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.

This morning I came back from a few days in northern Huehuetenango, where new community consultations on the mining issue were taking place. In the ongoing democratic resistance against mining exploitation by foreign companies, La Consulta Comunitaria de Buena Fe continues throughout the department, this time in San Mateo Ixtatán. There was a sense of civic fiesta there, with cheerful marimba music, many people assembling outside the community hall as the results came in from the surrounding communities of the region, and ‘fireworks’ going off at an unnerving rate (bombs, why not say it). As earlier, the ‘NO’ to mining seems unanimous, although I didn’t stay for the final results.

I’ve just revisited my last photo post on the previous consulta. I posted it rather quickly and since found a lot of errors. Now I’ve spent the last hours fixing it, uploading the images in big versions, captioning it and fixing technical issues, had to do a lot of fiddling with the code and other stuff I shouldn’t be doing at 2am, nor at any other time for that matter…but: There should now be a nice set of 18 photos in a slide show, up and working. Enjoy, and let me know if you notice any issues.

I’ll post more about this week’s consulta after I’ve sorted through my photos, of which there is far too many. It’ll be at least a week of staring into the screen, but luckily there’s also a great deal of eatin’ throughout this weekend. I’m sorry to say it’s on the occation that our friend Simca is leaving to go back home to Boston, but such is life.

Now I’m getting myself hungry again at 3am. Goodnight computer. Hello bed.

Here is a bewitching theatrical response to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.. The play was censored by the BBC who deemed it unsuitable for broadcast as they thought it too partial, but The Guardian aired it on their website. I think the solo performance of Jennie Stoller is remarkable, in her interpretation of seven scenes of Israeli adults discussing how they will explain seven key moments in Israeli and Jewish history – among them the Holocaust, first Intifada and the recent bombing of Gaza. How do you explain violence and fear to a child?

Also here, here, and text here. And an excerpt from the text:

Don’t tell her

Don’t tell her the trouble about the swimming pool

Tell her it’s our water, we have the right

Tell her it’s not the water for their fields

Don’t tell her anything about water.

Don’t tell her about the bulldozer

Don’t tell her not to look at the bulldozer

Don’t tell her it was knocking the house down

Tell her it’s a building site

Don’t tell her anything about bulldozers.

Don’t tell her about the queues at the checkpoint

Tell her we’ll be there in no time

Don’t tell her anything she doesnt ask

Don’t tell her the boy was shot

Don’t tell her anything.

Tell her we’re making new farms in the desert

Don’t tell her about the olive trees

Tell her we’re building new towns in the wilderness.

Don’t tell her they throw stones

Tell her they’re not much good against tanks

Don’t tell her that.

From A context for Gaza article by Duncan Kennedy, Harvard Law School – excerpt:

” Numerous observers have charged Israel with committing war crimes during the war. Without downplaying that aspect, I think it is important to understand the 1,300 Palestinian casualties, including 400 children as well as many, many women, versus 13 Israeli casualties, as typical of a particular kind of “police action” that Western colonial powers and Western “ethno-cratic settler regimes” like ours in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Serbia and particularly apartheid South Africa, have historically undertaken to convince resisting native populations that unless they stop resisting they will suffer unbearable death and deprivation. Not just in 1947 and 1948, but also in Lebanon in 1982 and 2006, Israel used similar tactics.

Causing horrific civilian deaths is often perfectly defensible under the laws of war, which favor conventional over unconventional forces in asymmetric warfare. The outright “crimes,” like the My Lai massacre, Abu Ghraib, or Russian massacres in Afghanistan and then in Chechnya, are less important for the civilian victims than the daily tactics of air assault, bombardment, and brutal door-to-door sweeps, meant to draw fire from the resisters that will justify leveling houses and the people in them.

Can this picture be right? If so, what is to be done? If not, what is to be done? (…) “

If you don’t see the animation above, refresh the page and it should show up. From Maps of War.

FRANCE – IMMIGRATION/SOLIDARITY: French President Nicolas Sarkozy has made the demand that a fixed quota of 5,500 people be arrested by 2011 for helping illegal immigrants in France. Article L662-1 of the ‘Code for the entry and residence of alien citizens in France’ allows the state to arrest pretty much anyone deemed a ‘helper’ to immigrants; the definition ranging from human smugglers to people who out of solidarity and humanity would give temporary roof, a meal or spare clothes to a migrant in need, or as in the case of a soup kitchen organizer, recharge an immigrant’s cellphone battery.

