One No, Many Yeses

by Paul Kingsnorth

  Exactly how many people are here isn’t clear, but 151 groups from 43 countries applied to attend the conference. Not all of them came, but of those that did, PGA applied its usual policy of ensuring that 70 per cent of them were from the ‘developing’ world. The result is that it is their concerns which largely set the agenda: an eye-opener for those who have read so many times in the press that this is a movement of spoilt middle-class white kids with nothing better to do.

  During our week here we will be listening to talks from community groups, swapping tactics and strategies, rewriting PGA’s manifesto, planning forthcoming days of action (the WTO meeting in November is the next biggie) and deciding on what issues the network will focus on for the next few years. We will also be chewing a lot of coca leaves. Bolivia’s union of coca farmers – the Cocaleros – are one of the local organisers of this conference, and are keen to explain how the USA’s ‘war on drugs’ (about as effective as its ‘war on terror’ so far; the drugs are winning) is, de facto, a war on them. They are small mountain farmers who have been growing coca plants for generations – the locals chew the leaves or make tea from them, as a mild stimulant. The plants are also the basis of cocaine, so the USA has decided that the way to prevent American kids taking drugs is to aerially fumigate vast swathes of Latin America with powerful pesticides. This, with any luck, will kill a lot of coca plants and opium poppies. It will also kill a lot of livelihoods, traditions and industries, such as those of the coca farmers, and probably a few people into the bargain.

  This policy has already had the effect of radicalising people like the coca farmers. It also has the indirect effect of ensuring that everyone at the PGA conference has to chew a lot of coca leaves in a gesture of defiance to the Yanqui imperialist aggressor. This is unfortunate because, with the best political intentions in the world, coca leaves are revolting. As we sit digesting our lunch, women farmers approach us one by one in their bowler hats and rainbow shawls, vast sacks of coca leaves around their neck. People take handfuls and slip them into their pockets, or chew them until they think no one is looking and then slip the resulting gobby mess under a bush. But it’s the thought that counts.

  Despite the coca, I am inspired by PGA. For the first time, I am beginning to see with my own eyes how truly global this movement is. It’s one in the afternoon on the first day of the conference, and I’m sitting in the hall, eating lunch on one of a row of trestle tables that fill the room. On my table sits an adivasi tribal woman from Bangladesh, an ecologist from Russia, a union representative from Canada, a stocky member of Ya Basta! who I last saw through a haze of tear-gas in Genoa, a Chilean human rights activist who was tortured under Pinochet, a Maori from New Zealand, a local student volunteer and two female cocaleros whose mobile phones keep going off in the middle of their meals. In other hands, such a convergence of worlds could lead to conflict or incomprehension. But here, with common forces affecting all, they have been brought together, and the results are fascinatingly fertile.

  The topic of conversation around the table at lunch is the topic that will recur throughout the gathering: September 11th, and how it will change the world. Already, the US is using the terrorist attacks as an excuse to push its free-trade agenda even faster than it had been doing on September 10th – using a sickening ‘idea’ that their trade representative, Robert Zoellick, has called ‘countering terror with trade’. It is also clear that the crackdown on ‘terrorism’ is likely to include conveniently sweeping attacks on dissidents of all stripes, whether peaceful or otherwise. Already we have heard American senators comparing anti-globalisation protesters to al-Qaeda. Everyone is nervous, but no one is being put off.

  ‘I think we could be seeing a new McCarthyism,’ says a blond, bearded union organiser from Canada. ‘For “communism” read “terrorism”. The governor of Cochabamba seems to have got the message already. Open season on us. It could be bad.’

  ‘What we must do,’ says a very serious old woman from Ecuador, ‘is issue a statement against terrorism. But against state terrorism as well. The sort of terrorism that America has been sponsoring in Latin America for so many years.’ There is general agreement on this point, and murmurs of consent break out around the table, in stages according to the speed at which people are translating the conversation for those who don’t speak English.

