Glenn Beck’s nightly tour through the terrifying political landscape of his paranoid imagination inevitably includes a detour into the shadowy precincts of liberal thought, unfriendly territory where conspiracies to destroy the United States are incubated in every university classroom, and enemies of the state lie in wait to hijack the American dream.  A rotating cast of left-of center bogeymen haunts the narrative of Beck’s other America, infecting the brains of ordinary citizens with conspiratorial designs that, if not properly defended against, will ultimately bring about the structural collapse of the United States.

Over the past several weeks Beck has made a point of aggressively singling out Frances Fox Piven—professor of political science and sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center—as especially dangerous to American life and liberty.  Beck accuses Piven and her late husband, Richard Cloward, of being the intellectual architects of a revolutionary plot to overthrow the United States government. The so-called “Cloward-Piven strategy,” outlined in a 1966 article published by The Nation, argued that a concentrated welfare enrollment drive could ultimately lead to a guaranteed national income. For Beck, Cloward and Piven are a particularly potent touchstone for kicking off feverish fantasies.  They represent, in Beck’s mythology, “the roots of the tree of radicalism and revolution” that employ “fear and intimidation” to “overwhelm the system.”

What began as mildly amusing attention quickly turned worrisome as threats to Piven’s life began appearing on internet message boards and even in her electronic inbox after Beck’s website, The Blaze,  posted an essay on New Year’s Eve entitled “Frances Fox Piven Rings in the New Year by Calling for Violent Revolution.” “I’m all for violence and change Francis,” one reader wrote, “where do your loved ones live?”  Another chimed in that he had “5000 roundas [sic] ready and I’ll give My life [sic] to take Our freedom [sic] back. Taking Her life [sic] and any who would enslave My children [sic] and grandchildren and call for violence should meet their demise as They wish [sic]. George Washington didn’t use His freedom [sic] of speech to defeat the British, He [sic] shot them.” Still others warned Piven to “be very careful what you ask for honey… As I mentioned in previous posts…ONE SHOT…ONE KILL! …a few well placed marksmen with high powered rifles…then there would not be any violence.” One Beck supporter suggested that “We should blowup Piven’s office and home,” while another signed off by praying that “cancer find[s] you soon.”  According to The Nation, a particularly succinct antagonist summed up his message in the subject line of a personal email: “DIE YOU CUNT.”

Concerns for Piven’s personal safety have since led to increased security precautions and an investigation by the FBI. Despite these unpleasant circumstances, however, Piven has hardly put her life on hold. Since the new year, she has continued writing prodigiously, has appeared regularly on nationally syndicated radio and TV, and is currently teaching a class at the Graduate Center. The Advocate sat down with Piven to discuss the ugly causes and consequences of Beck’s bilious targeting, as well as the recent attack on academic freedom at Brooklyn College, possibilities for a poor and working people’s movement in the midst of the US economic crisis, and the state of American democracy.

I was hoping we could begin with a brief discussion of what’s been going on: where it came from, how it has affected you personally, and what it says about our current moment.

Well, it started almost two years ago.  I didn’t pay any attention to it, however, until last winter.  when some of my students told me about it.  Now, I don’t watch Glenn Beck very often.  But they told me about Beck’s “tree of revolution,” and that Richard and I were at the trunk of this tree that has all these branches going off in different directions.  My first reaction was that it was  it was funny, because it was so fantastical.  Who wouldn’t laugh if they were being given credit for the Students for a Democratic Society [movement], the Open Society Institute, ACORN, the election of Barack Obama, the financial crisis, and probably other stuff which I am forgetting right now.

But as it’s gone on, I have been forced to think about it a little more seriously. I think it is dangerous in and of itself, and also because it’s a symptom of serious problems in American democracy.  It’s dangerous because our political culture includes a tradition of violent extremism, and also because there are always some loose nuts out there who are provoked by this kind of ranting.  But it’s a symptom of a bigger problem, I think.  The bigger problem is that there are a lot of people in the United States who are anxious, discontented, who are nostalgic for “the way things were,” who don’t understand the big changes that have occurred including deindustrialization and the decline of American power, or the increasing diversity of the American population,  or the election of a black president, or changes in sexual and family patterns.  These are very hard developments to decipher, to analyze, to explain.  They’re hard for academics to explain!  It’s also difficult to understand the government policies that are justified as dealing with these problems, or dealing with with the economic recession.

That’s a situation that I think creates a sort-of available space for propaganda.  That’s why Glenn Beck and company are dangerous: because they are propagandists.  They tell a nutty story about what is happening in the United States instead of trying to understand what’s happening, trying to understand who’s responsible.  Instead, they point at me and say, “SHE’S RESPONSIBLE!”  Well, think how ridiculous this is.  They also keep reiterating, “She is 78 years old!”  And I’m responsible?  This is paranoia.

Think about what we understand to be the elemental requirements for democracy.  People are supposed to assess their circumstances, the circumstances of their community, to discuss those circumstances—why they occurred, what government can do about it—and then vote accordingly. But, if these crazy stories are poured into what you might call the public mind or segment of the public’s mind, it blocks the possibility for this kind of democratic discourse.

How do you make sense of the violent threats against you, especially in light of the Gabriel Giffords shooting, and the Beck-inspired assassination plots of Byron Williams? Is Barbara Ehrenreich correct to suggest that the possession or use of guns themselves have come to represent political action to some Americans?  And if so, do you see a concerted effort by the far right to mobilize around this sense of “civic engagement,” for lack of a better way of describing it?

Well, I think that guns have always played a role in American politics culture.  That role perhaps grows and contracts, but there have always been extremist groups that have turned to guns and especially to forms of violence that play a dramatic symbolic role, like lynchings.  So I’m not sure that this is new. It may be surging right now—maybe because of a black president and the economic downturn—but it’s not new.  What is new, I think, is the potential power of propaganda in American life.  And that’s in part because of the media, and the role of big money, and who owns the media.  After all, it’s not Glenn Beck, it’s Rupert Murdoch—let’s face it.  Glenn Beck is an idiot: an overweight, neurotic, character who hit on this way of building an audience and making a lot of money.  But FOX News gave him his platform.

Why do you think Beck has fastened on to you? How did you and your late husband end up at the trunk of the “tree of revolution”?

Why does he fasten on me?  Partly it is accident: one of way or the other, he came into contact with David Horowitz, Fred Siegel Jim Sleeper and other annoying people who made the move from the far left to the far right in the 1970s, because the pay was better on the other side, or whatever.  They, along with Thomas Sowell, have a line which is very familiar that ordinary people themselves never rise up and make trouble on their own, it’s always outside agitators that instigate them.  And they say that Richard and I were the agitators that were responsible for the welfare rights movement and later the effort to get liberalized voter registration.  Thomas Sowell said we were for the responsible for the demand for affirmative action—“black people didn’t want that!”

Still, they could have picked on lots of others, so its accidental that they picked on me.  They could even have picked on one of their own! Just take a look at what ran in Ramparts magazine when David Horowitz was still an editor!  But I think that what’s not accidental is that they’re turning to someone who was an advocate for expanded democratic rights for poor and minority people in the United States, and expanded political rights for poor and minority people in the United States—that’s not accidental.  The Sixties movements drive them crazy. Actually, the Thirties movements also drive them crazy! But the Sixties movements have a kind of special edge to them because they did play a role in the election of Barack Obama, who is easily vilified and demonized because he is African-American.

If it’s true, as you say, that Glenn Beck’s narrative gains traction because of the complexity of American politics, what’s the remedy, what’s the way forward?  In other words, what are the prospects for reinvigorating a working class movement in American politics?