As a response, thousands of people gathered in the center of Paris and in other French cities, offering themselves up for arrest on the charge of the crime of solidarity – so that Sarkozy might meet his demand two years ahead of schedule.

Here’s an article at france24.com

I shouldn’t feel the need to explain why I personally don’t want to own a gun, because back home in Denmark I think the general public opinion is that the idea of private gun ownership is completely insane (with the exception of professional hunters. Only hunting rifles serve any purpose in a civil society, and that’s in the woods – though I don’t particularly like hunters either). After a bit of research on various pro-gun websites I now feel a nausea brewing from reading all these macho statements and glorifications of real men, warriors and free people. But that’s not why I wanted to suddenly write about gun ownership. It’s because I recently had a handful of conversations with some of my US friends about gun ownership, where the right to bear arms is constituted in the Second Amendment. I found the issue really worth further debate, because I was surprised that none of my friends, all of whom I consider liberals, offhand took the same position as me, though their opinions differed from each other.

It started over a breakfast conversation with my friend who is from Texas, and part of the radical liberal environment there – my friend is very politically conscious, conscientious, responsible and thoughtful. He’s also vegetarian and a great cook.
Talking about the news in the US he mentioned that the Obama administration wants to instate new restrictions on gun ownership, and that people are praising it – ‘because it’s Obama, it’s all right’. I haven’t been able to actually find any real news on that, but my immediate thought when he told me was that that sounded like a really good idea.

But apparently my friend spoke of the news as a disappointment – though he doesn’t own and doesn’t want to own a gun – and that puzzled me. How could a young radical liberal and my friend support private gun ownership, when the notion to me opposes just about everything I stand for? When I’ve brought it up with other friends since, I’ve still received mixed responses, and I’ve come to realize just how deeply rooted the right to bear arms as constituted in the Second Amendment, and the idea of the individual’s sense of personal protection must be in US culture and tradition. I guess I had an idea that gun-supporters were generally conservatist republicans and neoliberals.

The argument from my friend was that the people should have the right to possess firearms because the government should not have a monopoly on strength of arms. Theoretically, if the government does not serve the people or turns against its own people, the people should be able to defend themselves against the government, and hence have the potential means to do so.
On my first year in art school, a supposedly radical institution, I was taught the definition of the state, central to the understanding of politics, as an entity which claims monopoly on the legitimate use of violence .. something I’ve later found out is the definition given by Max Weber. The idea is that authority is based on the threat of exertion of force, be that a financial penalty or community service on the mild end of the scale, imprisonment and physical force on the opposite end. Advocates for gun ownership who agree with this point to totalitarian regimes, where strict gun control accompanied by confiscation has often been followed by restriction in social liberties and ultimately in human rights violations; therefore, the people should have the right to protect their rights and resist tyranny.

I of course agree with that people shall have the right to protect their civil and human rights, and that in regimes throughout the World this is not the case. I’ll even say that I support instances of popular struggle which was won through an armed struggle – most obvious to me is when I look back at Guatemala’s 36-year long internal armed struggle, though the progress won is still questionable. However in the light of what I observe in the world, I think there’s a very long way from the guerilla uprisings against dictatorships and totalitarian regimes of Central America or South East Asia, to the United States – well, at least in terms of comparison … Anyway,

I’m going to make some arguments and counter arguments to why I’m completely against private gun ownership. Two differnent arguments but both in favor:

“People should own personal firearms so they can defend themselves against the government. The government has guns, so the people should be able to respond to that”

“Even if you are opposed to guns, because they exist and are available in the US, it’s important for people to be familiar with them so if you are ever in a situation where there ARE guns, you won’t be at a disadvantage because you’ve never used one”

My real concern with these arguments is that they are made by people who claim radical positive change on a grassroots level, which I define as policy change from enlightenment, criticism, and vision. The idea of defending yourself against an oppressive government ignores a number of issues. and certainly constitutes, for me, a conflict of interests. It is a non-political position that accepts status quo – the fact that there’s an awful lot of firearms in the US – and responds by claiming the right for more firearms. In terms of wanting political change this thinking strikes me as an admission of failure and resort to militant, in essence primitive, measures. It also dehumanizes ‘the State’ to a point where it’s two chess players against one another and a uprising against an abstract ‘authority’. Without taking into account the fact that handguns are designed to kill people, that serve ‘no function than to harm individuals’ as Obama said in a statement about getting guns off the streets. In the end, it is a device to be used by one person to inflict death on the other.

