Arquivo da tag: Violência

Brazil study finds youth homicides have soared 346 percent over last three decades (AP)

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By Associated Press, Published: July 18

RIO DE JANEIRO — The homicide rate for Brazilian young people under age 19 shot up 346 percent over the past three decades, according to research published Wednesday by the Latin American School of Social Sciences.

During that period, youths became a far higher percentage of Brazil’s murder victims — rising from 11 percent of the total in 1980 to 43 percent in 2010, the report said. The homicide rate for young people rose from 3.1 per 100,000 people younger than 19 years old to 13.8 per 100,000.

This means deadly violence against the most vulnerable members of Brazilian society has surpassed the 10 deaths per 100,000 that mark the accepted threshold of an epidemic, said Julio Jacobo Waiselfisz, a researcher also affiliated with the Brazilian Center for Latin American Studies.

A country’s homicide rate conveys much more than just the number of people who have died, Waiselfisz said.

“Homicide is not a casual act. There is a culture of violence that is leading to the solving of conflicts by exterminating the bothersome element,” he said.

Waiselfisz said part of the increase in youth homicides might be due to the improvement in Brazil’s record keeping in recent decades.

But, he added, it is undeniable Brazil is experiencing an epidemic of violence against young people. Unlike a disease epidemic, however, the violence is not contained or short-lived because it has become part of society, built into relationships, he said.

“There is a discourse that blames the victims, that says these kids are dying because they are doing drugs, or they got into trouble,” Waiselfisz said. “There is a process of institutional omission when faced with these facts, which are taken as natural.”

The numbers in Waiselfisz’s study rank Brazil as the fourth-worst among 91 countries when it comes to youth homicides, behind El Salvador, Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago.

Perla Ribeiro, head of the nonprofit Association of Centers for the Defense of Children and Adolescents, called the study shocking, and said she hoped that Brazilians will face up to this reality and bring some change.

“Society needs to reflect on these numbers. This isn’t something often discussed, this increase in homicides of adolescents,” Ribeiro said. “All levels of government — municipal, state and federal — need to face up to this as a real public policy problem.”

Antonio Carlos Costa, a pastor who has worked for years in some of Rio de Janeiro’s most violent communities, said the homicide numbers aren’t just statistics, but names as well.

“There is Fabiana, who died in Morro dos Macacos, inside her house; there was the case of Juan,” he said, remembering an 11-year-old boy shot by police near his home and dumped in a river. “There is Joao Roberto, who died in Tijuca, and the boy Ramon from Costa Barros …,” he added, then his voice trailed off.

The cases of children who met violent deaths are too many to name, Costa said.

The majority of young victims suffer both at the hands of police and of drug traffickers and other criminal gangs, a part of Brazil that the rest of the population easily forgets — “the expendable Brazil,” he said.

“One thing I can tell you: This survey doesn’t fully reflect reality. Reality is far more dramatic,” Costa said.

He noted the numbers used in the study came from the Health Ministry’s database, and thus reflect deaths officially recorded, not the untold number of poor or marginalized youths whose disappearance or death is simply never recorded.

“Teenagers who are executed, dumped in rivers, those will never be counted,” Costa said.

The War on Suicide? (Time)

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Monday, July 23, 2012

By NANCY GIBBS; MARK THOMPSON

Leslie McCaddon sensed that the enemy had returned when she overheard her husband on the phone with their 8-year-old daughter. “Do me a favor,” he told the little girl. “Give your mommy a hug and tell her that I love her.”

She knew for certain when she got his message a few minutes later. “This is the hardest e-mail I’ve ever written,” Dr. Michael McCaddon wrote. “Please always tell my children how much I love them, and most importantly, never, ever let them find out how I died … I love you. Mike”

She grabbed a phone, sounded every alarm, but by the time his co-workers found his body hanging in the hospital call room, it was too late.

Leslie knew her husband, an Army doctor, had battled depression for years. For Rebecca Morrison, the news came more suddenly. The wife of an AH-64 Apache helicopter pilot, she was just beginning to reckon with her husband Ian’s stress and strain. Rebecca urged Ian to see the flight surgeon, call the Pentagon’s crisis hotline. He did–and waited on the line for more than 45 minutes. His final text to his wife: “STILL on hold.” Rebecca found him that night in their bedroom. He had shot himself in the neck.

Grand Praire, TX. Rebecca Morrison with some of her husband Ian’s belongings in her parents homes. Ian, an AH-64 Apache Helicopter pilot in the U.S. Army committed suicide on March 21, 2012. Ian chose ‘Ike’ for Rebecca. Peter van Agtmael/Magnum for TIME.

Both Army captains died on March 21, a continent apart. The next day, and the next day, and the next, more soldiers would die by their own hand, one every day on average, about as many as are dying on the battlefield. These are active-duty personnel, still under the military’s control and protection. Among all veterans, a suicide occurs every 80 minutes, round the clock.

Have suicides spiked because of the strain of fighting two wars? Morrison flew 70 missions in Iraq over nine months but never engaged the enemy directly. McCaddon was an ob-gyn resident at an Army hospital in Hawaii who had never been to Iraq or Afghanistan. Do the pride and protocols of a warrior culture keep service members from seeking therapy? In the three days before he died, Morrison went looking for help six times, all in vain. When Leslie McCaddon alerted commanders about her husband’s anguish, it was dismissed as the result of a lovers’ quarrel; she, not the Army, was the problem.

This is the ultimate asymmetrical war, and the Pentagon is losing. “This issue–suicides–is perhaps the most frustrating challenge that I’ve come across since becoming Secretary of Defense,” Leon Panetta said June 22. The U.S. military seldom meets an enemy it cannot target, cannot crush, cannot put a fence around or drive a tank across. But it has not been able to defeat or contain the epidemic of suicides among its troops, even as the wars wind down and the evidence mounts that the problem has become dire. While veterans account for about 10% of all U.S. adults, they account for 20% of U.S. suicides. Well trained, highly disciplined, bonded to their comrades, soldiers used to be less likely than civilians to kill themselves–but not anymore.

More U.S. military personnel have died by suicide since the war in Afghanistan began than have died fighting there. The rate jumped 80% from 2004 to 2008, and while it leveled off in 2010 and 2011, it has soared 18% this year. Suicide has passed road accidents as the leading noncombat cause of death among U.S. troops. While it’s hard to come by historical data on military suicides–the Army has been keeping suicide statistics only since the early 1980s–there’s no denying that the current numbers constitute a crisis.

The specific triggers for suicide are unique to each service member. The stresses layered on by war–the frequent deployments, the often brutal choices, the loss of comrades, the family separation–play a role. So do battle injuries, especially traumatic brain injury and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). And the constant presence of pain and death can lessen one’s fear of them.

But combat trauma alone can’t account for the trend. Nearly a third of the suicides from 2005 to 2010 were among troops who had never deployed; 43% had deployed only once. Only 8.5% had deployed three or four times. Enlisted service members are more likely to kill themselves than officers, and 18-to-24-year-olds more likely than older troops. Two-thirds do it by gunshot; 1 in 5 hangs himself. And it’s almost always him: nearly 95% of cases are male. A majority are married.

No program, outreach or initiative has worked against the surge in Army suicides, and no one knows why nothing works. The Pentagon allocates about $2 billion–nearly 4% of its $53 billion annual medical bill–to mental health. That simply isn’t enough money, says Peter Chiarelli, who recently retired as the Army’s second in command. And those who seek help are often treated too briefly.

Army officials declined to discuss specific cases. But Kim Ruocco directs suicideprevention programs at the nonprofit Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, or TAPS. She knows what Leslie McCaddon and Rebecca Morrison have endured; her husband, Marine Major John Ruocco, an AH-1 Cobra helicopter-gunship pilot, hanged himself in 2005. These were highly valued, well-educated officers with families, with futures, with few visible wounds or scars; whatever one imagines might be driving the military suicide rate, it defies easy explanation. “I was with them within hours of the deaths,” Ruocco says of the two new Army widows. “I experienced it through their eyes.” Their stories, she says, are true. And they are telling them now, they say, because someone has to start asking the right questions.

The Bomb Grunt

Michael McCaddon was an Army brat born into a uniquely edgy corner of the service: his father served in an ordnance-disposal unit, and after his parents divorced, his mother married another bomb-squad member. McCaddon entered the family business, enlisting at 17. “When I joined the Army I was 5’10” and weighed 129 lbs,” he blogged years later. “I had a great body … for a girl.” But basic training made him stronger and tougher; he pushed to get the top scores on physical-fitness tests; he took up skydiving, snorkeling, hiking. If you plan to specialize in a field in which a single mistake can cost you and your comrades their lives, it helps to have high standards. “Ever since I was new to the Army, I made it my personal goal to do as well as I can,” he recalled. “I thought of it as kind of a representation of my being, my honor, who I was.”

The Army trained him to take apart bombs. He and his team were among the first on the scene of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, combing the ruins for any other devices, and he traveled occasionally to help the Secret Service protect then First Lady Hillary Clinton. He met Leslie in 1994 during a break in her college psychology studies. They started dating, sometimes across continents–he did two tours in Bosnia. During a Stateside break in January 2001, he married Leslie in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif. They had three children in four years, and McCaddon, by then an active-duty officer, moved with his family to Vilseck, Germany, where he helped run an Army dental office.

He was still ambitious–two of Leslie’s pregnancies had been difficult, so he decided to apply to the military’s medical school and specialize in obstetrics. But then, while he was back in Washington for his interview, came a living nightmare: his oldest son, who was 3, was diagnosed with leukemia. Just before entering med school, McCaddon prepared for his son’s chemotherapy by shaving his head in solidarity so the little boy wouldn’t feel so strange. McCaddon may not have been a warrior, but he was a fighter. “I became known as a hard-charger,” he wrote. “I was given difficult tasks, and moved through the ranks quickly.” He pushed people who didn’t give 100%; he pushed himself.

The Apache Pilot

Ian Morrison was born at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, son of a Marine. An honor student at Thomas McKean High School in Wilmington, Del., he sang in the chorus, ran cross-country and was a co-captain of the swimming team before heading to West Point. He had a wicked sense of humor and a sweet soul; he met Rebecca on a Christian singles website in 2006 and spent three months charming her over the phone. One night he gave her his credit-card information. “Buy me a ticket, because I’m going to come see you,” he told her before flying to Houston. “The minute I picked him up,” she recalls, “we later said we both knew it was the real deal.” He proposed at West Point when she flew in for his graduation.

Morrison spent the next two years at Fort Rucker in Alabama, learning to fly the two-seat, 165-m.p.h. Apache helicopter, the Army’s most lethal aircraft. He and his roommate, fellow West Pointer Sean McBride, divided their time among training, Walmart, church, Seinfeld and video games, fueled by macaroni and cheese with chopped-up hot dogs. Morrison and Rebecca were married two days after Christmas 2008 near Dallas. The Army assigned him to an aviation unit at Fort Hood, so they bought a three-bedroom house on an acre of land just outside the town of Copperas Cove, Texas. They supported six African children through World Vision and were planning to have some kids of their own. “We had named our kids,” Rebecca says.

Morrison was surprised when the Army ordered him to Iraq on short notice late in 2010. Like all young Army officers, he saluted and began packing.

Triggers and Traps

One theory of suicide holds that people who feel useful, who feel as if they belong and serve a larger cause, are less likely to kill themselves. That would explain why active-duty troops historically had lower suicide rates than civilians. But now experts who study the patterns wonder whether prolonged service during wartime may weaken that protective function.

Service members who have bonded with their units, sharing important duties, can have trouble once they are at a post back home, away from the routines and rituals that arise in a close-knit company. The isolation often increases once troops leave active duty or National Guardsmen and reservists return to their parallel lives. The military frequently cites relationship issues as a predecessor to suicides; that irritates survivors to no end. “I’m not as quick to blame the Army as the Army is to blame me,” Leslie McCaddon says. “The message I get from the Army is that our marital problems caused Mike to kill himself. But they never ask why there were marriage problems to begin with.”

As McCaddon made his way through med school in Maryland, he encountered ghosts from his past. He was reaching the age at which his biological father had died by suicide, which statistically increased his own risk. But he wasn’t scared by it, Leslie says; he told associates about it. What did bother him was that he was gaining weight, the physical-training tests were getting harder for him, and the course work was challenging to juggle with a young family. He hid the strain, “but inside it is killing me,” he blogged. He called Leslie a hero “for not kicking me out of the house on the several times I’ve given her reason.” And he told her he sometimes thought of suicide.

“But he would tell everyone else that he was fine,” Leslie says. “He was afraid they’d kick him out of medical school if he was really honest about how depressed he was.” McCaddon sought counseling from a retired Army psychiatrist and seemed to be turning a corner in May 2010, when he graduated and got his first choice for a residency, at Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu.

“He loved being a soldier,” Leslie said, “and he was going to do everything he could to protect that relationship.”

Leslie had relationships to protect as well. He was increasingly hard on her at home; he was also hard on the kids and on himself. “He was always an amazing father–he loved his children–but he started lashing out at them,” Leslie recalls. “He wasn’t getting enough sleep, and he was under a lot of stress.” Leslie began exploring options but very, very carefully; she had a bomb-disposal problem as well. “When I was reaching out for help, people were saying, Be careful how you phrase this, because it could affect your husband’s career,” she says. “That was terrifying to me. It made me think that by advocating for him I’d be making things worse.”

The Pilot’s Pain

Captain Morrison headed to Iraq in early 2011. Once there, he and Rebecca Skyped nearly every day between his flight assignments. When he took R&R leave in early September, they visited family in Dallas, then San Antonio, and caught concerts by Def Leppard and Heart.

There were no signs of trouble. “He was so mentally stable–he worked out every day, we ate good food, and we always had good communication,” his wife says. “Most people would say he was kind of quiet, but with me he was loud and obnoxious and open.”

Morrison never engaged the enemy in direct combat; still, some 70 missions over Iraq took their toll. His base was routinely mortared. After one mission, he and several other pilots were walking back to their hangar when a rocket shot right past them and almost hit him; he and his comrades ran and dived into a bunker, he told Rebecca once he was safely home. He impressed his commander–“Excellent performance!” his superior raved in a formal review of the man his buddies called Captain Brad Pitt. “Unlimited potential … continue to place in position of greater responsibility.”

It was not the war that turned out to be hard; it was the peace. Morrison returned to Fort Hood late last year and spent his month off with Rebecca riding their horses, attending church and working out. He seemed unnerved by slack time at home. “He said it was really easy to fall into a routine in Iraq–they got up at the exact same time, they ate, they worked out, they flew forever and then they came back, and he’d talk to me, and then they did it all over again,” Rebecca says. “When he came back to Texas, it was really difficult for him to adjust.”

Morrison was due to be reassigned, so he and his wife needed to sell their house, but it just sat on the market. His anxiety grew; he was restless, unable to sleep, and they thought he might be suffering from PTSD. The couple agreed that he should see a doctor. Military wives, especially those studying mental health, have heard the stories, know the risks, learn the questions: Is their spouse drinking more, driving recklessly, withdrawing from friends, feeling trapped? Be direct, they are told. “I looked him right in the face and asked, ‘Do you feel like you want to hurt or kill yourself?'” Rebecca recalls. “He looked me right in the face and said, ‘Absolutely not–no way–I don’t feel like that at all. All I want to do is figure out how to stop this anxiety.'”

The Stigma

When troops return from deployment, they are required to do self-assessments of their experience: Did they see people killed during their tour? Did they feel they had been at risk of dying? Were they interested in getting counseling for stress or alcohol use or other issues? But a 2008 study found that when soldiers answer questions anonymously, they are two to four times as likely to report depression or suicidal thoughts. Independent investigations have turned up reports of soldiers being told by commanders to airbrush their answers or else risk their careers. A report by the Center for a New American Security cited commanders who refuse to grant a military burial after a suicide for fear that doing so would “endorse or glamorize” it.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and all the services have launched resiliency-training programs and emergency hotlines, offering slogans like “Never leave a Marine behind” and “Never let your buddy fight alone” that try to speak the language of the unit. Last year the Pentagon released a video game meant to allow soldiers to explore the causes and symptoms of PTSD from the privacy of their homes. “We want people to feel like they are encouraged to get help,” says Jackie Garrick, who runs the new Defense Suicide Prevention Office. “There are a myriad of ways you can access help and support if you need it.”

But faith in that commitment was shaken this year when Army Major General Dana Pittard, commander of the 1st Armored Division at Fort Bliss, Texas, complained on his official blog that he was “personally fed up” with “absolutely selfish” troops who kill themselves, leaving him and others to “clean up their mess. Be an adult, act like an adult, and deal with your real-life problems like the rest of us,” he continued. He later said he wanted to “retract” what he called his “hurtful statement,” but he didn’t apologize for what he said. Many soldiers and family members believe Pittard’s attitude is salted throughout the U.S. military.

Just a Lovers’ Quarrel

In August 2010, Leslie went to McCaddon’s commanding officer at the hospital. She didn’t tell Michael. “It was the scariest thing I’ve ever done,” she says. She recalls sitting in the commander’s office, haltingly laying out her concerns–McCaddon’s history of depression, his struggle to meet his high standards while doing right by his family. She was hoping that maybe the commander would order him into counseling and defuse the stigma somehow: he’d just be following orders. She watched the officer, a female colonel, detonate before her eyes. “No one at the medical school told me he had a history of depression, of being suicidal,” Leslie recalls her shouting. “I have a right to know this. He’s one of my residents. Why didn’t anyone tell me?” The commander was furious–not at Leslie, exactly, but at finding herself not in command of the facts.

The colonel called several colleagues into the room and then summoned McCaddon as well. Leslie registered the shock and fear on his face when he saw his wife sitting with his bosses. “I was shaking,” she says. “I told him I continued to be concerned that his depression was affecting our family and that I was really concerned for his safety but also for the well-being of our children and myself.”

The commander encouraged McCaddon to get help but wouldn’t order him to do it. He left the room, livid, and Leslie burst into tears. “Honey, don’t worry,” Leslie remembers the commander saying. “My first marriage was a wreck too.”

Can’t you make him get some help? Leslie pleaded again, but the colonel pushed back. McCaddon was doing fine at work, with no signs of a problem. “‘Leslie, I know this is going to be hard to hear, but this just doesn’t sound like an Army issue to me,'” McCaddon’s wife recalls the colonel saying. “‘It sounds like a family issue to me.'” Leslie felt her blood run cold. “No one was going to believe me so long as things were going fine at work.”

McCaddon did try to see an Army psychiatrist, but a month or more could pass without his finding the time. “I’d say, ‘He’s in the Army,'” Leslie recalls telling the doctor, “‘and you make him do everything else, so you should be able to make him go to mental-health counseling.'” But McCaddon was not about to detour from rounds to lie on the couch. He barely ate while on his shift. “Everybody here is under stress,” he stormed at Leslie. “I can’t just walk out for an hour a week–I’m not going to leave them when we’re already short-staffed.”

The marriage was cracking. Back in Massachusetts, Leslie’s mother was not well. Leslie and the kids moved home so she could take care of her. She and Michael talked about divorce.

The Waiting Room

Early on Monday, March 19, Ian Morrison showed up at a Fort Hood health clinic, where he sat waiting in his uniform, with his aviation badge, for three hours. Finally someone saw him. “‘I’m sorry you had to wait all this time,'” Rebecca says he was told. “‘But we can’t see you. We can’t prescribe you anything.'” He had to see the doctor assigned to his unit. When Morrison arrived at the flight surgeon’s office, he told Rebecca, the doctor was upset that Morrison hadn’t shown up at the regular daily sick call a couple of hours earlier.

“He told me this guy was so dismissive and rude to him. ‘You need to follow procedure. You should have been here hours ago,'” Rebecca says. “Ian wanted to tell the doctor he was anxious, depressed and couldn’t sleep, but this guy shut him down.” Morrison acknowledged only his sleeplessness, leading the doctor to give him 10 sleeping pills with orders to return the next week. He’d be grounded for the time being.

But that didn’t seem to affect his mood. Morrison toasted his wife’s success on a big exam that day–she was close to earning her master’s in psychology–by cooking a steak dinner and drawing a bubble bath for her that night. “He was dancing around and playing music and celebrating for me,” she remembers. “He seemed really hopeful.” He took a pill before bed but told Rebecca in the morning that he hadn’t slept.

On Tuesday, March 20, Morrison tried to enroll in an Army sleep study but was told he couldn’t join for a month. “Well, I’ll just keep taking Ambien and then go see the flight surgeon,” he told the woman involved with the study. She asked if he felt like hurting himself. “No, ma’am, you don’t have to worry about me at all,” he said. “I would never do that.” That day, Morrison typed an entry in his journal: “These are the things I know that I can’t change: whether or not the house sells, the state of the economy, and the world … these are things that I know to be true: I’m going to be alive tomorrow, I will continue to breathe and get through this, and God is sovereign over my life.”

Rebecca awoke the next morning to find her husband doing yoga. “I’m self-medicating,” he told her. She knew what that meant. “You couldn’t sleep again, huh?” Rebecca asked.

“No,” Morrison said. “I’m going back to the doctor today.” Given the lack of success with the medication, she told him that was probably a good idea. She left the house, heading for the elementary school on post where she taught second grade.

A System Overwhelmed

The Army reported in January that there was no way to tell how well its suicide-prevention programs were working, but it estimated that without such interventions, the number of suicides could have been four times as high. Since 2009, the Pentagon’s ranks of mental-health professionals have grown by 35%, nearing 10,000. But there is a national shortage of such personnel, which means the Army is competing with the VA and other services–not to mention the civilian world–to hire the people it needs. The Army has only 80% of the psychiatrists and 88% of the social workers and behavioral-health nurses recommended by the VA. Frequent moves from post to post mean that soldiers change therapists often, if they can find one, and mental-health records are not always transferred.

Military mental-health professionals complain that the Army seemed to have put its suicide-prevention efforts on the back burner after Chiarelli, a suicide fighter, left the service in January. “My husband did not want to die,” Rebecca says. “Ian tried to get help–six times in all … Think about all the guys who don’t even try to get help because of the stigma. Ian was so past the stigma, he didn’t care. He just wanted to be healthy.”

The Breaking Point

On March 15, McCaddon gave a medical presentation that got rave reviews. Then he called Massachusetts to speak to his children and sent Leslie that last e-mail. He regretted his failures as a husband, as a father. Don’t tell the children how I died, he begged her. “Know that I love you and my biggest regret in life will always be failing to cherish that, and instead forsaking it.” Leslie read the e-mail in horror. “In the back of my mind, I’m saying to myself, He’s at work–he’s safe,” she recalls. “It never occurred to me that he would do what he did at work.” But she immediately dialed the hospital’s delivery center. She had just received a suicide note from her husband, she told the doctor who answered, and they needed to find him immediately. The hospital staff fanned out.

“They’ve sent people to the roof, the basement, to your house. We’re looking everywhere,” a midwife told Leslie in a call minutes later. As they talked, Leslie suddenly heard people screaming and crying in the background. Then she heard them call a Code Blue. They had found him hanging from a noose in a call room. It had been less than 30 minutes since McCaddon had sent his final e-mail to his wife. Among the voices Leslie thought she recognized was that of McCaddon’s commander, whose words came rushing back. “Does it seem like a family issue to her now?” Leslie remembers thinking. “Because it looks like it happened on her watch.”

It took 15 minutes for the first responders to bring back a heartbeat. By then he had been without oxygen for too long. Leslie flew to Hawaii, and Captain McCaddon was taken off life support late Tuesday, March 20. He was pronounced dead early the next day.

That same day, Wednesday, March 21, Morrison saw a different Army doctor, who in a single 20-minute session diagnosed him with clinical depression. He got prescriptions for an antidepressant and a med to treat anxiety but hadn’t taken either when he called his wife. Rebecca encouraged him to stop by the resiliency center on post to see if he might get some mental-health counseling there. Just before noon, Morrison texted Rebecca, saying he was “Hopeful :)” about it. She wanted to know what they told him. “Will have to come back,” he responded. “Wait is about 2 hrs.” He needed to get back to his office.

Rebecca was still concerned. At about 4 p.m., she urged her husband to call a military hotline that boasted, “Immediate help 24/7–contact a consultant now.” He promised he would. “I said, ‘Perfect. Call them, and I’ll talk to you later,'” Rebecca says. “He was like, ‘O.K., bye.'”

That was the last time she ever talked to him. Their final communication was one more text about 45 minutes later. “STILL on hold,” he wrote to her. Rebecca responded moments later: “Can’t say you’re not trying.”

Morrison called Rebecca at 7:04 p.m., according to her cell phone, but she was leading a group-therapy session and missed it. He didn’t leave a message.

Two and a half hours later, she returned home from her grad-school counseling class. She threw her books down when she entered the living room and called his name. No answer. She saw his boots by the door; the mail was there, so she knew he had to be home. “I walked into our bedroom, and he was lying on the floor with his head on a pillow, on my side of the bed.” He was still in his uniform.

Rebecca stammers, talking softly and slowly through her sobs. “He had shot himself in the neck,” she says. “There was no note or anything. He was fully dressed, and I ran over to him and checked his pulse … and he had no pulse. I just ran out of the house screaming, ‘Call 911!’ and ran to the neighbors.”

The Next Mission

At a suicide-prevention conference in June, Panetta laid down a charge: “We’ve got to do everything we can to make sure that the system itself is working to help soldiers. Not to hide this issue, not to make the wrong judgments about this issue, but to face facts and deal with the problems up front and make sure that we provide the right diagnosis and that we follow up on that kind of diagnosis.”

But what makes preventing suicide so confounding is that even therapy often fails. “Over 50% of the soldiers who committed suicide in the four years that I was vice [chief] had seen a behavioral-health specialist,” recalls Chiarelli. “It was a common thing to hear about someone who had committed suicide who went in to see a behavioral-health specialist and was dead within 24, 48 or 72 hours–and to hear he had a diagnosis that said, ‘This individual is no danger to himself or anyone else.’ That’s when I realized that something’s the matter.”

There’s the horrific human cost, and there is a literal cost as well. The educations of McCaddon and Morrison cost taxpayers a sum approaching $2 million. “If the Army can’t be reached through the emotional side of it–that I lost my husband–well, they lost a $400,000 West Point education and God knows how much in flight school,” Rebecca says. (The Army says Morrison’s pilot training cost $700,000.) Adds Leslie: “They’d invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into this asset. At the very least, why didn’t they protect their asset?”

Captain McCaddon was buried with full military honors on April 3 in Gloucester, Mass. A pair of officers traveled from Hawaii for the service and presented his family with the Army Commendation Medal “for his selfless and excellent service.” Leslie and their three children also received the U.S. flag that had been draped over his casket and three spent shells fired by the honor guard. They visited his grave on Father’s Day to leave flowers, and each child left a card. After two years of chemotherapy, their oldest child’s leukemia remains in remission.

Captain Morrison was buried in central Texas on March 31. The Army had awarded him several decorations, including the Iraq Campaign Medal with Campaign Star. There were military honors graveside, and a bugler played taps. At his widow’s request, there was no rifle volley fired.

Chris Hedges | Totalitarian Systems Always Begin by Rewriting the Law (Truth Out)

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Monday, 26 March 2012 09:06By Chris Hedges, Truthdig | Op-Ed

Chris Hedges speaks at Occupy DC, January 9, 2012.

Chris Hedges speaks at Occupy DC, January 9, 2012. (Photo: Shrieking Tree)

I spent four hours in a third-floor conference room at 86 Chambers St. in Manhattan on Friday as I underwent a government deposition. Benjamin H. Torrance, an assistant U.S. attorney, carried out the questioning as part of the government’s effort to decide whether it will challenge my standing as a plaintiff in the lawsuit I have brought with others against President Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta over the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), also known as the Homeland Battlefield Bill.

The NDAA implodes our most cherished constitutional protections. It permits the military to function on U.S. soil as a civilian law enforcement agency. It authorizes the executive branch to order the military to selectively suspend due process and habeas corpus for citizens. The law can be used to detain people deemed threats to national security, including dissidents whose rights were once protected under the First Amendment, and hold them until what is termed “the end of the hostilities.” Even the name itself—the Homeland Battlefield Bill—suggests the totalitarian concept that endless war has to be waged within “the homeland” against internal enemies as well as foreign enemies.

Judge Katherine B. Forrest, in a session starting at 9 a.m. Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, will determine if I have standing and if the case can go forward. The attorneys handling my case, Bruce Afran and Carl Mayer, will ask, if I am granted standing, for a temporary injunction against the Homeland Battlefield Bill. An injunction would, in effect, nullify the law and set into motion a fierce duel between two very unequal adversaries—on the one hand, the U.S. government and, on the other, myself, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, the Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jónsdóttir and three other activists and journalists. All have joined me as plaintiffs and begun to mobilize resistance to the law through groups such as Stop NDAA.

The deposition was, as these things go, conducted civilly. Afran and Mayer, the attorneys bringing the suit on my behalf, were present. I was asked detailed questions by Torrance about my interpretation of Section 1021 and Section 1022 of the NDAA. I was asked about my relationships and contacts with groups on the U.S. State Department terrorism list. I was asked about my specific conflicts with the U.S. government when I was a foreign correspondent, a period in which I reported from El Salvador, Nicaragua, the Middle East, the Balkans and other places. And I was asked how the NDAA law had impeded my work.

It is in conference rooms like this one, where attorneys speak in the arcane and formal language of legal statutes, that we lose or save our civil liberties. The 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force Act, the employment of the Espionage Act by the Obama White House against six suspected whistle-blowers and leakers, and the Homeland Battlefield Bill have crippled the work of investigative reporters in every major newsroom in the country. Government sources that once provided information to counter official narratives and lies have largely severed contact with the press. They are acutely aware that there is no longer any legal protection for those who dissent or who expose the crimes of state. The NDAA threw in a new and dangerous component that permits the government not only to silence journalists but imprison them and deny them due process because they “substantially supported” terrorist groups or “associated forces.”

Those of us who reach out to groups opposed to the U.S. in order to explain them to the American public will not be differentiated from terrorists under this law. I know how vicious the government can be when it feels challenged by the press. I covered the wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua from 1983 to 1988. Press members who reported on the massacres and atrocities committed by the Salvadoran military, as well as atrocities committed by the U.S.-backed Contra forces in Nicaragua, were repeatedly denounced by senior officials in the Reagan administration as fellow travelers and supporters of El Salvador’s Farabundo Marti National Liberation (FMLN) rebels or the leftist Sandinista government in Managua, Nicaragua.

The Reagan White House, in one example, set up an internal program to distort information and intimidate and attack those of us in the region who wrote articles that countered the official narrative. The program was called “public diplomacy.”Walter Raymond Jr., a veteran CIA propagandist, ran it. The goal of the program was to manage “perceptions” about the wars in Central America among the public. That management included aggressive efforts to destroy the careers of reporters who were not compliant by branding them as communists or communist sympathizers. If the power to lock us up indefinitely without legal representation had been in the hands of Elliott Abrams or Oliver North or Raymond, he surely would have used it.

Little has changed. On returning not long after 9/11 from a speaking engagement in Italy I was refused entry into the United States by customs officials at the Newark, N.J., airport. I was escorted to a room filled with foreign nationals. I was told to wait. A supervisor came into the room an hour later. He leaned over the shoulder of the official seated at a computer in front of me. He said to this official: “He is on a watch. Tell him he can go.” When I asked for further information I was told no one was authorized to speak to me. I was handed my passport and told to leave the airport.

Glenn Greenwald, the columnist and constitutional lawyer, has done the most detailed analysis of the NDAA bill. He has pointed out that the crucial phrases are “substantially supported” and “associated forces.” These two phrases, he writes, allow the government to expand the definition of terrorism to include groups that were not involved in the 9/11 attacks and may not have existed when those attacks took place.