Well, there is the potential. Some of the conditions are right.  We have a president who’s not a champion of such movements, but who would nevertheless be vulnerable to them and forced to be responsive to them.  We have a clear villain in the financial sector, a villain that is not only similar to the economic royalists that Franklin Delano Roosevelt ranted against, but who are patently illegal in many of their actions.  And we have a lot of people who are losing their homes, we have people suffering under mountains of debt, not just credit card but student debt.  A lot of people are unemployed and many more have taken big wage cuts.

But at the same time, I do think there a lot of organizing problems that we have to solve. Here’s what I’ve come to think we should do.  We have to work on the organizing problems—how to bring people together; how to transform what is for many people a kind of humiliation—they’re debtors, or they are unemployed—we have to figure out how to transform this humiliation into indignation; we have to figure out how to identify targets for their indignation and their anger; how to shape local actions that have some muscle that can be brought to bear on the centers of power.  Of course, there are people working on this, but the stuff that’s happened so far has been very small. Still, I see no reason that it can’t be much bigger, that it can’t get much bigger.

Can you talk a bit about the recent events at Brooklyn College: specifically, how you view what happened there, and what ways, if any, you see its connection to Glenn Beck’s targeting of you as part of a larger right-wing attack on the American university?

Well, first of all, I don’t think it’s quite right to suggest that my situation is linked to what happened at Brooklyn College.  As to that situation, I think that administrators at CUNY—and I include the president of Brooklyn College here—administrators at CUNY are very sensitive on the issues of Israel and Zionism, and that’s partly because of the larger political environment of New York.  It’s also because of the history of CUNY.  There have historically been a lot of Jews at CUNY, there are lots of Jews on faculty. And it’s because Jewish politics—and by that I mean the politics of American Jews—has itself been very distorted, I think, by Israeli policy.  And so, you have a sensitivity that leads to the events at Brooklyn college.. I remember another: the Graduate Center graduation a few years ago in which a trustee—invited to give his blessing to the graduates—used the occasion to launch a kind of tirade against any anti-Zionist sentiment in the institution.

It’s true that David Horowitz, who is one of the gang promoting the idea there is a Cloward and Piven theory of orchrestrated crisis to bring down capitalism, did work with with Campus Watch a few years ago, and a lot of neo-cons are hyped-up on the issue of Israel.  In that sense, maybe there is a connection [between the Brooklyn College and Glenn Beck fiascos].  However, the university is the one institution in the United States that hasn’t been completely swamped by the march to the right in the country.  When the American Sociological Association’s three most recent presidents issued a statement defending me, they got an incendiary response from somebody called “Shadow Merchant.”  Randall Collins, one of the presidents, emailed Shadow Merchant to ask him how he had gotten the statement so quickly. In response Shadow Merchant laid out a big plan—I think Shadow Merchant is a probably some right-wing professor emeritus—but Shadow Merchant said, and I’m paraphrasing of course, “this is the counter-revolution and one of the things we’re going to do is mob every lefty professor.”  And he concluded his tirade by heaping praise on Senator Joseph McCarthy.

So, I think that the Right will target the universities, and that we have a responsibility to stand up to this kind of Right, and we especially have a responsibility to stand up to the propaganda of the Right.  Lunacy is not good for democracy.

Speaking of which, what do you make of the state of our democracy look like at present?

Well, democracy—understood as electoral representative democracy—is in a lot of trouble. Now, some of that comes from the growing role of business in American politics: the concentrated resources that business interests groups bring to bear on campaigns and candidates as lobbyists, as big-money contributors, and the influence they have on the parties, as well.

But some of the trouble also comes from the influence of propaganda in a society that is very difficult to understand for the ordinary citizen.  One has to have explanations for what happens, and the role of government in what happens,  in order to do one’s democratic duty as a citizen and as a voter.  American politics is hard to understand.  The fact that it is so dense, so complicated, so opaque and turgid opens the way for lunatic propaganda.  And sometimes not so lunatic!  The right-wing propaganda campaign that has now been going on for forty years—a campaign that is sometimes referred to as the politics of distraction—to try to wean the American working class away from New Deal policies and the Democratic Party by raising cultural issues that largely have to do with race and sex. This larger campaign is perhaps not  lunatic, but neither is it a contribution to democratic discourse.

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Mac McClelland

Nearly fifty years after Burma’s last democratically-elected government was overthrown by a military-led coup, the Southeast Asian country has suffered some of the world’s most egregious human rights abuses.  For activists, Burma has become synonymous with institutionalized rape, torture, forced labor, and ethnic cleansing.  In the popular imagination, however, the enormity of Burma’s crisis remains obscured by indifference and the overshadowing presence of disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Darfur.    

In 2006, Mother Jones editor and human rights reporter Mac McClelland volunteered as an English language teacher with a Burmese refugee organization in Mae Sot, Thailand, a small frontier town hugging the border with Burma.  There, she lived, worked, and partied with a small band of hard-drinking refugees who risk their lives to document the slowly grinding genocide consuming ethnic minorities in Burma. McClelland collects their stories of struggle and survival under a murderous regime in a wide-ranging, meticulously reported, and vividly recounted new memoir, For Us Surrender is Out of the Question.      

McClelland sat down recently with the CUNY Advocate to discuss her new book, the reason the world continues to ignore the genocide in Burma, and why there still may be hope for victims of the world’s longest-running war.   

I hoped we could begin by setting the stage a bit.  Can you discuss how it is that you came to work with Burmese refugees in Thailand?

It really was as lame as I describe it in the book.  I was dicking around on the internet, saw something about these Burmese refugee camps near the border in Thailand, but I couldn’t find any information about why they were there.  I saw that there were 100,000 Burmese refugees in Thailand, and I was like, “Huh? Really?”  I had never heard that before.  Of course, you know somewhere in the back of your mind that Burma sucks, that it’s not exactly a place you would want to live, not exactly a bastion of democracy, but I hadn’t heard that there was a refugee crisis, that there are hundreds of thousands of refugees leaving the country. I couldn’t find any easily accessible information about what the hell the story was, so when I finished graduate school I was like, “I’m just gonna go and check it out.”

Did you travel there with the intention of writing a book?

No. I really just wanted to go and see what was going on. 

What was the most surprising thing that you experienced while you were there?

Well, the genocide. The genocide that I had never heard of, that most people have never heard of because people are afraid to label it a genocide. It’s too complicated, too politically charged. To realize that something of that scope, at that level of horror, was happening and that it’s not widely reported—despite the fact that it has been documented to death—was stunning to me.  I mean, to every single thing that came out of the mouths of these guys that I was working with my response would be, “Really?!?” They would show me videos, and pictures, and I would get interviews, just endless stacks of shit, and with all of it, in every case, my response was, “No, that’s news to me. No, that story doesn’t exist in my media.  No, I don’t know what you are talking about.”  In retrospect, I guess it was stupid to have had faith in thinking that I would have known about this.  But it is so big! You would think that somebody would have been doing something about it. 

So, why haven’t they?  Is it simply that Burma is home to the world’s longest running war, and so doesn’t constitute news? Is news fatigue a factor? Or is there something else going on that we should consider?   

