Drought and Unequal Water Rights Threaten Family Farms in Chile

By Orlando Milesi

For the rural farmers in Chile, a combination of climate change-induced mega droughts, water policies that make access unaffordable and a State that either doesn’t want to or dares not intervene in the water market means family enterprises are dying out.

Rosa Guzmán harvests tomatoes on her family farm in San Pedro, in the municipality of Quillota, 126 kilometers north of Santiago, the Chilean capital, where she is unable to extend her crops due to lack of funds, which prevents her from drilling deeper wells to obtain water and combat the drought. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

QUILLOTA, Chile , Apr 30 2024 (IPS) - Lack of water threatens the very existence of family farming in Chile, forcing farmers to adopt new techniques or to leave their land.

The shortage is caused by a 15-year drought and exacerbated by the unequal distribution arising from the Water Code decreed in 1981 by the 1973-1990 dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, which turned water into a tradable commodity and gave its owners rights in perpetuity.

In addition, there are problems such as the accumulation of water rights in the hands of large agro-export companies and real estate speculation with the land of small farmers who are forced to sell.

“We have no water for human consumption,” Julieta Cortés, 52, president of the Rural Women’s Association of the municipality of Canela, told IPS. “In Canela, more than 80 percent of the population depends on the water truck that delivers 50 liters of water per person per day. It’s hard to get by with that amount.”

Located in the Coquimbo region, 400 kilometers north of Santiago, Canela, with a population of just over 11,000, was known for its goat herds, now reduced by half. Local farmers also used to grow wheat and barley. Today, the fruit trees are drying up and the livestock are dying of thirst.

In contrast, the extensive plantations of avocados for export are irrigated and green on the slopes of the dry valleys.

Chile’s agro-exports are one of its major sources of income, together with mining. In 2023, the agro-export sector accounted for 3.54 percent of GDP, or 10.09 billion dollars.

Water problems are concentrated in isolated rural areas that lack technical, economic, and infrastructure capacities.

“Family and small farmers do not have access to water rights controlled by those who have money and can buy and transfer them,” Cortés said in a telephone interview.

“The lower part of the Choapa River flows through my municipality and none of us who live here have access to the water that is used upstream in the Los Pelambres mine and the large agro-industries along the way,” she said.

 

Hills stand out for their greenery in Quillota, north of Santiago, Chile, with avocado plantations that reach to the top, covering many hectares. They are able to avoid water shortages thanks to water use rights held by large agro-exporters, which allow them to evade the effects of the drought and send their abundant production abroad. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

 

The Issue Is Not Lack of Water, but Inequality

In the publication Guardianas del Agua (Guardians of the Water), published by the German Heinrich Boll Stiftung Foundation, Macarena Salinas and Isaura Becker reported that 47.2 percent of the rural Chilean population had no formal drinking water supply or irrigation.

In this South American country, some 950 communities are not part of the Rural Drinking Water Program (RWP) and obtain water from informal sources such as wells, springs and water trucks.

“We have a privatized water model where the focus and priority has always been to maintain the right to property over the human right of access to water.” -- Evelyn Vicioso

The publication reported that between 2016 and 2021, the State invested 150 million dollars to use water trucks to supply the areas suffering from scarcity.

“While the RWP committees and cooperatives need drinking water and are supplied through emergency measures, there are individuals and companies that have surplus water and can profit from the sale of water using tanker trucks,” write Salinas and Becker.

Therefore, they point out, “rather than a lack of water, there is an unequal distribution of the resource.”

The drought in Canela has been repeated in other areas of this long, narrow country of 19.5 million people living between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean.

The shortage of rainfall has lasted for 15 years, with a brief respite in 2023. It is unclear what will happen in 2024.

In Canela, farmers survive by using recycled water from washing machines and bathrooms, water harvested from rooftops or with fog catchers, systems used to capture or trap microscopic water droplets from mist, which are widely used in Chile.

“We have been reinventing ourselves. We have even rescued water from the dew. Many of us have adopted new techniques; others have moved away,” Cortés said from her community, Carquindaña.

Rosa Guzmán, 57, and her three brothers own a 40-hectare property in San Pedro, a community of some 5,000 inhabitants in the municipality of Quillota, 126 kilometers north of Santiago in the Valparaíso region.

They only grow four hectares of vegetables and 2.5 hectares of avocados because they do not have the money to expand their crops.

“Sometimes we run out of water for the house because the wells are 10 meters deep. They are filled from two canals that rarely have water,” she said during a tour of the family’s farm with IPS.

Guzmán is director of the National Association of Rural and Indigenous Women (Anamuri) and president of her community’s environmental organization, San Pedro Digno.

Anamuri is an organization founded in 1998, composed solely of women, which organizes and promotes development among rural and indigenous women in this country. It also builds relationships of equality, regardless of gender, class, and ethnicity, on the basis of respect between people and nature.