It is worth reading Sections 1021 and 1022 of the bill. Section 1021 of the NDAA “includes the authority for the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons (as defined in subsection (b)) pending disposition under the law of war.” Subsection B defines covered persons like this: “(b) Covered Persons—A covered person under this section is any person as follows: (1) A person who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored those responsible for those attacks. (2) A person who was a part of or substantially supported Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the U.S. or its coalition partners.” Section 1022, Subsection C, goes on to declare that covered persons are subject to: “(1) Detention under the law of war without trial until the end of the hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force.” And Section 1022, Subsection A, Item 4, allows the president to waive the requirement of legal evidence in order to condemn a person as an enemy of the state if that is believed to be in the “national security interests of the United States.”

The law can be used to detain individuals who are not members of terrorist organizations but have provided, in the words of the bill, substantial support even to “associated forces.” But what constitutes substantial? What constitutes support? What are these “associated forces”? What is defined under this law as an act of terror? What are the specific activities of those purportedly “engaged in hostilities against the United States”? None of this is answered. And this is why, especially as acts of civil disobedience proliferate, the NDAA law is so terrifying. It can be used by the military to seize and detain citizens and deny legal recourse to anyone who defies the corporate state.

Torrance’s questions to me about incidents that occurred during my reporting were typified by this back and forth, which I recorded:

Torrance: In paragraph eight of your declaration you refer to the type of journalism we have just been discussing, which conveyed opinions, programs and ideas as being brought within the scope of Section 1021’s provision defining a covered people as one who has substantially supported or directly supported the acts and activities of such individuals or organizations and allies of associated forces. Why do you believe journalistic activity could be brought within that statute?

Hedges: Because anytime a journalist writes and reports in a way that challenges the official government narrative they come under fierce attack.

Torrance: What kind of attack do they come under?

Hedges: It is a range. First of all, the propaganda attempts to discredit the reporting. It would be an attempt to discredit the individual reporter. It would be a refusal to intercede when allied governments physically detain and expel the reporter because of reporting that both that allied government and the United States did not want. And any foreign correspondent that is any good through their whole career has endured all of this.

Torrance: Remind me, the phrase you used that you believed would trigger that was “coverage disfavorable to the United States”?

Hedges: I didn’t say that.

Torrance: Remind me of the phrase.

Hedges: I said it was coverage that challenged the official narrative.

Torrance: Have you ever been detained by the United States government?

Hedges: Yes.

Torrance: When and where?

Hedges: The First Gulf War.

Torrance: What were the circumstances of that?

Hedges: I was reporting outside of the pool system.

Torrance: How did that come about that you were detained?

Hedges: I was discovered by military police without an escort.

Torrance: And they took you into custody?

Hedges: Yes.

Torrance: For how long?

Hedges: Not a long time. They seized my press credentials and they called Dhahran, which is where the sort of central operations were, and I was told that within a specified time—and I don’t remember what that time was—I had to report to the authorities in Dhahran.

Torrance: Where is Dhahran?

Hedges: Saudi Arabia.

Torrance: And that was a U.S. military headquarters of some sort?

Hedges: Well, it was the press operations run by the U.S. Army.

Torrance: And what was the asserted basis for detaining you?

Hedges: That I had been reporting without an escort.

Torrance: And was that a violation of some law or regulation that you know of?

Afran: Note, object to form. Laws and regulations are two different things.

Hedges: Not in my view. …

Torrance: Did the people who detained you specify any law or regulation that in their view you violated?

Hedges: Let me preface that by saying that as a foreign correspondent with a valid journalistic visa, which I had, in a country like Saudi Arabia, the United States does not have the authority to detain me or tell me what I can report on. They attempted to do that, but neither I [nor] The New York Times [my employer at the time] recognized their authority.

Torrance: When you obtained that journalistic visa did you agree to any conditions on what you would do or where you would be permitted to go?

Hedges: From the Saudis?

Torrance: The visa was issued by the Saudi government?

Hedges: Of course, I need a visa from the Saudi government to get into Saudi.

Torrance: Did you agree to any such conditions?

Hedges: No. Not with the Saudis.

Torrance: Were there any other journalists of which you were aware who [were] reporting outside of the pool system?

Hedges: Yes.

Torrance: Were they also detained, to your knowledge?

Hedges: Yes.

The politeness of the exchanges, the small courtesies extended when we needed a break, the idle asides that took place during the brief recesses, masked the deadly seriousness of the proceeding. If there is no rolling back of the NDAA law we cease to be a constitutional democracy.

Totalitarian systems always begin by rewriting the law. They make legal what was once illegal. Crimes become patriotic acts. The defense of freedom and truth becomes a crime. Foreign and domestic subjugation merges into the same brutal mechanism. Citizens are colonized. And it is always done in the name of national security. We obey the new laws as we obeyed the old laws, as if there was no difference. And we spend our energy and our lives appealing to a dead system.

Franz Kafka understood the totalitarian misuse of law, the ability by the state to make law serve injustice and yet be held up as the impartial arbiter of good and evil. In his stories “The Trial” and “The Castle” Kafka presents pathetic supplicants before the law who are passed from one doorkeeper, administrator or clerk to the next in an endless and futile quest for justice. In the parable “Before the Law” the supplicant dies before even being permitted to enter the halls of justice. In Kafka’s dystopian vision, the law is the mechanism by which injustice and tyranny are perpetuated. A bureaucratic legal system uses the language of justice to defend injustice. The cowed populations in tyrannies become for Kafka so broken, desperate and passive that they are finally complicit in their own enslavement. The central character in “The Trial,” known as Josef K, offers little resistance at the end of the story when two men arrive to oversee his execution. Josef K. leads them to a quarry where he is expected to kill himself. He cannot. The men do it for him. His last words are: “Like a dog!”

Journalist Chris Hedges on Capitalism’s “Sacrifice Zones”: Communities Destroyed for Profit (Truth Out)

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Tuesday, 24 July 2012 09:18

By Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company | Interview

 

Camden, New Jersey is one of the poorest cities in the United States. Camden suffers from unemployment, urban decay, poverty, and many other social issues. Much of the city of Camden, New Jersey suffers from urban decay.Camden, New Jersey is one of the poorest cities in the United States. Camden suffers from unemployment, urban decay, poverty, and many other social issues. Much of the city of Camden, New Jersey suffers from urban decay. (Photo: Phillies1fan777)

There are forgotten corners of this country where Americans are trapped in endless cycles of poverty, powerlessness, and despair as a direct result of capitalistic greed. Journalist Chris Hedges calls these places “sacrifice zones,” and joins Bill this week on Moyers & Company to explore how areas like Camden, New Jersey; Immokalee, Florida; and parts of West Virginia suffer while the corporations that plundered them thrive.

These are areas that have been destroyed for quarterly profit. We’re talking about environmentally destroyed, communities destroyed, human beings destroyed, families destroyed,” Hedges tells Bill.

“It’s the willingness on the part of people who seek personal enrichment to destroy other human beings… And because the mechanisms of governance can no longer control them, there is nothing now within the formal mechanisms of power to stop them from creating essentially a corporate oligarchic state.”

The broadcast includes a visit with comics artist and journalist Joe Sacco, who collaborated with Hedges on Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, an illustrated account of their travels through America’s sacrifice zones. Kirkus Reviews calls it an “unabashedly polemic, angry manifesto that is certain to open eyes, intensify outrage and incite argument about corporate greed.”

A columnist for Truthdig, Hedges also describes the difference between truth and news. “The really great reporters — and I’ve seen them in all sorts of news organizations — are management headaches because they care about truth at the expense of their own career,” Hedges says.

TRANSCRIPT

Exploring parts of America “that have been destroyed for quarterly profit.”

Bill Moyers: Welcome. Here we are, barely halfway through the summer, and Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have stepped up their cage match, each attacking the other, throwing insults and accusations back and forth like folding chairs hurled across the wrestling ring.

Governor Romney pummels away at the economy; President Obama pummels away at Mr. Romney—when he was or wasn’t at his company Bain Capital, his tax returns and his offshore accounts. All the while, as they bob and weave their way through this quadrennial competition, punching wildly, the real story of what’s happening to ordinary people as capitalism runs amok is largely ignored by each of them. But not in this book “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt”—an unusual account of poverty and desolation across contemporary America. It’s a collaboration between graphic artist and journalist Joe Sacco, about whom more later, and my guest on this week’s broadcast, Chris Hedges.

Chris Hedges: All of the true correctives to American democracy came through movements that never achieved formal political power.

Bill Moyers: This is just the latest battle cry from Hedges, who, angry at what he sees in the world, expresses his outrage in thoughtful prose that never fails to inform and provoke. As a correspondent and bureau chief for “The New York Times,” he covered wars in North Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East—leaving the paper after a reprimand for publicly denouncing the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In such books as “War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning,” his weekly column for the website “Truthdig” and freelance articles for a variety of other publications, Chris Hedges has taken his life’s experience covering the brutality of combat and shaped a worldview in which morality and faith, and the importance of truth-telling, dissent and social activism take precedence, even if it means going to jail.

Welcome, Chris Hedges.

Chris Hedges: Thank you.

Bill Moyers: Tell me about Joe Sacco. He was your companion on this trip. And he was your, in effect, coauthor. Although he was sketching instead of writing.

Chris Hedges: I’ve known Joe since the war in Bosnia. We met when he was working on his book, “Gorazde.” And I was not a reader of graphic novels. But I watched him work. And I certainly know a brilliant journalist when I see one. And he is one of the most brilliant journalists I’ve ever met.

He reports it out with such depth and integrity and power, and then he draws it out. And I realized that an extremely important component of this book was making visible these invisible communities, because we don’t see them. They’re shut out. They’re frightening, they’re depressing. And they’re virtually off the radar screen in terms of the commercial media.

Bill Moyers: This is a tough book. It’s not dispatches from Disneyworld. It paints a very stark portrait of poverty, despair, destructive behavior. What makes you think people want to read that sort of thing these days?

Chris Hedges: That wasn’t a question that Joe Sacco and I ever asked. It’s absolutely imperative that we begin to understand what unfettered, unregulated capitalism does, the violence of that system, which is portrayed in all of the places that we visited.

These are sacrifice zones, areas that have been destroyed for quarterly profit. And we’re talking about environmentally destroyed, communities destroyed, human beings destroyed, families destroyed. And because there are no impediments left, these sacrifice zones are just going to spread outward.

Bill Moyers: What do you mean, there are no impediments left?

Chris Hedges: There’s no way to control corporate power. The system has broken down, whether it’s Democrat or Republican. And because of that, we’ve all become commodities. Just as the natural world has become a commodity that is being exploited until it is exhausted, or it collapses.

Bill Moyers: You call them sacrifice zones.

Chris Hedges: Right.

Bill Moyers: Explain what you mean by that.

Chris Hedges: Well, they have the individuals who live within those areas have no power. The political system is bought off, the judicial system is bought off, the law enforcement system services the interests of power, they have been rendered powerless. You see that in the coal fields of Southern West Virginia.

Now here, in terms of national resources is one of the richest areas of the United States. And yet these harbor the poorest pockets of community, the poorest communities in the United States. Because those resources are extracted. And that money is not funneled back into the communities that are sitting on top of, or next to those resources.

Not only that, but they’re extracted in such a way that the communities themselves are destroyed quite literally because you have not only terrible problems with erosion, as they cause when they do the mountaintop removal, they’ll use these gigantic bulldozers to push off all the trees and then burn them.

And when we flew over the Appalachians, and it’s a terrifying experience, because you realize only then do you realize how vast the devastation is. Just as when we were both in the war in Bosnia, you couldn’t grasp the destruction of ethnic cleansing until you actually flew over Bosnia, and village after village after village had been razed and destroyed.

And the same was true in the Appalachian Mountains. And these people are poisoned. The water is poisoned, it smells, the soil is poisoned. And the people who are making tremendous profits from this don’t even live in West Virginia–

Bill Moyers: You said something like, “While the laws are West Virginia are written by the coal companies, 95 percent of those coal companies–”

Chris Hedges: Right.

Bill Moyers: “–are not in West Virginia.”

Chris Hedges: That’s right. They no longer want to dig down for the coal, and so they’re blowing the top 400 feet off of mountains poisoning the air, poisoning the soil, poisoning the water.

They use some of the largest machines on earth. These draglines, 25-stories tall that are very efficient in terms of ripping out coal seams. But by the time they left, there’s just a wasteland. Nothing grows. Some of the richest soil, some of the purest water, and these are the headwaters for much of the East Coast, You are rendering the area moonscape. It becomes inhabitable. And you’re destroying you know, these are the lungs of the Eastern seaboard. It’s all destroyed and it’s not coming back.

And that violence is visited on these communities. And you see it played out. I mean, Camden, New Jersey, which is the poorest city per capita in the United States and always, the one or two in terms of the most dangerous, it’s a dead city. There’s nothing left. There is no employment. Whole blocks are abandoned. The only thing functioning are open-air drug markets, of which there are about a hundred.

And you’re talking third or fourth generation of people trapped in these internal colonies. They can’t get out, they can’t get credit. And what that does to your dignity, your self-esteem, your sense of self-worth.

BILL MOYERS I was struck by your saying Camden is “beset with the corruption and brutal police repression reminiscent of the despotic regimes that you covered as a correspondent for the New York Times in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.” You describe a city where the per capital income is $ll,967. Large swaths of the city, as Joe Sacco Shows us, are abandoned, windowless brick factories, forlorn warehouses.

Chris Hedges: At one point in the 50s, it was a huge shipyard that employed 36,000 people. Campbell’s Soup was made there, RCA used to be there. But there were a variety of businesses it attracted in that great migration a lot of unskilled labor from the South, as well as immigrants from New York

Because without an education, it was a place that you could find a job. It was unionized, of course, so people had adequate wages and some protection. And then it just– everything went down. With the flight of manufacturing overseas.

It’s all gone. Nothing remains. And that’s why it’s such a stark example of what we’ve done to ourselves, without realizing that the manufacturing base of any country is absolutely vital to its health. Not only in terms of its economic, but in terms of its, you know, the cohesion of a society because it gives employment.

Bill Moyers: But give me a thumbnail sketch of Pine Ridge, South Dakota, the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Chris Hedges: Well, Pine Ridge is where it began, Western exploitation. And it was the railroad companies that did it. They wanted the land, they took the land, the government gave them the land. It either gave it to them or sold it to them very cheaply. They slaughtered the buffalo herds, they broke these people. Forcing a people that had not been part of a wage economy to become part of a wage economy, upending the traditional values.

And it really is about the maximization of profit, it really is about the commodification of everything, including human beings. And this was certainly true in the western wars.

And it’s appalling. You know, the average life expectancy for a male in Pine Ridge is 48. That is the lowest in the Western Hemisphere outside of Haiti. At any one time, 60 percent of the dwellings do not have electricity or water.

Bill Moyers: You write of one tiny village, tiny village, with four liquor stores. And that dispense the equivalent of 13,500–

Chris Hedges: Right.

Bill Moyers: –cans of beer a day. And with devastating results.

Chris Hedges: Yes. And they start young and some estimates run that, you know, alcoholism is as high as 80 percent. This contributes, of course, to early death. That’s in Whiteclay, Nebraska. There is no liquor that is legally sold on the reservation, itself. But Whiteclay is about two miles from Pine Ridge. And that’s where people go. They call it “going south.” And that’s all they do, is sell liquor.

That’s true everywhere. You build a kind of dependency which destroys self-efficiency. I mean, that’s what the old Indian agencies were set up to do. You take away the livelihood, you take away the buffalo herds, you make it impossible to sustain yourself, and then you have lines of people waiting for lard, flour, and you know, whisky.

And that has been true in West Virginia. That’s certainly true in Camden. And it is a form of disempowerment. It is a form of keeping people essentially, at a subsistence level, and yet dependent on the very structures of power that are destroying them.

Bill Moyers: One of the most forlorn portraits is in your description of Immokalee, Florida. You describe Immokalee as a town filled with desperately poor single men.

Chris Hedges: Most of them have come across the border illegally. Come up from Central America and Mexico, especially after the passage of NAFTA. Because this destroyed subsistence farms in Mexico, the big agro businesses were able to flood the Mexican market with cheap corn. Estimates run as high as three million farmers were bankrupt, and where did they go? They crossed the border into the United States and in desperate search for work. They were lured into the produce fields. And they send what money they can, usually about $100 a month home to support their wives and children.

Bill Moyers: And they make $11,000, $12,000–

Chris Hedges: At best.

Chris Hedges: It’s brutal work, physically.

Bill Moyers: Yeah.

Chris Hedges: But they’re also exposed to all sorts of chemicals and pesticides. And it’s very hard to show the effects because as these workers age, you know, they’re bent over eight, ten hours a day. So they have tremendous back problems. And by the time they’re in their thirties, the crew leaders, they’ll actually line up in these big parking lots at about 4:00 in the morning, the busses will come.

They just won’t pick the older men. And so they become destitute. And they go back home physically broken. And it’s hard to tell, you know, how poisoned they’ve become, because they’re hard to trace. But clearly that is a big issue. They talk about rashes, respiratory, you know, not being able to breathe, coughing, it’s really, you know, a frightening window into the primacy of profit over human dignity and human life.

Bill Moyers: Fit this all together for me. What does the suffering of the Native American on the Pine Ridge Reservation have to do with the unemployed coal miner in West Virginia have to do with the inner-city African American in Camden have to do with the single man working for minimum wage or less in Immokalee, Florida? What ties that all together?

Chris Hedges: Greed. It’s greed over human life. And it’s the willingness on the part of people who seek personal enrichment to destroy other human beings. That’s a common thread. We, in that biblical term, we forgot our neighbor. And because we forgot our neighbor in Pine Ridge, because we forgot our neighbor in Camden, in Southern West Virginia, in the produce fields, these forces have now turned on us. They went first, and we’re next. And that’s–

Bill Moyers: What do you mean we’re next?

Chris Hedges: Well, the–

Bill Moyers: We being—

Chris Hedges: Two-thirds of this country. We are rapidly replicating that totalitarian vision of George Orwell in “1984.” We have an inner sanctum, inner party of 2 percent or 3 percent, an outer party of corporate managers, of 12 percent, and the rest of us are proles. I mean–

Bill Moyers: Proles being?

Chris Hedges: Being an underclass that is hanging on by their fingertips. And this is already very far advanced. I mean, numbers, I mean, 47 million Americans depending on food stamps, six million exclusively on food stamps, one million people a year going filing for personal bankruptcy because they can’t pay their medical bills, six million people pushed out of their houses.

Long-term unemployment or underemployment– you know, probably being 17 to 20 percent. This is an estimate by “The L.A. Times” rather than the official nine percent. I mean, the average worker at Wal-Mart works 28 hours a week, but their wages put them below the poverty line. Which is why when you work at Wal-Mart, they’ll give you applications for food stamps, so we can help as a government subsidize the family fortune of the Walton family.

It’s, you know these corporations know only one word, and that’s more. And because the mechanisms of governance can no longer control them, there is nothing now within the formal mechanisms of power to stop them from the creating, essentially, a corporate oligarchic state

Bill Moyers: And you say, though, we are accomplices in our own demise. Explain that paradox. That corporations are causing this, but we are cooperating with them.

Chris Hedges: This sort of notion that the corporate value of greed is good. I mean, these deformed values have sort of seeped down within the society at large. And they’re corporate values, they’re not American values.

I mean, American values were effectively destroyed by Madison Avenue when, after world war one, it began to instill consumption as a kind of inner compulsion. But old values of thrift, of self-effacement, or hard work were replaced with this cult of the “self”, this hedonism.

And in that sense, you know, we have become complicit, because we’ve accepted this as a kind of natural law. And the acceptance of this kind of behavior, and even the celebration of it is going to ultimately trigger our demise. Not only as a culture, not only as a country, but finally as a species that exists, you know, on planet Earth.

Bill Moyers: As we came here, I pulled an article published in “Nature” magazine by a group of rather accomplished and credible scientists who have done all the technical studies they need to do, who come to the conclusion that our planet’s ecosystems are careening towards an imminent, irreversible collapse. Once these things happen, planet’s ecosystems as we know them, could irreversibly collapse in the proverbial blink of an eye. Connect that to what you’ve been reporting.

Chris Hedges: Well, because the exploitation of human beings is always accompanied by the exploitation of natural resources, without any thought given to sustainability. I mean, the amount of chemicals and pesticides that are used on the produce in Florida is just terrifying.

And that, you know, migrates from those fields directly to the shelves of our supermarkets and we’re consuming it. And corporations have the kind of political clout that they can prevent any kind of investigation or control or regulation of this. And it’s, again, it’s all for short-term profit at long-term expense.

So the, you know, the very forces that we document in this book are the same forces that are responsible for destroying the ecosystem itself. We are watching these corporate forces, which are supranational. They have no loyalty to the nation state at all, reconfigure the global economy into a form of neo-feudalism. We are rapidly becoming an oligarchic state with an incredibly wealthy class of overlords.

Sheldon Wolin writes about this in “Democracy Incorporated” into what I would call, what he calls inverted totalitarianism, whereby it’s not classical totalitarianism, it doesn’t find its expression through a demagogue or a charismatic leader, but through the anonymity of the corporate state that purports to pay fealty to electoral politics, the Constitution, the iconography and language of American patriotism, and yet internally have seized all of the levers of power. This is what it means when lobbyists write all of our legislation, or when they stack the Supreme Court with people who serve the interests of corporations. And it’s to render the citizen impotent.

Bill Moyers: And what is it, you think, led us to this point of this mind-boggling inequality, mind-boggling consumption, which obviously many of us like, or we wouldn’t be participating? And the grip that money has on politics? What are the forces that got us to this?

Chris Hedges: I think it began after World War I. You know, Dwight McDonald writes about how after World War I, American society became enveloped in what he called the psychosis of permanent war, where in the name of anti-Communism, we could effectively banish anyone within the society who questioned power in a serious kind of way.

And of course, we destroyed populist and radical movements, which have always broadened democracy within American society, it’s something Howard Zinn wrote quite powerfully about in “A People’s History of the United States.” It has been a long struggle, whether it’s the abolitionist movement that fought slavery, whether it’s the suffragists for women’s rights, the labor movement, or the civil rights movement. And these forces have the ability to essentially destroy those movements, including labor unions, which made the middle class possible in this country. And have rendered us powerless. And–

Bill Moyers: Except for the power of the pen. You keep writing, you keep speaking, you keep agitating.

Chris Hedges: I do, but, you know, things aren’t getting better. And I think, you know, like you, I come out of the seminary, and I look less on my ability to effect change and understand it more as a kind of moral responsibility to resist these forces. Which I think in theological terms are forces of death. And to fight to protect, preserve, and nurture life.

But you know, as my friend, Father Daniel Berrigan says, you know, “We’re called to do the good, or at least the good insofar as we can determine it. And then we have to let it go.” Faith is the belief that it goes somewhere.

Bill Moyers: So let’s talk about you. You’ve been showing up in the news as well as well as just reporting the news, you took part in that mock trial down at Goldman Sachs.

Chris Hedges: Goldman Sachs is an institution that worships death, the forces of Thanatos, of greed, of exploitation, of destruction.

Bill Moyers: And I still remember the picture of you and the others sitting down, locking arms, and blocking the interests of the company. What was that about?

Chris Hedges: That was personal for me. Goldman Sachs runs one of the largest commodities index in the world. And I’ve spent 20 years in places like Africa, and I know what happens when wheat prices increase by 100 percent. Children starve. And I knew I was going to get arrested because, you know, I was, I covered the famine in Sudan and was in these huge U.N. tents and feeding stations trying to save.

And you know, the people who die in famines were usually elderly and children. The place was, I mean, everyone had tuberculosis. I have scars in my lungs from tuberculosis, which I successfully fought off. And those are sort of the whispers of the dead. All those children and others who couldn’t didn’t have the ability to go in front of a place like Goldman Sachs and condemn them.

Bill Moyers: But surely those people, as you were arrested, there were people working for Goldman Sachs looking down from the windows–

Chris Hedges: They were taking pictures–

Bill Moyers: Taking pictures, laughing. Surely you don’t think they would wish that outcome in Africa or anywhere else, right?

Chris Hedges: Well, it’s moral fragmentation. I mean, they blind themselves to what they do all day long, and they define themselves as good human beings by other criteria, because they’re a good father or a good husband or because they go to church. But it is that human trait to engage in what I would have to describe as a system of evil. And yet, look at it as just a job.

Bill Moyers: But are we all then therefore, and I come back to this, aren’t we all part of this system that in some way produces Pine Ridge, Immokalee, the coal fields, the inner-cities, and the starving children in Africa? Aren’t we all who have jobs and participate in the culture and are in the economic game, aren’t we all, in a way, as complicit as those people looking down on you from those windows at Goldman Sachs?

Chris Hedges: No. Because you know, the people who actually run the commodities index are very tiny, elite, and extremely wealthy group. And they’re highly compensated. These people make hundreds of thousands, often millions of dollars a year. And most of us don’t make that. And that personal enrichment, I think, is a powerful inducement to ignore their complicity in what is clearly a crime against other human beings.

Bill Moyers: But do you think what you did made any difference? Goldman Sachs hasn’t changed.

Chris Hedges: Well, that doesn’t matter. I did what I had to do. I did what I believed I should’ve done. And faith is a belief that it does make a difference, even if all of the empirical signs around you point otherwise. I think that fundamentally is what faith is about. And I’m not a very good Christian anymore. But I retain enough of my Christian heritage and my seminary training to still believe that.

Bill Moyers: What are you?

Chris Hedges: A, you know, a sinner.

Bill Moyers: Welcome to the clan.

Chris Hedges: You know, a doubter.

Bill Moyers: But you’re driven by something. I mean, I talked to you when you wrote your first and remarkable book “War is the Force that Gives Us Meaning.” I haven’t seen anyone as affected in their life after their experience as a journalist as you had been. I mean, there have been others, I just don’t know them. But somehow what you’re doing today goes back to what you saw and did and felt and experienced in all those years you were overseas and on the frontiers of trouble.

Chris Hedges: Well, because when you spend that long on the outer reaches of empire, you understand the cruelty of empire, what Conrad calls, “The horror, the horror.” And the lies that we tell ourselves about what is done in our name. Whether that’s in Gaza, whether that’s in Iraq, whether that’s in Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, El Salvador, I mean, there’s a long list.

And when you come back from the outer reaches of empire, you are, and I think, you know, many combat veterans feel this who come back, you’re forever alienated. And you to speak a very unpleasant truth about who we are, a truth that most people don’t want to hear. And yet I think to hold that truth in and to remain silent and not to speak that truth destroys you.

That it’s better to get up and speak it even as you correctly point out, you know that Goldman Sachs, you know, everyone at Goldman Sachs gets up the next morning and does it. I mean, this was also true as a war correspondent. I mean, the Serbs would kill.

They’d block all the roads into the village, we’d walk in with our satellite phones, we’d file it, we never believe they weren’t going to do it again the next day. But somehow not to chronicle it, not to take the risks to report it, was to be complicit in that killing. And I think that same kind of thought goes into what’s happening here.

Bill Moyers: But do you think taking sides marginalizes your journalism? I mean, when you were being arrested, and some businessman was quoted in the paper passing by and looking at those of you being carried away and said, “Bunch of idiots.” He needs to hear what you, read what you say. Do you think he will once he knows you’ve taken sides?

Chris Hedges: Well, I think that in life we always have to take sides.

Bill Moyers: Do journalists always have to take sides?

Chris Hedges: Yes. Journalists always do take sides. You know, you’ve been a journalist a long time. The idea that there’s something objective and impartial is just a lie. We sell it. But I can take the same set of facts– I was a newspaper reporter for a long time, and I can spin that story one way or another. We manipulate facts. That’s what we do. And I think that the really great journalists–

Bill Moyers: Not necessarily to deceive though. Some do, I know, but–

Chris Hedges: Right, but we do.

Bill Moyers: We choose the facts we want to organize–

Chris Hedges: Of course, it’s selective. And it’s what facts we choose, how we place, where we put the quotes. And I think the really great journalists, like the great preachers, care fundamentally about truth. And truth and news are not the same thing.

And the really great reporters, and I’ve seen them, you know, in all sorts of news organizations, are management headaches because they care about truth at the expense of their own career.

Bill Moyers: What do you mean truth as opposed to news?

Chris Hedges: Well, let’s take the Israel occupation of Gaza. You know, if I had a dinner with any Middle East correspondent who covered Gaza, none of us would have any disagreements about the Israeli behavior in Gaza, which is a collective war crime. And yet to get up and write it and say it within American society is not a career enhancer.

Because there’s a powerful Israeli lobby, and it’s a lobby that I don’t think represents Israel, it represents the right wing of Israel. And you know it. But, the great reporters don’t care. And they’re there.

But you know, large institutions like “The New York Times” attract huge numbers of careerists like any other large institutions, the Church of course, being no exception. And those are the people who are willing to take moral shortcuts to promote themselves within that institution.

And when somebody becomes a headache, even if they may agree with them, even if they may know that they are speaking a truth, and it puts their career in jeopardy– they will push them out or silence them.

So I think that one can take sides, and Orwell becomes the kind of model for this. But one can never not tell the truth. And I’ve often written stories that are not particularly flattering. And there’s much in this book about people in Pine Ridge or Camden, you know, that is not flattering. I mean, we’re interviewing people that are drug addicts and this kind of stuff. And–

Bill Moyers: Drug dealers–

Chris Hedges: –prostitutes and–

Bill Moyers: Yeah, drug dealers–

Chris Hedges: Yeah.

Bill Moyers: –prostitutes.

Chris Hedges: So we’re not, you know, the lie of omission is still a lie. But I don’t think any foreign correspondent who covers war, whether it was in Bosnia or whether it was in Sarajevo can be indifferent to the tremendous human suffering before them and not want that human suffering to stop.

Bill Moyers: But there is a price, as you have said, to be paid for stepping outside of the system that enabled your name and reputation and becoming a critic of that system. I mean, what price do you think you’ve paid?

Chris Hedges: I don’t think I paid a price, I think I would’ve paid a price for staying in. I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself. You know, I was pushed out of “The New York Times” because I was publicly denouncing the invasion of Iraq. And again, it comes down to that necessity to speak a truth, or at least the truth as far as you can discern it.

I’ve spent months of my life in Iraq. I knew the instrument of war. I understood in all the ways that this was going be a disaster– including upsetting the power balance in the Middle East. It’s one of the great strategic blunders of the United States, it’s empowered Iran. And to remain silent would’ve been the price. Was it good for my career? Well, of course not.

But my career was never the point. I didn’t drive down Mount Igman into Sarajevo when it was being hit with 2,000 shells a day because it was good for my career. I went there because what was happening was a crime against humanity. And as a reporter, I wanted to be there to chronicle it.

Bill Moyers: Well, you should. But, so you don’t think journalism is futile?

Chris Hedges: I think journalism is essential. I think it’s essential. And we’re watching its destruction. You know, journalism, the power of journalism is that it is rooted in verifiable fact. You go out as a reporter, you seek to find out what is factually correct. You crosscheck it with other sources. It’s sent to an editor. It’s fact-checked, you put it out. That’s all vanishing.

That’s what we’re really losing with journalism. Yes, you know, commercial journalism, there were things they wouldn’t write about. You know, as Schanberg says, “The power of great newspapers like “The Times” is that at least it’s stopped things from getting worse.” I think that’s right.

Bill Moyers: But can it make things better? I mean, do you think you can accomplish more as a dissenter, and I look up on you now, when I ask you what’s your faith, I think your faith is in dissent, if I may say so. It’s in “This far and no further.” But do you think you can accomplish as much as a dissenter than as a journalist?

Chris Hedges: Yeah, it’s not a question that I’ve asked. Because the question is, “What do you have to do?” I certainly knew after 15 years at “The New York Times” that running around on national television shows denouncing the war in Iraq was, as a news reporter, tantamount to career suicide. I mean, I was aware of that.

And yet, you know, as Paul Tillich writes about, you know, “Institutions are always inherently demonic, including the Church.” And you cannot finally serve the interests of those institutions. That for those who seek the moral life, there will always come a time in which they have to defy even institutions they care about if they are able to retain that moral core. And in essence, what, you know, “The New York Times,” or other institutions were asking is that I muzzle myself.

Bill Moyers: But all institutions do that, don’t they?

Chris Hedges: All institutions do.