Yeah, well, it seems to me that the fact that it is so old could possibly have something to do with it, but at the same time the story is so juicy, it is so shocking, that it seems to me like something that could totally move papers.  But it’s also that people in this country—this is not as true in the UK—don’t really know what Burma is, where Burma is, don’t necessarily know what continent Burma is on, so I think that news organizations assume that the story will be a hard sell, and they’re probably right.  If I were more of a conspiracy theorist I would say that the genocide in Burma is being underreported because our government doesn’t want the people to know about it because then they would have to do something about it. And they don’t want to do something about it because then China would get mad. But really, I think it’s just a hard-to-sell story. Of course, it could also be fatigue: people definitely had Haiti fatigue, just as they had New Orleans fatigue before that.  The thing with Burma, though, is it seems like it hasn’t reached that point.  I just think we don’t know what to do with it.  Instead, we talk about the same thing over and over again, which is that there’s a political prisoner [Aung San Suu Kyi] there . Couldn’t we use that as a news peg to say “Oh, and by the way, there’s also a genocide going on”?

Let’s talk about your approach to reporting on the crisis in Burma.  There’s a wonderful tension in the book between the rigorous historical research that contextualizes the story—which feels almost academic in nature—and the vigorously informal tone you adopt that frames the narrative.  First, did this mixture result from having a particular audience in mind while writing?  And second, can you discuss the challenges of negotiating the slippery slope between these two elements of your style?     

I definitely did not have a particular audience in mind.  To me, the number one thing was that I had the stories of these refugees which were fucking crazy. I really wanted to tell them. Period.  As for the way the narrative came about, that was more the result of personality than anything else. First of all, I am a huge nerd: I love research and fact-checking and collecting information.  At the same time, I write the way that I speak.  When we were shopping the book proposal, a lot of people were not huge fans of that. They would be like, “Yes, this is an important subject and people should write more books about Burma. But we can never abide by the scathing, the obnoxious tone of this narrator!” 

Since the excerpt from the book came out in the new Mother Jones, some pretty important organizations—I won’t name any names—have written letters to the editor saying “What the fuck were you thinking, framing this in this way. It’s totally inappropriate for a human rights story.”  So I guess I know, now, who is not my audience! They thought that I was undermining the importance of the situation by not being dryer in talking about it. But for me, that’s exactly the problem with all this information!  It’s presented in a way that no one would ever want to look at it.  Even the videos you see have these dire voiceovers—almost always done by British people—and there’s always this slow and sad piano music in the background. The moment you cue it up you say to yourself “I’m not going to watch this. It’s going to be boring and/or sad.” 

I’ve read a thousand books about Burma and even the modern ones, they still read like reports, like academic tracts. They’re long, there’s no narrative, and there are no characters. Because there are no characters, I think that makes it hard for people to read, to engage with this conflict.  So, I was basically writing the book I needed when I was trying to find out what was going on.  This was the book I was looking for, and couldn’t find.

Given the jaw-dropping violence and atrocities being perpetrated in Burma and the world’s seemingly indifferent response thus far, do you still hold any faith that the United Nations or other members of the international community will intervene on behalf of victims there at any point in the foreseeable future?

I have some. We have peacekeepers on the ground in Darfur, after all, so we know we can do it. It’s not like the mechanisms aren’t there, that money isn’t there.  They are.  It’s just that people aren’t employing them.  Thank God I can point to Sudan, though, because otherwise I would probably answer no, I don’t have much faith. In Burma, those villagers would be so happy to see something like that.  Even just the attention would be important. They would be so happy that people knew what was happening. It would make a huge difference in their lives.  So yes, I do have some faith.  I recognize that it might be stupid, but if more people were talking about Burma, then the United Nations would be forced to address it. 

Let’s talk about United States foreign policy for a moment.  Given the necessary political will to act on the situation in Burma, what options, if any, could the Barack Obama administration reasonably pursue to have a positive impact there?

First of all, our government could lead the charge for a commission of inquiry into crimes against humanity in Burma.  Everyone knows that the United States is in charge, in many ways, of the United Nations, and certainly of the Security Council.  So, if we made a big deal of Burma, showed that this is a cause that we are behind and are willing to fight for, that would make a huge difference in comparison to what we are doing now, which is nothing. If a commission of inquiry were to be put into place then all this documentation sitting around would have to be looked at. I can’t imagine that people would see all that and then decide that this is not a problem. The Obama administration actually wouldn’t even have to do all that much work: it wouldn’t cost anything; people wouldn’t have to be moved around.  The president would simply just have to say, “We need to do this thing, right now.”

You make the point in the book’s closing chapter that when it comes to US-China relations, economic concerns trump human rights complaints that Washington might otherwise press with respect to Burma.  Yet in the case of Darfur, we saw something a little different play out. Why? What are the key determinants that distinguish these two situations from one another? 

I think civil society plays a huge part.  First of all, it’s about awareness: the public doesn’t know about Burma, and if the public doesn’t know about Burma then they aren’t putting pressure on politicians to talk about it. And so they won’t, because it’s easier to ignore it.  The “g” word also plays a big part in this. Right now, we just have this vague idea about Burma—that there’s a dictatorship or something there, that they sound really mean, and that there’s a lot of censorship.  This is not enough for people to get behind, to pressure the United States to stand up to China and fight them on the issue.  But imagine if someone threw it out there, called it what it was, and said, “This is a genocide!  These are the pictures.  Here is the evidence.”  This is what happened in the case of Darfur.  The exact same thing could happen in Southeast Asia. There’s no reason why it couldn’t.

A host of possible actions, peaceful and coercive, have been articulated to pressure the Burmese junta to respect basic human rights and prepare the way for civilian rule. At the end of the day, other options having been considered, what do you think about possibilities for military intervention in Burma?  Is this going too far?

I don’t think it’s going too far.  In my opinion, peacekeepers are the answer.  At least, they’re as close to the answer as we’re likely to get. The ideal solution, of course, would be that the country eventually evolves away from dictatorship and builds the necessary institutions for a democratic society and blah blah blah. In the meantime, someone needs to protect these fucking villagers in the east of Burma. It’s absurd what’s happening.  I read exile newspapers.  Every single day, there are reports of five-year-old girls being gang-raped, four thousand new refugees pouring over the border into southern China, this sort of thing.  It is so urgent. Perhaps not to you, perhaps not to me, but it is for the people who have to deal with it.  The fact that this has been going on for so long, and that so few people know about it, is ridiculous.     

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A soft, steady rain pockmarks the mud brick foundation of the Citadel—according to some estimates the longest continually inhabited spot on earth, and the dominating feature of metropolitan Erbil in northern Iraq. The view from atop this massive mud mound is impressive: radiating out in all directions from the Citadel, modern-day Erbil spreads into the gloomy mist as far as the eye can see. But more remarkable still are the myriad cranes crowding out ancient minarets as the defining features of the Erbil skyline, and the buzz of jackhammers and other construction tools that even up high in the Citadel drown out the light patter of raindrops landing in puddles
at your feet.

This is the heart of the “other” Iraq, according to local enthusiasts, a Western-friendly enclave marked by peace, security, and the industrious pursuit of prosperity. Throughout the country’s Kurdish-dominated autonomous zone, all the hallmarks of successful state-building are seemingly on display to guests from abroad. From the laying of modern roads to the building of new schools and state-of-the-art skyscrapers, as well as the almost obsessive attentions of ubiquitous security forces, the north of Iraq stands in stark contrast to the chaos and uncertainty plaguing the county’s south. Yet while the gains in the north are impressive, at least on their face, I found while there that the region must still contend with a number of challenges that render its future far from certain. 

