today is the following: The rich countries, that is, the EU and the United States, give subsidies to their farmers for the production and export of their produce, last year to the tune of 349 billion dollars, [almost] a billion dollars a day. And the consequences of that is dumping, the destruction of agriculture in the southern hemisphere where there’s almost nothing else apart from peasant agriculture. To take an example, the capital of the republic of Senegal in West Africa, is Dakar. This city has the largest agricultural market in West Africa, the Sandagar Market. If you go to Sandagar Market, you can buy European vegetables, European fruit, European potatoes and so on, for a third of the local prices. So to the Senegalese peasant, even if he works himself into the ground for 18 hours a day under the burning sun, he hasn’t got a chance of being able to survive by working his own land.
So what can he do? If he’s still got the energy he risks his life as an illegal immigrant via the Strait of Gibraltar and has to hire himself out somewhere or other in Southern Spain or work as a street sweeper in Paris in inhumane conditions.”

“Free trade has nothing at all to do with freedom, that’s an enormous lie. It’s the freedom of the predatory animal in the jungle when Nestlé, for example, takes on an African farmers’ syndicate. That’s like Mike Tyson going into the ring against an unemployed and undernourished Bengali.
And the corporations, the power of the corporations in today’s world is expressed in a figure published last year by the World Bank: Last year, 52% of the gross world product, that means all the wealth produced in the world in a year, was controlled by 500 global corporations. And these global corporations are run purely with the aim of maximizing profits. The largest food product corporation in the world, with almost 300.000 employees, operating on five continents, and controlling over 8.000 brands, is Nestlé.
Nestlé is currently headed by a likable, suntanned Austrian. But he obeys the internal logic of the corporation, that is, value-free profit maximization. And if he doesn’t every year produce new, astronomical profits for his shareholders, then he’ll be out on his ear. The huge power he has today, over hundreds of millions of people in the world, won’t help him one bit. Profit maximization is the murderous strategy of global corporation hierarchies.”

– Jean Ziegler, former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food

The suntanned Austrian CEO of Nestlé is named Peter Brabeck. From his office in Switzerland, he says:

“Water is, of course, the most important raw material we have today in the world. It’s a matter of whether we should privatize the normal water supply for the population. And there are two different opinions on the matter.
The one opinion, which I think is extreme, is represented by the NGOs, who bang on about declaring water a public right. That means that you as a human being should have a right to water. That is the one, extreme solution.
And the other view says that water is a foodstuff like any other, and like any other it should have a market value. Personally I think it’s better to give foodstuff a value so that we’re all aware that it has its price, and then that one should take specific measures for the part of the population that has no access to this water, and there are many different possibilities there.
I’m still of the opinion that the biggest social responsibility of any CEO is to maintain and ensure the successful and profitable future of his enterprise. For only if we can ensure our continued long-term existence will we be able to actively participate in the solution of the problems that exist in the world.”

“We’ve got to create a positive image of the world for people, and I see absolutely no reason why we shouldn’t be positive about the future. We’ve never had it so good, we’ve never had so much money, we’ve never been so healthy, we’ve never lived as long as we do today. We have everything we want and still we go around as if we were mourning for something.”

Chair of the world’s largest producer–exporter of bottled drinking water, perhaps that’s a hint to what solutions he in having in mind, and his salary of $11 million annually, may help to explain why he’s never had it so good. The reality for the small farmers and hungry people around the globe, those millions of people which he goes on to say depend on his company, is a bit different, and less favourable: As Karl Otrok, the production director in Romania for Pioneer, one of the world’s largest producers of hybrid (GM) seeds for agriculture, says to a traditional Romanian farmer:

“I hope that the people here, the small farmers, will not have enough money to buy our seeds, that you will stay with your good seeds (…) We came here long time ago and we fucked all the West. And now we came to Romania, and we will fuck all the agriculture here.”

Howard Zinn died two days ago, as you will probably know. Here is him speaking on ideas and dreams:

Question: What is your philosophy?

Howard Zinn: I believe, I suppose, in what could be called democratic socialism. I believe that we need a society where the motive for the economic system is not corporate profit, but the motive is the welfare of people, health care, jobs, child care, and so on, where that is dominant; where there is a greater equalization of wealth and a society which is peaceful, which devotes its resources to helping people in the country and elsewhere.