Bill Moyers: Intuitively or explicitly.

Chris Hedges: That’s right. And I think for those of us who care about speaking, you know, the truth, you know, or if you want to call it dissent, we are going to have to accept that at one day, there’s going probably mean a clash with the very institutions that have nurtured and supported us. And I have been nurtured and supported by these institutions.

Bill Moyers: But your columns, your essays, your recent book, this book, contained repeated calls for uprisings, for civil disobedience. You even say in here, quote, “Revolt is all we have. It is our only hope. It is our only hope.” Unpack that from our viewers who are sitting there thinking, “What is he asking me to do? What does he mean by revolt? What’s he talking about?”

Chris Hedges: Nonviolence civil disobedience. And accepting the fact that engaging in that process will mean arrest. I’ve lived in societies that are rent and torn by violence, and I don’t want us to go there. And I think that we don’t have a lot of time left. And that for those of us who care about veering off into another course, a course that’s rational and sane and makes possible the perpetuation of not only the human species but the planet itself, we have to take this kind of radical action. And if we don’t, then as things disintegrate and as the paralysis within the centers of power become more and more apparent, then we will fuel very frightening extremes.

You know, again, which I saw in places like Central America or Bosnia. And I look at this as many ways, a kind of, a preventive action. A way to respond peacefully. A way to respond, in a Democratic fashion, to the problems in front of us before it’s too late.

Bill Moyers: Bear with me as I explore this, ‘cause there’s a paradox at two levels. One at a conceptual level, and the other at a practical level. You write in here, “Either you join the revolt or you stand on the wrong side of history. You either obstruct through civil disobedience, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil.” But in an early book, “Death of the Liberal Class,” which I think is one of your best, you wrote that, “The fantasy of widespread popular revolts and mass movements breaking the hegemony of the corporate state is just that, a fantasy.”

Chris Hedges: I wrote that before Occupy. And I was writing out of a kind of belief that this was what was absolutely necessary and yet I saw no signs within the wider society that was happening. And then suddenly, on September 17th, Zuccotti Park appears. And mostly fueled by the young. And I was writing out of a present reality. And I didn’t see Zuccotti coming. I was writing out of a kind of despair, for all of the reasons that I said.

Bill Moyers: Why did you take hope from that? Because after you’d been down there? You subsequently write that “By the end, even the most dedicated of the Occupiers in Zuccotti Park burned out.”

Chris Hedges: Yeah.

Bill Moyers: “They lost control of the park. The arrival in cold weather of individual tents, along with the numerous street people with mental impairment and addictions,” that you’re nothing if not honest in what you write, even about those people you support, “tore apart the community. Drug use as well as assaults and altercations became common.” So how is that square with what you said earlier that the Occupy Movement gave us a blueprint for how to fight back?

Chris Hedges: Because this is the trajectory of all movements. You know, it’s not a linear progression upwards. And the civil rights movement is a perfect example of that. All sorts of failures, whether it’s in Albany, Mississippi or anywhere else. You know, there were all sorts of moments within the civil rights movement where King wasn’t even sure he was going to be able to hold it together. And what happened in Zuccotti is like what happened in 1765 when they rose up against the Stamp Act.

That became the kind of dress rehearsal for the rebellion of 1775, 1776, 1905. The uprising in Russia became again the kind of dress rehearsal. These movements, this process, it takes a very long time. I think the Occupy was movement and I was there.

I mean, I certainly understand why it imploded and its many faults and how at that size, consensus doesn’t work, everything else. And yet it triggered something. It triggered a kind of understanding of systems of power. It, I think, gave people a sense of their own personal power. Once we step out into a group and articulate these injustices and these grievances to a wider public, and of course they resonated with a mainstream. I don’t think it’s over. I don’t know how it’s going to mutate and change, one never knows. But, I think that it’s imperative that we keep that narrative alive by being out there because things are not getting better.

The state is not responding in a rational way to what’s happening. If they really wanted to break the back of the opposition movement, rather than sort of eradicating the 18 encampments, they would’ve gone back and looked at Roosevelt. There would’ve been forgiveness of all student debt, $1 trillion, there would’ve been a massive jobs program targeted at those under the age of 25, and there would’ve been a moratorium on more closures and bank repossessions of homes.

That would’ve been a rational response. Instead, the state has decided to speak exclusively in the language of force and violence to try and crush this movement while people continue this dissent.

Bill Moyers: In one of your earlier books, you wrote that, quote, “We stand on the verge of one of the bleakest periods in human history, when the bright lights of civilization blink out, and we will descend for decades, if not centuries, into barbarity.” Do you really think that’s ahead?

Chris Hedges: If there’s not a radical change in the way we relate to the ecosystem that sustains life, yes. And I see, if you ask me to put my money down, I see nothing that indicates that we’re preparing to make that change.

Bill Moyers: But here’s another paradox then, you present us with a lot of paradoxes. You just– you and your wife a year and a half ago had your fourth child. How can you introduce another life into so forlorn a future?

Chris Hedges: That’s not an easy question to answer. I look at my youngest son, and his favorite book is “Out of the Blue,” which are pictures of narwhales and porpoises and dolphins. And I think, “It is most probable that within your lifetime, every single one of those sea creatures will be dead.” And in so many ways, I feel that I have to fight for them.

That even if I fail, they’ll say, “You know, at least my dad tried.” We’ve deeply betrayed this next generation on so many levels. And I can’t argue finally, you know, given the empirical facts in front of us that hope is rational. And I retreat, like so many people in my book, into faith. And a belief that resistance and fighting for life is meaningful even if all of the outward signs around us deny that possibility.

Bill Moyers: That faith in human beings?

Chris Hedges: Faith in that fighting for the sanctity of life is always worth it. Because you know, if we don’t fight, then we are finished. Then we signed our own death sentence. And Camus writes about this in “The Rebel,” that I think resistance becomes a kind of way of protecting our own worth as an individual, our own dignity, our own self-respect. And I think resistance does always leave open the possibility of change. And if we don’t resist, then we’ve essentially extinguished that hope.

Bill Moyers: H. L. Mencken, the celebrated iconoclast of the early part of the last century once wrote, “The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is more likely one who likes his country more than the rest of us and is those more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debouched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime, he is a good citizen, driven to despair.” Is that you?

Chris Hedges: Yeah–

Bill Moyers: A good citizen driven to despair?

Chris Hedges: Yes. And a good citizen driven to despair who will not remain apathetic and passive. And, you know, in every single place that we went to, Camden, West Virginia, Pine Ridge, we found these utterly magnificent human beings. I mean, this woman Lolly in Camden, African American woman, who you know, raised her own children. And I think by the time she was done, 19 others.

Her fiancé was shot and killed, one of her little seven-year-old daughters died of an asthma attack because they didn’t have the right medicine. And I said, “Lolly, how do you do it?” And she said, “I never ask why.” And when you spend time in the presence of people like that, and they were everywhere you know, they understood what they were up against.

It is deeply empowering. Because not to resist, not to fight back is on a very personal level to betray these people. And when you build relationships, as over the two years Joe and I did, with figures like that, it really, you know, almost comes down to something that simplistic. You can’t betray Lolly. You can’t betray any of these great figures who’ve stood up. Because their fight is our fight. And oftentimes they’ve endured far, far more– well, they have endured far, far more than I have endured or ever will endure.

Bill Moyers: The Book is, “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.” Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco. Thank you very much Chris for being with me.

Chris Hedges: Thanks Bill.

Bill Moyers: For all his power of expression, sometimes words fail even Chris Hedges, and a picture can say more in a single frame, well-drawn, than paragraphs of explanation. That’s what makes his partnership with graphic artist Joe Sacco on their book, “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt,” so potent and so effective. Joe Sacco has traveled all over the world, using the techniques of the comic book illustrator as a tool of journalism, telling stories with insight and humanity.

Joe Sacco: My name’s Joe Sacco and I’m a comics journalist. Drawing really often provides mood and atmosphere, and writing is that sort of precision. The facts. And you can put those two things together with comics, which I think is what makes the medium very powerful.

When I’m in the field, I meet people who are really in hard situations. I’m not interested in tears. I’m not even interested in sentimentality. But I am interested in telling people’s stories as well as possible who are oppressed or are poor.

Chris and I had already worked on a magazine piece about Camden and we decided we would expand that. You can read about poverty. You can read about despair. Or you can read about resignation. But to see it is really, it’s eye-opening.

I didn’t do that many stories in the book, maybe five or six. They all moved me quite a bit. I think the one that was sort of hit me in this way, because it was so unfamiliar to me was the woman who came out from Guatemala, the one that we call Anna in the story.

Her waiting by the phone after her husband had made the long, arduous trip so the United States. Waiting eight days, knowing he had to cross a desert where many people die. And that sort of story really touched me. Because when we think of migrant workers, we can be so dismissive of them. They’re just working in a fields. Oh, you see them bent over and they’re just doing their job, and you know they’re getting minimum wage. And you sort of feel sorry for them in a sense.

But to get a sense of, and to actually hear an individual story like that, for some reason that just really got to me when I was drawing it.

When I was about seven years old. I started drawing stories. Because I liked forms of self-expression and that was just one I never let go of. I never really drew just for the sake of drawing. There always had to be a story to go with it.

A story can be more true if you just let it be told. It’s very important for me, with my work, not to create these angelic people. You want to show people as nuts and bolts. Those are the people who seem real. With the Michael Red Cloud’s story, a story about his drug dealing days, making big money, partying, having women with him at all times. Now, he wasn’t necessarily pleased with how he’d lived his past life, he wasn’t. But to me, the idea is just to present the complete human being. You know, he’s a real person. I was moved by his story, or I saw the changes that he made through his story. And then you see the hard things in the context of his upbringing, in the context of what was around him, in the context of what he learned from people around him.

You see the commonalities between people who have nothing around them but despair. They are born into a context which simply doesn’t provide them opportunities or even the thought of opportunities. To me, it’s incumbent upon the journalist to go and see for himself or herself what’s actually going on. Journalism to me isn’t like a tennis match, where you’re just watching the ball, and each side is hitting it, hitting it back and forth to each other.

At some point, you have to arrest where the ball is, and that’s where truth is, you know? And like I say, truth doesn’t necessarily reside in the middle. And I’ve always had a problem with journalists who say things like, “Well, I pissed off both sides. I must be doing something right.” That is the laziest sort of phrase I’ve ever heard.

You know, hundreds of stories that still need to be told. I’m interested in sort of answering questions that journalism doesn’t really put its finger on.

To me, it’s very important to remind ourselves of the costs of what is going on in this world. The human costs.

I feel like I wouldn’t be where I need to be for myself if I didn’t look to those things, and I didn’t face them squarely. I just feel that’s who I am, and what I have to do.

DIG DEEPER

This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.

Sobre as bombas fabricadas no Brasil, e as tentativas de regulação do comércio mundial de armas (FSP)

Uncategorized, , , , ,
Folha de S.Paulo – 25/07/2012 – 03h00

Matias Spektor

Armas do Brasil

Negocia-se esta semana na ONU um Tratado de Comércio de Armas. É a primeira tentativa de regulação do lucrativo mercado global de armamentos.

O texto ora negociado afeta em cheio os interesses do Brasil emergente. Trata-se de uma área em que campeões da indústria estão em franca via de internacionalização. Além das gigantescas Embraer e Odebrecht, existe a Taurus, maior fabricante mundial de armas curtas. Exporta para 44 países, detém 20% do mercado de pistolas nos Estados Unidos e espera um lucro bruto para este ano de R$150 milhões de reais. Ainda entram na lista Avibrás (veículos não-tripulados e foguetes), Mectron (mísseis), Helibrás (helicópteros) e Companhia Brasileira de Cartuchos (munições). A Condor vende 100 produtos de “tecnologias não-letais”.

Essas empresas preferem um tratado minimalista. Não querem explicar publicamente suas vendas nem revelar a lista de clientes. Tampouco enfrentar questionamentos caso suas armas sejam utilizadas para desestabilizar uma região, violar direitos humanos, fomentar o crime transnacional e o terrorismo, ou atrapalhar o combate à pobreza. Isso é compreensível – elas querem fazer negócio.

Assim, o governo brasileiro trabalha para deixar o tratado livre de mecanismos intrusivos. Nem precisa fazer força para isso – há muitos países dispostos a fazê-lo em seu lugar. Irã, Síria, Cuba, Venezuela e Paquistão têm a dianteira. A Índia joga no mesmo time; muitas vezes, os Estados Unidos também. Na sexta-feira, estará provavelmente garantido o triunfo total da posição brasileira.

Em Brasília fomenta-se o êxito dessas indústrias, que geram divisas e empregam milhares de pessoas em áreas de alta tecnologia. Daí a lei de março passado, que outorga crédito fácil e isenção de PIS/Pasep, Cofins e IPI.

Ninguém no governo questionou a Avibrás por vender 18 sistemas de “bombas cluster” para a Malásia, a Mectron por seus 100 mísseis anti-radar para o Paquistão ou a Condor por sua exportação de gás lacrimogêneo para a Síria de Bashar al-Assad. O tema simplesmente não está na agenda, e todos os incentivos de hoje apontam para mais do mesmo.

Entretanto, há uma pequena ameaça no horizonte. Grandes indústrias de armamento europeias e americanas começaram a ajustar sua posição. Como elas enfrentam controles cada vez mais estreitos para suas exportações, buscam meios de moldar o novo ambiente regulatório em benefício próprio.

Segundo elas, um tratado internacional decente seria bom para quem quer ganhar dinheiro. Criaria um controle de qualidade parecido à ISO, padronização de produtos comandada pelo setor privado que facilita a abertura de mercados.

Também estabeleceria códigos de conduta comuns, algo valioso em mercados cheios de clientes de caráter duvidoso, onde uma venda inapropriada pode ferir o interesse de acionistas e macular a reputação das empresas e de países.

Se essas regras pegarem e nossa indústria continuar apostando contra a transparência, todos perdem. Sobretudo o cidadão brasileiro, que é obrigado a custear um negócio sobre o qual ninguém o consultou.

 

Elio Gaspari

De SaddamHussein@org para Dilma@gov

Estimada presidente Dilma Rousseff,

Outro dia jantei com o Che Guevara e o Laurent Kabila, aquele presidente do Congo que foi assassinado em 2001. A senhora deve se recordar que o Che andou pela África e deu-se mal.

No meio da conversa Che perguntou-lhe se era verdade que em 2001 o Robert Mugabe, o soba do Zimbábue, tinha ajudado sua facção na guerra civil congolesa repassando-lhe bombas incendiárias e de fragmentação fabricadas no Brasil. Ele desconversou. O Che ficou perplexo, imaginou Lula vendendo esse tipo de armas para africanos. São bombas que incendiam a mata ou, ao explodir, soltam dezenas de milhares de esferas de aço. Destinam-se a matar indiscriminadamente combatentes e civis. Como um jornalista chamado Rubens Valente achou um pedaço dessa história, resolvi escrever-lhe, pois não quebrarei o sigilo do que se aprende por aqui. Ele contou que o Brasil vendeu 726 bombas ao Mugabe. Faturou US$ 5,8 milhões para matar africanos miseráveis. Eles morreriam nas rebeliões congolesas ou no próprio Zimbábue. Dias depois o Che me procurou, explicando que o negócio não foi feito pelo Lula, mas por Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Estava de alma leve, mas esse Guevara é um sonhador. Ele não sabe das coisas do mundo.

Eu sei, presidente Dilma, e sei que a senhora está abrindo o cofre do BNDES para o que acha que será o reerguimento da indústria bélica brasileira. Sete grandes empreiteiras já se habilitaram num programa de incentivos e, novamente, a Federação das Indústrias de São Paulo alavanca o projeto. No varejo, já se acharam bombas de gás lacrimogênio brasileiras no Bahrein e na Turquia (jogadas contra refugiados sírios).

Isso vai acabar mal. Eu vi como acabou a última iniciativa do gênero, ocorrida entre os anos 70 e 80. Os brasileiros viraram piada. Nós trocaríamos petróleo por armas e compramos blindados leves e algumas baterias de foguetes. A senhora acredita que em 1979 um industrial paulista foi a Bagdá e ofereceu tecnologia nuclear para a minha bomba atômica? Eu disse a um embaixador brasileiro que o moço não devia vender o que não tinha. Quase dois anos depois vocês voltaram a mesma história, mais um míssil capaz de transportar a bomba. Deu em nada, até porque os sionistas bombardearam meu reator e deram um tranco num poderoso general brasileiro. O Muammar Gaddafi me contou que o mesmo paulista vendia-lhe blindados e queria fabricar um tanque, acho que se chamava Osório, financiado pelos sauditas. O “reis dos reis” sabia que, se a casa de Saud financiasse uma arma, seria para matá-lo. Procure saber quanto essa operação custou. Durante minha guerra com o Irã vocês me ofereciam blindados e queriam vender metralhadores para o aiatolá. Pode? A única vítima dessas aventuras foi um jornalista brasileiro. Ele se chamava Alexandre von Baumgarten. Falou demais a respeito de uma pasta de urânio que nós compramos em 1981. No ano seguinte foi passear de barco, encontrou uma lancha com amigos, convidou-os para um copo e foram metralhados. Ele, a mulher e o barqueiro.

O homem da bomba faliu, e vocês tomaram um calote de US$ 200 milhões.

Respeitosamente,

Saddam Hussein.

 

24/07/2012 – 03h00
Janio de Freitas

A transparência opaca

A presidente Dilma Rousseff está sob o risco iminente de perder o direito moral de cobrar transparência, como princípio e exigência do seu governo, a quem quer que seja. O Brasil faz uso, neste momento, de uma falácia primária para opor-se, em reunião da ONU, a um acordo que estabeleça transparência nas exportações de armas.

A política externa proclamada pelo governo, e fiel ao que se entende como índole brasileira, é contrária a confrontos armados entre nações ou como solução de dissensões internas. Logo, não pode favorecer a realidade de que a busca dos altos lucros da exportação sigilosa de armas, além de ser o sustentáculo de ditaduras sanguinárias, está na raiz das matanças de populações civis, condenadas pelo Brasil –na europeia Bósnia, no Oriente Médio, nas infindáveis guerras da África, na Ásia, agora mesmo na Síria.

O argumento do governo brasileiro na reunião da ONU, destinada a tentar um Tratado sobre Comércio de Armas, foi transcrito, no essencial, pelo repórter Rubens Valente (Folha de domingo): a transparência das exportações de armas “poderia expor os recursos e a capacidade dos países […] de sustentar um conflito prolongado”.

Mas a capacidade bélica de um país depende do seu arsenal e da relação entre qualidade e quantidade de suas tropas. Um grande exportador pode ter arsenal insignificante, dando prioridade aos lucros do comércio legal ou não, e descuidar daquela relação.

Da mesma maneira, baixa ou nenhuma exportação não significa que um país não produza armas e não tenha Forças Armadas bem equipadas e preparadas. E ainda há os que têm “capacidade de sustentar um conflito prolongado” com armamento importado às claras, o que parece ser o caso, na América do Sul, da Venezuela, por exemplo.

O argumento brasileiro é falso. Porque infundado e porque adotado para esconder o fato de que o Brasil exportador de armas está envolvido em monstruosidades que finge condenar. O trabalho excelente de Rubens Valente revela que o governo de Fernando Henrique Cardoso autorizou a produção e venda de bombas de fragmentação ao Zimbábue do ditador Robert Mugabe.

Ou seja, a uma ditadura sanguinária, conduzida por ideias psicopáticas como a da necessidade de exterminar os brancos, remanescentes da antiga Rodésia. E ainda algumas das tribos locais.

As bombas de fragmentação são proibidas por acordo internacional: não têm alvo preciso, desabrocham no ar em milhares de bolas de aço que atingem a população civil em áreas imensas. Israel foi acusado de lançar tais bombas sobre a população palestina de Gaza, e, se o fez, o acusado de produzir e exportar as bombas foi o Brasil. Cujo governo posou de contrário aos ataques à população palestina.

Os mutilados por pisar inadvertidamente em mina camuflada, resto de algum conflito estúpido, compõem uma tragédia africana que tem comovido o mundo. Crianças, em geral, esses mutilados são os que escapam da mortandade feita pelas minas deixadas no chão de vários países. Em grande parte das minas recuperadas, graças sobretudo a entidades de benemerência europeias, está preservada a inscrição: “Made in Brazil”.

Podemos ostentar um orgulho internacional: nós também temos nossos criminosos de guerra. Gente que não escaparia no Tribunal Penal Internacional de Haia, por fomentar a morte de populações civis inocentes, e com isso lucrar fortunas.

É a esse Brasil opaco que a falta de transparência dá proteção. Como sua continuidade permitirá que a Rússia arme Bashar al Assad, e os Estados Unidos, a Inglaterra, a França, e o Brasil também, façam o mesmo pelo mundo todo.

22/07/2012 – 05h15

Brasil se opõe a “transparência total” em debate de armas na ONU

RUBENS VALENTE

DE BRASÍLIA

Em declaração escrita apresentada à ONU, o Brasil atacou “a transparência absoluta” no tema da exportação de armas. Representantes de 193 países participam de uma negociação na sede da ONU, em Nova York, até o próximo dia 27, para tentar estabelecer um inédito Tratado de Comércio de Armas.

Segundo a declaração brasileira, de 2 de julho e apresentada no encontro pelo representante nas negociações, embaixador Antonio Guerreiro, o acesso livre “poderia expor os recursos e as capacidades dos países […] de sustentar um conflito prolongado”.

“Obrigações relativas a relatórios e transparência deverão ser tratadas com os necessários bom senso e precaução”, diz o texto.

Daniel Mack, coordenador de Políticas de Controle de Armas do Instituto Sou da Paz, de São Paulo, que acompanha as negociações sobre o tratado, classificou a preocupação como “anacrônica”.

“Transparência é o ‘calcanhar de Aquiles’ da posição brasileira, o que não deixa de ser altamente irônico e contraditório, considerando a nova Lei de Acesso à Informação. […] Dos maiores exportadores, o Brasil tem a pior transparência, não só em relação aos países europeus e aos EUA, mas também em comparação com a África do Sul e a Sérvia”, disse Mack.

RASTREABILIDADE

Embora avesso à transparência nas exportações, o Brasil quer dar o exemplo no tema da rastreabilidade das munições e armas, aspecto elogiado por Mack.

O país afirma que a indústria nacional já consegue fazer marcações a laser de armas e munições, à prova de raspagem, de forma a possibilitar a imediata identificação do fabricante e do destinatário final do produto.

A medida poderia coibir desvios de armamentos e ajudar a apurar crimes contra direitos humanos.

Na declaração, o Brasil diz ser preciso um esforço internacional conjunto para prevenir, combater e erradicar o contrabando de armas.

 

Brasil vendeu bombas condenadas a ditador do Zimbábue

RUBENS VALENTE
DE BRASÍLIA

Documentos inéditos sobre a exportação de material bélico brasileiro, um dos segredos militares mais bem guardados pelo país, revelam que o Brasil vendeu ao ditador Robert Mugabe, do Zimbábue, um tipo de bomba condenada pela comunidade internacional.

Após negar duas vezes um pedido da Folha com base na Lei de Acesso à Informação, o Ministério da Defesa voltou atrás e liberou 1.572 páginas de documentos secretos.

São registros de 204 operações de exportação de armas e munição, no total de US$ 315 milhões, de janeiro de 2001 a maio de 2002, os mais recentes disponibilizados. Os papéis, diz a pasta, manterão sigilo de no mínimo dez anos.

É a primeira vez que o órgão libera o acesso a documentos do gênero.

Entre os registros está a revelação de que o Brasil vendeu ao Zimbábue, em agosto de 2001, US$ 5,8 milhões em bombas de fragmentação e incendiárias.

Foram vendidas 340 bombas completas, além de componentes para a montagem de outras 426 bombas de fragmentação e 605 incendiárias.

Na época da aquisição, Mugabe, no poder desde 1980, era acusado de ajudar uma guerra no vizinho Congo e enfrentava distúrbios na zona rural do país, com a morte de fazendeiros brancos.

A venda pelo Brasil das bombas de fragmentação era uma antiga suspeita de ONGs que monitoram o uso dessas munições, conhecidas como “de dispersão”.

A bomba é assim chamada porque, ao ser detonada, espalha de 14 mil a 120 mil esferas de aço, a depender do modelo, que podem atingir indistintamente combatentes e população civil.

As esferas de bombas maiores podem se espalhar por área equivalente a sete campos de futebol.

Em 2008, mais de cem países assinaram convenção que veta a fabricação e venda do tipo de bomba. Brasil, EUA e Rússia, dentre outros, recusaram-se. “A transparência do Brasil na matéria é historicamente muito ruim”, diz Cristian Wittmann, de uma coalizão de ONGs contra esse tipo de munição.

O diretor de Produtos de Defesa do Ministério da Defesa, o general de brigada Aderico Mattioli, disse que muitas vendas “chamam a atenção” por indicarem munição pesada, mas podem estar relacionadas a treinamento de militares. “É uma munição, diga-se de passagem, de um material antigo”, disse.

RANKING

Os dados obtidos pela Folha eram desconhecidos por ONGs que estudam o comércio de armas. No ranking do Sipri (Instituto Internacional de Estocolmo para Pesquisa sobre a Paz), uma referência no tema, o Brasil aparece em 2001 no 46º lugar, o último, ao lado de países que não venderam material bélico.

Eles revelam a venda total de US$ 287,4 milhões em 2001, o que projetaria o Brasil para a décima posição no ranking liderado pelos EUA, que venderam US$ 6 bilhões.

A Sipri cita que o Brasil vendeu US$ 26 milhões em 2002, menos que as vendas de apenas quatro meses daquele ano: US$ 27,6 milhões.

Anarchists attack science (Nature)

Uncategorized, , , , , ,

Armed extremists are targeting nuclear and nanotechnology workers.

Leigh Phillips
28 May 2012

Investigations of the shooting of nuclear-engineering head Roberto Adinolfi have confirmed the involvement of an eco-anarchist group. P. RATTINI/AFP/GETTY

A loose coalition of eco-anarchist groups is increasingly launching violent attacks on scientists.

A group calling itself the Olga Cell of the Informal Anarchist Federation International Revolutionary Front has claimed responsibility for the non-fatal shooting of a nuclear-engineering executive on 7 May in Genoa, Italy. The same group sent a letter bomb to a Swiss pro-nuclear lobby group in 2011; attempted to bomb IBM’s nanotechnology laboratory in Switzerland in 2010; and has ties with a group responsible for at least four bomb attacks on nanotechnology facilities in Mexico. Security authorities say that such eco-anarchist groups are forging stronger links.

On 11 May, the cell sent a four-page letter to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera claiming responsibility for the shooting of Roberto Adinolfi, the chief executive of Ansaldo Nucleare, the nuclear-engineering subsidiary of aerospace and defence giant Finmeccanica. Believed by authorities to be genuine, the letter is riddled with anti-science rhetoric. The group targeted Adinolfi because he is a “sorcerer of the atom”, it wrote. “Adinolfi knows well that it is only a matter of time before a European Fukushima kills on our continent.”

“Science in centuries past promised us a golden age, but it is pushing us towards self-destruction and total slavery,” the letter continues. “With this action of ours, we return to you a tiny part of the suffering that you, man of science, are pouring into this world.” The group also threatened to carry out further attacks.

The Italian Ministry of the Interior has subsequently beefed up security at thousands of potential political, industrial and scientific targets. The measures include assigning bodyguards to 550 individuals.

The Olga Cell, named after an imprisoned Greek anarchist, is part of the Informal Anarchist Federation, which, in April 2011, claimed responsibility for sending a parcel bomb that exploded at the offices of the Swiss nuclear lobby group, Swissnuclear, in Olten. A letter found in the remains of the bomb demanded the release of three individuals who had been detained for plotting an attack on IBM’s flagship nanotechnology facility in Zurich earlier that year. In a situation report published this month, the Swiss Federal Intelligence Service explicitly linked the federation to the IBM attack.

The Informal Anarchist Federation argues that technology, and indeed civilization, is responsible for the world’s ills, and that scientists are the handmaidens of capitalism. “Finmeccanica means bio- and nanotechnology. Finmeccanica means death and suffering, new frontiers of Italian capitalism,” the letter reads.

Gathering momentum
The cell says that it is uniting with eco-anarchist groups in other countries, including Mexico, Chile, Greece and the United Kingdom. Mexico has already seen similar attacks: in August 2011, a group called Individuals Tending Towards Savagery sent a parcel bomb that wounded two nanotechnology researchers at the Monterrey Institute of Technology. One received burns to his legs and a perforated eardrum and the other had his lung pierced by shrapnel (G. Herrera Corral Nature 476,373; 2011). The package contained enough explosive to collapse part of the building, according to police, but failed to detonate properly.

Earlier that year, the same group sent two bombs to the nanotechnology facility at the Polytechnic University of the Valley of Mexico. One was intercepted before anyone could be harmed, but the second detonated, injuring a security guard. It is not clear how closely the group is tied to the Informal Anarchist Federation, but in online forums the two bodies offer “direct support” for each other’s activities and talk of a “blossoming” of a more organized eco-anarchist movement.

In the wake of the Mexican bombings, the Monterrey Institute installed metal detectors, began to use police sniffer dogs and started random inspections of vehicles and packages. After a letter bomb addressed to a nanotechnology researcher at the Polytechnic University of Pachuca in Hidalgo exploded in December last year, the institute installed a perimeter fence and scanners, and campuses across the state heightened security measures.

Italian police investigating the shooting say that they are concerned about the rise in violent action by anarchist groups amid Europe’s economic crisis. On 23 May, for example, members of the Informal Anarchist Federation attacked railway signals in Bristol, UK, causing severe transport delays. An online message from the group said that the targets had been chosen to disrupt employees of the Ministry of Defence and defence-technology businesses in the area, including Raytheon and QinetiQ.

The Swiss report also noted signs of “an increasing degree of international networking between perpetrators”. The level of risk to scientists depends on their field of work, says Simon Johner, a spokesman for the Swiss Federal Intelligence Service. “We are not able to tell them what to do. We can only make them aware of the dangers. It’s up to institutions to take preventative actions.” The agency is working with police forces, businesses and research communities to assess and tackle the threat.

“These people do not represent mainstream opinion. But I am still pretty frightened by this violence,” says Michael Hagmann, a biochemist and head of corporate communications for the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology near Zurich, a public-sector partner of the IBM facility that also does nanotechnology research.

“Just a few weeks after the attempted bombing, we were due to have a large conference on nanotechnology and we were really quite nervous” about going ahead with it, Hagmann says. “But we concluded that the public discussion was more important and didn’t want to scare people by having 20 police guarding us. It would have sent the wrong message.”

Nature 485, 561 (31 May 2012) doi:10.1038/485561a

*   *   *

Published online 22 August 2011 | Nature 476, 373 (2011) | doi:10.1038/476373a

Column: World View

Stand up against the anti-technology terrorists

Home-made bombs are being sent to physicists in Mexico. Colleagues around the world should ensure their own security, urges Gerardo Herrera Corral.

Gerardo Herrera Corral

My elder brother, Armando Herrera Corral, was this month sent a tube of dynamite by terrorists who oppose his scientific research. The home-made bomb, which was in a shoe-box-sized package labelled as an award for his personal attention, exploded when he pulled at the adhesive tape wrapped around it. My brother, director of the technology park at the Monterrey Institute of Technology in Mexico, was standing at the time, and suffered burns to his legs and a perforated eardrum. More severely injured by the blast was his friend and colleague Alejandro Aceves López, whom my brother had gone to see in his office to share a cup of coffee and open the award. Aceves López was sitting down when my brother opened the package; he took the brunt of the explosion in his chest, and shrapnel pierced one of his lungs.

Both scientists are now recovering from their injuries, but they were extremely fortunate to survive. The bomb failed to go off properly, and only a fraction of the 20-centimetre-long cylinder of dynamite ignited. The police estimate that the package contained enough explosive to take down part of the building, had it worked as intended.

