Linyon fé lafòs*

*This is Haitian Kreyol for "There is strength in numbers." (Prononciation: leen-YON fay lah-FAWSS. It's very similar to the other Haitian Kreyol saying, "There is strength in onions.")

I suppose the literal translation would be, "The union makes strength." I really want to join the United Strength Workers' Union. Or at least get one of their t-shirts.

February 20, 2006

The other night I found myself in a real ideological dilemma. It's the dilemma that every well-meaning, middle-class white kid from America's Heartland faces about a dozen times a day when spending time in the global south:

Coconut ice cream or strawberry swirl?

No, while the ice cream dilemma is surely one I'll expound on at a later date, my current brain-buster is marginally more complicated and waaaay less delicious.

Here's the context: I've just started a class on development and underdevelopment that deals with why traditional economic development strategies don't work in the ex-colonized world. We're reading a book by a guy named Carlos Marx – I'm thinking he's a lesser-known relative of the nineteenth century father of socialism, Karl Marx.

So we're discussing the original accumulation of capital and the birth of capitalism, and how it was an unusually violent combination of:
1) systematically kicking farmers off their land and forcing them into wage labor in Europe, and 2) bringing in cheap raw materials with the use of slave labor in the colonies.

Add this to the context of being in the Dominican Republic, an ex-colony and card-carrying member of "the developing world." It doesn't take a great deal of digging around to see how the DR's colony status still plays out today: free trade zones, crippling foreign debt, and cheap, cheap labor.

We all know that unskilled laborers are exploited to no end in places like this – 44 percent of the world's population lives on less than $2 a day. But sometimes we don't realize how much supposedly respected occupations get squeezed as well. Teachers regularly make less than $300 a month, and doctors in the public hospitals make as little as $500-600. (That's poverty wages – for a doctor.)

The cost of living is lower here, but not drastically lower. Gas costs over $3 a gallon and many imports cost more than they would in the U.S.

Anyway, the developed world still counts on cheap labor here as much as it ever did, so it follows that they're going to do all they can to make sure "underdeveloped" countries never actually develop. To date, none ever have.

Then in class we start talking about the State as we now know it, and how it came into being as a means of protecting the ill-gotten wealth of the new capitalist class.

So by now I'm pretty much hating the State. Just walking around after class, hating the State. That crafty, conniving, no-good bourgeoisie and its bully big brother the State, always trying to keep the working man down. I've got myself all riled up – I'm almost mad enough to write a letter to my Senator!

Later that evening, we've got a meeting to talk about preparations for our International Summit of Justicia Global. Four of us come out of the community house to leave at about 10 p.m. – and Harry says, "Hey, very funny, guys. Where'd you hide my car?"

Somebody stole Harry's car. In the fifteen minutes between when our friends left and when we left, they stole his car. Right out from under our noses. No broken glass, no loud noises. Just no car.

So the rest of the night until about one in the morning, we're talking to the cops, submitting reports, shuffling papers.

And I've got this mantra going through my head the whole time: "The purpose of the State is to protect the private property of the ruling class. The purpose of the State is to protect the private property of the ruling class. The purpose of the State..."

Ha. Now we are the ruling class. We are depending on the State to find our private property, return it to us, and throw those poor thieving rascals who stole from us into the clink.

Having been so recently steeped in (under)development theory and the writings of Carlos Marx, I found it absurd to think about shaking my fist and howling for "justice." But ... sniffle ... they stole Harry's car!

* * *

The end of this story doesn't fit in the cute little box I've been building for it. I was going to write something about how "we can either buy bigger alarm systems to protect our cars, or we can become more determined to work toward a society where people don't need to steal cars." Something like that. Very nice. Very inspiring. But then Harry called me and told me the end of the story.

Within 24 hours, the police found the stolen car, and when they identified the thief, they shot him. They could have locked him up, but they decided just to kill him instead. Within 36 hours, the case was closed. The private property had been returned to its registered owner, and justice, according to the State, had been served.

Suddenly this story is not about me and the little dilemma I had resolving the supposed contradiction between my ideology and my privilege. Suddenly it's about a society that kills human beings in order to protect Honda Accords.

But it's more than that. It's about a mother who later this week will have to bury her son. And there aren't too many grand philosophical statements I can make about that.

February 13, 2006

Five hundred United States soldiers have entered the Dominican Republic through the southern city of Barahona as a part of the "New Horizons 2006" agreement between the U.S. and Dominican governments.

According to articles in the Dominican daily El Nacional and Prensa Latina of Mexico, the soldiers have come to build four medical clinics and begin a long-term project of humanitarian aid.

Protesters from dozens of local organizations called the soldiers' presence "an abusive invasion with the intent of guaranteeing military dominion over Haiti and threatening all of Latin America from our soil."

Does that sound a little paranoid? Looking back at history, Dominicans have good reason to be wary of U.S. military presence in their country.

In 1915 U.S. troops landed to "enforce" the Dominican-Haitian border, an act that both Haitians and Dominicans in the region opposed. The U.S. soldiers served as self-appointed customs agents for nearly ten years, interrupting the free flow of people and goods between the two countries. All tariffs collected at the border went into the U.S. Treasury as repayment for an old debt owed by the Dominican Republic.