I had entered Iraq overland a week earlier through the border town of Zahko which hugs the Turkish frontier, where I hired Mohammed, a chain-smoking taxi driver, to bring me to the country’s northernmost city of prominence, Dohuk. The journey there begins with a chaotic tangle of dusty, dilapidated roads snaking through mountains and farmland drained of their color by the sun and drought. Any feelings of passing through the bleached landscape of an old photograph soon subside, however, on the approach to Dohuk. Here, the countryside gives way to the most extraordinarily emerald pastures—electric greens familiar to northernmost Syria—framed by the gentle slopes of a purple-tinted mountain range to the east. As he tore through at breakneck speed what seemed to be endless waves of lumbering lorries on their way to and from Turkey, Mohammed waved a cigarette out the window, smiling. “Iraq,” he said, clearly
pleased. “Beautiful.”

Dohuk itself offers a glimpse into the Iraq of neo-con wet dreams. The city boasts a rapidly developing infrastructure, street graffiti celebrating Eminem, an American style mega-mall, bustling markets, and the reputation as a safe weekend getaway for vacationing American GIs. Indeed, the groups of troops I saw there were treated like celebrities, unfailingly followed by a paparazzi of young men and women asking for photographs and contact info. Alarmingly, the downtown hotel I checked into featured a large portrait of George W. Bush in its foyer, and the hotel manager—an Adidas tracksuit-wearing, Raul Julia carbon-copy—feigned disappointment to learn I was not a distant relative of the former president.

Similar displays of explicitly pro-American sympathies are not as easily found south of Dohuk, but the trappings of a nascent prosperity have taken hold in urban areas throughout the Kurdish controlled north. The imperial splendor of the main road alone that leads into the regional capital Erbil—miles of magnificently massive, arching light posts hanging over the four-lane highway—its state of the art international airport, and the formidable bomb-blast walls surrounding the fancy, VIP-only Sheraton hotel, unquestionably announce the city’s ambitious pretensions to twenty-first century regional dominance.  

More impressive still, perhaps, the southeastern city of Sulimaniyah—long considered a free-spirited hotbed of liberalism and resistance to outside influence, not to mention a persistent thorn in the side of Saddam Hussein’s regime—has been tamed by the twin influences of Iranian investment and an American University. All over the city, construction teams frame high-rise office buildings, money-lenders hawk impossibly tall piles of Iranian rials, and young people practice their English in cafes advertising wifi, Red Bull, and “Kan Tucky Fried Chiken.”

Yet evidence supporting the arguments that Kurdish Iraq offers a model for the rest of the country to follow in order to achieve peace and stability are largely confined to urban centers, and belied by a number of sobering realities. Chief among them is the violent anarchy destroying any hope for a normal life in the northern cities of Mosul and Kirkuk. Both cities—the most ethnically and religiously diverse spots in the country—feature highly combustible mixtures of Sunni and Shia Arabs, Kurds and Turkomen, and a slew of other religious minorities including Assyrian Christian and Yazidi groups. As it happens, both cities also sit astride massive oil deposits, and therefore, not surprisingly, have served as playgrounds for the sometimes violent power struggles between regional Kurdish authorities and the central government in Baghdad. These contests for control have left power vacuums filled by unbridled sectarian violence and mark the cities as virtual no-go zones for outsiders.

When I told the hotel manager in Dohuk that I planned on traveling to Erbil, he cautioned me that under no circumstances was I to leave the Kurdish-controlled roads as the route between the two cities passes through the Mosul suburbs. “You’ll be killed,” he said with a frightening matter-of-factness. And with reason: a full-blown ethnic cleansing continues apace throughout Mosul, where Assyrian Christian communities have been the most recent victims of death squad violence that some observers suggest may involve Kurdish security forces and police. A Human Rights Watch report from late 2009 warns that firm evidence pointing the finger of responsibility at any particular party is lacking, though the authors outline possible motivations for Kurdish complicity.

“Kurdish-dominated security forces were in charge of security in the area the attacks took place, [leading some to suggest] that the murder campaign was designed to undermine confidence in the central government’s security forces. From this perspective, the attacks created an opportunity for the [Kurdish authorities] to appear benevolent before the Christian community and the world by subsequently providing shelter, security, and financial assistance to those who fled the attacks into Kurdistan, strengthening the Kurdish hand in any upcoming referendum
or election.”

While Kurdish authorities have predictably denied these allegations and pinned blame on Shiite militias with ties to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, it increasingly appears that whomever lies behind the bloodshed serves as a proxy for interest groups situated in Baghdad. This suspicion was reinforced further when the Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella organization with direct links to al-Qaeda—and known for its eager pursuit of publicity—denied any responsibility whatsoever for the recent spate of violence in Mosul.

Christians and other minority groups have also been the targets of choice in Kirkuk of late. While the violence there has not exhibited the same characteristics of systematized execution as in Mosul, the results have been no less horrific. Most recently, insurgent groups have carried out attacks on Christian businessmen, and have continued their practice of assassinating municipal security forces, routine violence which has claimed the lives of hundreds of police officers over the past few years. While the social disintegrations in Kirkuk and Mosul has until recently been confined to the city limits—and therefore has not been much of a concern to regional authorities or the American military—the cancerous destruction has recently spread to surrounding areas. Gangland-style takeovers of nearby villages has prompted fears that Kurdish security forces are losing territorial control to increasingly brazen local mafias and terrorist groups which, if true, casts the entire region’s future security in doubt. The seriousness of the this developing threat was underscored while I was there by the announcement of by General Raymond Odierno, commander of all American forces in Iraq, that he was ordering US troops to the area to help Kurdish security personnel reassert coercive authority
in the area. 

Yet beyond the headline-grabbing violence crippling Mosul and Kirkuk, the dispossession and violence allowed along Iraq’s rural borders with Iran and Turkey more immediately undermines confidence in the country’s future. A teacher working in the northern provinces who I meet in Erbil—who I’ll call Dadyar—dismisses the evident progress enjoyed by Dohuk, Erbil, and Sulimaniyah as nothing more than window dressing obscuring the reality of life for Kurds living far from any of the urban power centers. “All the construction, the tall buildings, the expensive shops, this is all for show,” says Dadyar with disgust. [The Kurdish president of Iraq, Jalal] Talabani knows what investors want to see and he gives it to them. You visit the cities, you see one Iraq. But in the small villages, things are very different. It is bad.”

 Dadyar’s alternative perspective on Kurdish stability is endorsed by Michele Naar-Obed, a peace activist and diligent chronicler of deprivation in the Kurdish north. According to Naar-Obed, whom I meet in Sulimaniyah, life is a shambles. Vulnerable populations there have been largely ignored by Baghdad and regional authorities and forgotten by the West. She notes that nearly one million Kurds have been internally displaced since 1990, a situation that has not been adequately addressed, and with no immediate remedy forthcoming from the powers that be.

“As internally displaced people (IDPs),” Naar-Obed recently wrote, “they are not entitled to the same provisions and services from the United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees as refugees [are afforded]. They are more dependent on their government to protect and provide for them,” a government that is more concerned with political bureaucratic infighting in Baghdad than in serving its most vulnerable citizens along the border, not to mention
hopelessly corrupt.

Naar-Obed acknowledges that in the Kurdish-controlled west, regional authorities have “built collective townships for the IDPs.” But “they have not been able to reclaim their lives and their livelihoods. They live in slums and have become dependent on government subsistence. They describe themselves as spiritually dead.” 

Meanwhile, as Turkish and Iranian entrepreneurs invest heavily in Iraq’s northern cities, their sponsoring governments continue quietly prosecuting low-grade sectarian wars against communities of borderland Iraqi Kurds. Recent months have witnessed repeated incursions into Iraqi territory by Turkish troops to the north (supposedly prompted by tips from American intelligence) and shelling by Iranian forces in the east (reportedly supported by Turkish surveillance aircraft).