The next day, I, too, was sent a suspicious package. I have been advised by the police not to offer details of why the package was judged of concern, but it arrived by an unusual procedure, and on a Sunday. It tested positive for explosives, and was taken away by the bomb squad, which declared a false alarm after finding that the parcel contained only books. My first reaction was to leave the country. Now, I am confused as to how I should respond.

As an academic scientist, why was my brother singled out in this way? He does not work in a field that is usually considered high-risk for terrorist activity, such as medical research on animals. He works on computer science, and Aceves López is an expert in robotics. I am a high-energy physicist and coordinate the Mexican contribution to research using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory; I have worked in the field for 15 years.

An extremist anarchist group known as Individuals Tending to Savagery (ITS) has claimed responsibility for the attack on my brother. This is confirmed by a partially burned note found by the authorities at the bomb site, signed by the ITS and with a message along the lines of: “If this does not get to the newspapers we will produce more explosions. Wounding or killing teachers and students does not matter to us.”

In statements posted on the Internet, the ITS expresses particular hostility towards nano­technology and computer scientists. It claims that nanotechnology will lead to the downfall of mankind, and predicts that the world will become dominated by self-aware artificial-intelligence technology. Scientists who work to advance such technology, it says, are seeking to advance control over people by ‘the system’. The group praises Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, whose anti-technology crusade in the United States in 1978–95 killed three people and injured many others.

The group’s rhetoric is absurd, but I urge colleagues around the world to take the threat that it poses to researchers seriously. Information gathered by Mexican federal authorities and Interpol link it to actions in countries including Spain, France and Chile. In April this year, the ITS sent a bomb — similar to the one posted to my brother — to the head of the Nanotechnology Engineering Division at the Polytechnic University of Mexico Valley in Tultitlan, although that device did not explode. In May, the university received a second parcel bomb, with a message reading: “This is not a joke: last month we targeted Oscar Camacho, today the institution, tomorrow who knows? Open fire on nanotechnology and those who support it!”

“I believe that terror should not succeed in establishing fear and imposing conduct.”

The scientific community must be made aware of such organizations, and of their capacity for destruction. Nanotechnology-research institutes and departments, companies and professional associations must beef up their security procedures, particularly on how they receive and accept parcels and letters.

I would like to stand up and speak in this way because I believe that terror should not succeed in establishing fear and imposing conduct that takes us far from the freedom we enjoy. I would like the police to take these events seriously; they are becoming a real threat to society. I would also like to express my solidarity with the Monterrey Institute of Technology — the institution that gave me both financial support to pursue my undergraduate studies and high-level academic training.

To oppose technology is not an unacceptable way to think. We may well debate the desirability of further technical development in our society. Yet radical groups such as the ITS overlook a crucial detail: it is not technology that is the problem, but how we use it. After Alfred Nobel invented dynamite he became a rich man, because it found use in mining, quarrying, construction and demolition. But people can also decide to put dynamite into a parcel and address it to somebody with the intention of killing them.

Gerardo Herrera Corral is a physicist at the Research and Advanced Studies Centre of the National Polytechnic Institute of Mexico in Mexico City.

Sobre a Portaria No. 303 da Advocacia Geral da União – retrocesso na área dos direitos indígenas – Notas de repúdio da ABA e da APIB

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Portaria da AGU diz que governo pode intervir em área indígena

Portaria da Advocacia-Geral da União publicada ontem (17/07/12) no “Diário Oficial da União” prevê que o poder público faça intervenções em terras indígenas sem a necessidade de consultar índios ou a Fundação Nacional do Índio (site da ABA, 17 de juulho de 2012).

Nota de repúdio da ABA:

UM ATO NOCIVO E ARBITRÁRIO

A ABA vem a publico manifestar o seu repúdio a recente Portaria No. 303 elaborada pela AGU e publicada no DOU. A pretexto de homogeneizar o entendimento dos organismos de governo no que tange a aplicação das chamadas condicionantes para o reconhecimento de terras indígenas apontadas pelo STF durante a decisão sobre a TI Raposa/Serra do Sol, esta portaria pretende impor uma leitura da legislação indigenista brasileira em total dissintonia com os interesses indígenas, com os princípios constitucionais estabelecidos na Carta Magna de 1988 e com as convenções internacionais das quais o Brasil é signatário.

É um ato totalmente arbitrário e inadequado pretender resolver questões complexas e da maior importância para a ação indigenista mediante uma simples portaria. As chamadas condicionantes estabelecidas no curso de um processo judicial específico e cheio de singularidades, não poderiam de maneira alguma ser tratadas de modo caricatural e mecânico, ignorando por completo as múltiplas interpretações antropológicas e jurídicas que podem receber.

A portaria atropela ainda de maneira grosseira e acintosa a própria ação indigenista e a distribuição de mandatos e competências entre os órgãos públicos. Assim ignora os esforços desenvolvidos pela própria FUNAI e pela Secretaria-Geral da Presidência da República, em amplos foros de debate, no sentido de promover a regularização do direito de consulta, considerando-o procedimento dispensável sempre que algum governismo governamental vier a entender, por critérios puramente internos, que está lidando com questão de superior interesse nacional (art. 1º, itens 5, 6 e 7). Por outro lado com uma simples canetada e sem qualquer justificativa que o embase, transfere para o Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade as responsabilidades, o poder de administração e controle sobre uma imensidade de terras indígenas (art. 1º, itens VII, IX e X).

Ao leitor atento a portaria não deixa dúvidas – sem um embasamento doutrinário e sem cercar-se dos devidos cuidados de estudar a questão a fundo e promover os debates necessários a cristalização de um entendimento democrático, a AGU selecionou questões totalmente diversas colocadas a administração pública no seu trato com as comunidades indígenas e procurou dar-lhes a interpretação mais restritiva e negativa possível aos direitos dos indígenas.

Por seu primarismo e incongruência, buscando restringir e amesquinhar os direitos indígenas presentes na CF-1988, a ABA considera a portaria 303 um instrumento jurídico-administrativo absolutamente equivocado e pede a sua imediata revogação.

Bela Feldman Bianco e João Pacheco de Oliveira
Presidente da Associação Brasileira de Antropologia e Coordenador da Comissão de Assuntos Indígenas

*   *   *

REPÚDIO CONTRA A PORTARIA 303 DA ADVOGACIA GERAL DA UNIÃO QUE REAFIRMA OS ATAQUES DO GOVERNO DILMA AO DIREITOS TERRITORIAIS DOS POVOS INDÍGENAS

O Governo da Presidente Dilma, por meio da Advogacia Geral da União baixou no último dia 16 de julho a Portaria 303, que diz considerar “a necessidade de normatizar a atuação das unidades da AGU em relação às salvaguardas institucionais às terras indígenas”, supostamente nos termos do entendimento fixado pelo Supremo Tribunal Federal na Petição 3.388-Roraima (caso Raposa Serra do Sol).

A Articulação dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil – APIB manifesta publicamente o seu total repúdio a esta outra medida autoritária do Governo Dilma que como o seu antecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, considera os povos e territórios indígenas ameaças e empecilhos a seu programa neodesenvolvimentista, principalmente à implantação do PAC e do PAC 2, pois dificultam os processos de licenciamento das obras do Programa (hidrelétricas, ferrovias, rodovias, usinas nucleares, linhas de transmissão etc.)

A APIB repudia esta medida vergonhosa que aprofunda o desrespeito aos direitos dos povos indígenas assegurados pela Constituição Federal e instrumentos internacionais assinados pelo Brasil. Entre outras aberrações jurídicas, a Portaria relativiza, reduz e diz como deve ser o direito dos povos indígenas ao usufruto das riquezas existentes nas suas terras; ignora o direito de consulta assegurado pela Convenção 169 da Organização Internacional do Trabalho (OIT); reduz o tratamento dos povos indígenas à condição de indivíduos, grupos tribais e comunidades; afirma que são as terras indígenas que afetam as unidades de conservação, quando que na verdade é ao contrário, e, finalmente, enterra, ditatorialmente, o direito de autonomia desses povos reconhecido pela Declaração da ONU sobre os Direitos dos Povos Indígenas.

A Portaria 303 da AGU, publicada oportunamente depois da Conferência das Nações Unidas sobre Desenvolvimento Sustentável (Rio+20) e das pressões da OIT, e ainda às vésperas do recesso parlamentar, que poderia comprometer a aprovação de medidas provisórias e projetos de lei de interesse do Executivo, aprofunda o estrangulamento dos direitos territoriais indígenas iniciados com a paralisia na tramitação e aprovação do Estatuto dos Povos Indígenas, engavetado há mais de 20 anos na Câmara dos Deputados, e com a edição das Portarias Interministeriais 420 a 424, que estabelecem prazos irrisórios para a Funai se posicionar frente aos Estudos de Impactos e licenciamento de obras. Isso, sem citar em detalhes a aprovação da PEC 215 e a falta de coragem em vetar na íntegra as mudanças ao código florestal defendidas pela bancada ruralista.

A AGU desvirtua e pretende reverter o já arquivado processo do STF, cujo plenário conforme reiterado em 23 de maio de 2012 pelo ministro Ricardo Lewandowski, já declarou especificamente a constitucionalidade da demarcação contínua da Terra Indígena Raposa Serra do Sol, observadas 19 condições ou salvaguardas institucionais. Só que tal decisão não tem efeito vinculante, segundo o magistrado. Ou seja, não pode ser forjada a ligação entre o processo da Raposa Serra do Sol com as demais Terras Indígenas do Brasil. Do contrário fica evidente o propósito deste Governo de submeter mais uma vez o destino dos povos indígenas, a demarcação de suas terras, aos interesses do agronegócio, do capital financeiro, das empreiteiras, da grande indústria, das corporações e da base política de sustentação que lhe garante governabilidade no Congresso Nacional e em outras estruturas do Estado.

Este tratamento dado aos povos indígenas não tem cabimento num Estado democrático de direito a não ser num Estado de exceção ou num regime ditatorial cujas políticas e práticas a atual presidente da República e seus mais próximos assessores conhecem bem.

Se o governo da Presidente Dilma tomar a determinação de levar em frente à aplicabilidade destes instrumentos jurídicos que legalizam a usurpação dos direitos indígenas, principalmente o direito sagrado à terra e o território. Estará notoriamente desvirtuando e tirando a credibilidade de seus propósitos ao chamar os povos indígenas, por meio de seus dirigentes e instâncias representativas, a dialogar sobre a promoção e proteção dos direitos indígenas no âmbito de distintos espaços como a Comissão Nacional de Política Indigenista (CNPI) e o Grupo de Trabalho Interministerial (GTI) que promove a regulamentação dos mecanismos de aplicação do direito de consulta e consentimento livre, prévio e informado, estabelecido pela Convenção 169 da Organização Internacional do Trabalho (OIT). Além de tudo, irá contrariar os princípios da boa fé e do efeito vinculante deste instrumento internacional, incorporado desde 2004 no ordenamento jurídico nacional.

A APIB lamenta que um Governo que se diz democrático, em nome das pactuações que lhe dão sustentação, do progresso e do crescimento econômico, sacrifique os direitos coletivos e fundamentais dos primeiros habitantes deste país, que não obstante as diversas tentativas de dizimação promovidas pelo poder colonial e sucessivos regimes de governo, é depositário da maior diversidade sociocultural do mundo, com mais de 230 povos indígenas reconhecidos e várias dezenas de povos ainda não contatados.

A APIB reafirma a sua missão de lutar pela promoção e defesa dos direitos dos povos indígenas.

Brasília, 18 de julho de 2012.
Articulação dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil – APIB

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Procuradoria questiona portaria que permite intervenção em área indígena (Folha de São Paulo)

JC e-mail 4543, de 19 de Julho de 2012.

O Ministério Público Federal vai contestar na Justiça a portaria editada anteontem pela Advocacia-Geral da União que libera a intervenção em terras indígenas sem a necessidade de consultar os índios ou mesmo a Funai (Fundação Nacional do Índio).

Para a Procuradoria, a medida adotada pelo órgão é “absurda” e representa um “retrocesso” na causa indígena. “A portaria é completamente inconstitucional, não há ali nenhum suporte legal”, disse Marco Antônio Delfino de Almeida, procurador responsável por tratar de assuntos relacionados aos índios.

A AGU diz que, em respeito à “soberania nacional”, será possível construir bases militares, estradas ou hidrelétricas em áreas demarcadas “independentemente de consulta às comunidades indígenas”. A Constituição e convenções internacionais preveem consultas aos índios sobre qualquer atividade que os afetem.

Segundo Almeida, o STF ainda não se posicionou sobre a revisão do tamanho de terras indígenas. Áreas demarcadas antes da Constituição de 1988 não contavam com estudos antropológicos, o que acabou gerando distorções. Pela portaria da AGU, não será possível revisar o tamanho de terras.

Até ontem à noite a Funai não havia se pronunciado sobre a portaria da AGU.

Social Identification, Not Obedience, Might Motivate Unspeakable Acts (Science Daily)

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ScienceDaily (July 18, 2012) — What makes soldiers abuse prisoners? How could Nazi officials condemn thousands of Jews to gas chamber deaths? What’s going on when underlings help cover up a financial swindle? For years, researchers have tried to identify the factors that drive people to commit cruel and brutal acts and perhaps no one has contributed more to this knowledge than psychological scientist Stanley Milgram.

Just over 50 years ago, Milgram embarked on what were to become some of the most famous studies in psychology. In these studies, which ostensibly examined the effects of punishment on learning, participants were assigned the role of “teacher” and were required to administer shocks to a “learner” that increased in intensity each time the learner gave an incorrect answer. As Milgram famously found, participants were willing to deliver supposedly lethal shocks to a stranger, just because they were asked to do so.

Researchers have offered many possible explanations for the participants’ behavior and the take-home conclusion that seems to have emerged is that people cannot help but obey the orders of those in authority, even when those orders go to the extremes.

This obedience explanation, however, fails to account for a very important aspect of the studies: why, and under what conditions, people did not obey the experimenter.

In a new article published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers Stephen Reicher of the University of St. Andrews and Alexander Haslam and Joanne Smith of the University of Exeter propose a new way of looking at Milgram’s findings.

The researchers hypothesized that, rather than obedience to authority, the participants’ behavior might be better explained by their patterns of social identification. They surmised that conditions that encouraged identification with the experimenter (and, by extension, the scientific community) led participants to follow the experimenters’ orders, while conditions that encouraged identification with the learner (and the general community) led participants to defy the experimenters’ orders.

As the researchers explain, this suggests that participants’ willingness to engage in destructive behavior is “a reflection not of simple obedience, but of active identification with the experimenter and his mission.”

Reicher, Haslam, and Smith wanted to examine whether participants’ willingness to administer shocks across variants of the Milgram paradigm could be predicted by the extent to which the variant emphasized identification with the experimenter and identification with the learner.

For their study, the researchers recruited two different groups of participants. The expert group included 32 academic social psychologists from two British universities and on Australian university. The nonexpert group included 96 first-year psychology students who had not yet learned about the Milgram studies.

All participants were read a short description of Milgram’s baseline study and they were then given details about 15 variants of the study. For each variant, they were asked to indicate the extent to which that variant would lead participants to identify with the experimenter and the scientific community and the extent to which it would lead them to identify with the learner and the general community.

The results of the study confirmed the researchers’ hypotheses. Identification with the experimenter was a very strong positive predictor of the level of obedience displayed in each variant. On the other hand, identification with the learner was a strong negative predictor of the level of obedience. The relative identification score (identification with experimenter minus identification with learner) was also a very strong predictor of the level of obedience.

According to the authors, these new findings suggest that we need to rethink obedience as the standard explanation for why people engage in cruel and brutal behavior. This new research “moves us away from a dominant viewpoint that has prevailed within and beyond the academic world for nearly half a century — a viewpoint suggesting that people engage in barbaric acts because they have little insight into what they are doing and conform slavishly to the will of authority,” they write.

These new findings suggest that social identification provides participants with a moral compass and motivates them to act as followers. This followership, as the authors point out, is not thoughtless — “it is the endeavor of committed subjects.”

Looking at the findings this way has several advantages, Reicher, Haslam, and Smith argue. First, it mirrors recent historical assessments suggesting that functionaries in brutalizing regimes — like the Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann — do much more than merely follow orders. And it simultaneously accounts for why participants are more likely to follow orders under certain conditions than others.

The researchers acknowledge that the methodology used in this research is somewhat unorthodox — the most direct way to examine the question of social identification would involve recreating the Milgram paradigm and varying different aspects of the paradigm to manipulate social identification with both experimenter and learner. But this kind of research involves considerable ethical challenges. The purpose of the article, the authors say, is to provide a strong theoretical case for such research, “so that work to address the critical question of why (and not just whether) people still prove willing to participate in brutalizing acts can move forward.”

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Most People Will Administer Shocks When Prodded By ‘Authority Figure’

ScienceDaily (Dec. 22, 2008) — Nearly 50 years after one of the most controversial behavioral experiments in history, a social psychologist has found that people are still just as willing to administer what they believe are painful electric shocks to others when urged on by an authority figure.

Jerry M. Burger, PhD, replicated one of the famous obedience experiments of the late Stanley Milgram, PhD, and found that compliance rates in the replication were only slightly lower than those found by Milgram. And, like Milgram, he found no difference in the rates of obedience between men and women.

Burger’s findings are reported in the January issue of American Psychologist. The issue includes a special section reflecting on Milgram’s work 24 years after his death on Dec. 20, 1984, and analyzing Burger’s study.

“People learning about Milgram’s work often wonder whether results would be any different today,” said Burger, a professor at Santa Clara University. “Many point to the lessons of the Holocaust and argue that there is greater societal awareness of the dangers of blind obedience. But what I found is the same situational factors that affected obedience in Milgram’s experiments still operate today.”

Stanley Milgram was an assistant professor at Yale University in 1961 when he conducted the first in a series of experiments in which subjects – thinking they were testing the effect of punishment on learning – administered what they believed were increasingly powerful electric shocks to another person in a separate room. An authority figure conducting the experiment prodded the first person, who was assigned the role of “teacher” to continue shocking the other person, who was playing the role of “learner.” In reality, both the authority figure and the learner were in on the real intent of the experiment, and the imposing-looking shock generator machine was a fake.

Milgram found that, after hearing the learner’s first cries of pain at 150 volts, 82.5 percent of participants continued administering shocks; of those, 79 percent continued to the shock generator’s end, at 450 volts. In Burger’s replication, 70 percent of the participants had to be stopped as they continued past 150 volts – a difference that was not statistically significant.

“Nearly four out of five of Milgram’s participants who continued after 150 volts went all the way to the end of the shock generator,” Burger said. “Because of this pattern, knowing how participants react at the 150-volt juncture allows us to make a reasonable guess about what they would have done if we had continued with the complete procedure.”

Milgram’s techniques have been debated ever since his research was first published. As a result, there is now an ethics codes for psychologists and other controls have been placed on experimental research that have effectively prevented any precise replications of Milgram’s work. “No study using procedures similar to Milgram’s has been published in more than three decades,” according to Burger.

Burger implemented a number of safeguards that enabled him to win approval for the work from his university’s institutional review board. First, he determined that while Milgram allowed his subjects to administer “shocks” of up to 450 volts in 15-volt increments, 150 volts appeared to be the critical point where nearly every participant paused and indicated reluctance to continue. Thus, 150 volts was the top range in Burger’s study.

In addition, Burger screened out any potential subjects who had taken more than two psychology courses in college or who indicated familiarity with Milgram’s research. A clinical psychologist also interviewed potential subjects and eliminated anyone who might have a negative reaction to the study procedure.

In Burger’s study, participants were told at least three times that they could withdraw from the study at any time and still receive the $50 payment. Also, these participants were given a lower-voltage sample shock to show the generator was real – 15 volts, as compared to 45 volts administered by Milgram.

Several of the psychologists writing in the same issue of American Psychologist questioned whether Burger’s study is truly comparable to Milgram’s, although they acknowledge its usefulness.

“…there are simply too many differences between this study and the earlier obedience research to permit conceptually precise and useful comparisons,” wrote Arthur G. Miller, PhD, of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

“Though direct comparisons of absolute levels of obedience cannot be made between the 150-volt maximum of Burger’s research design and Milgram’s 450-volt maximum, Burger’s ‘obedience lite’ procedures can be used to explore further some of the situational variables studied by Milgram, as well as look at additional variables,” wrote Alan C. Elms, PhD, of the University of California, Davis. Elms assisted Milgram in the summer of 1961.

In Rousseau’s footsteps: David Graeber and the anthropology of unequal society (The Memory Bank)

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http://thememorybank.co.uk

By Keith Hart

July 4, 2012, 11:14 pm

A review of David Graeber Debt: The first 5,000 years (Melville House, New York, 2011, 534 pages)

Debt is everywhere today. What is “sovereign debt” and why must Greece pay up, but not the United States? Who decides that the national debt will be repaid through austerity programmes rather than job-creation schemes? Why do the banks get bailed out, while students and home-owners are forced to repay loans? The very word debt speaks of unequal power; and the world economic crisis since 2008 has exposed this inequality more than any other since the 1930s. David Graeber has written a searching book that aims to place our current concerns within the widest possible framework of anthropology and world history. He starts from a question: why do we feel that we must repay our debts? This is a moral issue, not an economic one. In market logic, the cost of bad loans should be met by creditors as a discipline on their lending practices. But paying back debts is good for the powerful few, whereas the mass of debtors have at times sought and won relief from them.

What is debt? According to Graeber, it is an obligation with a figure attached and hence debt is inseparable from money. This book devotes a lot of attention to where money comes from and what it does. States and markets each play a role in its creation, but money’s form has fluctuated historically between virtual credit and metal currency. Above all Graeber’s enquiry is framed by our unequal world as a whole. He resists the temptation to offer quick remedies for collective suffering, since this would be inconsistent with the timescale of his argument. Nevertheless, readers are offered a worldview that clearly takes the institutional pillars of our societies to be rotten and deserving of replacement. It is a timely and popular view. Debt: The first 5,000 years is an international best-seller. The German translation recently sold 30,000 copies in the first two weeks.

I place the book here in a classical tradition that I call “the anthropology of unequal society” (Hart 2006), before considering what makes David Graeber a unique figure in contemporary intellectual politics. A summary of the book’s main arguments is followed by a critical assessment, focusing on the notion of a “human economy”.

The anthropology of unequal society

Modern anthropology was born to serve the coming democratic revolution against the Old Regime. A government by the people for the people should be based on what they have in common, their “human nature” or “natural rights”. Writers from John Locke (1690) to Karl Marx (1867) identified the contemporary roots of inequality with money’s social dominance, a feature that we now routinely call “capitalism”. For Locke money was a store of wealth that allowed some individuals to accumulate property far beyond their own immediate needs. For Marx “capital” had become the driving force subordinating the work of the many to machines controlled by a few. In both cases, accumulation dissolved the old forms of society, but it also generated the conditions for its own replacement by a more just society, a “commonwealth” or “communism”. It was, however, the philosophers of the eighteenth-century liberal enlightenment who developed a systematic approach to anthropology as an intellectual source for remaking the modern world.

Following Locke’s example, they wanted to found democratic societies in place of the class system typical of agrarian civilizations. How could arbitrary social inequality be abolished and a more equal society founded on their common human nature? Anthropology was the means of answering that question. The great Victorian synthesizers, such as Morgan, Tylor and Frazer, stood on the shoulders of predecessors motivated by an urgent desire to make world society less unequal. Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, a best-seller when published in 1798, was the culmination of that Enlightenment project; but it played almost no part in the subsequent history of the discipline. The main source for nineteenth-century anthropology was rather Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  He revolutionized our understanding of politics, education, sexuality and the self in four books published in the 1760s: The Social Contract, Emile, Julie and The Confessions. He was forced to flee for his life from hit squads encouraged by the church. But he made his reputation earlier through two discourses of which the second, Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men (1754), deserves to be seen as the source for an anthropology that combines the critique of unequal society with a revolutionary politics of democratic emancipation.

Rousseau was concerned here not with individual variations in natural endowments which we can do little about, but with the conventional inequalities of wealth, honour and the capacity to command obedience which can be changed. In order to construct a model of human equality, he imagined a pre-social state of nature, a sort of hominid phase of human evolution in which men were solitary, but healthy, happy and above all free. This freedom was metaphysical, anarchic and personal: original human beings had free will, they were not subject to rules of any kind and they had no superiors. At some point humanity made the transition to what Rousseau calls “nascent society”, a prolonged period whose economic base can best be summarized as hunter-gathering with huts. This second phase represents his ideal of life in society close to nature.

The rot set in with the invention of agriculture or, as Rousseau puts it, wheat and iron. Here he contradicted both Hobbes and Locke. The formation of a civil order (the state) was preceded by a war of all against all marked by the absence of law, which Rousseau insisted was the result of social development, not an original state of nature. Cultivation of the land led to incipient property institutions which, far from being natural, contained the seeds of entrenched inequality. Their culmination awaited the development of political society. He believed that this new social contract was probably arrived at by consensus, but it was a fraudulent one in that the rich thereby gained legal sanction for transmitting unequal property rights in perpetuity. From this inauspicious beginning, political society then usually moved, via a series of revolutions, through three stages:

The establishment of law and the right of property was the first stage, the institution of magistrates the second and the transformation of legitimate into arbitrary power the third and last stage. Thus the status of rich and poor was authorized by the first epoch, that of strong and weak by the second and by the third that of master and slave, which is the last degree of inequality and the stage to which all the others finally lead, until new revolutions dissolve the government altogether and bring it back to legitimacy (Rousseau 1984:131).

One-man-rule closes the circle. “It is here that all individuals become equal again because they are nothing, here where subjects have no longer any law but the will of the master”(Ibid: 134). For Rousseau, the growth of inequality was just one aspect of human alienation in civil society. We need to return from division of labour and dependence on the opinion of others to subjective self-sufficiency. His subversive parable ends with a ringing indictment of economic inequality which could well serve as a warning to our world. “It is manifestly contrary to the law of nature, however defined… that a handful of people should gorge themselves with superfluities while the hungry multitude goes in want of necessities” (Ibid: 137).

Lewis H. Morgan (1877) drew on Rousseau’s model for his own fiercely democratic synthesis of human history, Ancient Society, which likewise used an evolutionary classification that we now call bands, tribes and states, each stage more unequal than the one before.  Morgan’s work is normally seen as the launch of modern anthropology proper because of his ability to enrol contemporary ethnographic observations of the Iroquois in an analysis of the historical structures underlying western civilization’s origins in Greece and Rome. Marx and Engels enthusiastically took up Morgan’s work as confirmation of their own critique of the state and capitalism; and the latter, drawing on Marx’s extensive annotations ofAncient Society, made the argument more accessible as The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). Engels’s greater emphasis on gender inequality made this a fertile source for the feminist movement in the 1960s and after.

The traditional home of inequality is supposed to be India and Andre Beteille, in Inequality among Men (1977) and other books, has made the subject his special domain, merging social anthropology with comparative sociology. In the United States, Leslie White at Michigan and Julian Steward at Columbia led teams, including Wolf, Sahlins, Service, Harris and Mintz, who took the evolution of the state and class society as their chief focus. Probably the single most impressive work coming out of this American school was Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People without History (1982). But one man tried to redo Morgan in a single book and that was Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949). In Tristes Tropiques (1955), Lévi-Strauss acknowledged Rousseau as his master. The aim of Elementary Structures was to revisit Morgan’s three-stage theory of social evolution, drawing on a new and impressive canvas, “the Siberia-Assam axis” and all points southeast as far as the Australian desert. Lévi-Strauss took as his motor of development the forms of marriage exchange and the logic of exogamy. The “restricted reciprocity” of egalitarian bands gave way to the unstable hierarchies of “generalized reciprocity” typical of the Highland Burma tribes. The stratified states of the region turned inwards to endogamy, to the reproduction of class differences and the negation of social reciprocity.

Jack Goody has tried to lift our profession out of a myopic ethnography into an engagement with world history that went out of fashion with the passing of the Victorian founders. Starting with Production and Reproduction (1976), he has produced a score of books over the last three decades investigating why Sub-Saharan Africa differs so strikingly from the pre-industrial societies of Europe and Asia, with a later focus on refuting the West’s claim to being exceptional, especially when compared with Asia (Hart 2006, 2011).  The common thread of Goody’s compendious work links him through the Marxist pre-historian Gordon Childe (1954) to Morgan-Engels and ultimately Rousseau. The key to understanding social forms lies in production, which for us means machine production. Civilization or human culture is largely shaped by the means of communication — once writing, now an array of mechanized forms. The site of social struggles is property, now principally conflicts over intellectual property. And his central issue of reproduction has never been more salient than at a time when the aging citizens of rich countries depend on the proliferating mass of young people out there. Kinship needs to be reinvented too.

David Graeber: the first 50 years

Graeber brings his own unique combination of interests and engagements to renewing this “anthropology of unequal society”. Who is he? He spent the 1960s as the child of working-class intellectuals and activists in New York and was a teenager in the 1970s, which turned out to be the hinge decade of our times, leading to a “neoliberal” counter-revolution against post-war social democracy. This decade was framed at one end by the US dollar being taken off the gold standard in 1971 and at the other by a massive interest rate increase in 1979 induced by a second oil price hike. The world economy has been depressed ever since, especially at its western core. Graeber says that he embraced anarchism at sixteen.

The debt crisis of the 1980s was triggered by irresponsible lending of the oil surplus by western banks to Third World kleptocrats (Hart 2000: 142-143) and by the new international regime of high interest rates. In market theory, bad loans are supposed to discipline lenders, but the IMF and World Bank insisted on every penny of added interest being repaid by the governments of poor countries. This was also the time when structural adjustment policies forced those governments to open up their national economies to the free flow of money and commodities, with terrible consequences for public welfare programmes and jobs. If the anti-colonial revolution inspired my generation in the 1960s, Graeber’s internationalism was shaped by this wholesale looting of the successor states. He took an active part in demonstrations against this new phase of “financial globalization”, a phenomenon now often referred to as the “alter-globalization movement” (Pleyers 2010), but he and his fellow activists call it the “global justice movement”. Its public impact peaked in the years following the financial crisis of 1997-98 (involving Southeast Asia, Russia, Brazil and the failure of a US hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management), notably through mass mobilizations in Seattle, Genoa and elsewhere. In the Debt book, Graeber claims that they took on the IMF and won.

David Graeber received a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Chicago based on ethnographic and historical research on a former slave village in Madagascar. This was eventually published as a long and exemplary monograph, Lost People: Magic and the legacy of slavery in Madagascar (Graeber 2007a). The history of the slave trade, colonialism and the post-colony figure prominently in how he illustrates global inequality through a focus on debt. Before that, he published a strong collection of essays on value, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The false coin of our own dreams (Graeber 2001), in which he sought to relate economic value (especially value as measured impersonally by money) and the values that shape our subjectivity in society. This hinged on revisiting both Karl Marx and Marcel Mauss, providing the main account in English of how the latter’s cooperative socialism shaped his famous work on the gift (Mauss 1925). A theme of both books is the role of magic and money fetishism in sustaining unequal society.

Politics forms a central strand of Graeber’s work, with four books published so far and more in the works: Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004), Possibilities: Essays on hierarchy, rebellion, and desire (2007b), Direct Action: An ethnography (2009a) and Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on politics, violence, art, and imagination (2011c). These titles reveal a range of political interests that take in violence, aesthetics and libido. He insists on the “elective affinity” between anthropological theory and method and an anarchist programme of resistance, rebellion and revolution; and this emphasis on “society against the state” makes him a worthy successor to Pierre Clastres (1974). Graeber’s academic career has been fitful, most notoriously when he was “let go” by Yale despite his obvious talent and productivity. This fed rumours about the academic consequences of his political activities. These have led to numerous brushes with the police, but so far not to prolonged incarceration, although his inability to find a job in American universities could be seen as a form of exile.