I believe in a world where war is no longer the recourse for the settling of grievances and problems. I believe in the wiping out of national boundaries.

I don’t believe in visas and passports and immigration quotas. I think we need to move toward a global society. They use the word “globalization,” but they use it in a very narrow sense to mean the freedom of corporations to move across boundaries. But what we need is a freedom of people and things to move across boundaries.

When I talk about socialism without jails, I mean greater societal intervention into the economy, but without deprivation of civil liberties. Dalton Trumbo, the Hollywood writer, put it very simply. He said, “Socialism without jails.”

I’ve had these words floating through my mind for days both sung by Lhasa de Sela and by Mercedes Sosa. Indeed it’s the lyrics to the song in my previous post, written by Fito Paéz. But the ladies perform it the best.

¿Quién dijo que todo está perdido?
yo vengo a ofrecer mi corazón,
tanta sangre que se llevó el río,
yo vengo a ofrecer mi corazón.

No será tan fácil, ya sé qué pasa,
no será tan simple como pensaba,
como abrir el pecho y sacar el alma,
una cuchillada del amor.

Luna de los pobres siempre abierta,
yo vengo a ofrecer mi corazón,
como un documento inalterable
yo vengo a ofrecer mi corazón.

Y uniré las puntas de un mismo lazo,
y me iré tranquilo, me iré despacio,
y te daré todo, y me darás algo,
algo que me alivie un poco más.

Cuando no haya nadie cerca o lejos,
yo vengo a ofrecer mi corazón.
cuando los satélites no alcancen,
yo vengo a ofrecer mi corazón.

Y hablo de países y de esperanzas,
hablo por la vida, hablo por la nada,
hablo de cambiar ésta, nuestra casa,
de cambiarla por cambiar, nomás.

¿Quién dijo que todo está perdido?
yo vengo a ofrecer mi corazón.

I recently rewatched Avi Lewis & Naomi Klein’s The Take, their documentary from 2004 on Argentina’s reclaimed factory movement that rose out of the ashes of 2001’s economic melt-down (imposed by speculative neoliberalist policies, not surprisingly). I was particularly moved by the scene towards the end of the film which shows Buenos Aires street protests against a government shutdown of the worker cooperative Brukman —a textile factory run by its seamstresses— at a similarly desperate time for the film’s protagonists, industrial workers struggling to claim legal the legal rights over their autoparts factory, Forja. Lhasa de Sela’s version of the song Yo vengo a ofrecer mi corazón, popularized by la negra Mercedes Sosa, is definitely among the emotionally strongest I’ve heard. The next day I was saddened to learn that Lhasa died only days ago, on New Year’s Day – following a long struggle against breast cancer. Here’s to her—Bless her soul!

I haven’t written here for ages, but I assure you the blog isn’t left behind, it’s just been resting. I think it’s been oversleeping, but that’s how it goes. in any case, I came across a poem that merits being posted – may it signal a return to regular writing. Here’s the poem:

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
no one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world will there be,
no other end of the world will there be.

(Czeslaw Milosz)

Voces de Cambio participants, 2009 (the whole bunch this time)

It should be pretty obvious from my last post that I’ve been away from blogging for a good while, and long overdue that I write. I’m particularly sorry to have neglected to write about Voces de Cambio while the fourth session was still going on, partly because it’s something that I’ve put a lot of time and good effort into during the past months, but mostly because it’s a great organization that deserves much, much more credit and attention. If you want to learn more about Voces, don’t hesitate to write me (or them), visit their website, and if you’d like to support the program, it’s quite easy to make a donation to Voces de Cambio from there. Recently we put them on Facebook and Twitter as well, just in case .. following them on Twitter won’t flood your inbox right away, but we might have participants twittering about their experiences in future sessions. Vamos a ver ..

Above are all of the girls from this year’s session, the fourth so far. Pictured from above, left side are: Sara, Evelyn, Ana, Angie, Laura, Janeth, Felisa, and Nancy. Below: Marta, Darinca, Mariela, and Gladys. A click on the image will open the individual portraits I took of the girls.