The fear motivating Iranian, Turkish, and to a lesser extent, Syrian foreign policy towards Kurdish Iraq centers on the belief that Kurdish leaders are feverishly planning independence. To be sure, the inevitability of Kurdish succession from Iraq—and attendant uprisings by Kurdish populations throughout the region—has become conventional wisdom if not an outright article of faith among decision makers in Tehran, Istanbul, Damascus and Washington.

The haunting specter of an independent Kurdistan triggering not only a redrawing of the Middle Eastern map but also massive bloodshed in the process was provocatively and neatly anatomized by Jeffrey Goldberg in a recent issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Yet while Goldberg is undeniably correct that modern Middle Eastern borders are merely Western fabrications that poorly reflect real lines of political influence, the prospect of a region-wide liberation struggle for a Kurdish state is remote.

“Only fools and liars seriously talk about an independent Kurdistan,” says Hawar Salih as we drive through the gorgeous mountains surrounding the small town of Koyo. A dapper, American-educated scientist—and former bureaucrat in the Ministry of Agriculture during the days of Saddam Hussein—Salih provides me with a brief lesson in the environmental destruction visited upon his country as a consequence of foreign-imposed sanctions on the Hussein regime following the American invasion in 1991. As the scarred and deforested mountain landscape zips by my backseat window, Salih nimbly avoids directly answering my questions about local politics. But when I touch on the subject of succession, he becomes unexpectedly animated.

“If you think about it for even a moment, you can see why it makes no sense. If the Kurds declare the north as their own country, the Turks, Iranians and Syrians would suffocate the economy. Any Kurdistan would be completely landlocked and dependent on [its neighbors] for trade. The way it is now, the Kurds are officially Iraqis and so everyone is happy. And everyone is making money.”

This may be true for the moment, but many people I spoke with fear that any gains made in the north since the American invasion in 2003 could be undone by the rapidly approaching national elections. On March 7, Iraqis will go to the polls to elect local representatives and a new national government. Yet the initial celebration at Iraq’s supposed transition to democracy were quickly muted as the country’s prime minister that over 500 candidates for office nationally would be barred from running for office.

That the vast majority of these candidates are former Sunni Baathists was not lost on local populations, prompting Sunni leaders and informed observers to predict major unrest in the lead-up to election. A State Department official with considerable experience in Iraq spoke to me off the record about his pessimistic assessment of Iraq’s future. “To be honest, I’ve given up on the [Iraqi] Arabs. They haven’t demonstrated the ability or desire to move forward in a meaningful way. The Kurds are a different story. They’re organized and they’re attracting investment. But I don’t see any solutions in sight for the Arabs, and the elections are going to undo the progress that has been made. We’re going to see a lot more violence late in February.” He worried that a new outbreak of sectarian strife would threaten not only the central state, but the northern reaches of Iraq as well. “I’ll tell you one thing: I’m getting the hell out of here. It’s going to be ugly.”

The violence began much sooner than he thought. Two days later, on January 25, a series of coordinated explosions ripped through three hotels in downtown Baghdad. Gunman stormed the Sheraton, Babylon, and Hamra hotels, killing security staff and clearing the way for a second wave of attackers who drove vans packed with explosives into the buildings, leaving nearly forty dead and another seventy people injured. The following afternoon, a car bomb detonated just outside the Interior Ministry’s capital headquarters taking eighteen lives and injuring over eighty Iraqis, most of them neighborhood locals.

Violent episodes continued to mount throughout the first weeks of February. One young woman marked the beginning of a new month by blowing herself up in the middle of a major transportation hub just north of Baghdad, taking the lives of over fifty people, most of them Shi’ite pilgrims on their way to the holy city of Karbala, and leaving another hundred people badly hurt. In an apparent retaliatory attack, a bomb detonated hours later in Baghdad’s mainly Sunni neighborhood of Daura. While the explosion thankfully left behind no dead bodies, it sent over a dozen civilians to the hospital.

Yet despite the steady bursts of violent destruction peppering the Iraqi map, the Kurdish north continues to enjoy relative stability. How long this peaceful status quo remains intact, however, is anyone’s guess. Some Kurds see the election as the most critical moment in Iraq’s history since the 2003 invasion. Numerous people I spoke with—Kurds, Arabs, and Americans alike—expressed fear that the clearly undemocratic nature of the election would give the US government an excuse to abandon their nearly eight year occupation of the country, which might entice unfriendly neighbors at home and abroad to invade and wreak havoc in Kurdish territory. On the flip side, a smooth electoral process may produce similar outcomes if the United States interprets the results as the culminating event in a job well-done shepherding Iraq toward a democratic future. Either way, March brings uncertainty. 

On the next-to-last last day of my time in Iraq, I met with a group of students in the central square of Sulimaniyah’s Grand Bazaar. The students were eager to know about life in the United States, and asked if I had travelled through any of Europe. I told them I had, and asked if any of them had as well. All shook their heads no. As it turned out, none had been beyond the Kurdish line of control within the country. Obtaining foreign visas and permission to leave were near impossible without significant financial means to which none had access. “Here is like a prison,” one student said. “A big, beautiful prison.” The observation initially struck me as a sad admission of the inherent trade-offs for peace in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. But what he said next made me appreciate the metaphor in a slightly different light. “We are forced to stay in, but the guards keep all the bad
stuff out.” 

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Vermeer’s Masterpiece. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

There’s quite a lot riding on Vermeer’s Masterpiece, the headlining act in the Metropolitan Museum’s fall exhibition calendar. At a moment when the slumping economy has drained the Met’s endowment, forced major layoffs within the institution, and threatened to shrink the number of annual visitors, the museum desperately needed a shot in the arm to boost morale and draw big crowds. And it got it, in the form of a temporary gift generously proffered by Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. Ostensibly celebrating the 400^th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s voyage from the Netherlands to New York, the Dutch shipped Johannes Vermeer’s astonishing Milkmaid to the Met where it was quickly made the centerpiece of the museum’s autumn program.

The mini-marquee exhibit, which runs through the end of November, offers a blueprint of what to expect from the Met as it moves forward with a new model of recession-special installations—small shows anchored in a prominent work or two, and bolstered by a supporting cast drawn from the museum’s expansive permanent collection. The logic of the move is clear: with a contracting endowment and significantly reduced operating budget, the Met’s recently-appointed director Thomas Campbell decided that looking inward and relying on the occasional munificence of partner institutions was the museum’s most promising tactic to cut costs without sacrificing quality. But concerns challenging the utility of this approach persist, making Vermeer’s Masterpiece the most important trial of Campbell’s young career.

Unfortunately, the budget blockbuster falls flat. To be sure, the exhibit betrays hints of limited resources. Including period reproductions of ceramic bowls and tile work, for example, is charming but suggests a quiet desperation to fill space without clear purpose in the absence of relevant content, while the comic book-length catalogue (stapled at the spine) indicates that the Met has abandoned its tradition of producing gorgeously hefty companion pieces to its major exhibits. But this is hardly the problem.

If the curatorial cocktail animating Vermeer’s Masterpiece comprises one part inadequate funding, it is most certainly met with three parts conceptual incoherence. Not content to let The Milkmaid’s reputation as one of the finest paintings in the Western tradition serve as reason enough to scramble uptown for a viewing, the show’s designer, Walter Liedtke, insists on spicing it up for the oversexed masses with promises of a radical rereading of Vermeer’s masterwork. All of which would be fascinating if it could be sustained throughout the entire exhibition. But it can’t, and the show deteriorates with impressive velocity into a slapdash arrangement of pictures bound together more by proximity than through the rhythm of an internal logic.