Debt: The first 5,000 years was published in summer 2011 and Graeber began a year’s sabbatical leave from his teaching job in London by moving to New York, where he became an ubiquitous presence in the print media, television and blogs. In August-September he helped form the first New York City General Assembly which spawned the Occupy Wall Street movement. He has been credited with being the author of that movement’s slogan, “We are the 99%”, and helped to give it an anarchist political style. OWS generated a wave of imitations in the United States and around the world, known collectively as “the Occupy movement”, inviting comparison with the “Arab Spring” and Madrid’s Los Indignados in what seemed then to be a global uprising. Some shared features of this series of political events, such as an emphasis on non-violence, consensual decision-making and the avoidance of sectarian division, evoke Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s idea of the “general will”; and it is not wholly fanciful to compare David Graeber’s career so far with his great predecessor’s.

Graeber and Rousseau both detested the mainstream institutions of the world they live in and devoted their intellectual efforts to building revolutionary alternatives. This means not being satisfied with reporting how the world is, but rather exploring the dialectic linking the actual to the possible. This in turn implies being willing to mix established genres of research and writing and to develop new ones. Both are prolific writers with an accessible prose style aimed at reaching a mass audience. Both achieved unusual fame for an intellectual and their political practice got them into trouble. Both suffered intimidation, neglect and exile for their beliefs. Both attract admiration and loathing in equal measure. Their originality is incontestable, yet each can at times be silly. There is no point in considering their relative significance. The personal parallels that I point to here reinforce my claim that Graeber’s Debt book should be seen as a specific continuation of that “anthropology of unequal society” begun by Rousseau two and a half centuries ago.

Debt: the argument

Much of the contemporary world revolves round the claims we make on each other and on things: ownership, obligations, contracts and payment of taxes, wages, rents, fees etc. David Graeber’s book, Debt: The first 5,000 years, aims to illuminate these questions through a focus on debt seen in very wide historical perspective. It is of course a central issue in global politics today, at every level of society. Every day sees another example of a class struggle between debtors and creditors to shape the distribution of costs after a long credit boom went dramatically bust.

We might be indebted to God, the sovereign or our parents for the gift of life, but Graeber rightly insists that the social logic of debt is revealed most clearly when money is involved. He cites approvingly an early twentieth-century writer who insisted that “money is debt”. This book of over 500 pages is rich in argument and knowledge. The notes and references are compendious, ranging over five millennia of the main Eurasian civilizations (ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Mediterranean, medieval Europe, China, India and Islam) and the ethnography of stateless societies in Africa, the Americas and the Pacific. Its twelve chapters are framed by an introduction to our moral confusion concerning debt and a concluding sketch of the present rupture in world history that began in the early 1970s. Graeber’s case is founded on anthropological and historical comparison more than his grasp of contemporary political economy, although he has plenty to say in passing about that. There is also a current of populist culture running through the book and this is reinforced by a prose style aimed at closing the gap between author and reader that his formidable scholarship might otherwise open up.

Perhaps this aspect of the book may be illustrated by introducing a recent short film. Paul Grignon’s Money as Debt (2006, 47 minutes) — an underground hit in activist circles — seeks to explain where money comes from. Most of the money in circulation is issued by banks whenever they make a loan. The real basis of money, the film claims, is thus our signature whenever we promise to repay a debt. The banks create that money by a stroke of the pen and the promise is then bought and sold in increasingly complex ways. The total debt incurred by government, corporations, small businesses and consumers spirals continuously upwards since interest must be paid on it all. Although the general idea is an old one, it has taken on added salience at a time when the supply of money, which could once plausibly be represented as public currency in circulation, has been overtaken by the creation of private debt.

The film’s attempt to demystify money is admirable, but its message is misleading.  Debt and credit are two sides of the same coin, the one evoking passivity in the face of power, the other individual empowerment. The origin of money in France and Germany is considered to be debt, whereas in the United States and Britain it is traditionally conceived of as credit. Either term alone is loaded, missing the dialectical character of the relations involved. Money as Debt demonizes the banks and interest in particular, letting the audience off the hook by not showing the active role most of us play in sustaining the system. Money today is issued by a dispersed global network of economic institutions of many kinds; and the norm of economic growth is fed by a widespread desire for self-improvement, not just by bank interest.

David Graeber offers a lot more than this, of course; but his book also feeds off popular currents too, which is not surprising given how much time he spends outside the classroom and his study. His analytical framework is spelled out in great detail over six chapters. The first two tackle the origins of money in barter and “primordial debt” respectively. He shows, forcefully and elegantly, how implausible the standard liberal origin myth of money as a medium of exchange is; but he also rejects as a nationalist myth the main opposing theory that traces money’s origins as a means of payment and unit of account to state power. In the first case he follows Polanyi (1944), but by distancing himself from the second, he highlights the interdependence of states and markets in money’s origins.  A short chapter shows that money was always both a commodity and a debt-token (“the two sides of the coin”, Hart 1986), giving rise to a lot of political and moral contestation, especially in the ancient world. Following Nietzsche, Graeber argues that money introduced for the first time a measure of the unequal relations between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor. Whereas Rousseau traced inequality to the invention of property, he locates the roots of human bondage, slavery, tribute and organized violence in debt relations. The contradictions of indebtedness, fed by money and markets, led the first world religions to articulate notions of freedom and redemption in response to escalating class conflict between creditors and debtors, often involving calls for debt cancellation.

The author now lays out his positive story to counter the one advanced by mainstream liberal economics. “A brief treatise on the moral grounds of economic relations” makes explicit his critique of the attempt to construct “the economy” as a sphere separate from society in general. This owes something to Polanyi’s (1957) universal triad of distributive mechanisms – reciprocity, redistribution and market – here identified as “everyday communism”, hierarchy and reciprocity. By the first Graeber means a human capacity for sharing or “baseline sociality”; the second is sometimes confused with the third, since unequal relations are often represented as an exchange – you give me your crops in return for not being beaten up. The difference between hierarchy and reciprocity is that debt is permanent in the first case, but temporary in the second. The western middle classes train their children to say please and thank you as a way of limiting the debt incurred by being given something. All three principles are present everywhere, but their relative emphasis is coloured by dominant economic forms. Thus “communism” is indispensable to modern work practices, but capitalism is a lousy way of harnessing our human capacity for cooperation.

The next two chapters introduce what is for me the main idea of the book, the contrast between “human economies” and those dominated by money and markets (Graeber prefers to call them “commercial economies” and sometimes “capitalism”). First he identifies the independent characteristics of human economies and then shows what happens when they are forcefully incorporated into the economic orbit of larger “civilisations”, including our own. This is to some extent a great divide theory of history, although, as Mauss would insist, elements of human economy persist in capitalist societies. There is a sense in which “human economies” are a world we have lost, but might recover after the revolution. Graeber is at pains to point out that these societies are not necessarily more humane, just that “they are economic systems primarily concerned not with the accumulation of wealth, but with the creation, destruction, and rearranging of human beings” (2011a: 130). They use money, but mainly as “social currencies” whose aim is to maintain relations between people rather than to purchase things.

“In a human economy, each person is unique and of incomparable value, because each is a unique nexus of relations with others” (Ibid: 158). Yet their money forms make it possible to treat people as quantitatively identical in exchange and that requires a measure of violence. Brutality — not just conceptual, but physical too — is omnipresent, more in some cases than others. Violence is inseparable from money and debt, even in the most “human” of economies, where ripping people out of their familiar context is commonplace. This, however, gets taken to another level when they are drawn into systems like the Atlantic slave trade or the western colonial empires of yesteryear. The following extended reflection on slavery and freedom — a pair that Graeber sees as being driven by a culture of honour and indebtedness — culminates in the ultimate contradiction underpinning modern liberal economics, a worldview that conceives of individuals as being socially isolated in a way that could only be prepared for by a long history of enslaving conquered peoples. Since we cannot easily embrace this account of our own history, it is not surprising that we confuse morality and power when thinking about debt.

So far, Graeber has relied heavily on anthropological material, especially from African societies, to illustrate the world that the West transformed, although his account of money’s origins draws quite heavily on the example of ancient Mesopotamia. Now he formalizes his theory of money to organize a compendious review of world history in four stages. These are: the era from c.3000 BC that saw the first urban civilizations; the “Axial Age” which he, rather unusually, dates from 800BC to 600AD; the Middle Ages (600-1450AD); and the age of “the great capitalist empires”, from 1450AD to the US dollar’s symbolic rupture with the gold standard in 1971. As this last date suggests, the periodization relies heavily on historical oscillations between broad types of money. Graeber calls these “credit” and “bullion”, that is, money as a virtual measure of personal relations, like IOUs, and as currency or impersonal things made from precious metals for circulation.

Money started out as a unit of account, administered by institutions such as temples and banks, as well as states, largely as a way of measuring debt relations between people. Coinage was introduced in the first millennium as part of a complex linking warfare, mercenary soldiers, slavery, looting, mines, trade and the provisioning of armies on the move. Graeber calls this “the military-coinage-slavery complex” of which Alexander the Great, for example, was a master. Hence our word, “soldier”, refers to his pay. The so-called “dark ages” offered some relief from this regime and for most of the medieval period, metal currencies were in very short supply and money once again took the dominant form of virtual credit. India, China and the Islamic world are enlisted here to supplement what we know of Europe. But then the discovery of the new world opened up the phase we are familiar with from the last half-millennium, when western imperialism revived the earlier tradition of warfare and slavery lubricated by bullion.

The last four decades are obviously transitional, but the recent rise of virtual credit money suggests the possibility of another long swing of history away from the principles that underpinned the world the West made. It could be a multi-polar world, more like the middle ages than the last two centuries. It could offer more scope for “human economies” or at least “social currencies”. The debt crisis might provoke revolutions and then, who knows, debt cancellation along the lines of the ancient jubilee. Perhaps the whole institutional complex based on states, money and markets or capitalism will be replaced by forms of society more directly responsive to ordinary people and their capacity for “everyday communism”.

All of this is touched on in the final chapter. But Graeber leaves these “policy conclusions” deliberately vague. His aim in this book has been to draw his readers into a vision of human history that runs counter to what makes their social predicament supposedly inevitable. It is a vision inspired in part by his profession as an anthropologist, in part by his political engagement as an activist. Both commitments eschew drawing up programmes for others to follow. Occupy Wall Street has been criticized for its failure to enumerate a list of “demands”. No doubt much the same could be said of this book; but then readers, including this reviewer, will be inspired by it in concrete ways to imagine possibilities that its author could not have envisaged.

Towards a human economy

David Graeber and I came up with the term “human economy” independently during the last decade (Graeber 2009b, 2011a; Hart 2008, Hart, Laville and Cattani 2010). The editors of The Human Economy: A citizen’s guide distanced ourselves, in the introduction and our editorial approach, from any “revolutionary” eschatology that suggested society had reached the end of something and would soon be launched on a quite new trajectory. The idea of a “human economy” drew attention to the fact that people do a lot more for themselves than an exclusive focus on the dominant economic institutions would suggest. Against a singular notion of the economy as “capitalism”, we argued that all societies combine a plurality of economic forms and several of these are distributed across history, even if their combination is strongly coloured by the dominant economic form in particular times and places.

For example, in his famous essay on The Gift (1925), Marcel Mauss showed that other economic principles were present in capitalist societies and that understanding this would provide a sounder basis for building non-capitalist alternatives than the Bolshevik revolution’s attempt to break with markets and money entirely. Karl Polanyi too, in his various writings, insisted that the human economy throughout history combined a number of mechanisms of which the market was only one. We argued therefore that the idea of radical transformation of an economy conceived of monolithically as capitalism into its opposite was an inappropriate way to approach economic change. We should rather pay attention to the full range of what people are doing already and build economic initiatives around giving these a new direction and emphasis, instead of supposing that economic change has to be reinvented from scratch. Although this looks like a gradualist approach to economic improvement, its widespread adoption would have revolutionary consequences.

David Graeber’a anarchist politics inform his economic analysis; and he has always taken an anti-statist and anti-capitalist position, with markets and money usually being subsumed under the concept of capitalism. That is, he sees the future as being based on the opposite of our capitalist states. The core of his politics is “direct action” which he has practised and written about as an ethnographer (Graeber 2009a). In The Human Economy, we argued that people everywhere rely on a wide range of organizations in their economic lives: markets, nation-states, corporations, cities, voluntary associations, families, virtual networks, informal economies, crime. We should be looking for a more progressive mix of these things. We can’t afford to turn our backs on institutions that have helped humanity make the transition to modern world society. Large-scale bureaucracies co-exist with varieties of popular self-organization and we have to make them work together rather than at cross-purposes, as they often do now.

Graeber also believes, as we have seen, that economic life everywhere is based on a plural combination of moral principles which take on a different complexion when organized by dominant forms. Thus, helping each other as equals is essential to capitalist societies, but capitalism distorts and marginalizes this human propensity. Yet he appears to expect a radical rupture with capitalist states fairly soon and this is reflected in a stages theory of history, with categories to match. At first sight, these positions (let’s call them “reform” and “revolution”) are incompatible, but recent political developments (the “Arab Spring” and Occupy movements of 2011, however indeterminate their immediate outcomes) point to the need to transcend such an opposition.

The gap between our approaches to making the economy human is therefore narrowing. Even so, there are differences of theory and method that point to some residual reservations I have about the Debt book. The first of these concerns Graeber’s preference for lumping together states, money, markets, debt and capitalism, along with violence, war and slavery as their habitual bedfellows. Money and markets have redemptive qualities that in my view (Hart 2000) could be put to progressive economic ends in non-capitalist forms; nor do I imagine that modern institutions such as states, corporations and bureaucracy will soon die away. Anti-capitalism as a revolutionary strategy begs the question of the plurality of modern economic institutions. As Mauss showed (Hart 2007), human economies exist in the cracks of capitalist societies. David Graeber seems to agree, at least when it comes to finding “everyday communism” there and, by refusing to sanitize “human economies” in their pristine form, he modifies the categorical and historical division separating them and commercial economies. Revolutionary binaries seem to surface at various points in his book, but an underlying tendency to discern continuity in human economic practices is just as much a feature of David Graeber’s anthropological vision.

An argument of Debt’s scope hasn’t been made by a professional anthropologist for the best part of a century, certainly not one with as much contemporary relevance. The discipline largely abandoned “conjectural history” in the twentieth century in order to embrace the narrower local perspectives afforded by ethnographic fieldwork. Works of broad comparison such as Wolf’s and Goody’s were the exception to this trend. Inevitably Graeber’s methods will come under scrutiny, not just from fellow professionals, but from the general public too. (He tells me that academics don’t read footnotes any more, but laymen do). To this reader, the first half of the book – which relies heavily on ethnographic sources to spell out the argument — is more systematic, in terms of both analytical coherence and documentation, than the second, concerned as it is with fleshing out his cycles of history. In either case, little attempt is made to analyse contemporary political economy, although Graeber makes more explicit reference to this than, for example does Mauss in The Gift, where readers’ understanding of capitalist markets is taken for granted. Nowhere in the book is any reference made to the digital revolution in communications of our times and its scope to transform economies, whether human or commercial (Hart 2000, 2005).

Well, that is not quite true, for the author does occasionally introduce anecdotes based on common or his personal knowledge. The problem is that many readers who take on trust what he has to say about ancient Mesopotamia or the Tiv, may find these stories contradicted by their own knowledge. It is something akin to “Time magazine syndrome”: we accept what Time has to say about the world in general until it impinges on what we know ourselves and then its credibility dissolves. Thus:

Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages (Graeber 2011a: 96).

The veracity of this anecdote has been challenged by numerous Californian bloggers and the author’s scholarship with it. Graeber is aware of the pitfalls of making contemporary allusions. In the final chapter (Ibid: 362-3), he cleverly introduces an urban myth he often heard about the gold stored under the World Trade Centre and then (almost) rehabilitates that myth using documented sources. Fortunately, David Graeber has not been deterred by the pedants from crossing the line between academic and general knowledge in this book and his readers benefit immensely as a result. I contributed to the publisher’s blurb for this book and said that he is “the finest anthropological scholar I know”. I stand by that. The very long essay he recently published on the divine kingship of the Shilluk (Graeber 2011c) covers the same ground as a number of famous anthropologists from Frazer onwards, but with an unsurpassed range of scholarship, as well as a democratic political perspective. Inevitably in a book like this one, the fact police will catch him out sometimes. But it is a work of immense erudition and deserves to be celebrated as such.

Our world is still massively unequal and we may be entering a period of war and revolution comparable to the “Second Thirty Years War” of 1914-1945 which came after the last time that several decades of financial imperialism went bust. Capitalism itself sometimes seems today to have reverted to a norm of rent-seeking that resembles the arbitrary inequality of the Old Regime more than Victorian industry. The pursuit of economic democracy is more elusive than ever; yet humanity has also devised universal means of communication at last adequate to the expression of universal ideas. Jean-Jacques Rousseau would have leapt at the chance to make use of this opportunity and several illustrious successors did so in their own way during the last two centuries. We need an anthropology that rises to the challenge posed by our common human predicament today. No-one has done more to meet that challenge than David Graeber, in his work as a whole, but especially in this book.

References

Beteille, Andre   1977   Inequality among Men. Blackwell: Oxford.

Childe, V. Gordon   1954   What Happened in History. Penguin: Harmondsworth.

Clastres, Pierre    1989 (1974)    Society against the state: Essays in political anthropology. Zone Books: New York.

Engels, Friedrich   1972 (1884)   The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. Pathfinder: New York.

Goody, Jack   1976   Production and Reproduction: A Comparative Study of the Domestic Domain. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

Graeber, David   2001   Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The false coin of our own dreams. Palgrave: New York.

——    2004    Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Prickly Paradigm: Chicago.

——    2007a   Lost People: Magic and the legacy of slavery in Madagascar. Indiana University Press: Bloomington IN.

——   2007b   Possibilities: Essays on hierarchy, rebellion, and desire . AK Press: Oakland CA.

——    2009a   Direct Action: An ethnography. AK Press: Baltimore MD.

——    2009b   Debt, Violence, and Impersonal Markets: Polanyian Meditations. In Chris Hann and K. Hart editors Market and Society: The Great Transformation today. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 106-132.

——   2011a    Debt: The first 5,000 years. Melville House: New York.

——   2011b   The divine kingship of the Shilluk: On violence, utopia, and the human condition or elements for an archaeology of sovereignty, Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 1.1: 1-62.

——   2011c   Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on politics, violence, art, and imagination. Autonomedia: New York.

Hann, Chris and K. Hart   2011   Economic Anthropology: History, ethnography, critique. Polity: Cambridge.

Hart, Keith   1986   Heads or tails? Two sides of the coin. Man 21 (3): 637–56.

——   2000   The Memory Bank: Money in an unequal world. Profile: London; republished in 2001 as Money in an Unequal World. Texere: New York.

—— 2005 The Hit Man’s Dilemma: Or business personal and impersonal. Prickly Paradigm: Chicago.

——   2006   Agrarian civilization and world society. In D. Olson and M. Cole (eds.), Technology, Literacy and the Evolution of Society: Implications of the work of Jack Goody. Lawrence Erlbaum: Mahwah, NJ, 29–48.

——   2007   Marcel Mauss: in pursuit of the whole – a review essay. Comparative Studies in Society and History 49 (2): 473–85.

——   2008   The human economy. ASAonline 1. http://www.theasa.org/publications/asaonline/articles/asaonline_0101.htm

——   2011   Jack Goody’s vision of world history and African development today (Jack Goody Lecture 2011). Halle/Saale: Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Department II.

Hart, Keith, J-L. Laville and A. Cattani editors   2010   The Human Economy: A citizen’s guide. Polity: Cambridge.

Kant, Immanuel   2006   Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude   1969 (1949)   The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Beacon: Boston.

——    1973 (1955) Tristes Tropiques. Cape: London.

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Pleyers, Geoffrey   2010   Alter-globalization: Becoming actors in a global age. Polity: Cambridge.

Polanyi, Karl   2001 (1944)   The Great Transformation: The political and economic origins of our times. Beacon: Boston.

——   1957   The economy as instituted process. In K. Polanyi, C. Arensberg and H. Pearson editors Trade and Market in the early Empires. Free Press: Glencoe IL, 243-269.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques   1984 (1754)   Discourse on Inequality. Penguin: Harmondsworth.

Bolsa Família reduz violência, aponta estudo da PUC-Rio (O Globo)

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Programa foi responsável por 21% da queda da criminalidade em SP

ALESSANDRA DUARTE
SÉRGIO ROXO
Publicado: 16/06/12 – 19h59/Atualizado: 16/06/12 – 20h28

Ana Clara (no centro, sentada) e outros alunos da José Lins do RegoFoto: Eliária AndradeAna Clara (no centro, sentada) e outros alunos da José Lins do Rego. ELIÁRIA ANDRADE.

RIO e SÃO PAULO – A redução da desigualdade com o Bolsa Família está chegando aos números da violência. Levantamento inédito feito na cidade de São Paulo por pesquisadores da PUC-Rio mostra que a expansão do programa na cidade foi responsável pela queda de 21% da criminalidade lá, devido principalmente à diminuição da desigualdade, diz a pesquisa. É o primeiro estudo a mostrar esse efeito do programa na violência.

Em 2008, o Bolsa Família, que até ali atendia a famílias com adolescentes até 15 anos, passou a incluir famílias com jovens de 16 e 17 anos. Feito pelos pesquisadores João Manoel Pinho de Mello, Laura Chioda e Rodrigo Soares para o Banco Mundial, o estudo comparou, de 2006 a 2009, o número de registros de ocorrência de vários crimes — roubos, assaltos, atos de vandalismo, crimes violentos (lesão corporal dolosa, estupro e homicídio), crimes ligados a drogas e contra menores —, nas áreas de cerca de 900 escolas públicas, antes e depois dessa expansão.

— Comparamos os índices de criminalidade antes e depois de 2008 nas áreas de escolas com ensino médio com maior e menor proporção de alunos beneficiários de 16 e 17 anos. Nas áreas das escolas com mais beneficiários de 16 e 17 anos, e que, logo, foi onde houve maior expansão do programa em 2008, houve queda maior. Pelos cálculos que fizemos, essa expansão do programa foi responsável por 21% do total da queda da criminalidade nesse período na cidade, que, segundo as estatísticas da polícia de São Paulo, foi de 63% para taxas de homicídio — explica João Manoel Pinho de Mello.

O motivo principal, dizem os autores, foi a queda da desigualdade causada pelo aumento da renda das famílias beneficiadas— Há muitas explicações de estudos que ligam queda da desigualdade à queda da violência: uma, mais sociológica, é que diminui a insatisfação social; outra, econômica, é que o ganho relativo com ações ilegais diminui — completa Rodrigo Soares. — Outra razão é que muda a interação social dos jovens ao terem de frequentar a escola e conviver mais com gente que estuda.

Reforma policial ajudou a reduzir crimes

Apesar de estudarem no bairro que já foi tido como um dos mais violentos do mundo, os alunos da Escola Estadual José Lins do Rego, no Jardim Ângela, periferia de São Paulo — com 1.765 alunos, dos quais 126 beneficiários do Bolsa Família —, dizem que os assaltos e brigas de gangues, por exemplo, estão no passado.

— Os usuários de drogas entravam na escola o tempo todo — conta Ana Clara da Silva, de 17 anos, aluna do ensino médio.

— Antes, você estava dando aula e tinha gente vigiando pela janela — diz a diretora Rosângela Karam.

Um dos principais pesquisadores do país sobre Bolsa Família, Rodolfo Hoffmann, professor de Economia da Unicamp, elogia o estudo da PUC-Rio:

— Há ali evidências de que a expansão do programa contribuiu para reduzir principalmente os crimes com motivação econômica — diz. — De 20% a 25% da redução da desigualdade no país podem ser atribuídos ao programa; mas há mais fatores, como maior valor real do salário mínimo e maior escolaridade.

Professora da Pós-Graduação em Economia da PUC-SP, Rosa Maria Marques também lembra que a redução de desigualdade não pode ser atribuída apenas ao Bolsa Família:

— Também houve aumento do emprego e da renda da população. E creio que a mudança na interação social dos jovens beneficiados contou muito.

Do Laboratório de Análise da Violência da Uerj, o professor Ignácio Cano concorda com a relação entre redução da desigualdade e queda da violência:

— Muitos estudos comparando dados internacionais já apontaram que onde cai desigualdade cai criminalidade.

Mas são as outras razões para a criminalidade que chamam a atenção de Michel Misse, coordenador do Núcleo de Estudos da Cidadania, Conflito e Violência Urbana da UFRJ. Misse destaca que a violência na capital paulista vem caindo por outros motivos desde o fim dos anos 1990:

— O estudo cobre bem os índices no entorno das escolas. Mas não controla as outras variáveis que interferem na queda de criminalidade. Em São Paulo, a violência vem caindo por pelo menos quatro fatores: reforma da polícia nos anos 2000; política de encarceramento maciça; falta de conflito entre quadrilhas devido ao monopólio de uma organização criminosa; e queda na taxa de jovens (maioria entre vítimas e autores de crimes), pelo menor crescimento vegetativo.

Para Misse, a influência do programa não foi pela desigualdade:

— É um erro supor que só pobres fornecem agentes para o crime; a maioria dos presos é pobre, mas a maioria dos pobres não é criminosa. Creio que, no caso do Bolsa Família, o que mais afetou a violência foi a criação de outra perspectiva para esses jovens, que passaram a ter de estudar.

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DECLARACION DE KARI-OCA 2012

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DECLARACION DE KARI-OCA 2012

“CONFERENCIA MUNDIAL DE LOS PUEBLOS INDIGENAS

SOBRE RIO+20 Y LA MADRE TIERRA” 13 -22 Junio 2012

Nosotros, los Pueblos Indígenas de la Madre Tierra reunidos en la sede de Kari-Oca I Sacred Kari-Oka Púku en Rio de Janeiro para participar en la Conferencia de las Naciones Unidas sobre Desarrollo Sostenible Rio+20, agradecemos a los Pueblos Indígenas de Brasil por darnos la bienvenida a sus territorios. Reafirmamos nuestra responsabilidad para hablar para la protección y del bienestar de la Madre Tierra, la naturaleza y las futuras generaciones de nuestros Pueblos Indígenas y toda la humanidad y la vida. Reconocemos el significado de esta segunda convocatoria de los Pueblos Indígenas del mundo y reafirmamos la reunión histórica de 1992 de Kari-Oca I, donde los Pueblos Indígenas emitieron la Declaración de Kari-Oca y la Carta de la Tierra de los Pueblos Indígenas. La conferencia de Kari-Oca y la movilización de los Pueblos Indígenas durante la Cumbre de la Tierra, marcó un gran avance del movimiento internacional para los derechos de los Pueblos Indígenas y el papel importante que desempeñamos en la conservación y el desarrollo sostenible. Reafirmamos también la Declaración de Manaos sobre la convocatoria de Kari-Oca 2 como el encuentro internacional de los Pueblos Indígenas en Río+20.

La institucionalización del colonialismo

Consideramos que los objetivos de la Cumbre de las Naciones Unidas sobre Desarrollo Sostenible (UNCSD) Río+20, la “Economía Verde” y su premisa de que el mundo sólo puede “salvar” a la naturaleza por mercantilizar sus capacidades de dar vida y sostener la vida como una continuación del colonialismo que los Pueblos Indígenas y nuestra Madre Tierra han resistido durante 520 años. La “Economía Verde” se promete erradicar la pobreza, pero en realidad sólo va a favorecer y responder a las empresas multinacionales y el capitalismo. Se trata de una continuación de una economía global basada en los combustibles fósiles, la destrucción del medio ambiente mediante la explotación de la naturaleza a través de las industrias extractivas, tales como la minería, la explotación y producción petrolera, la agricultura intensiva de mono-cultivos y otras inversiones capitalistas. Todos estos esfuerzos están dirigidos hacia las ganancias y la acumulación de capital por unos pocos.

Desde Rio 1992, nosotros como Pueblos Indígenas vemos que el colonialismo se ha convertido en la base de la globalización del comercio y la hegemónica economía capitalista mundial. Se han intensificado la explotación y el saqueo de los ecosistemas y biodiversidad del mundo, así como la violación los derechos inherentes de los pueblos indígenas. Nuestro derecho a la libre determinación, a nuestra propia gobernanza y a nuestro desarrollo libremente determinado, nuestros derechos inherentes a nuestras tierras, territorios y recursos están cada vez más atacados por una colaboración de gobiernos y empresas transnacionales. Activistas y líderes indígenas que defienden sus territorios siguen sufriendo represión, militarización, incluyendo asesinatos, encarcelamientos, hostigamiento y calificación como “terroristas”. La violación de nuestros derechos colectivos enfrenta la misma impunidad. La reubicación forzosa o asimilación amenaza nuestras futuras generaciones, culturas, idiomas, espiritualidad y relación con la Madre Tierra, económica y políticamente.

Nosotros, pueblos indígenas de todas las regiones del mundo, hemos defendido a Nuestra Madre Tierra de las agresiones del desarrollo no sustentable y la sobreexplotación de nuestros recursos por minería, maderería, megarepresas hidroeléctricas, exploración y extracción petrolera. Nuestros bosques sufren por la producción de agrocombustibles, biomasa, plantaciones y otras imposiciones como las falsas soluciones al cambio climático y el desarrollo no sustentable y dañino.

La Economía Verde es nada menos que capitalismo de la naturaleza; un esfuerzo perverso de las grandes empresas, las industrias extractivas y los gobiernos para convertir en dinero toda la Creación mediante la privatización, mercantilización y venta de lo Sagrado y todas las formas de vida, así como el cielo, incluyendo el aire que respiramos, el agua que bebemos y todos los genes, plantas, semillas criollas, árboles, animales, peces, diversidad biológica y cultural, ecosistemas y conocimientos tradicionales que hacen posible y disfrutable la vida sobre la tierra.

Violaciónes graves de los derechos de los pueblos indígenas a la soberanía alimentaria continúan sin cesar lo que da lugar a la “inseguridad” alimentaria. Nuestra propia producción de alimentos, las plantas que nos reunimos, los animales que cazamos, nuestros campos y las cosechas, el agua que bebemos y el agua a nuestros campos, los peces que pescamos de nuestros ríos y arroyos, está disminuyendo a un ritmo alarmante. Proyectos de desarrollo no sostenibles, tales como mono-culturales plantaciones de soja químicamente intensiva, las industrias extractivas como la minería y otros proyectos destructivos del medioambiente y las inversiones con fines de lucro están destruyendo nuestra biodiversidad, envenenando nuestra agua, nuestros ríos, arroyos, y la tierra y su capacidad para mantener la vida. Esto se agrava aún más por el cambio climático y las represas hidroeléctricas y otras formas de producción de energía que afectan a todo el ecosistema y su capacidad para proveer la vida. La soberanía alimentaria es una expresión fundamental de nuestro derecho colectivo a la libre determinación y desarrollo sustentable. La soberanía alimentaria y el derecho a la alimentación deben ser reconocido y respetados: alimentación no debe ser mercancía que se utiliza, comercializada o especula con fines de lucro. Nutre nuestras identidades, nuestras culturas e idiomas, y nuestra capacidad para sobrevivir como pueblos indígenas.

La Madre Tierra es la fuente de la vida que se requiere proteger, no como un recurso para ser explotado y mercantilizado como “capital natural”. Tenemos nuestro lugar y nuestras responsabilidades dentro del orden sagrado de la Creación. Sentimos la alegría sustentadora cuando las cosas ocurren en armonía con la Tierra y con toda la vida que crea y sostiene. Sentimos el dolor de la falta de armonía cuando somos testigos de la deshonra del orden natural de la Creación y la colonización económica y continua y la degradación de la Madre Tierra y toda la vida en ella. Hasta que los derechos de los pueblos indígenas sean observados, velados y respetados, el desarrollo sustentable y la erradicación de la pobreza no se lograrán.