Not surprisingly there is a substantial correlation between ownership of firearms and the rate of homicides and suicides by gun – interestingly enough it seems the possession of a firearm becomes an incentive to crime, homicide and suicide, rather than just a tool in the process. Seems that suicide victims as well as homicide perpetrators by gun, are likelier to not carry out their plan if the means of a firearm is not at hand – they don’t turn to another means instead. I believe this must have something to do with the nature of the gun itself.

An argument from another good friend was that the government shouldn’t regulate everything. I agree with this, but definitely not in that the government shouldn’t regulate anything – and that a strong case could be made that the government is not regulating those things that are killing people at home and abroad – such as guns and the free market. Instead, its citizens tend to destroy each other by fear as well as by gun. Government should definitely regulate guns, and not to protect itself from its people, but to protect the people from themselves. Unfortunately the free flow of weapons correlate with the flow of the free market and with the interests of the multinational neoliberals.

The justification by political radicals (liberals and Greens) for owning firearms is thus self contradictory to their political goal. If you support the rights to bear arms and you own a firearm, then you naturally support the weapons industry, the end of which profits financially from the death of the other. An industrial complex that feeds on and into capitalism and the immensity of pain and human suffering that takes place in our world today.

I’ve twice been on the wrong end of a gun, but those two experiences didn’t give me any desire to be on the commanding end, rather they made me despise them even more. People should oppose to the nature of authority, of domination, of force; by denouncing its external means of upholding that authority instead of  resorting to primitive rhetoric of resistance, based on fighting fear with fear, externalized force through the barrel of a gun. That’s what the neoliberal agenda and the nations of dominance are about.

It’s this society of fear, built up in the Western world, that has laid bare entire nations within the last decade and is threatening to eat us from within. People who share this ideology do not deserve to call themselves radicals … at least not in the intended meaning of the word.

I remember a short discussion about this a long time ago, another dinner where in response to something I said about never wanting to shoot, even hold a gun, another friend said she liked to shoot her family’s hunting rifle, because it made her feel powerful.
If that’s power I would rather be powerless – but I’m not. I believe we can affect change by enlightenment and unity, by building a community of social cohesion, connectedness and trust.

Any comments are more than welcome.

Here are the photos from Caserio Canicham, the very small community I visited during their community referendum on mining, which I wrote about in the previous post. A click on an image starts a view of the entire set in full size (18 pictures).

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Click on an image to view the whole series in a large size.

San Rafael la Independencia, Guatemala, 2009. During a local community referendum against chemical mineral mining, in which the people of Canicham, a small rural community in northern Huehuetenango, voted unanimously against mining in Guatemala. Before being signed, the community statement was read to the community members.

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Click on an image to view the whole series in a large size.

San Rafael la Independencia, Guatemala, 2009. During a local community referendum against chemical mineral mining, kids play with found stuff.

The last two days I spent in the mountains in northern Huehuetenango, where a series of community consultations over mineral mining took place on Tuesday, in mainly Mayan Akateca communities in the farmlands surrounding San Rafael la Independencia. Thanks to a friend from NISGUA I had the opportunity to witness this rare moment of community gathering and to document the events of the day.