“I used to collect medicinal herbs on the banks of the canal, but now there are none. The natural springs have dried up. This is a serious problem, and there are people who have no water to drink, which is a grave issue,” she said.

According to the rural activist, the State has abandoned small-scale agriculture.

“It would be very different if the State were to put more of a priority on small-scale agriculture and give us soft credits or subsidies. It has to pay attention to what is happening because, at this rate, it pains me to say it, family farming could disappear in Chile,” she said.

 

Water stored in a small reservoir allows the Guzmán siblings to maintain vegetable production on their 40-hectare plot of land, of which only 10 percent is planted due to a lack of resources. It is one of the few surviving family farms in the municipality. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

 

Agro-export Model in the Spotlight

Water scarcity directly affects farmers’ livelihoods and way of life and often leads to complex environmental problems.

“The lack of safe water impacts household and community economies, especially for families who depend on small-scale family farming for their food,” write Salinas and Becker.

Guzmán criticized the agro-export model and called for a return to planting wheat, lentils and chickpeas, products that form part of Chile’s food security. But, she stressed, in order to do so, soft loans or subsidies are needed.

“We need food sovereignty. But if small farmers suffer losses every year, many end up selling their land. We want to live well without losing our identity and our know-how,” she underlined.

Sociologist Evelyn Vicioso, executive director of Sustainable Chile, criticized the agro-export model because “it is super intensive in water use and is extremely irresponsible with regard to crops. But above all, because it does not solve a problem nationally: the availability of water for many communities,” she said.

“We particularly depend on small-scale family farming for food, and if it disappears, we have a problem of costs and distribution. The big farmers think about ensuring food sovereignty for any country except their own communities,” she told IPS in Santiago.

 

Hernán Guzmán, one of four siblings who own a plot of land in Quillota, inspects a small area dedicated to growing basil that is destined, along with other vegetables, for the market in the nearby port city of Valparaíso, in central Chile. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

 

Watershed Management Slow To Take Off

To advance climate justice in a scenario of water scarcity, many experts agree on the need to manage watersheds with representative councils.

“Our country has a gigantic mass of mountains, but today we do not have a management system that allows us to link what happens in the headwaters with what is happening further downstream,” said Vicioso.

She listed a string of failures to create watershed councils, as there have been 25 attempts since 1994 and only one is functioning.

There is no will to create them, especially among water rights owners.

“We have a privatized water model where the focus and priority have always been to maintain the right to property over the human right of access to water,” said Vicioso.

Salinas and Becker regret that the 2005 reforms to the Water Code are not retroactive.

“This generates the conditions for the holders of water use rights to exploit the water with a strictly economic focus, thus discouraging the development of uses not involving extractive industries, such as ancestral and ecological uses,” they argue.

The regulation hinders integrated management of the water cycle, as it does not consider the river basin as the minimum unit, does not establish mechanisms to jointly manage surface and groundwater, and allows rivers to be sectioned off.

 

Evelyn Vicioso, executive director of the non-governmental organization Sustainable Chile, sits in her office in Santiago, where she monitors the water situation among small farmers and coordinates actions to defend the human right to water. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

 

Land speculation

In Quillota there is a growing sale of agricultural land to real estate companies that resell it as non-productive family recreational plots.

Thus, native trees disappear and the hope of reviving family farming is waning.

“Land has become a business. It sells for 60 million pesos (60,000 dollars) per half a hectare that sometimes does not even have water. That value attracts people to sell,” Guzmán said.

These plots will increase the demand for water and deforestation because the government’s Agriculture and Livestock Service (SAG) has no oversight capacity.

“All the hills are being parceled out and water is brought to these people with water trucks,” said Guzmán.

Migration from the countryside has been driven by climate change.

In Canela, said Cortés, it used to be young people who moved away. But now it is entire families who go to nearby cities in search of access to water.

According to Guzmán, “young people do not want to stay in the countryside and women say that it is not even profitable to raise chickens.”

Cortés is grateful for the water from trucks, but stresses that the underlying problem is restoring watershed management.

“To rebuild this, resources must be allocated. And for that, we need forestation to make barriers to retain the scarce rainfall and restore the hydrological system,” she said.

Vicioso complained that “there is a lack of protection of the glaciers, which are the headwaters of the basins where the water comes from.”

The sociologist also urged a rethinking of the intensive use of water in productive activities.