La Solución

La relación inseparable entre los seres humanos y la Tierra, inherente para los pueblos indígenas debe ser respetada por el bien de las generaciones futuras y toda la humanidad. Instamos a toda la humanidad a unirse con nosotros para transformar las estructuras sociales, las instituciones y relaciones de poder que son la base de nuestra pobreza, opresión y explotación. La globalización imperialista explota todo lo que sostiene la vida y daña la tierra. Necesitamos reorientar totalmente la producción y el consumo en base de las necesidades humanas en lugar de la acumulación desenfrenada de ganancia de para unos pocos. La sociedad debe tomar control colectivo de los recursos productivos para satisfacer las necesidades de desarrollo social sostenible y evitar la sobreproducción, el sobreconsumo y la sobreexplotación de las personas y la naturaleza que son inevitables bajo prevaleciente sistema capitalista monopólico. Debemos enfocar sobre comunidades sostenibles con base en conocimientos indígena sy no desarrollo capitalista.

Exigimos que las Naciones Unidas, los gobiernos y las empresas abandonen las falsas soluciones al cambio climático, tales como las grandes represas hidroeléctricas, los organismos genéticamente modificados, incluyendo los árboles transgénicos, las plantaciones, los agrocombustibles, el “carbón limpio”, la energía nuclear, el gas natural, el fracturamiento hidráulico, la nanotecnología, la biología sintética, la bioenergía, la biomasa, el biochar, la geo-ingeniería, los mercados de carbono, el Mecanismo de Desarrollo Limpio y REDD+ que ponen en peligro el futuro y la vida tal como la conocemos. En lugar de ayudar a reducir el calentamiento global, ellos envenenan y destruyen el medio ambiente y dejan que la crisis climática aumente exponencialmente, lo que puede dejar el planeta prácticamente inhabitable. No podemos permitir que las falsas soluciones destruyan el equilibrio de la Tierra, asesinen a las estaciones, desencadenen el caos del mal tiempo, privaticen la vida y amenacen la supervivencia de la humanidad. La Economía Verde es un crimen de lesa humanidad y contra la Tierra.

Para lograr el desarrollo sostenible los Estados deben reconocer los sistemas tradicionales de manejo de recursos de los pueblos indígenas que han existido por milenios, sosteniéndonos aún durante el colonialismo. Es fundamental asegurar la participación activa de los pueblos indígenas en los procesos de toma de decisiones que les afectan y su derecho al consentimiento libre, previo e informado. Los Estados también deben proporcionar apoyo a los pueblos indígenas que sea apropiada a su sustentabilidad y prioridades libremente determinadas, sin restricciones y directrices limitantes.

Seguiremos luchando contra la construcción de represas hidroeléctricas y todas las formas de producción de energía que afectan a nuestras aguas, nuestros peces, nuestra biodiversidad y los ecosistemas que contribuyen a nuestra soberanía alimentaria. Trabajaremos para preservar nuestros territorios contra el veneno de las plantaciones de monocultivos, de las industrias extractivas y otros proyectos destructivos del medioambiente, y continuar nuestras formas de vida, preservando nuestras culturas e identidades. Trabajaremos para preservar nuestras plantas y las semillas tradicionales, y mantener el equilibrio entre nuestras necesidades y las necesidades de nuestra Madre Tierra y su capacidad de sostener la vida. Demostraremos al mundo que se puede y se debe hacer. En todos estos asuntos recopilaremos y organizaremos la solidaridad de todos los pueblos indígenas de todas partes del mundo, y todas las demás fuentes de solidaridad con los no indígenas de buena voluntad a unirse a nuestra lucha por la soberanía alimentaria y la seguridad alimentaria. Rechazamos la privatización y el control corporativo de los recursos, tales como nuestras semillas tradicionales y de los alimentos. Por último, exigimos a los estados a defender nuestros derechos al control de nuestros sistemas de gestión tradicionales y ofreciendo un apoyo concreto, tales como las tecnologías apropiadas para que podamos desarrollar nuestra soberanía alimentaria.

Rechazamos las promesas falsas del desarrollo sostenible y soluciones al cambio climático que solamente sirven al orden económico dominante. Rechazamos REDD, REDD+ y otras soluciones basadas en el mercado que tienen como enfoque nuestros bosques, para seguir violando nuestros derechos inherentes a la libre determinación y el derecho a nuestras tierras, territorios, aguas y recursos, y el derecho de la Tierra a crear y sostener la vida. No existe tal cosa como “minería sostenible”. No hay tal cosa como “petróleo ético”.

Rechazamos la aplicación de derechos de propiedad intelectual sobre los recursos genéticos y el conocimiento tradicional de los pueblos indígenas que resulta en la enajenación y mercantilización de lo Sagrado esencial para nuestras vidas y culturas. Rechazamos las formas industriales de la producción alimentaria que promueve el uso de agrotóxicos, semillas y organismos transgénicos. Por lo tanto, afirmamos nuestro derecho a poseer, controlar, proteger y heredar las semillas criollas, plantas medicinales y los conocimientos tradicionales provenientes de nuestras tierras y territorios para el beneficio de nuestras futuras generaciones.

Nuestro Compromiso con el Futuro que Queremos

Debido a la falta de implementación verdadera del desarrollo sostenible el mundo está en múltiples crisis ecológicas, económicas y climáticas; incluyendo la pérdida de biodiversidad, desertificación, el derretimiento de los glaciares, escases de alimentos, agua y energía, una recesión económica mundial que se agudiza, la inestabilidad social y la crisis de valores. En ese sentido, reconocemos que queda mucho que hacer para que los acuerdos internacionales respondan adecuadamente a los derechos y necesidades de los pueblos indígenas. Las contribuciones actuales y potenciales de nuestros pueblos deben ser reconocidas como un desarrollo sostenible y verdadero para nuestras comunidades que permita que cada uno de nosotros alcancemos el Buen Vivir.

Como pueblos, reafirmamos nuestro derecho a la libre determinación y a poseer, controlar y manejar nuestras tierras y territorios tradicionales, aguas y otros recursos. Nuestras tierras y territorios son la parte medular de nuestra existencia -somos la Tierra y la Tierra es nosotros-; tenemos una relación espiritual y material con nuestras tierras y territorios y están intrínsecamente ligados a nuestra supervivencia y a la preservación y desarrollo de nuestros sistemas de conocimientos y culturas, la conservación y uso sostenible de la biodiversidad y el manejo de ecosistemas.

Ejerceremos el derecho a determinar y establecer nuestras prioridades y estrategias de autodesarrollo y para el uso de nuestras tierras, territorios y otros recursos. Exigimos que el consentimiento libre, previo e informado sea el principio de aprobación o rechazo de cualquier plan, proyecto o actividad que afecte nuestras tierras, territorios y otros recursos. Sin el derecho al consentimiento libre, previo e informado el modelo colonialista del dominio de la Tierra y sus recursos seguirá con la misma impunidad.

Seguiremos uniéndonos como pueblos indígenas y construyendo una solidaridad y alianza fuertes entre nosotros mismos, comunidades locales y verdaderos promotores no-indígenas de nuestros temas. Esta solidaridad avanzará la campaña mundial para los derechos de los pueblos indígenas a su tierra, vida y recursos y el logro de nuestra libre determinación y liberación.

Seguiremos retando y resistiendo los modelos colonialistas y capitalistas que promueven la dominación de la naturaleza, el crecimiento económico desenfrenado, la extracción de recursos sin límite para ganancias, el consumo y la producción insostenibles y las mercancías no reglamentadas y los mercados financieros. Los seres humanos son una parte integral del mundo natural y todos los derechos humanos, incluyendo los derechos de los pueblos indígenas que deben ser respetados y velados por el desarrollo.

Invitamos a toda la sociedad civil a proteger y promover nuestros derechos y cosmovisiones y respetar la ley de la naturaleza, nuestras espiritualidades y culturas y nuestros valores de reciprocidad, armonía con la naturaleza, la solidaridad y la colectividad. El cuidar y el compartir, entre otros valores, son cruciales para crear un mundo más justo, equitativo y sostenible. En este contexto, hacemos un llamado por la inclusión de la cultura como el cuarto pilar del desarrollo sostenible.

El reconocimiento jurídico y la protección de los derechos de los pueblos indígenas a la tierra, territorios, recursos y los conocimientos tradicionales deberían ser un requisito para el desarrollo y planificación de todos y cada uno de los tipos de adaptación y mitigación del cambio climático, conservación ambiental (incluyendo la creación de “áreas protegidas”), el uso sostenible de la biodiversidad y medidas a combatir desertificación. En todos los casos, tienen que haber consentimiento libre, previo e informado.

Continuamos dando seguimiento a los compromisos asumidos en la Cumbre de la Tierra tal como se refleja en esta declaración política. Hacemos un llamado a la ONU a comenzar su implementación, y asegurar la participación plena, formal y efectiva de los pueblos indígenas en todos los procesos y actividades de la Conferencia de Rio+20 y más allá, de acuerdo con la DNUDPI y el principio del consentimiento libre, previo e informado (CLPI). Seguimos habitando y manteniendo los últimos ecosistemas sostenibles y las más altas concentraciones de biodiversidad en el mundo. Podemos contribuir de una manera significativa al desarrollo sostenible pero creemos que el marco holístico de ecosistemas para el desarrollo se debe promover. Eso incluye la integración del enfoque de derechos humanos, el enfoque de ecosistemas y enfoques culturalmente sensibles y basados en conocimientos.

Caminamos al futuro en las huelles de nuestros antepasados.

Aprobado por aclamación, Aldea de Kari-Oca, en el sagrado Kari-Oca Púku.

Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, 18 de junio de 2012

Metade dos ativistas ambientais assassinados na última década são brasileiros, diz estudo (BBC)

Uncategorized, , , ,

Júlia Dias Carneiro

Da BBC Brasil no Rio de Janeiro

Atualizado em  20 de junho, 2012 – 19:47 (Brasília) 22:47 GMT
Nísio Gomes (Foto:Survival International)Líder de acampamento indígena Guarani-Kaiowá, Nísio Gomes está desaparecido desde novembro de 2011

Um estudo da ONG Global Witness concluiu que 711 ativistas foram assassinados no mundo todo ao longo da última década por protegerem a terra e a floresta – e mais da metade são brasileiros.

De acordo com a pesquisa, divulgada durante a Rio+20, 365 brasileiros foram mortos entre 2002 e 2011 ao defenderem direitos humanos e o meio ambiente.

Depois do Brasil, os dois países com mais mortes no período também estão na América do Sul: o Peru, com 123 mortos, e a Colômbia, com 70.

Para o pesquisador britânico Billy Kyte, o alto número de mortes no Brasil se deve a uma conjunção de fatores que fazem a concorrência pela terra e pelos recursos naturais se intensificar e geram maior pressão – e tensão – no campo.

Ele enumera a desigualdade na posse de terra no país, com a concentração de propriedades nas mãos de latifundiários; o grande número de comunidades que tira o seu sustento da terra; e a atuação de setores cuja produção consiste também em explorar a terra, como oagropecuário, de mineração e madeireiro.

Mas Kyte acredita também que os números sejam mais altos no caso brasileiro porque o monitoramento é melhor, graças ao relatório anual produzido pela Comissão Pastoral da Terra sobre conflitos de terra no país.

Wutty Chut (Foto: Global Witness)Wutty Chut, diretor de organização de vigilância ambiental do Camboja, foi baleado e morto em abril

Sobretudo em países da África e da Ásia, a ONG teve dificuldades em levantar números de mortos, já que os relatos são esparsos.

“Provavelmente há muitos outros casos que permaneceram ocultos. E o estudo nem leva em consideração as milhares de pessoas sendo intimidadas ou ameaçadas”, diz. “Há uma grave falta de informações sobre essas mortes a um nível global, e ninguém está monitorando.”

Uma morte por semana

Segundo Kyte, a pesquisa busca preencher uma lacuna, oferecendo um panorama internacional dos perigos no campo.

Intitulado “Uma crise oculta? Aumento das mortes decorrentes do acirramento do conflito pelo acesso a terra e as florestas”, o estudo indica que há, em média, mais de um assassinato por semana em contextos relacionados à proteção ambiental.

O número de mortes vêm aumentando, tendo dobrado nos últimos três anos em relação ao restante do período.

De acordo com Kyte, o objetivo é expor na Conferência da ONU para o Desenvolvimento Sustentável que a proteção ao meio ambiente e aos direitos humanos está se tornando um campo de batalhas por recursos, e traz cada vez mais risco para as pessoas.

Túmulo de Frederic Moloma Tuka (Foto: Global Witness)Túmulo de Frederic Moloma Tuka, da República Democrática do Congo, morto em confronto com a polícia

“Pedimos que os governos investiguem esses assassinatos, façam a justiça e tragam compensações às famílias que estão defendendo seus direitos à terra e à floresta”, diz Kyte.

Os casos investigados pelo estudo são de pessoas mortas em ataques ou confrontos decorrentes de protestos, investigações ou denúncias contra atividades de mineração, exploração madeireira, agropecuária, plantações de árvores, barragens hidrelétricas, desenvolvimento urbano e caça ilegal.

Sete desses casos estão sendo apresentados a partir desta quarta-feira na Rio+20, em uma exposição fotográfica com imagens de sete ativistas e sua história de vida e de morte.

O brasileiro Nísio Gomes faz parte da exposição. Líder de um acampamento indígena Guarani-Kaiowá no Mato Grosso do Sul, ele foi levado por 40 homens armados em novembro de 2011 e seu corpo nunca foi encontrado.

A terra estava em vias de ser oficialmente reconhecida como território da comunidade, mas estava sendo usada por agricultores e fazendeiros locais.

O mundo está levemente mais pacífico, apesar dos Estados Unidos (IPS)

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Inter Press Service – Reportagens
20/6/2012 – 09h47

por Carey L. Biron, da IPS

IPS42 O mundo está levemente mais pacífico, apesar dos Estados UnidosWashington, Estados Unidos, 20/6/2012 – Revertendo uma tendência que durava dois anos, o mundo ficou levemente mais pacífico em 2011, segundo o último Índice de Paz Global. Entretanto, os Estados Unidos caíram sete posições, ficando em 88º lugar entre os 158 países estudados, “uma colocação bem baixa, que em grande parte reflete os níveis mais altos de militarização e de participação em conflitos externos”, afirma o documento, conhecido como GPI. Embora o gasto militar de Washington “tenha caído drasticamente” entre 1991 e 2000, “agora voltou aos níveis da Guerra Fria”, afirma o estudo.

Uma das conclusões mais preocupantes do estudo, elaborado pelo Instituto para a Economia e a Paz, com sede em Washington, em colaboração com a Unidade de Inteligência Econômica, é que o maior gasto militar (calculado como porcentagem do produto interno bruto) tem correlação com menores níveis de paz. O GPI, que estuda 23 indicadores em 158 países, encontrou “melhorias nas pontuações gerais em todas as regiões”, menos no Oriente Médio e no norte da África. Devido ao impacto da Primavera Árabe, pela primeira vez a África subsaariana não foi a região menos pacífica do mundo.

Na verdade, os cinco países que experimentaram as maiores reduções na lista foram afetados pela Primavera Árabe. A Síria foi o que sofreu maior deterioração de seu nível de paz, caindo 31 posições para ficar no 147º posto. A Somália foi novamente o país menos pacífico, enquanto a Islândia outra vez se destacou como o mais pacífico, em uma tendência que já dura dois anos.

O informe ajuda a definir exatamente o que é a paz, disse durante a apresentação do documento, em Washington, Anne-Marie Slaughter, ex-funcionária do Departamento de Estado norte-americano. “O índice vai além de calcular a ausência de conflito, além da ausência de instabilidade. Por outro lado, a definição usada aqui é a ausência de medo e de violência”, afirmou.

Pela primeira vez, este ano o GPI incluiu um novo ranking, o Índice de Paz Positiva. Com base nos primeiros seis anos de experiência do informe, o novo índice se concentra em fatores que contribuem para a capacidade dos países de manterem uma sociedade pacífica. “Isto inclui o trabalho positivo para melhorar a qualidade de vida, não apenas de evitar o ruim”, destacou Slaughter.

Os oito fatores que compõem o Índice de Paz Positiva – entre eles a educação, a baixa corrupção, o bom funcionamento do governo e a distribuição equitativa dos recursos – são considerados um verdadeiro mapa pelo diretor de políticas do Instituto para Economia e Paz, Michael Shank.

Segundo os pesquisadores do informe, “a necessidade de aprofundar o entendimento de como construímos a paz foi realçada pelas últimas experiências de desenvolvimento institucional no Iraque e no Afeganistão”. O principal ator nas duas experiências, os Estados Unidos, demonstraram incapacidade para se envolver adequadamente e criar sociedades pacíficas, afirmam.

Depois de quase uma década de esforços liderados por Washington, Afeganistão e Iraque “ainda estão paralisados no fundo do GPI”. Segundo a jornalista Emily Cadei, que cobre o Congresso norte-americano e falou na apresentação do documento, a participação dos Estados Unidos no exterior foi pobre nos últimos dois anos. Nos últimos seis anos, os pesquisadores do GPI registraram uma queda nos conflitos externos e entre Estados, e um aumento da violência interna. Além disso, o GPI indica uma crescente militarização correlacionada com menores níveis de paz.

“O fato de os conflitos internos crescerem é uma má notícia, porque os Estados Unidos não estão preparados para enfrentar essas formas de violência. O governo de Barack Obama ainda não tem um consenso sobre como fazer isso”, indicou Cadei. A jornalista acrescentou que, “além disso, o fato de a militarização estar negativamente correlacionada com a paz ainda não foi assumido nos Estados Unidos. A visão predominante no governo é que a paz vem por meio da força. No Congresso, a assistência internacional sempre está atada à segurança”, acrescentou.

Por sua vez, Lawrence Wilkerson, ex-coronel do exército norte-americano e professor de políticas públicas e governo, disse que essa mentalidade datava da Guerra Fria e que não havia conseguido se transformar desde o fim da União Soviética, em 1991. “O novo índice mostra que os Estados Unidos precisam ser mais cautelosos no que tenta fazer em outros países. Durante 50 anos demonstramos sermos muito maus na construção da paz”, ressaltou. Envolverde/IPS

O parto da memória (Fapesp)

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HUMANIDADES

Criação tardia de uma Comissão da Verdade mostra como o Brasil enfrenta de modo peculiar o legado de violações dos direitos humanos

FABRÍCIO MARQUES | Edição 196 – Junho de 2012

© ANTONIO LÚCIO / AE. Manifestação pela anistia em São Paulo, em 1979…

O Brasil tem uma trajetória singular no enfrentamento do legado de violações de direitos humanos nos governos militares entre 1964 e 1985. Apenas agora, 27 anos após o retorno do poder aos civis, está sendo criada a Comissão Nacional da Verdade, que nos próximos dois anos colherá depoimentos de vítimas da repressão política e de agentes do Estado acusados de crimes e, ao cabo do trabalho, publicará um relatório narrando oficialmente as circunstâncias das violações e propondo ações para que não voltem a acontecer. A experiência brasileira é singular sob duas perspectivas. De um lado, trata-se da mais tardia das comissões criadas por cerca de 40 países nas últimas décadas para apurar crimes praticados durante ditaduras. De outro, o Brasil é um exemplo incomum de país que tomou diversas iniciativas para reparar crimes, como as indenizações a famílias de mortos pela ditadura e a perseguidos políticos, mas deixou a apuração dos fatos para mais tarde.

Por que o Brasil optou primeiro pelo caminho de reparações financeiras? Esta pergunta norteou a pesquisa de doutorado da cientista política Glenda Mezarobba, defendida na USP em 2008 com bolsa da FAPESP. Uma das conclusões principais de sua pesquisa, fertilizada por uma temporada de seis meses num centro de estudos em Nova York, foi que a Lei da Anistia de 1979 exerceu uma influência muito forte sobre o comportamento tanto dos agentes quanto das vítimas da repressão. Na Argentina, por exemplo, os militares se autoanistiaram pouco antes de entregarem o poder aos civis, em 1983, mas o perdão foi instantaneamente revogado pelo presidente civil, Raúl Alfonsín, pressionado por amplos setores da população que queriam justiça. A trajetória da apuração e das punições na Argentina teria altos e baixos. Houve quarteladas militares e leis, mais tarde revogadas, que determinaram o encerramento dos processos, mas a Justiça seguiu seu curso – hoje, os ex-ditadores Jorge Videla e Reynaldo Bignone cumprem prisão perpétua. Mesmo no Chile, onde a transição foi mediada pelo ex-ditador Augusto Pinochet, aboletado numa cadeira de senador vitalício, acordou-se a convocação de uma Comissão da Verdade e, mais tarde, os crimes acabaram sendo investigados sob pressão internacional. O próprio Pinochet foi mantido em prisão domiciliar em Londres, em 1998, acusado pela Justiça da Espanha de crimes cometidos contra cidadãos do país.

© DANIEL GARCIA / AFP …e passeata das mães da praça de Maio em Buenos Aires, em 1985: os militares do Brasil articularam o esquecimento, mas os da Argentina não resistiram aos pedidos de justiça

Já no Brasil, observa Glenda, a Lei da Anistia serviu de antídoto para neutralizar ânimos mais exigentes. “A anistia era reivindicada desde mea-dos dos anos 1960, se tornou palavra de ordem durante a ditadura e a mobilização que desencadeou no final da década de 1970, com a criação de comitês pela anistia no Brasil e na Europa, é apontada como precursora dos atuais movimentos de defesa dos direitos humanos no Brasil”, diz Glenda, que atualmente é pesquisadora da Universidade Estadual de Campinas e do Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia para Estudos sobre os Estados Unidos (INCT-Ineu), e diretora da área de Humanas da FAPESP. “A Lei da Anistia foi discutida num Congresso cerceado pelos militares e sancionada pelo governo, mas o movimento pela anistia sentiu-se vitorioso. Foi uma lógica muito diferente da observada na Argentina ou no Chile. Lá não havia Congresso ou Parlamento aberto para legitimar a anistia. E ninguém queria perdão, mas justiça”, afirma. Salvo raras exceções, os beneficiados pela Lei da Anistia no Brasil não buscaram a Justiça para identificar e punir seus torturadores. “Num país em que há ‘leis que pegam’ e ‘leis que não pegam’, causa espanto a forma como a Lei da Anistia tem sido interpretada desde a ditadura. É certo que existe margem para a Justiça reinterpretar a Lei da Anistia, que, aliás, não faz menção ao crime de tortura, por exemplo, mas foram pouquíssimas as tentativas de testá-la nos tribunais. Os próprios anistiados têm dificuldade em se enxergar como vítimas e em perceber o Judiciário como a esfera de realização da Justiça”, diz a pesquisadora.

O campo de pesquisa a que Glenda Mezarobba se dedica é o da justiça de transição, que trata de iniciativas e mecanismos judiciais e extrajudiciais adotados por países para enfrentar legados de violações em massa de direitos humanos e referendados por instituições como a Organização das Nações Unidas (ONU) e a Organização dos Estados Americanos (OEA). Diante da impossibilidade material ou política de levar à Justiça um conjunto muito extenso de crimes, construíram-se estratégias para evitar a impunidade. As punições se concentram em crimes contra a humanidade ou genocídios, a exemplo dos julgamentos de criminosos nazistas após a Segunda Guerra Mundial. No cerne da  justiça de transição está a noção de que os Estados têm ao menos quatro deveres perante a sociedade – o da justiça, o da verdade, o da reparação e o das reformas – e que tais deveres podem ser cumpridos por intermédio de anistias para crimes menores, indenizações, pedidos públicos de desculpas, abertura de arquivos, construção de museus e memoriais, entre outros.

© USHMM. Julgamento de criminosos nazistas em Nuremberg, em 1946: o desafio de julgar e de punir crimes que mataram milhões

E, naturalmente, há o recurso das comissões da verdade, que buscam dar voz às vítimas, resgatar a memória do período de exceção e ajudar a construir o ambiente democrático – sem ter, contudo, poder de punir. “Em determinadas situações, a justiça de transição enfatiza a necessidade de se concentrar a atenção mais explicitamente na restauração do relacionamento entre as vítimas, os perpetradores e a sociedade, em vez da punição”, diz Lucia Elena Arantes Ferreira Bastos, pesquisadora do Núcleo de Estudos da Violência da USP, que no ano passado concluiu um pós-doutorado com bolsa da FAPESP. Essas comissões buscam administrar conflitos que não se encerraram com a passagem de um período de violações em massa de direitos humanos para um governo democrático. A Comissão da Verdade e Reconciliação da África do Sul foi criada em 1993, num período em que confrontos raciais ainda eram frequentes, e buscava transformar a violência em diálogo. Foi fruto de uma longa negociação e procurava reconstruir a memória do período de violência, abrindo-se para depoimentos de vítimas, familiares e agentes repressores. Como o que se procurava era a reconciliação, havia um inédito mecanismo pelo qual os algozes que confessassem seus crimes seriam anistiados. “A maior inovação dos sul-africanos é aquela ligada a um princípio, o da anistia individual e condicional, em oposição às anistias gerais concedidas na América Latina sob pressão dos militares”, diz Luci Buff, autora de uma tese de doutorado em filosofia, defendida em 2007 na PUC de São Paulo, sobre os horizontes do perdão, na qual aborda o exemplo sul-africano. “O objetivo não era o de apagar, encobrir crimes, mas revelar. Os antigos criminosos tiveram a oportunidade de participar da reescritura da história nacional para serem perdoados”, afirmou. O artifício teve eficiência parcial. Houve confissões e anistia para apenas 17% dos crimes apurados pela comissão.

Há, é certo, poucas semelhanças entre a experiência sul-africana e a brasileira, como observa Edson Teles, professor de filosofia da Universidade Federal de São Paulo (Unifesp), campus de Guarulhos, e autor de uma tese de doutorado, com bolsa da FAPESP, sobre a trajetória das políticas de justiça e reparação no Brasil pós-ciclo militar e na África do Sul pós-apartheid. “O Brasil se encontra em momento muito diferente. A ditadura acabou há muito tempo, mas há heranças que precisam ser revistas. A comissão aqui busca a apuração histórica e a reconstrução da memória para obter a transformação política do presente”, afirma Teles, que pertence a uma família de presos políticos no Araguaia. “A nossa Comissão da Verdade igualmente não busca a punição de culpados, mas tem diferenças fundamentais. 
Enquanto a sul-africana é autônoma, a nossa é vinculada à Casa Civil da Presidência da República. É uma diferença relevante porque o que vai ser discutido são crimes de Estado e ainda há dentro do Estado herdeiros do legado de governos anteriores, como se vê nas manifestações das Forças Armadas. Há uma forte pressão, por isso a questão da autonomia é importante.”

© AFP PHOTO. Apoiadores da Comissão da Verdade e Reconciliação da África do Sul, em 1995: anistia para quem confessava

Mas a Comissão da Verdade brasileira pode desempenhar um papel histórico, observa Teles, como na construção de uma memória coletiva sobre o período. “A publicidade dos traumas e dos ressentimentos por meio das narrativas pode contribuir para a consumação do luto e para o aprimoramento dos elos sociais”, afirma. “A oposição entre a razão política pacificadora do Estado e as memórias doloridas sobre a ditadura militar brasileira obstrui a expressão pública da dor e reduz a memória às emoções privadas.” Outra contribuição importante pode ser colhida no campo do aprimoramento das instituições democráticas. Teles lembra que o Brasil ainda mantém leis e legados na estrutura do Estado dos tempos da ditadura e afirma que, na experiência de outros países, comissões da verdade sugeriram reformas nessas estruturas e ajudaram a montar o Estado democrático. “A tortura segue como uma prática corriqueira no aparelho policial brasileiro. Um dos benefícios que a Comissão da Verdade pode trazer é propor reformas das instituições. Isso, se ela tiver êxito em identificar tanto os responsáveis pelos atos criminosos quanto a estrutura que permitiu que esses atos acontecessem.”

Os estudos no campo da justiça de transição são recentes no Brasil. Para fazer sua tese de doutorado, a cientista política Glenda Mezarobba teve de passar seis meses em Nova York, fazendo pesquisa numa entidade que é referência nessa área, o International Center for Transitional Justice. “Havia pouca pesquisa no Brasil naquela época sobre esse tema e sentia falta de interlocutores, que encontrei nos Estados Unidos”, afirma. Na época em que esteve lá, o presidente do centro era o argentino Juan Méndez, que foi advogado de presos políticos na década de 1970, razão pela qual foi ele também preso e torturado, sendo expulso para os Estados Unidos em 1977, quando a organização Anistia Internacional adotou-o como prisioneiro de consciência. Atualmente é o relator especial das Nações Unidas para crimes de tortura. “Eu perguntava a ele sobre a anistia decretada ao final do governo militar na Argentina e ele não via sentido na minha pergunta. Foi aí que eu constatei que no Brasil, ao contrário da Argentina e do Chile, por exemplo, a água tem movimentado mais os moinhos do esquecimento”, afirma. Em Nova York, encontrou vasta bibliografia sobre o assunto, inclusive escrita no Brasil, mas não mais disponível aqui. “Sem ir a Nova York não teria feito a tese”, afirma a pesquisadora. Glenda é autora dos quatro verbetes sobre o Brasil que fazem parte da 1ª enciclopédia de justiça de transição, que a Cambridge University Press lança em dezembro.

© WIKIMEDIA. Refugiados do genocídio em Ruanda, que matou 800 mil em 1994: crimes contra humanidade testam os limites da justiça de transição

Quando, ainda no governo Lula, foi criado um grupo de trabalho para discutir o anteprojeto de lei que criaria a Comissão da Verdade, Glenda foi convidada a assessorar um dos membros do grupo, o cientista político Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, professor da USP e fundador do Núcleo de Estudos sobre a Violência. “O empenho do então ministro dos Direitos Humanos, Paulo Vanucchi, foi fundamental para a criação desse grupo e fizemos, na época, um esforço para aproximar a academia do debate sobre a Comissão da Verdade”, diz Glenda. Antes disso, mas com o mesmo objetivo, ela coordenou, junto com Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, em outubro de 2009, a Conferência Internacional sobre o Direito à Verdade, em São Paulo. O evento de dois dias reuniu pesquisadores de campos como o direito, a ciência política e as relações internacionais, além de autoridades e ativistas dos direitos humanos, vindos do Brasil e do exterior, com apoio da FAPESP. Para Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, nomeado membro da Comissão da Verdade, a experiência das comissões de outros países e o engajamento da academia podem ajudar no trabalho da comissão brasileira. “O Brasil vai beneficiar-se da experiência de diferentes ‘comissões da verdade’ criadas no mundo desde os anos 80. Podemos aprender com comissões recentes, como a do Paraguai; ou do Uruguai, que teve uma grande participação das universidades; ou do Peru”, afirmou à agência BBC.

Uma das observações mais agudas da pesquisa de Glenda Mezarobba sugere que a ditadura brasileira foi mais habilidosa em ‘capturar corações e mentes’ de seus cidadãos do que as congêneres da América Latina. “Isso talvez ajude a entender por que a ditadura do Brasil foi ‘menos sangrenta’ do que a da Argentina e a do Chile. Ela não precisou ser mais sangrenta do que foi”, afirma. A apropriação da bandeira da anistia, transformando-a num dínamo do esquecimento, seria um exemplo dessa habilidade. Glenda também cita a eficiência da ditadura em impedir a entrada no país de observadores da Comissão Interamericana de Direitos Humanos. “Na Argentina e no Chile o relato dos observadores teve papel fundamental na denúncia de violações de direitos humanos. No Brasil, nossa diplomacia foi ‘eficiente’ ao barrar essas iniciativas”, diz. Da mesma forma, o Brasil foi pouco acionado por tribunais de outros países por crimes cometidos contra seus cidadãos, ao contrário do que aconteceu com Argentina e Chile. “Só houve uma ação, movida na Itália”, afirma Glenda.