  ‘What we have,’ says a short, stocky, Afro-Colombian man in a frightening rainbow shirt, who has travelled here from the former freed slave colonies of Colombia, ‘is a system where we are the horses and they are the riders! And they have whips!’ More nods, this time slightly vaguer. A few people light cigarettes, despite the polite signs pasted up above all the doors, and the talk goes on. A grizzled old farmer from Lake Titicaca says that the world is divided into a ‘culture of life and a culture of death’ – with capitalism and terrorism on the same side. No one is quite sure what to do, or what the world will now become. In this, at least, they have something in common with the rulers of the world.

  Lunch can’t go on for ever, though; we have an appointment with the history of the city to keep. There is a reason that PGA is meeting in Cochabamba, and we’re about to have the details of it explained to us. What happened here just a year before we arrived has already gone down in the annals of this movement as one of its most famous victories; one that has made Cochabamba as symbolic a place to activists as Chiapas or Seattle.

  In the school gym, we gather to listen to a talk by a local man who has already become a legend within the movement. Oscar Olivera, a short, unassuming former shoemaker and union leader, has come to tell us how he, and others who are here with him, led what he calls ‘the first victory against the neoliberal economic model’ in Cochabamba two years ago.

  The story started, Olivera explains, in 1999, when the city’s water system was leased to a consortium of multinational companies which, it later turned out, was a subsidiary of the US engineering mammoth Bechtel Enterprises. The World Bank (‘Our dream is a world free of poverty’) told the Bolivian government that if they wanted international debt relief they had better privatise Cochabamba’s water system – and they had better not subsidise prices to help the poor pay their bills.

  None of this was new in Bolivia, which, in exchange for accepting help from the IMF in 1985, was forced to restructure its economy along US-designed neoliberal lines. Bolivia followed globalisation’s recipe for prosperity to the letter: it opened its markets to foreign corporations, slashed government spending, and privatised everything that wasn’t nailed down. The result, after eighteen years of this, is that Bolivia is the poorest country in Latin America. Sixty-five per cent of its people live below the poverty line (in the countryside, it’s greater than 90 per cent), nearly 12 per cent of urban Bolivians are out of work, and for the country’s rural indigenous people – who make up more than 70 per cent of the population – unemployment rates are even higher. The gap between the rich and the poor has widened and an increasing number of Bolivians are beginning to feel very cheated indeed.16

  The Bechtel consortium was given a long-term lease on Cochabamba’s water system for an undisclosed sum. For its money, Bechtel got control not only of the city’s water delivery infrastructure, built by the government, but also of the ancient irrigation systems of local farmers, and of community wells, none of which were the government’s to sell. And they were allowed to start charging for it.

  And charge they did. In January 2000, the first private water bills arrived in the homes of the Cochabambans. ‘Within a month of Bechtel taking over the water,’ says Oscar, ‘all the bills had gone up. Some by as much as 300 per cent.’ People living on the minimum wage of $60 a month were expected to spend $15 of it just to keep their taps running. Bechtel were asking the poor of Cochabamba to pay more for their water than some World Bank economists paid in Washington. ‘They are a very stupid company,’ says Oscar, simply. It was to cost them dear.

  In January 2000, Cochabamba ground to a halt as a new community body known
as the Coordinadora, led by Olivera and the others who are with him today in the gym, led a four-day general strike in protest. The government sent in 1,000 troops. Street children, women, peasant farmers and thousands of local families were tear-gassed by police as they tried to march to the centre of their city. A shaken government promised a review of the water rates and of Bechtel’s performance, but the deadline for that came and went with nothing to show for it but promises.

  By now, the Coordinadora and its tens of thousands of followers were demanding the cancellation of the contract with Bechtel. No chance, said the government. Bechtel had signed a binding contract: the water was theirs for forty years. And Bolivia’s reputation for international stability was riding on this: if the government allowed popular pressure to topple this privatisation, it could all end in tears.