Voces de Cambio participants, 2009 (Fourth Session)

Since early July I’ve been working with Voces de Cambio, a small non-profit in Xela run by some great people, and only my general lack of time to blog has kept it out of here; it deserves much more honorable mention than I’ve been able to give it. Voces de Cambio is an after-school program for teenage girls which provide free classes in photography and writing, as well as conversations centered around women’s rights, the role of women in Guatemala, machismo and other issues of gender inequity, and which promotes participation, self-confidence and creative growth. I originally took over from Lucas when he left Guatemala, and now that the fourth session is over, I’ve also left Guatemala. However, it’s an amazing program really, and as it’s close to our hearts we’re both continuing to work with Voces from afar. During the fourth session I’ve been running the photography bit of the program, with the indispensable help of Brenda, a graduate of the program’s first session who now works as an assistant in facilitating the new sessions. With only two days left of the exhibition at Alianza Francesa in Xela, a mention is all but overdue, but I’ll put up my images from the opening as soon as I get myself sorted here. In the meanwhile, all of the final images are now up at our Flickr gallery.

As you can see there’s some great work up there. I’ve really enjoyed working with and getting to know the participants, but also the quality of so many of the photographs has totally humbled me. I should add that most of the girls have never photographed at all before, and they’ve received a very minimum of tutoring – mostly a camera crash course and an idea to go with it. While there’s room for some personal favorites among them, more than a few of the girls have produced amazing work, and it’s been a pleasure as well as an honour to have worked with them. If you happen to be in Xela before Sep. 8th, the exhibition is still on, so I’d say get your butt down to Alianza Francesa.

¡Hasta la próxima!

Santo Domingo, Huehuetenango, Guatemala. 2009. Indians.

Santo Domingo, Guatemala, 2009.

A photo from March 2009, during a demonstration against public energy privatization in Flores, Petén region, Guatemala.

“Having left your native land, don’t look back, the Erinyes are behind you.” One of the Pythagorean principles, the advice is good but difficult to follow. It is true, the Erinyes are there, behind your back, and their very sight may petrify a mortal. Some say them to be daughters of Earth, others, daughters of Night, in any case they arrive from the depth of the underworld, are winged, and in their hair carry twisting serpents. They are your punishment for your past offenses and you know well that you cannot claim purity whether you are aware of your failings or not. The best protection against the Erinyes would be, indeed, never to look back. And yet it is impossible not to look back, for there, in the land of your ancestors, of your language, of your family, a treasure has been left, more valuable than any riches measured by money, namely, colors, shapes, intonations, details of architecture, everything that shapes one’s childhood. By letting your memory speak you wake up the past and by the same token attract the Erinyes; yet man stripped of memory is hardly human or he represents only a very impoverished humanity. Thus a contradiction appears and you have to learn how to live with it. There is another aspect of exile considered as a specific affliction of the twentieth century The most famous of the exile writers of the past, Dante, after leaving his native Florence, wandered all his life from one city to another but today those cities hardly can mean “abroad” as they are all situated in Italy. Dante died and was buried in Ravenna which today doesn’t seem at all a land distant from his birthplace. Could it happen that with the shrinkage of the planet Earth distances but also differences between particular countries grow smaller and smaller? Perhaps it would be possible to visualize a modern pilgrim’s wanderings as his going from one place to another within one country, whether that country is called Europe, a continent, or the world? If this is not so now, there is a certain latent dynamism inherent in the progress of technology, which pushes in that direction. The twentieth century also brings a quantitative change as befits an era of population explosion. In Dante’s time the number of people leaving the towns and villages where they were born was very small. Now hundreds of thousands, and even millions, migrate, chased from their homes by war, by harsh economic necessities, or political persecution, and an expatriate, for instance a writer, an artist, an intellectual who left his country for his own, so to say, fastidious reasons, motivated as he was not only by fear of starvation or of the police, cannot isolate his fate from the fate of those masses. Their nomadic existence, the slums they often inhabit, the deserts of dirty streets where their children play are, in a way, his own; he feels solidarity with them and he only wonders whether this is not an image, more and more generalized, of the human condition. For life in exile seems no more limited to a transplantation from one country to another. Industrial centers attract people who leave their peaceful but impoverished rural districts, new towns grow where a few decades ago only cattle were grazing, shacks and barracks of slums surround big capitals. When characterizing the indefiniteness and insecurity inherent in exile one notices that practically everything that is said on the subject applies to the new inhabitants of the urban landscape, even if they have not arrived from foreign lands. Alienation becomes a predicament of too many human beings to be considered an affliction of a special category, and the self-pity of an emigre reflecting on that phenomenon is undermined. (…)