© AFP PHOTO. O ex-ditador chileno Augusto Pinochet, detido numa clínica em Londres em 1998: pressão da justiça internacional forçou tribunais chilenos a investigarem crimes

Durante a ditadura no Brasil a luta por anistia foi acompanhada pela defesa e promoção aos direitos humanos, pela volta da democracia e pela punição dos torturadores. Tal bandeira foi levantada por grupos de defesa dos direitos humanos e familiares de mortos e desaparecidos, mas não conseguiu reverberar na sociedade. E a resistência dos militares contra a apuração dos fatos, escorados na Lei da Anistia, prevaleceu. Isso não significa que o Estado brasileiro nada tenha feito no sentido de cumprir, ainda que parcialmente, suas obrigações desde então. Todos os presidentes civis que precederam Dilma Rousseff contribuíram de alguma forma para enfrentar o legado de violações em massa dos direitos humanos. José Sarney assinou os Pactos Internacionais das Nações Unidas sobre Direitos Civis e Políticos e a Convenção contra a Tortura e outros Tratamentos ou Penas Cruéis, Desumanos ou Degradantes. Também durante o governo Sarney – mas sem participação oficial – foi divulgado o projeto Brasil: Nunca Mais (ver box, no final da matéria). Trata-se da mais importante iniciativa já feita até agora para revelar os fatos ligados à violação dos direitos humanos pela repressão política entre 1961 e 1979, por meio da sistematização de informações de processos do Superior Tribunal Militar. No governo Fernando Collor iniciou-se a abertura de alguns arquivos de órgãos estaduais de repressão que estavam sob a guarda da Polícia Federal. Sob a Presidência de Fernando Henrique Cardoso, foi sancionada a Lei dos Mortos e Desaparecidos, que reconhece a responsabilidade do Estado sobre 136 desaparecidos, e criou-se a Comissão de Anistia, que abriu caminho para a reparação financeira de perseguidos políticos que sofreram perdas econômicas em decorrência de atos de repressão política. O governo Lula seguiu pagando reparações e contribuiu com a divulgação de documentos públicos, por meio do portal Memórias Reveladas, do Arquivo Nacional, e com a criação do grupo de trabalho que propôs o anteprojeto da lei que criou a Comissão da Verdade.

A Comissão da Anistia criada no governo Fernando Henrique para garantir reparações financeiras a vítimas da ditadura não foi constituída com propósitos investigativos. “Em nenhum momento a lei que criou a comissão fala em vítimas, mas em ‘anistiados’ ou ‘beneficiados pela anistia’”, diz Glenda. Para garantir a reparação financeira, basta provar a responsabilidade do Estado pela morte de um militante ou pelo prejuízo causado ao perseguido político – assim que isso acontecia, a investigação cessava, sem preocupação de apontar circunstâncias e personagens. “Caso típico de anistia em branco, o modelo de transição brasileiro negligenciou a demanda por esclarecimento dos crimes passados e, duas décadas depois, acolheu um princípio de responsabilidade difusa, legada indistintamente ao Estado, sem identificação de operadores individuais”, escreveram as pesquisadoras Cristina Buarque de Holanda, Vanessa Oliveira Batista e Luciana Boiteux, da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, em artigo publicado em 2010.

© ANTONIO CRUZ/AGÊNCIA BRASIL. Cerimônia de instalação da Comissão da Verdade, em Brasília: 27 anos depois, a decisão de investigar as violações do ciclo militar

Os mecanismos para garantir reparação financeira geraram distorções. “A reparação é necessariamente simbólica, uma vez que não é possível dimensionar materialmente a perda de uma vida ou o sofrimento numa sala de torturas”, observa Glenda Mezarobba. Seguindo exemplos internacionais, a indenização a familiares de mortos e desaparecidos foi arbitrada em cerca de US$ 150 mil. Mas nos processos dos perseguidos políticos, em que se avaliava o prejuízo financeiro causado por demissões ou por exílio, o montante pode chegar à casa dos milhões. “A lei 10.559 foi construída de forma equivocada”, diz a pesquisadora, que entrevistou o ex-presidente Fernando Henrique sobre o assunto para sua tese. “Perguntei por que o Brasil seguiu o caminho das reparações. Ele atribuiu à nossa herança patrimonialista”, diz, referindo-se àquela característica de um Estado que não esboça distinção entre os limites do público e do privado.

O advento da Comissão da Verdade brasileira também pode ser visto como uma resposta à recente pressão internacional contra a resistência do Brasil em apurar os crimes do período militar – em 2010, por exemplo, o Brasil foi condenado pela Corte Interamericana dos Direitos Humanos da Organização dos Estados Americanos por não ter punido os responsáveis pelas mortes e desaparecimentos ocorridos na Guerrilha do Araguaia. O tribunal concluiu que o Estado brasileiro é responsável pelo desaparecimento de 62 pessoas, ocorrido entre 1972 e 1974, e determinou que sejam feitos todos os esforços para localizar os corpos. “A postura negacionista do Brasil chocou-se com a guinada do direito internacional acerca das violências cometidas por Estados”, diz Lucia Bastos, que é autora de uma tese de doutorado sobre as leis de anistia em face do direito internacional. Em 2005, a ONU aprovou um conjunto de princípios sobre o direito das vítimas de violações dos direitos humanos, que estabeleceu diretrizes para reparações. “Sentenças e documentos de instâncias como a Corte Interamericana dos Direitos Humanos passaram a apontar enfaticamente no sentido de considerar ilegais as anistias em branco e de chancelar mecanismos extrajudiciais capazes de combater a impunidade e reconciliar a sociedade. Eles formam os pilares da justiça de transição e foram erguidos não apenas a partir da teoria, mas também das experiências concretas”, afirma a pesquisadora.

Lucia observa que a adoção de mecanismos de justiça de transição vem se consolidando desde o fim da Guerra Fria. “Em duas décadas, comissões da verdade se multiplicaram, houve um desenvolvimento sem precedentes no que diz respeito à justiça internacional penal e nunca existiram antes tantos pedidos de desculpa e concessão de reparações a vítimas de violações de direitos humanos”, diz Lucia. “Mas a justiça de transição deparou-se com fatos contraditórios, divididos entre momentos de esperança e tragédia, que aqueceram o debate a respeito de qual seria a melhor forma de se alcançar a reconciliação, se uma política de perdão ou de punição”, afirma. Do lado da esperança, houve o colapso das ditaduras comunistas, o fim do apartheid na África do Sul e a consolidação das democracias na América Latina. Do lado trágico, houve o genocídio em Ruanda e a limpeza étnica na ex-Iugoslávia. “Atualmente, a justiça internacional trabalha com ambas as proposições, tanto os mecanismos extrajudiciais para a reconstrução da sociedade como as punições.”

Brasil: Nunca Mais on-line

© FOLHAPRESS. Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns…

Estão sendo digitalizados os documentos do projeto Brasil: Nunca Mais, iniciativa liderada pelo cardeal católico dom Paulo Evaristo Arns e o pastor presbiteriano Jaime Wright que gerou a mais importante documentação sobre a repressão política no Brasil entre 1961 e 1979. No horizonte de um ano, os documentos estarão disponíveis para consulta na internet. A digitalização está sendo feita pelo Arquivo Público do Estado de São Paulo, a partir de microfilmes guardados nos Estados Unidos. O Arquivo Edgard Leuenrouth (AEL), da Unicamp, que abriga a coleção de documentos, está conferindo a versão digitalizada e sanando eventuais falhas, fornecendo processos que não foram microfilmados. Nessa fase do processo, o AEL utiliza equipamentos adquiridos por meio do Programa de Infraestrutura da FAPESP, que viabilizou investimentos de cerca de R$ 590 mil no Arquivo. “Estamos em fase de conferência e de tratamento de imagens”, diz Alvaro Bianchi, diretor do AEL e professor de ciência política da Unicamp. Desde 1987, a Unicamp abriga a coleção de documentos, que reúne mais de 1 milhão de páginas contidas em 707 processos do Superior Tribunal Militar (STM) e seus 10 mil anexos.

Os documentos foram obtidos de forma quase clandestina por um grupo de 30 ativistas dos direitos humanos. Alguns deles optaram pelo anonimato. Entre 1979 e 1985, essa equipe consultou e gerou cópias de processos no STM que continham, por exemplo, as denúncias de torturas apresentadas pelos presos políticos nos tribunais. “Sua publicação precedeu a divulgação de uma lista com o nome de 444 torturadores, mas nem o livro nem a identificação dos agentes despertaram reação em grande escala pelo fim da impunidade aos acusados de violar direitos humanos”, diz a cientista política Glenda Mezarobba. Tornou-se uma espécie de versão oficial dos fatos, embora tenha sido feito à revelia do governo. Segundo Alvaro Bianchi, o Brasil: Nunca Mais é uma das coleções mais consultadas do AEL. Serviu de base para muitos estudos e teses sobre a história da esquerda, a resistência ao governo militar e o movimento estudantil, mas foi pouco aproveitado para estudos sobre direitos humanos. “O interesse principal dos pesquisadores tem sido os documentos apreendidos que foram anexados aos processos. Eles constituem uma fonte de informações de difícil obtenção”, afirma.

© FOLHAPRESS …e Jaime Wright: à revelia do governo, operação para reunir a mais importante documentação sobre repressão política

Servidores do IBAMA, ICMBio e MMA denunciam pressões de Governo Federal por Licenças de obras do PAC (EcoDebate)

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Publicado em junho 13, 2012 por 

Em carta divulgada no dia 31 de maio, servidores do Ibama, Instituto Chico Mendes (ICMBio) e Ministério do Meio Ambiente (MMA) denunciam as situações de assédio moral e falta de autonomia que sofrem para que grandes projetos de infraestrutura sejam aprovados sem os devidos requisitos ambientais e sociais exigidos pela lei.

Eles afirmam que situações graves já se tornaram cotidianas, como por exemplo, a alteração de pareceres, diminuição e retirada de condicionantes de licenças ambientais e a articulação para que vistoriais e autuações não sejam realizadas.

Segundo a carta, o objetivo do manifesto é “ revelar a todo o país, neste momento em que ele está no foco da questão ambiental, qual é a realidade que vivemos: desvalorização completa, falta de recursos, e constante pressão para validar um projeto político e econômico, que mascarado de desenvolvimento e economia verde, distribui, de forma injusta, mais degradação e desastres ambientais”.

Eis o manifesto.

Nós, servidores do IBAMA, ICMBio e MMA, queremos DENUNCIAR a pressão que estamos sofrendo diariamente em nosso cotidiano frente à política de aprovação desenfreada de grandes projetos em nosso país.

Estamos vivendo um momento crucial na área ambiental. Visando o avanço desses grandes projetos e do agronegócio, diversas leis ambientais estão sendo modificadas e aprovadas sem ampla discussão e sem embasamento científico, com interesses puramente econômicos, sem considerar de fato a questão socioambiental.

O avanço do capital em detrimento dos aspectos socioambientais está ocorrendo numa velocidade sem precedentes, e assistimos a isso percebendo, infelizmente, a passividade de quem dirige nossos órgãos.

Dentro desse contexto, nós, que trabalhamos diretamente com a análise técnica desses processos, com fiscalização, e com a gestão de áreas protegidas impactadas por eles, estamos vivendo uma situação de assédio moral e falta de autonomia para atuarmos como se deve, com critérios técnicos e defendendo os interesses da sociedade.

O Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento – PAC, articulado com a Iniciativa de Integração da Infraestrutura Regional Sul Americana – IIRSA, chegou trazendo inúmeros projetos de infra-estrutura por todo o país e, juntamente com eles, a obrigatoriedade da emissão de licenças ambientais que validem tais obras em prazos mínimos. Sem a real estrutura e tempo suficiente para análises adequadas, o servidor se vê sem os instrumentos necessários para a tomada de decisões sérias, que envolvem manutenção e preservação da vida de fauna, flora, populações tradicionais…vidas.

Além de todos esses problemas estruturais e técnicos, soma-se a pressão de: alterar pareceres, diminuir e retirar condicionantes de licenças, evitar vistorias e autuações, e diversas violações ao bom e devido cumprimento do exercício legal de nossas atribuições. Por fim, é recorrente que os gestores desconsiderem recomendações dos técnicos e adotem posturas e decisões contrárias. Situação gravíssima que se tornou cotidiana, embora até este momento, velada.

Questionamos a atuação da cooperação internacional no Ministério do Meio Ambiente e a forma como os organismos internacionais interferem na gestão do órgão. Também apontamos a direção privatista que MMA vem assumindo, esvaziando agendas de participação e controle social e estreitando laços com o setor privado, o que contraria o interesse público que o órgão deve defender.

Discutimos exaustivamente esta realidade no V congresso da ASIBAMA, que ocorreu em maio deste ano, no Rio de Janeiro, cidade que abrigará a Rio +20 e a Cúpula dos Povos, evento em contraposição. Todas as unidades da federação brasileira estiveram presentes no congresso e o que se ouviu dos servidores de todos os órgãos citados foi muito semelhante, demonstrando que não são casos isolados.

Portanto, decidimos não mais calar diante de tais absurdos, e revelar a todo o país, neste momento em que ele está no foco da questão ambiental, qual é a realidade que vivemos: desvalorização completa, falta de recursos, e constante pressão para validar um projeto político e econômico, que mascarado de desenvolvimento e economia verde, distribui, de forma injusta, mais degradação e desastres ambientais.

Pedimos o apoio de todos aqueles que temem pelo retrocesso ambiental pelo qual estamos passando, para que juntos possamos realmente contribuir com o Brasil, esse país que é formado por pessoas, matas, animais, rios, e inúmeras riquezas naturais que merecem ser defendidas.

Rio de Janeiro, 31 de maio de 2012

O Manifesto é publicado pelo sítio http://www.asibamanacional.org.br/

(Ecodebate, 13/06/2012) publicado pela IHU On-line, parceira estratégica do EcoDebate na socialização da informação.

A poucos dias de seu início, Xingu+23 recebe apoio de artistas, cantores e ambientalistas (Adital)

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Belo Monte
11/6/2012 – 06h46

por Natasha Pitts, da Adital

A cada dia o Xingu+23, que acontecerá de 13 a 17, em Vitória do Xingu, Estado do Pará (Norte do país), para debater a resistência à hidrelétrica Belo Monte, recebe mais adesões. Além de artistas que já haviam confirmado presença no evento, há poucos dias o cantor Gilberto Gil, a ambientalista e ex-ministra Marina Silva, o cantor Arnaldo Antunes, e o teólogo, filósofo e escritor Leonardo Boff também divulgaram apoio à iniciativa.

Para chamar ainda mais atenção para a luta contra o megaempreendimento do Plano de Aceleração do Crescimento (PAC), Gilberto Gil cedeu sua canção Um sonho para ser transformada em clipe. Em poucos dias a música, que apesar de ser de 1977 ainda é atual, se tornou o hino do evento, por falar claramente sobre a luta contra o desenvolvimentismo, principal discurso em torno de Belo Monte.

c83 A poucos dias de seu início, Xingu+23 recebe apoio de artistas, cantores e ambientalistas

Por meio de ações como estas, sobretudo nas mídias sociais, o evento ganhou mais repercussão e deverá receber além de artistas, cantores e ambientalistas de Belém, São Paulo e São Luís, ativistas dos Estados Unidos e da Turquia.

Apesar da intensa participação de outros atores sociais, o Xingu+23 é voltado especialmente para pescadores, ribeirinhos, indígenas, agricultores e demais afetados por Belo Monte com o intuito de discutir as ações de resistência, conversar sobre o futuro do(as) atingidos(as) e suas famílias e fortalecer as ações da população local.

O Xingu+23 faz uma referência ao 1º Encontro dos Povos Indígenas do Xingu, ocorrido em 1989 em Altamira e organizado pelos kaiapó com a intenção de protestar contra as decisões tomadas na Amazônia sem a participação dos índios e repudiar a construção do Complexo Hidrelétrico do Xingu. No encontro, os indígenas e ativistas conseguiram a primeira vitória na luta contra Belo Monte, pois impediram o primeiro projeto de barramento do rio.

Durante o Xingu+23, os participantes também querem marcar um importante momento de luta e resistência no Brasil. Às vésperas da Conferência das Nações Unidas sobre Desenvolvimento Sustentável (Rio+20) e da Cúpula dos Povos, que acontecerão no Rio de Janeiro, o Movimento Xingu Vivo para Sempre (MXVPS) e seus parceiros decidiram chamar atenção da comunidade nacional e internacional para os impactos sociais e ambientais de Belo Monte e para as ilegalidades que cercam o seu processo de implantação.

Os interessados em participar podem encontrar informações no site oficial do evento. A estrutura oferecida é um acampamento com espaço para barracas e redes. No local não há sinal de telefonia, nem internet.

Programação

O Xingu+23 terá início na quarta-feira, dia 13, em Vila Santo Antônio, a 50 quilômetros de Altamira. A comunidade não foi escolhida por acaso. A Vila foi desapropriada quase em sua totalidade pela concessionária Norte Energia devido à proximidade do maior canteiro de obras de Belo Monte. Após a recepção e o credenciamento, acontecerá um debate sobre violações do Licenciamento e Instalação de Belo Monte. O dia será encerrado com a celebração da tradicional missa de Santo Antônio.

No dia 14, ainda na Vila, os atingidos pela obra vão se reunir em grupos para um debate. A programação do dia acabará com uma audiência pública em Altamira. A sexta-feira (15) será reservada para uma marcha e um ato público. Neste dia, a partir das 8h os(as) participantes vão iniciar a concentração em frente à empresa de energia Rede Celpa (Avenida 7 de setembro, 2190).

Já no sábado, dia 16, acontece a assembleia final do evento seguida por torneio de futebol e a festa do padroeiro da Vila. No domingo, acontece o encerramento.

* Publicado originalmente no site Adital.

Racismo faz surgir identidade explosiva, forjada na dor e na raiva (UNEafro Brasil)

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12/02/2013 – 00h12 – Atualizado em 12/02/2013 – 00h30

Fonte: UNEafro Brasil – União de Núcleos de Educação Popular para Negras/os e Classe Trabalhadora

ENTREVISTA – Dr. Jaime Amparo Alves

Morte negra é necropolítica

Por Jorge Américo

Militante da UNEafro Brasil recebe título de Doutor em Antropologia pela Universidade do Texas/Austin,nos EUA. Entrevista com Jaime Amparo Alves, Doutor em Antropologia e Pesquisador do Departamento de Estudos Africanos e Afro-Americanos da Universidade do Texas, em Austin (EUA) e militante da UNEafro Brasil

No início de maio, pelo menos 40 organizações populares se reuniram na cidade de São Paulo para lançar a Frente Pró-Cotas Raciais. O encontro ocorreu duas semanas após o Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF) declarar a constitucionalidade da reserva de vagas para negros em instituições públicas de ensino superior. A mobilização se deu quando os reitores das três universidades estaduais paulistas (USP, UNESP e Unicamp) anunciaram que a decisão dos ministros não provocará nenhuma alteração em seus processos seletivos. O primeiro ato político da Frente foi a realização de uma Aula Pública, na semana da Abolição, no interior da Faculdade de Direito do Largo São Francisco. Anteriormente, muitas dessas organizações formaram o Comitê contra o Genocídio da Juventude Negra, para denunciar a violência policial e a ausência de políticas públicas voltadas para essa parcela da população.

Em entrevista à Radioagência NP, do grupo Brasil de Fato, Jaime Amparo Alves, doutor em Antropologia e Pesquisador do Departamento de Estudos Africanos e Afro-Americanos da Universidade do Texas (EUA), interpreta as recentes mobilizações como um indicativo de que é possível uma reaproximação das entidades do movimento negro, fragmentado com a aprovação de um Estatuto da Igualdade Racial “esvaziado”.

“A esquerda brasileira é esquizofrênica ão esperar que se resolva o problema de classe para que um dia a questão racial seja, enfim, posta na mesa de debates”, analisa o antropólogo. “Eu descobri isso quando vi minha mãe envelhecendo na cozinha dos companheiros revolucionários”. Entre outras análises, ele vê São Paulo “como uma necrópole que ambienta nas relações sociais e nas políticas governamentais as práticas genocidas antinegro”.

O que configura o genocídio? 

Esta é uma pergunta imprescíndivel. O movimento negro tem caracterizado como genocídio todas as políticas estatais que sistematicamente têm impactado negativamente na qualidade de vida da populacão negra. Se levarmos em conta o conceito de genocídio tal qual definido pela resolução de 9 de dezembro de 1948, da Assembléia Geral das Nações Unidas, o termo diz respito a  todo o ato que visa, destruir, matar, limitar a reprodução fisica, cultural e  social de um determinado grupo etnico-racial ou nacional. A resolução vai ainda mais longe e configura como genoídio as políticas que visam infrigir condições de vida que põem o grupo em desvantagem social em relação a outros grupos em determinada sociedade.  Na discussão que se seguiu ão conceito da ONU, o foco saiu do resultado das acões  para a intencionalidade, ou seja, ão se caracterizar um ato como genocidio haveria que se provar se o estado teve intenção de levar a cabo tais politicas ou não. A intelectualidade negra – João Costa Vargas por exemplo –  tem feito a seguinte pergunta: do ponto de vista das vítimas importa provar a intencionalidade de um estado genocida? O que dizer das politicas estatais que resultam em morte generalizada de um grupo social mesmo quando o estado não prescreve tais politicas de eliminação no seu estatuto juridico? Na era dos direitos humanos, seria quase impossivel provar a existencia do genocidio contra determinados grupos sociais se tivermos que provar a intenção estatal. Agora, dizer que porque não há politicas oficiais de eliminação fisica baseadas em raca e etnicidade não haja praticas genocidas é uma outra história.

No caso do Brasil, que ações evidenciam que há um projeto genocida em curso, como o movimento negro vem denunciando? Não seria genocidio, então, as politicas de matanca de jovens negros?

O genocidio contra a população negra é tão evidente que somente o cinismo cruel da nossa elite intellectual poderia negar a sua existência. Não é apenas a violência homicida, com vitimizacão juvenil negra 1900% superior `a branca em estados como Paraíba e Alagoas, que caracteriza o genocídio brasileiro. É também as más condicões de vida, as políticas de limpeza urbana com os novos desabrigados como nos casos de Pinheirinho e a Favela do Moinho em São Paulo, ou ainda a hedionda acão na chamada ‘cracolândia’, para não falar do sistemático assassinato de pessoas em situacão de rua e a política de encarceramento em massa. Como os/as pesquisadores/as do genocídio negro têm mostrado, a morte negra é morte produzida políticamente, não é o resultado do processo natural de nascer, crescer e morrer. É “necropolitica”. É o resultado de processos conscientes que desqualificam, desumanizam e dizimam. Quantas pessoas negras precisam morrer para que o massacre seja considerado genocídio? Como fazer legivel aos olhos internacionais a economia do massacre que transforma as cidades brasileiras em campos de guerra e a experiencia negra urbana em tragedia programada. Ainda assim, esbarramos nas dificuldades legais de levar o Estado brasileiro ao banco dos réus. É preciso que se diga, no entanto, que essa não é uma dificuldade apenas nossa. Ainda em 1950 um grupo de intelectuais negros estadunidenses protocolou uma petição na ONU denunciando os Estados Unidos pelo genocídio da população negra daquele país. Você pode advinhar qual o resultado da peticão certo? Se a ONU é um organismo internacional em que quem tem poder de voto e de veto são os super-poderes implicados eles mesmos na ordem genocida, quem vai condená-los?

Qual o significado político da ocupação do Shopping Higienópolis, visto que cerca de 30 organizações participaram do ato?

A ocupação do Shopping Higienópolis tem um simbolismo muito importante. Primeiro pelo próprio significado que a palavra higienópolis encerra. Essa area onde o shopping está plantado tem tambem um peso histórico muito grande porque ela nasceu como parte da Cidade Nova, um projeto urbanistico que visava reestruturar o espaco urbano no final do século XIX, quando a elite cafeicultora dividiu a cidade em duas, varrendo os bairros predominantemente negros. A nova cidade não poderia comportar os territorios negros das áreas adjacentes do centro porque o corpo negro representava um obstáculo ão projeto de modernidade capitalista que São Paulo copiava da Europa. Eu sei, eu possso estar cançando o leitor do Brasil de Fato com essa revisão historica pobre. Mas aí é que está o problema e a solucão: ao ocupar o Shopping Higienópolis, estamos deixando a elite paulistana nua, assim como deixamos com o churrasco da “gente diferenciada”. Nossas elites têm uma capacidade impressionante de reescrever a história e se configurar como progressista nas colunas dos jornalões  de maneira tal que famílias tradicionais como a Matarazzo, ou a Mesquita, para lembrar de duas, aparecem como vanguarda política na boca de alguns. O que esse sujeito [Andrea Matarazzo] fez como sub-prefeito da Sé eo que Kassab fez na cidade foi apenas reatualizar esse modelo de higienização social que está no nascedouro de São Paulo. Eu tenho sugerido o termo “espacialidade macabra” para descrever a cidade de São Paulo. Sugiro que a gente leia/entenda a cidade como uma necropolis que ambienta nas relacões  sociais e nas politicas governamentais as praticas genocidas anti-negro. Ão ocupar o Shopping Higienópolis, denunciamos as políticas programadas da morte negra, exigimos o nosso direito `a cidade e mandamos um recado bem direto `a elite paulistana:vocês estão construindo uma cidade muito perigosa. Um dia a miseria cansa, cuidado! Fica então a pergunta: qual a estrategia de luta para aqueles deserdados da cidade neoliberal?

A última mobilização nacional do movimento negro foi em torno do Estatuto da Igualdade Racial. Porque houve fragmentação depois da “aprovação”?

Olha, o Estatuto da Igualdade Racial já nasceu morto. Se tem algo no Brasil que exemplifica o impasse político para uma agenda negra revolucionária, é o Estatuto. Ele serviu como esvaziamento politico-ideológico e colocou em lados opostos liderancas negras com contribuicões  históricas contra o racismo. De um lado aqueles vislumbrados com a migalhas políticas acenadas pelo Petismo, de outro aqueles que entendem a luta negra para além das concessões estatais. O Estatuto mostrou mais uma vez as artimanhas do racismo brasileiro: ele opera a partir da despolitização da categoria ‘raca’ e da falsa ideia de que é preciso substituir as ruas pelos gabinetes em Brasília. Eu não gostaria de dar nomes, mas perguntar não ofende: por que entidades outrora combativas como a Educafro e a Unegro se prestam ão triste papel de marionetes nas mãos dos companheiros do PT? O que se viu foram liderancas com pires nas mãos negociando cada exigência ão ponto de, no fim, o lema da Educafro por exemplo passar de “Zumbi, deixe que continuamos tua luta” para “mas vale um estatuto vazio na mão do que um perfeito engavetado”. As dificuldades em torno de uma unidade programática na militância põe um desafio `a construção da agenda radical negra. Eu acho que um dos impasses é reconhecer ou não a natureza anti-negro do Estado brasileiro em particular e do modelo capitalista em geral. Se para as organizacões  negras radicais os terrenos estão bem demarcados, me parece que falta rumo a outras, e olha que estou consciente das implicacões  políticas de uma crítica pública `as organizacões  negras no contexto do racism anti-negro brasileiro. Se negras e negros são ‘os últimos da fila depois de ninguém’, é deste lugar social que pode nascer um projeto radical em tempos de dystopia.  A pergunta é se a aprovação do Estatuto e a constitucionalidade das cotas pelo STF vão esfriar ou dar novo gás á agenda negra. Mais do que nunca, a gente precisa de uma radicalidade negra que recupere a crítica ão capitalismo racial e ão Estado como disposicões anti-negras, das quais não podem surgir transformacões  sociais. Onde o movimento negro se posiciona no dilemma revolução vesus reforma?

Considerando as composições políticas, ainda há possibilidades de unidade nas bandeiras do movimento negro?

Acredito que há possibilidade de unidade e acredito que esta unidade se forja nas ruas. Aqui está o que eu penso: o racismo antinegro cria as condicões materiais para a luta negra. Veja o exemplo da campanha contra o genocídio negro, emcampada por dezenas de organizacões  negras em São Paulo. A morte negra aparece aqui como o ‘lugar’ histórico, permanente, estrutural de onde forjamos uma identidade em movimento. Não foi a morte de Robson Silveira da Luz, em 1978, e os atos contínuos de discriminação sofrida por jovens negros na cidade o que deu origem ão MNU? Com isso quero dizer que, ironica e paradoxicamente, o sofrimento social negro traz consigo as sementes revolucionária porque não nos resta outra opcão a não ser resistir enquanto grupo organizado. Se a dominação racial no Brasil opera a partir do esvaziamento politico da categoria ‘raca’, os encontros diários de negras e negros com as tecnologias de dominação racial faz surgir uma identidade explosiva, forjada na dor e na raiva. Ai está a experiência comum que ultrapassa as diferencas politicas entre as organizacões  negras e cria o combustível para a batalha política.

Por que há tanta resistência em enxergar o racismo como problema estrutural, mesmo dentro da esquerda?

Sua pergunta nos obriga a voltar `a questão anterior porque de certa forma o Estatuto visibiliza bem esssa esquizofrenia da esquerda em entender a especificidade da condição negra. Eu acho que o debate empobrece quando as respostas que recebemos `as nossas criticas `a esquerda é a de que nós negros e negras fragmentamos a luta, como se fóssemos partidários do DEM ou do PSDB. Nós pedimos ãos companheiros e companheiras das esquerdas: se quiserem ser radical/revolucionários/as, não nos peçam para ter paciência porque no contexto da luta pela sobrevivencia negra, ter paciência é um privilégio branco. Não podemos esperar que se resolva o problema de classe para que um dia a questão racial seja enfim posta na mesa de debates. Não! Não ha negociação se a esquerda ‘progressista’ se recusa a entender como raça informa a maneira como a opressão de classe é experienciada. É a condição negra, o lugar do não-lugar, que sintetiza o que o feminismo radical negro tem chamado de ‘matriz da dominação’ no mundo contemporâneo. Eu acho que a dificuldade da esquerda em entender o racismo reside na recusa em entender o que representou o trauma histórico da travessia do Atlantico negro. O militante radical/revolucionário branco encontra os limites da praxis revolucionária exatamente quando confrontado com a sua propria identidade. Eu descobri isso quando vi minha mae envelhecendo na cozinha dos companheiros revolucionarios. Estamos falando de um trauma histórico que tem na cor da pele negra as marcas de todos os horrores de um passado que se mantem entre nos. As feridas abertas com a travessia do atlântico ainda não cicatrizaram e não cicatrizarão tão cedo. Só quem é negro entende o que estou falando em termos de dor física e psíquica. Ou a esquerda brasileira entende isso ou continuará recolhendo os cacos do que sobrou do seu percurso de classe media branca, universitária. O conceito abstrato e universalista de ‘classe’ não convence nem a mim nem ãos meus amigos da quebrada. Convence a você?

Faça uma consideração sobre o potencial de mobilização da juventude negra nos cursinhos comunitários. Eles podem ser espaços de resistência ão genocídio?

Aí reside a esperanca, Jorge. O que em outra oportunidade o Douglas Belchior chamou de ‘identidade explosiva’ nasce aí na quebrada. Os cursinhos comunitários estão forjando uma nova subjetividade negra. São jovens que se sabem excluídos da cidade neoliberal, sabem quem são os seus algozes e se reconhecem como agentes de sua propria historia. O que me chama atenção nos núcleos da Uneafro-Brasil, por exemplo, é a criatividade em fazer tanto com tão pouco e a  perspicácia política dos seus membros. Estamos falando de uma juventude que cresceu nos anos 90, sob a égede de uma política neoliberal sanguinária. Encarceramento em massa, violência policial, desemprego, todos os tipos de vulnerabilidade social que configuram o genocídio negro tiveram nos governos do PSDB dos últimos vinte anos em São Paulo sua expressão maxima. Este foi o contexto em que surgiram as experiências dos pre-vestibulares comunitários em SP e é essa a reaalidade que orienta a luta de organizacões  como a Uneafro-Brasil em sua luta. O fato de serem estas organizacões  as principais articuladoras da campanha contra o genocídio negro e pelas acões  afirmativas nas universidades estaduais paulistas mostra bem o potencial revolucionário de uma juventude excluida para quem não resta outra opção mas resistir.

Os autos de “resistência seguida de morte” significam “licença para matar”?