  For Bechtel, it did. In April, the Coordinadora led a ‘final battle’ against the unbending government and the dismissive consortium which closed the city down for four days. A running battle between thousands of its people surged through the streets. The Coordinadora leaders were arrested then released, martial law was declared, protesters shut off the city with blockades and soldiers fired on crowds, killing a seventeen-year-old boy. Protests began in other parts of Bolivia, as people took to their own streets in solidarity.

  After a week, the government caved in. They warned Bechtel that the safety of its staff couldn’t be guaranteed, and the water men – all of whom had been shipped in from abroad – took to their heels, stopping only to grab the computers and the company’s cash as they fled the city. The government announced the cancellation of the contract with Bechtel, and a stunned citizenry realised that it had won.17

  The reverberations of the Cochabamba ‘Water War’ rang around the world, inspiring activists and making investors jittery. Bechtel decided the only fair response was to sue the government of Latin America’s poorest country for $25 million in ‘damages’ for loss of potential earnings. Cochabamba’s water was placed in the hands of a new public company, whose board included members of the Coordinadora. The Cochabambans had turned something very big on its head: not just a water company, not even just a major privatisation, but an assumption of inevitability; a myth that there is no alternative, that private will always beat public and that people are no longer active citizens but passive consumers. ‘It can be done,’ says Olivera, simply. ‘We know, because we did it.’

  It’s a warm afternoon, a few days into the conference, and in the school hall, small groups of people are sitting in corners charged with rewriting key parts of the PGA manifesto, which is to be given a spring-clean.

  ‘So,’ says a pencil-sucking man sitting on a wall, ‘should it be “northern concept of the nation state” or “northern corporate nation state”?’

  ‘What if we take out “concept”?’ suggests his partner.

  ‘Mmmm . . . maybe. OK, how about “an emancipatory anti-capitalist perspective struggles” . . . er . . . “struggles for the idea of self-determination and opposes the concept of the capitalist nation state”?’

  ‘I like it!’

  Eventually, the groups break up and come together again as a whole, for there is serious business to discuss. We form a circle of chairs in the hall, which is marked by all the signs of a gathering of curious rebels: indigenous flags, posters, badly painted renderings of Che Guevara, EZLN videos, tables of books in Spanish about the inevitable collapse of capitalism. Banners are strung across the windows, bearing slogans that are found all over the activist diaspora – slogans like ‘our resistance is as transnational as capital’, and, my favourite, the direct translation from the original Zapatista threat/promise: ‘Estamos en todas partes’ – ‘We are everywhere.’

  The subject under discussion is direct action, a topic which no one in PGA seems able to keep off for very long. The cocaleros would like us to take a trip with them to a nearby army base at Chapare and stage a demonstration against Plan Colombia. Others are worried that, what with the ‘terrorist’ crackdown and all, this might not be a good idea. A heated but polite debate ensues.

  It had always seemed unlikely that this conference could break up and go home without some form of civil disobedience taking place. For all this week’s talk of ‘sustained local campaigns’ being the way forward, PGA is still an organisation that was born out of non-violent direct action – ‘NVDA’. This was one ‘hallmark’ of PGA’s manifesto that wasn’t going to be touched by the rewriting session: ‘A confrontational attitude, since we do not think that lobbying can have a major impact in such biased and undemocratic organisations, in which transnational capital is the only real policy-maker.’

  It doesn’t get much clearer than that. Direct action, civil disobedience, is in PGA’s lifeblood. It forms part of a belief that I will come across wherever I find this movement: the belief that direct action – taking politics into your own hands – is not simply a lobbying tool, an outlet for frustrations or a means of pursuing a goal, but is an end in itself.