La Consulta Comunitaria de Buena Fe (‘The Community Referendum of Good Faith’) took place on the background of the opposition of Guatemalan communities to international megaprojects such as hydroelectric dams and especially chemical mineral mining operations. On such is the Marlin mine, an open-pit gold mine in the San Miguel Ixtahuacán and Sipakapa municipalities of San Marcos to the south, and since its opening in 2005 the subject of massive local opposition. And with good reason, as the impact on the local environment has been nothing short of disastrous. With little or no local consultation or consent prior to beginning construction, the company behind the Marlin mine, Montana Exploradora, pressured communities of San Miguel Ixtahuacán into selling their fertile ancestral lands, and people found themselves uprooted and displaced to infertile lands they couldn’t farm. From then it got worse; the mine is an open-pit mining operation where gold is extracted from the ore by a chemical process using cyanide and enough water per hour to sustain an average Guatemalan family of the area for 22 years. What follows is like the Plagues of Egypt unleashed upon the lands: water depletion and contamination, structural damages to houses due to underground vibrations, health issues such as vicious skin infections in children and a rise of cancer cases. As the mining cmopany has increased its use of security personnel, the area has also seen an increase of disappearences and mysterious deaths. In San Miguel Ixtahuacán, the sense of vigilance is mixed also with a sense of fear and oppression. When I visited a community in San Miguel Ixtahuacán with a big group, we were unexpectantly met by armed San Marcos police who insisted to escort us on the entire journey on the pretext of protecting us; it felt more like surveillance, as I think it was, on request of someone else.

The mine in San Marcos is owned by Goldcorp, a Canadian mining giant of which Montana is a subsidiary. Goldcorp has continually denied any responsability and in biased Environmental and Human Rights Impacts Assessments claim there’s no relation between their mining operations and the environmental damages and health issues of the surrounding communities. But if you ask any independent organizations you’ll hear a different story, or better yet, if you ask the people. The local opposition movement against mining in Guatemala have in part risen out of the local resistance in neighbouring Sipakapa to Goldcorp’s operations that are expanding from San Miguel Ixtahuacán into Sipakapa. For almost five years Sipakapa has resisted Goldcorp’s influence, witnessing as they could the destruction being done to Ixtahuacán. Since mid 2005 the residents have organized community consultations where they put the mining to a popular vote which is then presented to Congress. The consultas should be seen as part of the larger resistance movement in Guatemala, but they form an important and inspirational capacity.  In selling off their land piece by piece to foreign investors it gets harder and harder for the government to ignore the signatures of hundreds of thousands of farmers’ votes against mining licensing to foreign companies, as more and more community consultas take place around in the country.

Back in Huehue, I spent the night in the casa of Don Miguel, a local patriarch of Caserio Canicham, a small settlement of ten or so houses. Most of the people speak Akateco and little or no Spanish, but during dinner with Miguel we did have some great conversations, in which the inevitable question soon popped up: Whether there were work to be found in Europe. Don Miguel worked in the fields for 30 years, but family in the States – everyone has some family in the States or Mexico – have made it possible for him to build a colourful annex to his house here in the hills. The toilet’s still a tiny shed down before the cornfields, but I guess you have to prioritize. Empathetically (at least I’d like to think) I guess I said something about the World economic crisis ‘n’ all, and that it’s probably tough to find work anywhere.

The next morning at the consulta most of Canicham showed up prepared. I was acting as an independent observer to the proceedings, which I did as best I could, and snapping pictures when I could get around to it. Although I did attract a fair bit of attention, being the only outsider present in a group of forty-eight people, I think I balanced well enough between being a photographer and some kind of authority of international standing and was accepted as such .. perhaps a bit over the top, as the assembly secretary Francisco Diego gave off the impression I’d flewn in directly from Europe to oversee the consulta (though he could have done that as a courtesy towards me, he’s that kind of guy). In any case, I won’t hide a certain pride in knowing that my name was meticulously written into the community act to be entered into the municipal records.
If my presence at the consulta caused any uneasiness or stifled curiosity from the elders -I don’t know which- I think it fell apart after goofing around with the kids for a few hours. Of course they all turned out to be incredibly resourceful, which I think is the case with most kids who grew up under pretty dire straits, like life in this countryside; after our shared efforts of building a tiny church out of twigs, they were suddenly all over the place finding ever more unlikely construction materials and the church had turned into several towers of babel.

So this was what the consulta was all about: everyone was there. Every head a vote, and it was made by the book and with pride. A hand raised in favor, a hand raised against. It was a popular vote, direct democracy in one of is purest forms and I’m glad I was there to witness the members of a small community not yet affected by mining, unanimously say no to the exploitation of their ancestral lands.

Pictures will be up soon.