In 1965 U.S. Marines returned to the D.R. under the pretext of helping to restore order in Santo Domingo, while actually backing the overthrow of democratically elected leftist president Juan Bosch. The extra U.S. muscle insured the installation of the repressive and corrupt Joaquín Balaguer, who would later joke about being a "puppet for U.S. interests."

History shows very few cases of truly humanitarian intervention on the part of the U.S. military. It's hardly ever about "helping people" or "spreading democracy," as the above case reflects. The bottom line is securing increased access to resources.

Post-World War II policy adviser George Kennan knew that the U.S., with 6.3 percent of the world's population, controlled 50 percent of the world's wealth. His objective was to maintain that disparity.

"We shouldn't fool ourselves into permitting any altruism or sentimentality in our foreign policy," Kennan said. "We must focus on our direct national objectives."

This idea has been the backbone of U.S. policy for the past 50 years in Republican and Democratic administrations alike. The Iraq war, with its series of fabricated reasons for invasion and occupation, is only the latest in a long tradition of using the rhetoric of justice to propogate policies of domination.

Now let's return to the present situation in the Dominican Republic.

Humanitarian aid is fine idea; the D.R. sorely needs medical clinics and supplies. But why send 500 U.S. troops to do construction work in a country where the people's number one concern is unemployment? If this were a truly humanitarian mission, the U.S. would have sent cash to set up a public works program for local laborers.

The soldiers' arrival in Barahona, not far from the Haitian border, does nothing but confirm suspicions that this project is part of a larger strategy to secure U.S. interests in the face of the new Left forming in Latin America (Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, and now René Preval in Haiti, elected February 7).

So this line of critical thinking begs more questions: How many of these kinds of "agreements" are being signed despite massive protests in Latin American countries? How many U.S. soldiers are being deployed throughout Latin America for "humanitarian" purposes?

These are questions that should concern us. It's our tax dollars at work, after all.

* * *

Read the articles in El Nacional and Prensa Latina.

February 6, 2006

This was a first-rate weekend for gardening. Oh boy, did we ever garden our tails off. (It's true -- look! No more tails.)

On Saturday five of us fellas went up into the mountains outside of the city of Bonao to visit some of the members of the farmers' federation there. It was paradise. The green mountains rise almost straight out of the river hundreds of feet below. You can feel your lungs rejoicing in your chest from the clean air. There are birds and goats and bunny rabbits and all manner of crawling things, including children.

The Federación is the most beautiful place you've never been. Unless you are Elizabeth Miller, in which case you were there last summer. (Elizabeth: three of the four people I met there asked about you -- and Esteban surely would have asked as well, but he had to leave again right away.)

If you attend the 2nd International Summit of Justicia Global, you will have the pleasure of visiting the Federación. Maybe you will get to eat some of the vegetables they grow there. Maybe you will get to swim in the mountain stream. Maybe you will get to watch rabbits mating.

We brought back many medicinal plants, a sack of natural fertilizer, seeds of all shapes and sizes, and a bag full of composting worms. We were ready to build us a garden.

Yesterday, Sunday, eight of us from the organization mixed the fertilizer with sacks of dirt and sawdust that we got from the vacant lot next door and the furniture shop down the street, respectively. We fixed the shovel I broke while excavating said dirt from said vacant lot. We stopped when it got hot, went to the supermarket, bought lots of hamburger meat, and made some fantastic hamburgers. (I helped do the dishes.)

Back to the supermarkets for a second. In Dominican supermarkets, they don't often advertise, "Buy 1, Get 1 Free!" deals. They just attach whatever the thing is you're buying to the thing you're getting for free. For example, you might see a small bag of bread tied to a big bag of bread. You are to assume that the small bag is your free prize for buying the big bag. For another example, you might see a stick of butter Saran-wrapped to a package of bacon. You are to assume that your prize in this case is a free heart attack.

In the evening we fixed up the back yard/patio/slab of cement to be a plant nursery. We found an old tire, lined it with one of the sacks, filled it with our dirt mixture, and planted some little avocado trees. In plastic Coke bottles cut in half, we planted eggplant, tomatoes, green peppers, and red beans.

Now we wait. We wait like expectant fathers, our primary function finished almost before it began. We wait and pray that Susi doesn't destroy the whole thing before morning.

Susi is the German shepherd that lives here. It would make a better story if she were a jealous lover or a crazy neighbor, but alas, she is just the dog.

February 4, 2006

They say the Eskimos have 100 words for "snow" -- well, Dominicans must have at least that many for "party." I've been learning many of these words (ir de bonche, de bureo, de bureillo, de parranda, estar en chercha, hacer coro) without even once having to reveal that I can't dance.

I'm getting excellent tutoring on the words all the cool kids are using nowadays. I now know about 30 different ways to call someone stupid. My favorite is probably caradenalga ("buttface"). Incidentally, I'm also learning words that are useful in conversations with people who aren't 12 years old. Most of these words are actually English words that need to be pronounced poorly in order to be understood here.

For example, in order to go north-south in the downtown area of Santo Domingo, you need to take either the avenue Ah-brah-AN LEEN-co or the WEEN-ton CHOOR-chee.

(Hint: these are two famous dead white guys, one-time leaders of their respective nations -- two guys who, I might add, both looked good in big hats.)

There are many things I don't know yet. But when I learn them, you can bet I'll post it here first.