The exhibit’s central argument advances the proposition that Vermeer endows The Milkmaid with a heretofore unappreciated degree of eroticism. In order to mount this attack against traditionally staid interpretations of old masters, Liedtke, curator of the Met’s Dutch collection, convenes a small parade of the museum’s holdings in the first gallery to demonstrate that the stereotypical “milkmaid” colonized the landscape of European sexual imagination, exciting noblemen with the prospect of a little pinch n’ giggle when their ladies of the manor weren’t looking. According to the accompanying brochure, milkmaids were summed up by an early modern poem in which “a woman in the act of milking a cow (‘A sinewy thing she has seized with joy,’ and so on) is compared with grabbing a man’s…attention.” And certainly, the images gathered here—populated as they are by buxom women and admiring men with their bulging codpieces and cocked crossbows set “to shoot…bolts”—support the curator’s contention that milkmaids had acquired a reputation for being “sexually available” by the time Vermeer came along. Says Liedtke, “It was the old joke of the farmer’s daughter and the travelling salesman.”

If one considers, moreover, the overt sexuality of Vermeer’s early work—a topic strangely not broached by the curators in this show—the bridge between the naughty milkmaids of Dutch lore and Vermeer’s masterpiece might be easily crossed. As a young man, Vermeer saturated his work with salaciousness, painting scenes of seduction that range from the sexually subdued—as in Girl with the Wineglass, where a man eagerly plies his uncertain female companion with drink and lecherous looks while a third friend dozes in the corner—to more direct depictions of debauchery, perhaps best represented in The Procuress, where a john feels up a drunken prostitute while her madam and some random lout look on.

Still, even theoretically, Liedtke’s attempt to eroticize Vermeer’s Milkmaid wears thin quickly. Beyond his claim of potent sexuality inherent in all period representations of the milkmaid, the curator’s most straightforward charge holds that the maid’s milk jug—out of which she measuredly pours milk into a pudding bowl—represents what Liedtke prudishly refers to as “a portion of the female anatomy.” Fair enough, for the moment, but what more? The curator directs our attention to the painting’s lower right hand corner, where a small painted tile decorated with a naked Cupid poised to strike abuts an ochre foot warmer. One might question just how a dull-colored foot warmer would provoke lip-biting arousal from Vermeer’s contemporary audiences. Yet they would surely scratch their head even more vigorously at Liedtke’s giddy answer: “The mistress of the house would put her feet up. It heats everything under the skirt.” And with that, the case is closed.

But when confronted with the sheer weight of The Milkmaid—finely wrought exquisiteness packed into each pore of canvas, tender attentions that produce the painting’s photographic effects—it becomes clear that Liedtke’s theory cannot withstand the magnitude of Vermeer’s creative ambition. The piece hangs together in perfect balance, allowing its painter to showcase his dazzling command of perspective and light, in turn establishing The Milkmaid’s moving sense of serene contemplation. Far from injecting it with signposts of an ulterior motive, Vermeer strips the work of possible distractions that might interfere with an appreciation of his technical brilliance.

Digital imaging studies of the painting (also not mentioned in the exhibit) bear out the point. An infrared reflectogram of the painting demonstrates that the sexy foot warmer was not even included in the original composition. Instead, Vermeer had first painted a hulking basket piled high with clothing in the right corner, which, had it not been replaced with the smaller heating device, would have cluttered the canvas, ruining any sense of depth that the stark, bare wall behind affords. As it is, the floodlit void in the upper-right hand corner directs the eye’s attention to the lower-left hand sector where it is held captive witness to Vermeer’s serial acts of virtuosity.

How exactly he achieves such a degree of precise pointillism in the spread of bread and pottery laid out on the maid’s worktable defies easy understanding, but the effect is spellbinding. From the torn chunks of bread collected at table’s edge and the surviving loaf safely within its wicker basket, to the smooth shell of a blue beer jug and worn brittleness of the milk pitcher and pudding bowl, Vermeer uses pinpricks of paint to establish an illusionistic play of light, endowing otherwise mundane subjects with a jaw-dropping, three-dimensional voluptuousness. Indeed, there may exist no other work that so successfully ascends the heights of hyper-realism—save that found in the liquid eyes, moist lips and teardrop jewelry of Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Earring—and certainly not in such concentrated fashion.

Young Woman With A Water Pitcher

Once museum-goers, however, successfully negotiate the traffic jam of camera-flashing tourists and scolding guards gridlocked around The Milkmaid—roughly halfway through the exhibit—they quickly enter a labyrinth of curatorial disorder and poor judgment. Apparently having shot his wad on the milkmaids theme at the start of the show, Liedtke doesn’t seem overly concerned about what comes next. As a result, the exhibit becomes a string of pretty pictures that takes on the feel of the museum’s permanently installed Dutch gallery in the Met’s European wing, minus the majesty of its considerable collection of Rembrandts.

Haunting the vicinity to The Milkmaid’s left hangs Study of a Young Woman, perhaps signaling the most bewildering missed opportunity of the show. The painting offers another example of Vermeer’s masterful deployment of light and shadow, and the gentle brush strokes that mysteriously breathe life into his subjects. The angelic moonishness of the girl’s face, her porcelain-perfect skin surrounding a simple smile and invitation to eye contact, make for arresting portraiture. But the picture possesses no other characteristics that directly connect it to The Milkmaid, nor for that matter any other paintings in Vermeer’s oeuvre with the exception again of Girl with a Pearl Earring. What’s it doing here?

In its place should have been Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, a painting executed towards the end of Vermeer’s life, and also on view in a separate gallery. Of the paintings in the artist’s small body of work, Young Woman with a Water Pitcher offers the greatest opportunity to compare and contrast the middle and late periods of a career in full blossom. Like The Milkmaid, Study of a Young Woman offers no narrative intrigue, privileging instead mood and composition in its intimate contemplation of domestic tranquility. Here again, a young woman is depicted in placid repose, her attention apparently captured by something off-stage as she prepares her morning bath. Vermeer employs the same pointillist technique to highlight the glistening pitcher, the soft touch of velvet covering the table, and the reflections caught by the water basin’s rim. Yet these perfectly rendered details are overwhelmed by the oppressively rigid geometry that structures the space. In startling contrast to the supple curves organizing The Milkmaid, here Vermeer traps his young woman’s serenity within the stern constraints of unyieldingly straight lines, achieving a dynamic balance that frees the image to

jump off the canvas. No two works in Vermeer’s catalogue are more similar in structure and different in execution.

Another painting curiously tucked away in an adjoining gallery, Hendrick Sorgh’s A Kitchen, should have been granted pride of place in the same room as the show’s star. Sorgh’s dark, domestic interior scene, painted when Vermeer was still a child, clearly proved influential in The Milkmaid’s development. Aside from Domenico Fiasella’s Queen Artemisia, perhaps no painting made more of an impression on Vermeer in this period. Liedtke acknowledges this, of course, but understates the case. “This thinly painted and somewhat worn panel dates from about 1643 and anticipates some aspects of Vermeer’s domestic interiors, such as the abrupt recession from the left. The Delft artist [Vermeer] achieves a more naturalistic effect by bringing the viewer in much closer to the scene, and through his more sophisticated study of daylight.” True enough. But were one to crop the painting down to nothing but the maidservant in the corner, the extent to which Vermeer copied Sorgh’s composition for his own purposes becomes abundantly clear. The Met makes this point itself in the show, all the more reason to question why the two paintings have been sequestered in different rooms.