  If big summit protests now follow a familiar pattern, so does the furious debate that takes place after every one about what they achieved, where they go now and whether they are justified. But what’s often lost in the media scrum is the importance of protest on a personal level. Those who would debate the purpose, point and future of direct action without ever having been a part of it will never know the personal power that being one of so many people moving in the same direction can give you. They will miss a great deal of the point – that getting people up and moving, personally inspiring them to take things into their own hands rather than vote or petition or ask someone else for it – allowing people to live again – is at least half the achievement. It may not bring capitalism to its knees, but what it does do is to give many thousands of people a taste of the power they have by joining together and taking things into their own hands. That power is unequalled, and once you have tasted it, you are never the same again.

  Evening is here on the last day of the conference, and the scent of jacaranda blossoms is flooding the schoolyard. Tomorrow morning, horribly early, those going to protest at Chapare will set off by bus. This evening, though, it’s party time.

  In the hall, we’re having a multi-national entertainment session. Bolivian kids are demonstrating ancient dances which mock the conquistadores. A Mexican man is providing a rendition of a deeply worthy play about capitalism which, fortunately, is in Spanish. A guy from Bristol gets a huge round of cheers for his fire-breathing. Tiano, a Maori who has no interest in half measures, wants to perform a Maori drinking song with his friend but can’t persuade anyone to lend them a guitar and, in any case, is ‘not pissed enough to make it work properly’.

  Later, the evening descends into mass dancing in and around and outside of the hall. I am being swept off my feet by Virginia, a woman of utterly boundless energy from South Africa, who has been telling me that, if I want to see what people are really doing to fight privatisation of their services, I should come to Johannesburg. I have promised to take her up on her offer. In the meantime, she is trying to teach me to toyi-toyi – the hip-wiggling South African tribal dance that became a symbol of resistance to apartheid, and is now becoming a symbol of resistance to globalisation. ‘Move your hips, Englishman! Your hips! Do they move?’ she keeps screaming, before joining Katharine in a round of mocking female laughter.

  As the dancing goes on, and the night draws in, and everyone gets progressively more drunk, including me, I look around me and I realise something. It’s when everyone is up and moving, ripping and running around in mad circles to the Che Guevara song, under a waving, multicoloured, chequered flag; the symbol of the campesino farmers of Latin America. I’m being swung from South African to Colombian to ecologist to anarchist, from Brazilian to Bangladeshi, from cocalero to tribesman, all of them grinning madly, most of them dancing badly and me worst of all.

  It’s when I look around and see that everyone who surrounds me – all colours, from all corners, all
together even as they are so far apart – all of them, all of these people, are determined and somehow together. I realise that they have between them something too powerful to wash away. You’d have to kill all these people, and the hundreds of thousands more they represent, to stop this movement. And as the pipes and drums roll on and the circle turns faster, throwing people half off their feet, I can’t see anything that will shut them up, shut them down, make them go home quietly and stop causing so much trouble. Apart from winning.

  3

  apartheid: the sequel

  ‘South Africa is in the hands of global capital. That’s why it can’t meet the legitimate aspirations of its people.’

  GEORGE SOROS, FINANCIAL SPECULATOR, 2001

  ‘He says that when the poor rise, they will rise against all of us.’

  MOJANKU GUMBI, THABO MBEKI’S LEGAL ADVISER, REVEALS HIS BOSS’S FEARS, 1996

  A young black man in a red T-shirt bearing the legend ‘Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee’ is hauling himself up a telegraph pole in a Soweto suburb. When he gets to the top, he reaches into a leather bag slung around his shoulder and pulls out a pair of pliers and a knife. He spends a couple of minutes doing something technical to the wires, then lowers himself down.

  He makes his way over to an electricity meter mounted on the side of a nearby house, and swings a pickaxe at it. It splinters and tears away from the wall. He makes some adjustments to a jumble of wires sticking out of the wall with a knife, using a bin bag for insulation. Then he stands up, dusts himself down and approaches the house owner, an old woman who has been watching anxiously from her doorway.

  ‘You now have electricity,’ he says, grandly. He flicks the woman’s light switch, and her tiny front room floods with light for the first time in weeks. She begins to sniff, gratefully.