Os autos de resistência ou ‘resistencia seguidas de morte’ são não apenas licenca para matar, mas elas tambem sintetizam o que temos chamado de antropofagia racial brasileira. Darcy Ribeiro já chamava a atenção para a “máquina de triturar gente” que foi a empreiteira da escravidão e do genocídio indígena. Na perspectiva do genocídio negro, Abdias Nascimento e Marcelo Paixão também elucidam esta equação: se no mito fundacional da nação, os indios devoraram os primeiros colonizadores, aqui temos o inverso, esta é uma nação que devora o corpo negro. O corpo negro, tenho dito, representa um excesso de significados – criminoso, feio, perverso, malvado, sujo – que não lhe basta matar, é preciso negar qualquer possibilidade de humanidade. Quando a polícia aperta o gatilho ela está “apenas” traduzindo os significados da subalternidade negra historicamente produzidos. A polícia mata em conformidade com um modelo de sociedade que em sua essencia é anti-negra, afinal o policial não é um extra-terrestre. Ele é parte de uma sociedade inerentemente racista. A licenca para matar reitera o modelo de relacões  raciais em que não basta tirar a vida. É preciso submeter o corpo negro a multiplas mortes; morte simbolica, fisica, social. Percebo isso por exemplo no fato de que a polícia não apenas tem licença para matar, mas o morto também é indiciado pelo Estado por resistir a prisão, o que o leitor pode muito bem chamar de morte dupla. Explico: a polícia mata, o delegado lavra um boletim de ocorrências baseado nos depoimentos dos políciais, o morto é caracterizado como ‘bandido’ e indiciado.  Isso nos remete, então, mais uma vez `a especificidade da condição negra. A esquerda acha que o problema da violencia policial é um ‘defeito’ da democracia brasileira, ou seja, melhorando a democracia, depurando as instituicões  e punindo os policiais haveria uma saída para o genocidio negro. O que afirmamos é precisamente  o contrário: qual o lugar do corpo negro em um regime de cidadania racializado em que a morte negra não é excessão, mas a regra? Quais os limites de negociação com um estado democrático de direitos inerentemente anti-negro? Parece contradição, mas não é. Direitos humanos e morte negra caminham de mãos dadas no Brasil da democracia racial.

Qual o significado da decisão dos ministros do STF, que declararam constitucionais as cotas?

A decisão foi o fruto da luta do movimento negro que todos estes anos pautou a questão racial mesmo com uma campanha  da midia contra as acões  afirmativas. O STF apenas confirmou o que ativistas negros tem dito ão longo dos anos: a democracia racial e’ uma promessa, não uma realidade. Depois de mais de 120 anos da abolição da escravidão, onde estão os negros na hierarquia social brasileira? Continuam com o mesmo status  subalterno do seculo XIX. A decisão do STF, como lembrou Aires Britto, abre caminho para o Brasil finalmente se reencontrar consigo mesmo. Acho que pela primeira vez uma intelectualidade branca que tem construido suas carreiras academicas negando a existencia do racismo vai ter que aceitar o peso social que a categoria raca tem na produção de desigualdades. Mas tem algo mais aqui: um desafio e’ que a militancia negra não se dê por satisfeita e tome o momento presente como um novo impulso `a luta pela emancipação negra plena. As cotas racias são ponto de partida, não ponto de chegada.

Como se explica a postura das universidades paulistas (USP, UNESP e UNICAMP) , que imediatamente anunciaram que não promoverão mudanças em seus processos seletivos?

O fato das universidades estaduais paulistas USP, Unesp e Unicamp decidirem não adotar programas de acões  afirmativas não nos surpreende. Estas institiuicões  são disposições anti-negro em sua essência. Veja o que aconteceu recentemente no campus da Unesp/Araraquara onde inscrições nas paredes associavam alunos africanos com animais. Na USP eu mesmo tive meus encontros racializados não apenas nas tentativas de ingresso na pos-graduação da instituição, como tambem quando da minha tentativa de visita a um certo nucleo de estudos da violencia, agora como pesquisador visitante e inexplicavelmente o professor branco se recusou a me receber. Estas experiências cotidianas não são fatos isolados. Elas mostram como o sentimento anti-negro esta enraizado na burocracia e nas praticas cotidianas que desqualificam nossa gente para o ingresso na universidade. O agravante aqui e’ que a universidade publica e’ financiada com o dinheiro dos impostos da coletividade. Ironicamente, são os mais pobres – aqueles sob os quais ha uma disproporcional taxação dos impostos haja vista que o ICMS  e’ a fonte de recursos das estaduais paulistas – quem paga para os filhos da elite estudar. O menino pobre do Capão Redondo paga pelo curso de Medicina do playboy morador de Itaim Bibi. As universidades estaduais paulistas não irão adotar as cotas raciais porque elas representam projetos politico-ideologicos muito bem definidos. Mas isso não quer dizer que elas serão imbativeis em seu cinismo cruel. A campanha do movimento negro em São Paulo pelas acões  afirmativas tem agora na decisão do STF um combustivel a mais. A USP não pode continuar sendo um instrumento perverso de reprodução das desigualdades raciais no país. Sua comunidade acadêmica precisa e dever ser envergonhada não apenas no país, mas tambem no exterior. Uma estrategia e’ mapearmos todas as universidades internacionais com as quais USP, Unesp e Unicamp possuem convenio e acionar os seus parceiros para que não celebrem acordos com as universidades enquanto elas insistirem em investir na supremacia branca.

Jaime Amparo Alves – Doutor em Antropologia e Pesquisador do Departamento de Estudos Africanos e Afro-Americanos  da Universidade do Texas, em Austin amparoalves@gmail.com

Jorge Américo – Mestrando em Ciências Sociais, Universidade Federal do ABC

Violence Hits Brazil Tribes in Scramble for Land (N.Y.Times)

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Mauricio Lima for The New York Times. GUARDING TRADITION Guarani youths during a ceremony in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil.

By SIMON ROMERO, Published: June 9, 2012

  • ARAL MOREIRA, Brazil — The gunmen emerged from pickup trucks at dawn, their faces hidden in balaclavas, and stormed into an encampment surrounded by a field of soybean plants near this town on Brazil’s porous frontier with Paraguay.

Witnesses said the men then shot Nísio Gomes, 59, a leader of the indigenous Guarani people; loaded his corpse onto a truck; and drove away.

“We want the bones of my father,” said Valmir Gomes, 33, one of Nísio’s sons, who witnessed the November attack. “He’s not an animal to drag away like that.”

Whether the bodies are hauled away or left as testaments to battles for ancestral land, killings and disappearances of indigenous leaders continue to climb, leaving a stain on Brazil’s rise as an economic powerhouse.

Mauricio Lima for The New York Times. FALLEN LEADER A boy played near a memorial for Nísio Gomes, who disappeared in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, where there has been a spate of attacks against indigenous peoples.

The expansion of huge cattle ranches and industrial-scale farms in remote regions has produced a land scramble that is leaving the  descendants of Brazil’s original inhabitants desperate to recover tribal terrains, in some cases squatting on contested properties. Nonindigenous landowners, meanwhile, many of whom live on land settled decades ago by their own ancestors under the government’s so-called colonization programs, are just as attached to their claims.

The conflicts often result in violent clashes, which sometimes end tragically for the squatters, armed here only with bows and arrows.

Fifty-one Indians were killed in Brazil in 2011; as many as 24 of the killings are suspected of being related to land battles, according to the Indigenous Missionary Council, an arm of the Roman Catholic Church.

The killings have focused attention on a problem that still plagues Brazil ahead of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, a gathering of thousands scheduled to be held in Rio de Janeiro this month. Twenty years ago, ahead of the original Earth Summit in Rio, officials responded to international criticism over killings of Yanomami people by gold miners, creating a 37,000-square-mile reserve in the Amazon.

In a less striking gesture, President Dilma Rousseff moved ahead this month with the demarcation of seven much smaller indigenous areas. But Cleber César Buzatto, the executive secretary of the Indigenous Missionary Council, said the move was disappointing since the areas were generally not the focus of land battles or big state-financed infrastructure projects.

Meanwhile, land clashes in various parts of Brazil are still taking place. In some cases, courts have opened the way for some indigenous people, who account for less than 1 percent of Brazil’s population of 191 million, to recuperate lands.

In the northern state of Roraima in 2009, Brazil’s high court expelled nonindigenous rice farmers from the lands of 20,000 Indians, mainly the Macuxi people. In a case this year, the Supreme Federal Tribunal annulled the private titles of almost 200 properties in the northeastern Bahia State, ruling that the land belonged to the Pataxó Hã-Hã-Hãe people. The decision followed clashes that left at least two dead.

But the courts can accomplish only so much. Tension is also increasing over proposed legislation aimed at opening indigenous areas to mining, pointing to how demand for Brazil’s natural resources may exacerbate land disputes.

Attacks against indigenous peoples persist here in Mato Grosso do Sul, a sprawling state in southwest Brazil where multinationals like Louis Dreyfus, the French commodities giant, have put down stakes.

A surge in wealth contrasts with the sense of hopelessness among Mato Grosso do Sul’s indigenous peoples, who account for about 75,000 of the state’s population of 2.4 million. Their marginalization has roots in policies put in place in the 1930s, when Brazil’s rulers corralled the Guarani into small reserves with the intent of opening vast areas to settlers.

The results for indigenous people were disastrous. In the shadow of Mato Grosso do Sul’s prosperity, indigenous leaders have called attention over the past decade to the deaths of dozens of Guarani children from malnutrition and an epidemic of suicides, notably in Dourados, an urban area where thousands of Guarani live cheek by jowl on small plots of land.

“Dourados is perhaps the largest known indigenous tragedy in the world,” said Deborah Duprat, Brazil’s deputy attorney general.

Beyond the malnutrition and suicide, there have also been attacks on the Guarani. More than half of Brazil’s killings of indigenous people in 2011 took place in Mato Grosso do Sul. The violence is far from hidden.

The November attack on Mr. Gomes, days after he led a group of 200 Guarani who squatted on a soybean farm, was especially brutal. A gang of gun-wielding men, “pistoleiros” as they are called here, was said by witnesses to have carried out the attack, which also involved beatings of others adults and children in the encampment.

Brazil’s Federal Police found evidence that four landowners in the area had hired a private security firm to remove the Guarani, according to Agência Brasil, the government’s news agency. Ten people were identified in December as suspects in the attack, said Jorge Figueiredo, the official investigating the case. More than six months after the attack, the suspects remain free, despite witness accounts of the attack. Mr. Figueiredo said their identities could not be disclosed, as the authorities try to build a stronger case. Moreover, without Mr. Gomes’s body, investigators do not even have material proof that he was killed, even though his son Valmir said he saw his father shot dead that day.

As the investigation drags on, the Guarani live in fear. Families sleep under tarpaulins in the encampment, which they call a “tekohá,” or “sacred land.” Teenagers patrol with bows and arrows. When visitors are allowed in, children hold signs saying, “We want the bones of Nísio Gomes, our leader.”

The sense of impunity over the attack follows a pattern, Guarani leaders said, in which they face landowners who mount powerful legal efforts to oust squatters from their properties. Some landowners contend that Brazil’s labyrinthine legal system makes the resolution of disputes difficult.

“The rights of all have to be guaranteed,” said Roseli Maria Ruiz, whose family owns a ranch that has been partly occupied for more than a decade by Guarani squatters. Clashes on her property have emerged. “We cannot, as nonnative, be treated as second-class citizens,” she said. “Instead, we, too, should have the right to defend ourselves.”

Guarani leaders say they are also stymied in their claims by the legal process, involving anthropological studies and rulings by bureaucrats in Brasília for determining land ownership.

Meanwhile, tensions smolder across Mato Grosso do Sul, and threats persist against the Guarani. A Guarani leader, Tonico Benites, 39, described one harrowing encounter in April. He said a gunman on a motorcycle stopped him and his wife on a deserted road and threatened to kill him because of his efforts to recover lands. A thunderstorm ended that encounter, said Mr. Benites, who still shakes when recounting it. “I told myself, ‘I’ll scream until I’m killed; my wife will hear me, maybe someone else,’ ” he said. “They can eliminate me, but I won’t go without a scream.”

Lis Horta Moriconi contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro.

A version of this article appeared in print on June 10, 2012, on page A6 of the New York editionwith the headline: Violence Hits Brazil Tribes In Scramble For Land.

Os cinco grandes sufocam questionamento ao veto na ONU (IPS)

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Inter Press Service – Reportagens
29/5/2012 – 10h11

por Thalif Deen, da IPS

42 Os cinco grandes sufocam questionamento ao veto na ONU

As potências com poder de veto no Conselho de Segurança fizeram desaparecer uma resolução para limitar o mau uso dessa faculdade. Foto: UN Photo/Paulo Filgueiras

Nações Unidas, 29/5/2012 – Quando a Guerra Fria estava em seu apogeu, um embaixador peruano, Víctor Andrés Belaúnde, expressou ceticismo com relação à capacidade dos países pequenos de sobreviver ao poderio diplomático das grandes potências na Organização das Nações Unidas (ONU). A ONU é uma instituição “onde sempre há algo que desaparece”, diz uma frase atribuída a Belaúnde (1993-1966) na década de 1960. “Quando dois países pequenos têm uma disputa, a disputa desaparece. E quando uma grande potência e uma menor estão em conflito, a potência menor é que desaparece”, observava o diplomata.

Isto é, supostamente, o que aconteceu este mês quando cinco dos menores Estados-membros das Nações Unidas, que se fazem chamar “os cinco pequenos”, desafiaram outras cinco potências com cadeira permanente no Conselho de Segurança (Estados Unidos, China, França, Grã-Bretanha e Rússia) sobre o mau uso que fazem de seu poder de veto. Horas antes do debate e da votação de uma resolução proposta pelos cinco pequenos à Assembleia Geral de 193 membros, esse texto desapareceu sem nenhuma cerimônia do sagrado recinto da ONU, e provavelmente da face da Terra.

Belaúnde, que presidiu a Assembleia Geral e o Conselho de Segurança, foi, inclusive, mais longe ao afirmar que, “quando duas grandes potências têm uma disputa, o que desaparece é a ONU”, segundo consta do livroCrosscurrents at Turtle Bay (Contracorrentes em Turtle Bay), publicado em 1970 pela jornalista do The New York Times, Kathleen Teltsch. Felizmente, desta vez as Nações Unidas e os cinco pequenos (Costa Rica, Jordânia, Liechtenstein, Cingapura e Suíça) não desapareceram e vivem para contar o ocorrido.

A abortada resolução, formulada no delicado jargão diplomático, “recomendava” aos cinco membros permanentes do Conselho de Segurança considerarem “a contenção no uso do veto diante de ações concebidas para evitar ou pôr fim a genocídios, crimes de guerra e contra a humanidade”. Porém, desde o começo, os cinco grandes deixaram claro que a Assembleia Geral não tinha motivo para fazer tais recomendações ao Conselho.

William Pace, diretor-executivo do Movimento Federalista Mundial – Instituto para a Política Global, disse à IPS que, apesar de os cinco pequenos se virem obrigados a retirar essa histórica proposta, as organizações não governamentais esperam que isto seja apenas o primeiro passo, depois de 67 anos, de um trabalho comum da Assembleia e do Conselho para responder à enorme necessidade de se melhorar a capacidade de manter a paz e a segurança.

“É preciso mudar os fundamentos disfuncionais de um Conselho de Segurança dos tempos da Guerra Fria”, opinou Pace. “E um começo indispensável seria esse organismo aceitar uma provisão de não uso do veto para bloquear ações sobre grandes crimes”. A oposição a semelhante recomendação foi “um escândalo”, acrescentou.

Para Stephen Zunes, professor de estudos políticos e internacionais na Universidade de São Francisco, a retirada da Resolução mostra que os cinco grandes continuam mandando na ONU. “No entanto, são questionados cada vez mais, sua credibilidade enfraquece e seu fracasso ético é cada vez mais evidente para uma crescente maioria da comunidade internacional”, destacou.

A importância da resolução estava no fato de não só desafiar o veto chinês e russo às medidas contra o regime sírio, que reprime de forma sangrenta a oposição, e o da China diante do genocídio no Sudão, como também dos Estados Unidos quanto aos crimes de guerra cometidos por Israel, relatou Zunes, especialista em Conselho de Segurança. “Ao impulsionar essa resolução, esses pequenos países destacaram que as violações ao direito internacional humanitário são imperdoáveis, sem importar que tipo de relação tenham os cinco grandes com o governo acusado”, explicou Zunes.

Para Zunes, a proposta foi especialmente oportuna, não apenas pela situação na Síria, mas pela quase unânime votação na câmara baixa do Congresso norte-americano que, no começo deste mês, estabeleceu como política oficial de Washington o veto sistemático a qualquer resolução do Conselho de Segurança que critique Israel.

Um diplomata do Sul em desenvolvimento, que pediu reserva de seu nome, contou à IPS que os cinco retiraram a proposta no dia 23, mesmo dia em que estava prevista sua discussão, após intensa pressão exercida pelos cinco grandes, tanto na sede nova-iorquina da ONU, quanto em cada uma das capitais. O Escritório de Assuntos Legais, prosseguiu o diplomata, também embaralhou o meio de campo ao afirmar que a resolução exigia um apoio de dois terços da Assembleia Geral, pois implicava uma reforma do Conselho de Segurança.

“Provavelmente, o Escritório estava agradando aos cinco grandes, e chama a atenção o fato de a China ter feito circular o texto do Escritório entre todos os Estados-membros mesmo antes de sua publicação, indicando que os cinco membros permanentes o receberam antecipadamente”, relatou a fonte. “Isto frustra todo o impulso para reformar o Conselho e também prejudica sua efetividade”, lamentou. Ao bloquearem a menor reforma, os cinco grandes podem ter ganho momentaneamente uma batalha, mas, no longo prazo, causam um enorme dano à credibilidade do Conselho. “Pode haver mais e mais países que o evitem ou se neguem a cumprir suas decisões”, alertou o diplomata.

Além da oposição das potências, os cinco pequenos não conseguiram convencer uma quantidade suficiente de governos sobre a conveniência de separar a ampliação do Conselho de Segurança, que exige reformas na Carta da ONU, da modificação de métodos de trabalho e procedimentos do órgão. Isto está limitado por uma resolução que a Assembleia Geral adotou em 1993 e que exige maioria de dois terços de seus membros, ou 129 países.

“Um objetivo fundamental é separar as reformas, que não exigirem mexer na Carta, das restrições de 1993. E isto se consegue com uma decisão da Assembleia Geral por maioria simples”, explicou Pace. Embora a ampliação do Conselho, para dar lugar a mais membros permanentes, seja muito importante, pode demorar anos ou mesmo décadas, enquanto as outras reformas nesse órgão devem ser adotadas de imediato, tanto pela Assembleia Geral quanto pelo próprio Conselho de Segurança, ressaltou.

Os cinco pequenos, segundo esse especialista, não colocaram em questão a legitimidade do veto, mas seu uso indevido, causador de milhões e milhões de mortes. Ao criticar o silêncio sobre esta notícia na maioria dos grandes meios de comunicação, Pace destacou que “o fato de a IPS e apenas mais um punhado de órgãos da mídia em todo o mundo cobrirem a resolução dos cinco pequenos constitui um sinal aterrador do estado em que se encontra o jornalismo internacional”.

Envolverde/IPS

 

Segurança da Rio+20, entre a crítica e o temor (IPS)

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Envolverde Rio + 20
31/5/2012 – 09h32

por Fabíola Ortiz, da IPS

IPS2b Segurança da Rio+20, entre a crítica e o temorRio de Janeiro, Brasil, 31/5/2012 – Fortes críticas da sociedade civil, cujos líderes não querem que “se militarize a Cúpula dos Povos”, foram provocadas pelo anúncio da operação de segurança que o governo brasileiro colocará em ação por ocasião da Conferência das Nações Unidas sobre Desenvolvimento Sustentável (Rio+20), de 20 a 22 de junho no Rio de Janeiro, e dos encontros paralelos. O governo se mostrou preocupado, ao mesmo tempo em que acredita poder garantir a segurança do encontro contra ataques cibernéticos ou terroristas.

O Plano Geral de Segurança da Rio+20 foi divulgado no dia 28 pelos chefes militares e pelo ministro da Defesa, Celso Amorim, os quais explicaram que haverá um centro para coordenar as operações em toda a área onde se desenvolverem as reuniões da cúpula oficial e também dos encontros paralelos.

Cerca de 15 mil agentes distribuídos em diversos pontos do Rio de Janeiro, onde está prevista a realização de, aproximadamente, 500 encontros e painéis, enquanto as principais avenidas, viadutos e túneis estarão controlados por veículos blindados. Além disso, está previsto o investimento de US$ 10 milhões para rastrear e evitar possíveis ameaças de hackers ao sistema de conexões pela internet.

“Foi preparado um plano muito detalhado com o objetivo de garantir que a Conferência transcorra com tranquilidade. Do total de agentes, as forças armadas fornecerão oito mil soldados”, informou Amorim em entrevista coletiva com jornalistas brasileiros e estrangeiros. A operação Rio+20 acontecerá entre 5 e 29 de junho, quando haverá atividades, seminários, encontros e manifestações ambientalistas, além das reuniões de alto nível, entre as quais o encontro de chefes de Estado e de governo.

O esquema especial de proteção nos locais de hospedagem, traslado e realização das reuniões contará com cerca de cinco mil efetivos de segurança diariamente nas ruas e acompanhando as delegações estrangeiras. As escoltas de autoridades e delegações dos países e dos funcionários da Organização das Nações Unidas (ONU) constarão de 52 equipes especializadas, com apoio de 29 helicópteros e mais de 400 motociclistas. Haverá cuidado especial com os espaços aéreo e marítimo, missão que estará a cargo da Força Aérea e dos fuzileiros navais.

Também estarão na mira dos corpos de segurança as manifestações e conferências paralelas ao encontro oficial, especialmente a mais importante delas, a Cúpula dos Povos sobre a Rio+20 pela Justiça Social e Ambiental, de 15 a 23 de junho. Precisamente, uma das mobilizações com maior número de pessoas deverá ser a marcha prevista pelos líderes da Cúpula dos Povos, na Avenida Rio Branco, no dia 20 de junho, data de abertura da Rio+20.

O general Adriano Pereira Júnior, um dos comandantes da operação, afirmou que os movimentos sociais não serão reprimidos sob nenhuma circunstância, acrescentando que espera-se que se manifestem em um clima de ordem e cordialidade. “Os organizadores da Cúpula dos Povos já nos procuraram solicitando apoio na segurança de seus eventos”, contou o militar.

Porém, Carlos Henrique Painel, do Fórum Brasileiro de ONGs e Movimentos Sociais para o Meio Ambiente e o Desenvolvimento Sustentável, alertou para a possibilidade de os militares não respeitarem a liberdade das mobilizações. “Não queremos soldados armados do exército fazendo a segurança, não queremos uma Cúpula dos Povos militarizada, pois nosso receio é quanto ao nível de tolerância com relação às manifestações que são espontâneas e não diretamente ligadas à Cúpula”, disse à IPS.

“A Guarda Municipal é capaz de garantir nossa segurança”, opinou Painel, um dos organizadores da Cúpula dos Povos, para a qual se espera a presença de 25 mil a 30 mil pessoas, segundo seus promotores. “De fato pedimos ajuda para nossos acampamentos no Aterro do Flamengo e nos locais de hospedagem previstos em duas escolas públicas e no sambódromo, que abrigarão cerca de 12 mil participantes, explicou Painel.

Embora o Brasil não figure entre os países-alvo de possíveis atentados, um encontro internacional da dimensão da Rio+20 obriga a criar um centro de inteligência e prevenção. O general José Carlos De Nardi, do centro de defesa cibernética, informou que é a primeira vez que se articula no Brasil um site integrado contra ataques cibernéticos. “A Polícia Federal já tem muita experiência neste aspecto devido a tantas invasões a páginas da internet de órgãos e agências reguladoras. Temos condições de chegar ao local exato e ao computador de onde possam partir os ataques”, admitiu o general.

As autoridades também disseram que, no caso de ataques cibernéticos interromperem o fornecimento de energia, os principais locais já estão preparados com geradores para iluminação, bem como as empresas de telecomunicações com redes sem fio. O Brasil não receberá nenhum apoio em seu trabalho de segurança, “somos capazes e temos meio para fazê-lo”, enfatizou o general Pereira Júnior. Porém, admitiu que terão apoio de inteligência dos corpos de segurança dos governantes que chegarem ao Rio de Janeiro.

Envolverde/IPS

Conheça todos os 12 vetos ao novo Código Florestal (EcoD)

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29/5/2012 – 10h34

por Redação EcoD

51 Conheça todos os 12 vetos ao novo Código Florestal

Os ministros anunciaram vetos em 12 itens e 32 modificações no texto do Código Florestal, feitos pela presidenta Dilma Rousseff, na última semana. Foto: José Cruz/ABr

Impedir a anistia a quem desmatou e proibir a produção agropecuária em áreas de proteção permanente (APPs) foram alguns dos principais objetivos da presidenta Dilma Rousseff ao vetar parte do novo Código Florestal na sexta-feira, 25 de maio. Os vetos de 12 artigos resgatam o teor do acordo firmado entre os líderes partidários e o governo durante a tramitação da proposta no Senado.

O Artigo 1º, que foi modificado pelos deputados após aprovação da proposta no Senado, foi vetado. Na medida provisória (MP) publicada hoje (28) no Diário Oficial da União, o Palácio do Planalto devolve ao texto do Código Florestal os princípios que haviam sido incorporados no Senado e suprimidos, posteriormente, na segunda votação na Câmara. A MP foi o instrumento usado pelo governo para evitar lacunas no texto final.

Também foi vetado o Inciso 11 do Artigo 3º da lei, que trata das atividades eventuais ou de baixo impacto. O veto retirou do texto o chamado pousio: prática de interrupção temporária de atividade agrícolas, pecuárias ou silviculturais, para permitir a recuperação do solo.

61 Conheça todos os 12 vetos ao novo Código Florestal

Artigo 61 previa a continuidade das atividades agrossilvipastoris, de ecoturismo e turismo rural em áreas rurais consolidadas até 22 de julho de 2008 – o governo vetou. Foto: leoffreitas

Recebeu veto ainda o Parágrafo 3º do Artigo 4º que não considerava área de proteção permanente (APP) a várzea (terreno às margens de rios, inundadas em época de cheia) fora dos limites estabelecidos, exceto quanto houvesse ato do Poder Público. O dispositivo vetado ainda estendia essa regra aos salgados e apicuns – áreas destinadas à criação de mariscos e camarões.

Foram vetados também os parágrafos 7º e 8º. O primeiro estabelecia que, nas áreas urbanas, as faixas marginais de qualquer curso d’água natural que delimitem as áreas das faixas de passagem de inundação (áreas que alagam na ápoca de cheia) teriam sua largura determinada pelos respectivos planos diretores e pela Lei de Uso do Solo, ouvidos os conselhos estaduais e municipais do Meio Ambiente. Já o Parágrafo 8º previa que, no caso de áreas urbanas e regiões metropolitanas, seria observado o dispositivo nos respectivos planos diretores e leis municipais de uso do solo.

O Parágrafo 3º do Artigo 5º também foi vetado. O dispositivo previa que o Plano Ambiental de Conservação e Uso do Entorno de Reservatório Artificial poderia indicar áreas para implantação de parques aquícolas e polos turísticos e de lazer em torno do reservatório, de acordo com o que fosse definido nos termos do licenciamento ambiental, respeitadas as exigências previstas na lei.

73 Conheça todos os 12 vetos ao novo Código Florestal

APP em Minas Gerais. Parágrafo 3º do Artigo 4º desconsiderava área de proteção permanente (APP) a várzea (terreno às margens de rios, inundadas em época de cheia) fora dos limites estabelecidos, exceto quanto houvesse ato do Poder Público. Foto: Paula FJ

Já no Artigo 26, que trata da supressão de vegetação nativa para uso alternativo do solo tanto de domínio público quanto privado, foram vetados o 1º e 2º parágrafos. Os dispositivos detalhavam os órgãos competentes para autorizar a supressão e incluía, entre eles, os municipais do Meio Ambiente.

A presidenta Dilma Rousseff também vetou integralmente o Artigo 43. Pelo dispositivo, as empresasconcessionárias de serviços de abastecimento de água e geração de energia elétrica, públicas ou privadas, deveriam investir na recuperação e na manutenção de vegetação nativa em áreas de proteção permanente existente na bacia hidrográfica em que ocorrer a exploração.

Um dos pontos que mais provocaram polêmica durante a tramitação do código no Congresso, o Artigo 61, foi vetado. O trecho autorizava, exclusivamente, a continuidade das atividades agrossilvipastoris, de ecoturismo e turismo rural em áreas rurais consolidadas até 22 de julho de 2008.

Também foram vetados integramente os artigos 76 e 77. O primeiro estabelecia prazo de três anos para que o Poder Executivo enviasse ao Congresso projeto de lei com a finalidade de estabelecer as especificidades da conservação, da proteção, da regeneração e da utilização dos biomas da Amazônia, do Cerrado, da Caatinga, do Pantanal e do Pampa. Já o Artigo 77 previa que na instalação de obra ou atividade potencialmente causadora de significativa degradação do meio ambiente seria exigida do empreendedor, público ou privado, a proposta de diretrizes de ocupação do imóvel.

A MP que complementa o projeto, publicada nesta segunda-feira (28), vale por 60 dias, podendo ser prorrogada por mais 60 dias – ela ainda será votada pelo Congresso.

* Publicado originalmente no site da EcoD.

Rio+20: ruptura ou ajuste? (Mundo Sustentável)

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Se você entende que há alguma razão para a mudança, manifeste-se. A Rio+20 é uma obra em construção. Ainda há tempo.

Diante do risco de a mais importante conferência do ano se transformar em uma “terapia de grupo”, onde o falatório e a papelada possam resultar em um novo acordo político genérico, convém prestar atenção desde já no posicionamento dos diferentes segmentos que marcarão presença na Rio +20.

Reunidos na PUC-RJ durante a conferência, aproximadamente 500 cientistas deverão compartilhar novas avaliações sobre o estado de fragilidade e degradação dos ecossistemas que  fornecem água, matéria-prima e energia à humanidade. De lá deverá surgir mais um grito de alerta em favor da vida sem nenhuma conotação política ou religiosa. Quem usa a ciência para medir os estragos causados pelo atual modelo de desenvolvimento é basicamente um cético: se orienta apenas e tão somente pelas evidências que a metodologia científica lhe revela.

Os povos indígenas causarão enormes constrangimentos aos organizadores da Rio+20. Representantes das etnias que sobreviveram a sucessivos massacres no Brasil e no exterior denunciarão o absurdo do uso insustentável da terra.

Os empresários engajados exibirão os resultados contábeis da ecoeficiência e assumirão novos compromissos em defesa da inovação tecnológica e da redução do desperdício. Haverá entre eles os que fazem maquiagem verde (falam de “sustentabilidade”, mas não praticam), os neo-convertidos, que ajustaram procedimentos mais por conveniência (do que por convicção) e os que, de fato, estão convencidos da necessidade de mudanças e conseguem enxergar mais além do lucro imediato.

A constelação das ONGs deverá confirmar o tamanho e a diversidade das múltiplas correntes de pensamento que não cabem na moldura da ONU, mas que emprestam densidade e legitimidade a uma das pautas mais importantes da Rio+20: governança. Os tomadores de decisão já reconhecem a força do terceiro setor num mundo onde as articulações em rede robustecem a democracia, oxigenam as instituições e promovem a transparência e a justiça.

Caberá às organizações civis e às mídias (todas as mídias, de todos os tamanhos) aquecer a panela de pressão onde os chefes de estado vão cozinhar o texto final da Conferência. Sem isso, será mais do mesmo. Obnubilados pelos afazeres e interesses mais imediatos, de curtíssimo prazo, os chefes de estado não conseguirão justificar mudanças estruturais de longo prazo sem que haja uma boa razão para isso. Se você entende que há alguma razão para a mudança, manifeste-se. A Rio+20 é uma obra em construção. Ainda há tempo.

André Trigueiro

14.mar.2012

Artigo publicado na edição de março 2012 da Revista GQ