While most shows are designed to end with a bang—if for no other reason than to get museum goers excited about purchasing items from the little gift shop barnacles affixed to every exhibit these days—Vermeer’s Masterpiece peters out with a trickling whimper. Having assembled a pageant of images depicting people—their appetites, labors, and loves—the show closes with an isolated pair of paintings wildly out of place. Interior of the Oude Kerk, the shared title of these nearly identical works by Hendrick van Vliet and Emanuel de Witte, respectively, are almost completely devoid of human presence, emphasizing as they do the beauty of Delft’s iconic church. According to the Met, each work “evoked a spiritual environment and anticipated the optical approach of Vermeer,” which is fine, but why consign them to the end of the line? Had they come earlier to set the stage for understanding Vermeer’s milieu, influences and development, the church interiors would have nicely complemented the other works, building momentum toward a climactic viewing of The Milkmaid. As it is, guests leave the exhibit with the feeling of
seeing double.

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As El Salvador transitions from decades of conser- vative rule to the administration of leftist President Mauricio Funes, the country faces an international showdown triggered by a restrictive free-trade agree- ment between the United States and Central Ameri- ca. Canada’s Pacific Rim Mining Corporation is suing the government for its refusal to allow it to mine gold in El Salvador’s rural north. If Pacific Rim succeeds in securing the $100 million settlement it seeks, a trou- bling precedent would be set. At stake is a question that affects all nations: Can private interests trump national sovereignty under international law?
Pacific Rim initiated arbitration proceedings against El Salvador with the World Bank’s International Cen- ter for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) on April 30, 2009. The corporation argues that El Salva- dor violated investment rules in the US-Dominican Republic Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) which is confusing on its face, seeing as Canada is not a party to the accord. (Pac Rim fun- neled the lawsuit through a US subsidiary.)
Company officials charge that the government has violated their “investor rights” by refusing to approve an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) submit- ted by the company. Without this approval, Pacific Rim cannot obtain a mining permit.
The company insists that its operations pose no threat whatsoever to El Salvador’s ecological stabil- ity and public health, but a wide array of community leaders, activists, and environmental experts disagree. They contend that Pacific Rim’s assessment offers little evidence supporting the company’s “green min- ing” claims, and serves as a smokescreen to obscure the adverse socioeconomic impacts gold mining is likely to produce in the small, densely populated na- tion. These social movements contend that it’s Pacific Rim that should be sued. Says Rodolfo Calles of the anti-mining activist group Mesa Frente a la Minería Metálica: Pacific Rim and other “extractive compa- nies in question have violated national laws, caused environmental damage, provoked economic losses, generated conflicts among communities, corrupted government officials, and offended religious leaders.”
Thus far, El Salvador’s movement against precious- metal mining in El Salvador has succeeded in com- pelling the government to fight Pacific Rim’s strong-
arming. But questions remain concerning Funes’s resolve to stand defiant in the face of international pressure. These concerns have grown in recent weeks following a spate of murder and violence directed at anti-mining activists.
This wave of intimidation began with the murder of Marcelo Rivera, a teacher, community leader, and political activist involved in the anti-mining fight. Ri- vera, who went missing on June 18, was discovered weeks later in a remote section of Cabanas depart- ment. An autopsy revealed that he had been tortured extensively before his windpipe was crushed, and his body dumped in an unused well. Activists continue to challenge Salvadorian authorities, who claim that this was an ordinary crime committed by members of a Salvadoran gang, to investigate what they say was a politically motivated assassination.
Since then, local media have been targets of sab- otage and threats for their coverage of the Pac Rim lawsuit. Information Radio Victoria discovered its transmitter stolen shortly after reporting on the min- ing case, and at least four journalists covering the is- sue have received death threats. Bay Area IndyMedia reports that the journalists were “threatened to be the ‘next on the list’” and would fall victim to those who “‘also spoke in San Isidro,’ making a clear reference to the link between these events and the disappearance and murder of…Marcelo Rivera.’”
Violence has also been directed at the Catholic Church, which has stood as a staunch ally of anti- mining activists throughout the dispute. A colleague of Rivera’s, Father Luis Quintanilla—himself a fre- quent target recently of threats against his life—was stopped by four hooded men on a road in Cabanas and forced from his vehicle. The priest threw himself down a gully to avoid what many believe would have been his murder. Quintanilla later released a copy of the text message he received shortly before the inci- dent. It reads, “Extermination…you motherfuckers better stop stirring people up if you don’t want to end up like Marcelo. We’ve got eyes on you.”
background
Pacific Rim began exploring the country’s potential for gold exploitation nearly seven years ago, chart- ing a vein system that covers considerable portions of El Salvador’s northern reaches. It commenced op-
erations at what it claims was the invitation of the government’s Ministries of the Economy and the Environment, which issued exploration permits in 2002 under the neoliberal administration of Fran- cisco Flores. Since then, the corporation has identi- fied some twenty-five sites for gold extraction across seven national departments, and invested upwards of $80 million.
While global corporations haven’t historically seen El Salvador as promising territory for mining, Pacific Rim significantly extended its base of operations as gold prices exploded on the international market. With the value of gold nearly tripling since 2001, the company assured shareholders that it was discovering “bonanza gold grades” and making “exciting gold dis- coveries” that would expand opportunities for future investment and high returns.
Meanwhile, Salvadorian environmentalists, civil society organizations, and others in the country grew increasingly alarmed about the potentially adverse ef- fects of gold mining. Critics point to the threat of wa- ter and soil contamination from chemical residue in the wake of mining operations (miners use cyanide- laced water to extract gold from subterranean rock, which, experts contend, makes its way back to local reserves tapped for drinking). That all of Pacific Rim’s sites are located along the country’s longest river, the Rio Lempa, has environmentalists especially wor- ried. The river’s basin extends nearly halfway across the country, supplying much of the nation’s drinking water. Moreover, the Lempa runs through Guate- mala and Honduras as well, increasing the likelihood that contaminated water could spread throughout the region.
Pacific Rim denies that these concerns are real. The corporation claims that it would detoxify any water used for mining, leaving local water sources cleaner than they were previously. “You could basically stick a cup in the water and drink it,” Pacific Rim’s Barbara Henderson recently boasted to the Miami Herald. “We’ve met all conditions under the law. So there’s no basis for the government of El Salvador to fail to make a decision [about issuing mining permits].”
Not so, say experts. Robert Moran, an independent, nonpartisan hydrogeologist, undertook a technical review of Pacific Rim’s environmental assessment in 2005, concluding that “it would not be acceptable
to regulatory agencies in most developed countries.” In his final report, Moran notes that “The public EIA review process is clearly lacking in openness and transparency… only one printed copy of the EIA is available…within all of El Salvador. The public must review and submit written comments on this 1,400 page document within a period of ten working days. No photocopies or photos of any part of this docu- ment may be made.” More- over, Moran points out that the EIA completely ignores “many of the environmen- tal impacts encountered at similar gold mining sites,” and voiced concerns about the fact that “the signifi- cant uncertainty of [its] seismic risk calculations” and a number of other is- sues were presented in the document in English only.
Page —GC Advocate—September 009
Local activists Fight back
These concerns were met with popular unrest. La Mesa Nacional Frente a la Minería Metálica in El Salvador (the National Working Group against Mining in El Salva- dor), an umbrella organization for coordinating nationwide action, has led the charge. Beginning with local organizing and small-scale protests, La Mesa and its partner organiza- tions have managed to make min- ing a central issue in Salvadoran politics. Activists scored an early victory when Pacific Rim agreed to freeze its operations at the compa- ny’s Santa Rita mining site in 2006, while negotiating a resolution to its clash with local anti-mining organi- zations. Though the meeting failed to reach a mutually acceptable com- promise, local organizers success- fully used the gathering to attract the attention of the media and the government, and garner broad national and interna- tional support.