(…) an archetypal exclusion from the Garden of Eden repeats itself in our lives, whether Eden be the womb of our mother or the enchanting garden of our early childhood. Centuries of tradition are behind the image of the whole earth as a land of exile, usually presented as a desertic, sterile landscape in which Adam and Eve march, their heads despondently lowered. They were chased from their native realm, their true home where the same rhythm has ruled over their bodies and their surroundings, where no separation and no nostalgia has been known. Looking back, they may see fiery swords guarding the Gates of Paradise. Their nostalgic thinking about a return to the once happy existence is intensified by their awareness of prohibition. And yet they will never completely relinquish the thought of the day when their exile will end. Later, much later on, perhaps that dream will take the shape of a golden city lasting beyond time, of a heavenly Jerusalem.

(Czeslaw Milosz on Josef Koudelka’s “Exiles” – from Americansuburb X)

Floor after community assembly. Santo Domingo, northern Huehuetenango, Guatemala. May 21, 2009.

I may be sinking into fb/twitter lingo, but I just became a fan of Somaly Mam.

A member of the Phnong ethnic minority of Cambodia, Somaly grew up alone in the forests of the Mondulkiri province after the disappearence of her family, before being taken in by a man who posed as her grandfather, who then began to abuse her and in the end sell her to a local brothel. That’s how she ended up in sexual slavery at an age of sixteen, enduring torture, rape and unspeakable abuse. After years she managed to escape by marrying a Frenchman, and now leads the Somaly Mam Foundation which works against the industry of sexual labour and human trafficking. The foundation leads a rescue and rehabilitation program that has so far effectively gotten more than 5.000 girls and women out of prostitution and helped them get an education.

So now I have a pending friend request for her on Facebook .. she also twitters:

her dead comes up with bubble from mouth and noise seems she committed suicides or spoiled by food
3 days ago

The Road of Lost Innocence is the number 1 selling in Demark
1 day ago

cooked foods for the survivors in Kampong Cham center
12 hours ago

brought the survivors to Pagoda. We made small funeral ceremony indicate Lak Kimseng who dead last Saturday
12 hours ago

enjoyed receiption under honorable of Queen of Spain’s right hand
12 hours ago

Busy lady.

My friend Peter asked me about this. So since the news is well out in international media by now, it would probably be fair to mention that these past couple of weeks the political situation in Guatemala has been more than a little precarious.

The Economist article: An indictment from the grave explains and puts the situation into a bit of context.

In brief, key members of the government have come under suspicion of murder, as foretold by the now deceased lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg. In a video released onto the internet in the days following his death, he accused president Álvaro Colom of the murder of Rosenberg’s client, anticipating that he himself would be the next to die. A serious allegation to be sure, that’s now being investigated by the UN independent comittee CICIG and an FBI agent (one) the US embassy flew in last week. There has been a bunch of manifestations in support of Colom and a great deal more demanding his resignation these past weeks, marking the deepest political crisis of the Colom administration.

Also, demonstrations against the mining operations sprung up in the capital yesterday, among other places at the Canadian embassy. And also yesterday Goldcorp, the company responsible for the Marlin mine in San Marcos, held its annual shareholder meeting in Vancouver, Canada. Indigenous community members from Sipacapa and San Miguel Ixtahuacán in the Guatemalan highlands, as well as Nak’azdli First Nation representatives of British Colombia came to Vancouver to confront Goldcorp with its environmental and human rights resposibilities. I’m excited to hear how it went.

To illustrate earlier posts, the Marlin mine in San Miguel Ixtahuacán seen from a distance. San Marcos, Guatemala, 2009. Go ahead and click it.