Momentum behind the movement increased fur- ther when the Conference of Bishops of the Roman Catholic Church issued a statement of opposition to mining operations in El Salvador. In addition to enumerating the adverse consequences of mining to El Salvador’s people and environment, the bishops castigated Pacific Rim’s economic justification for gold mining operations. “No material advantage,” the bishops warned, “can be compared with the value of human life.”
The combined effect of local resistance and reli- gious backing had a decisive impact on government decision-making. With public opinion polls showing a clear majority in opposition to gold mining, and despite its initial enthusiasm for Pacific Rim’s min- ing proposals, officials from the ruling conservative ARENA party refused to issue the company permits to begin extracting gold from underground deposits. In essence, the government ceased to acknowledge Pacific Rim’s existence. Repeated complaints and ap- plications for permits were filed by the company with government ministries, and promptly ignored.
Since then, La Mesa has continued to push the en- velope. Not trusting that government silence on the permits issue equaled support for their cause, the organization presented a bill for congressional con- sideration in 2006 that would ban all precious met- al mining in El Salvador. While the bill was almost immediately withdrawn from deliberation, it wasn’t forgotten. Shortly after Funes took power, the Frente Fabarundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (a left- wing opposition party, better known as the FMLN) resurrected the proposed legislation and presented it to El Salvador’s National Assembly for a vote. Accord- ing to the Latin American Herald Tribune, the pro- posed law would grant Pacific Rim and other foreign companies six months to discontinue operations be- fore being ordered to leave the country.
Legal action
With its prospects for obtaining permits grinding to a standstill within the government bureaucracy, and opposition forces gaining the advantage locally, Pacific Rim filed a notice of intent in December 2008 to bring El Salvador before an international arbitra- tion tribunal to resolve the dispute. Specifically, the company claimed that El Salvador violated the spirit of nondiscrimination enshrined in Chapter 10 of the DR- CAFTA agreement, by allowing domestic com- panies to pollute while denying the same privilege to Pacific Rim.
The agreement, which El Salvador signed in 2006, allows multinational corporations to sue governments covered by it for cash compensation when their po- tential for profit has been undermined by measures that are tantamount to expropriation. But because Canada isn’t a signatory to DR-CAFTA, Pacific Rim
isn’t technically entitled to Chapter 10 protections as it claims. Nevertheless, the corporation routed the lawsuit through the backdoor of its US-based subsid- iary Pac Rim Cayman LLC, and relied on the services of an American lobbying firm to ensure support from Capitol Hill.
Under DR-CAFTA’s Chapter 10 proceedings, par- ties to a dispute are mandated to respect a 90-day consultation period before filing their claims in court. Pacific Rim’s December filing ensured that their threatened lawsuit would coincide with El Salvador’s national election three months later. According to Burke Stansbury, an activist with the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), the claim was timed to affect the electoral outcome. They “either us[ed] the threat of a lawsuit as leverage or [as] a strategy to help ARENA win the election,” Stansbury told the Pacific Free Press in February.
If this was true, Pacific Rim miscalculated. Out- going president Antonio Saca remained firm in his rejection of the corporation’s demands, rendering the case a non-issue during the election. Yet Saca’s refusal to give in to corporate pressure—whether politically motivated or based on genuine concern for his country—had the effect of kicking the Pa- cific Rim can down the road for the incoming Funes administration.
On April 30, Pacific Rim filed for arbitration with the ICSID, demanding a $100 million payout for damages. “The company’s claims under CAFTA,” the company announced in a press release, “are based on the government’s breaches of international and Salvadoran law arising out of the government’s im- proper failure to finalize the permitting process as it is required to do and to respect the company’s…legal rights to develop mining activities in El Salvador.”
La Mesa’s Rodolfo Calles sees things differently. “Operating permits are not automatic; that is, the current mining law does not oblige the government to provide [permits] after having allowed exploration. Pacific Rim submitted an Environmental Impact As- sessment that did not meet environmental require- ments, and was not able to demonstrate that its min- ing projects would not pollute the environment…In our view, it is Pacific Rim that should be sued, not the Salvadoran state; It is the company that should com- pensate the country and not vice versa.”
Early indications, however, suggest that Funes will pursue a compromise solution instead of risk- ing a costly settlement. “We’re not in a position to be losing litigation. That money should be allocated to social programs,” El Salvador’s Secretary of Technol- ogy recently noted. Indeed, if the arbitration tribunal rules in Pacific Rim’s favor, El Salvador would be pro- foundly crippled by the $100 million payout. Perhaps more troubling still, the verdict would send a signal to other multinationals in Central America that the law sides with corporate interests over the protection of local populations.
Nevertheless, a negotiated settle- ment offers equally disturbing pos- sibilities. The most likely would be an amendment to existing environ- mental and mining laws, allowing foreign corporations easier access to El Salvador’s natural resource deposits. In all likelihood, the Mesa Nacional/FMLN-sponsored anti-mining legislation would be shelved indefinitely, and oppor- tunities for peaceful resolution of local concerns increasingly fore- closed.
On top of Pacific Rim’s case, on March 16, another international mining firm added to the pressure by threatening an additional DR- CAFTA lawsuit. A joint venture of American companies, Commerce Group Corp. and San Sebastian Gold Mines, Inc. (Commerce/San- seb), filed a notice of intent to claim compensation for additional $100
million for the government’s alleged failure to renew a permit to mine gold and silver at the San Sebastian Goldmine near Santa Rosa de Lima, in the depart- ment of La Unión in El Salvador.
The prospect of mounting lawsuits has led to calls from activists demanding that El Salvador revisit the terms of its international trade agreements. “The de- mand of Pacific Rim against El Salvador recalls the need to review international treaties signed by previ- ous governments, especially CAFTA, and reverse—or at least modify—those aspects that are most harmful and violate our sovereignty.”
Hopeful signs from Washington?
The mining companies’ lawsuits—along with the vi- olent repression of recent protests in Peru—represent the latest example of failure by US trade agreements to bring prosperity and progress to the region. US policymakers, including Barack Obama, seem to ac- knowledge as much: bilateral trade agreements with Panama and Colombia continue to stall, and pressure to amend the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) continues to build.
Yet hopes that the social movement against min- ing in El Salvador would find an ally in Obama have been unrealized. Obama, who voted against the pas- sage of DR-CAFTA as a senator, spoke out passion- ately on the campaign trail against free trade agree- ments (FTAs) that privileged economic gain over the welfare of local populations under threat. And “with regards to provisions in several FTAs that give foreign investors the right to sue governments directly in for- eign tribunals,” Obama promised, “I will ensure that this right is strictly limited and will fully exempt any law or regulation written to protect public safety or promote the public interest.” As president, however, Obama has so far failed to meaningfully act on an issue he himself acknowledges desperately demands attention and change.
The president reportedly will outline a new vision of equitable trade in a major speech at the Group of 20 meeting in Pittsburgh at the end of this month. There, Obama will hopefully forge plans for a new approach to trade that would meet his goal of preventing foreign corporations from gaining “an economic advantage by destroying the environment” and amend NAFTA and possibly other FTAs to “make clear that fair laws and regulations written to protect citizens…cannot be overridden at the request of foreign investors.”
In some respects, unfortunately, it’s already too late for Salvadorans affected by Pacific Rim’s activi- ties. The failure of Funes and other likeminded “part- ners” throughout the region, like Obama, to stand up for these communities under threat, sets a regret- table precedent—that concern for corporate profit overrides that for human beings and their environ- ment—a precedent that would invest even Obama’s most eloquent rhetoric with the hollow timbre of false promises.

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