“We have an underlying political problem with water that has a high market value and a State that does not dare, does not want, and does not seek the tools to intervene in this deregulated market, just like in drug trafficking,” she said.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Portugal’s Carnation Revolution, Fifty Years Later

By Boaventura de Sousa Santos

April 23, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

For forty years I have been writing an article about each decade of the revolution of April 25, 1974 that brought democracy back to Portugal after 48 years of dictatorship. The analysis of interpretative or prospective priorities shows that over the years I have been faced with two resentments, one the major one, the other secondary. To both I have responded, without resentment, but with arguments and justification for political choices. I’m referring to resentment of the lost opportunity and resentment of the lost past. Over the course of this long period, the two resentments have changed their positions of relative prominence. The first resentment dominated in the first three decades and the second has dominated ever since.

There are two types of resentment: the historical-ideological and the interpersonal-intra-community. In both cases, what is at stake is emotions or feelings that dramatize damage considered unjust in an ethical-moral and therefore non-political way. They always involve the existence and celebration of victims. Both types of resentment demonize the aggressor and, in the case of historical-ideological resentment, repentance or reparation is much more difficult, if not impossible. In the resentments that abound in contemporary society, we find components of both types of resentment, but it is always possible to detect nuances and prevalences. In this text I’m dealing exclusively with historical-ideological resentment.

The resentment of the lost opportunity.

The revolution of April 25, 1974 unleashed two extraordinary political energies that were intertwined: democracy and socialism. After 48 years of dictatorship, democracy was at the heart of the revolution. It took place a few years after the student movement of 1968, which had its precursor in Coimbra in 1962, and a year after Pinochet’s coup against Salvador Allende’s democratic socialist regim . Of course, in Portugal, extremist positions did emerge in the socialist camp that didn’t want representative democracy because they considered it bourgeois; they were divided between supporters of the Soviet, Albanian or Chinese systems. The truly hegemonic idea was democratic socialism. It was enshrined in the 1976 Constitution and the very parties that are now right-wing considered themselves to be defenders of socialism. The idea of democratic socialism was inscribed in popular aspirations, even if it wasn’t clear what it consisted of. I remember that in 1980 – at the time I was liaising between the University of Coimbra and the Coimbra section of the captains’ Movement of the Armed Forces (MFA), led by Lieutenant General Franco Charais – the Rector asked me to visit Yugoslavia to learn about the self-managing socialist system, which was anti-Soviet but about which little was known, and to write a report about it. I spent a month in that country and also in Albania (for contrast), but when I returned the interest in socialism back home had waned.

In 1985, I wrote: “Portuguese society today lives in an atmosphere of reserved expectation. The last ten years have been the unfolding of a very complex process of social transformation whose implications are not yet fully visible. There are fears and, at the same time, hopes that the future will be different from the many recent pasts that have resulted in our uncertain present. Everything, or almost everything, began with April 25, 1974, undoubtedly the most significant event in our country’s contemporary history. To come to know in depth what happened then (and right afterwards) and why it so happened, is the key to understanding many of our questions today. It is therefore a challenge for social scientists and, in general, for all of us citizens committed to the historical development of our country […], to launch a scientific debate, looking back from this particular historical moment [1985], on this important date in our contemporaneity. It was indeed a rich and complex social process that has covered (deeply? superficially?) the Portuguese reality with development models and political plans, with action projects and programs for the future as so many threads of ruptures and continuities between the emerging society and the old society which went on resisting them with the strength of its years.” Democracy was not questioned, as it was seen as an unconditional and irreversibly acquired good, but socialism was already a long way off, replaced by its capitalist version – never mind the contradiction – of social democracy. The main topics of reflection were “culture and new ways of life; changes in the law and the administration of justice; the struggle for control of production; popular movements to improve living conditions”.

Almost thirty years later, in the midst of the financial-existential crisis that the intervention of the Troika (European Union-European Central Bank-International Monetary Fund) meant, I wrote on April 25, 2011: “We are living the darkest April 25 since the one that 37 years ago, like an unholy miracle, called out to us: get up and walk. And so we did, by leaps and bounds, overcoming challenges, falling into traps, until we reached these days when a strange god, because trinitarian but without grace, commands us: get down on your knees and crawl. It’s also a strange imperative, although not unprecedented in our history, because it offers us salvation in exchange for losing our souls.

We are witnessing the development of our country’s underdevelopment and apparently we are watching passively. As if the country were a distant place, inhabited by people we hardly know, for whom we have no special esteem and who certainly deserve the burden they have to carry. Listening to or reading some commentators gives the impression that they are Germans talking about our country. They dissect the national reality as if they were coroners, butchering the corpse as if they were not part of it. Others, the super-rich, whose money entitles them to a wealth of wisdom, declare themselves disgusted by poverty and miserable pensions, as if poverty were a sin of which their wealth is innocent. And almost all of them flagellate the country, as if the causes of our financial crisis weren’t systemic and therefore, in part, foreign to our action, however clumsy our action may have been. Self-flagellation is the bad conscience of passivity and it’s not easy to overcome it in a context where passivity, when it’s not wanted, is imposed. The arrival in Lisbon of the EU-ECB-IMF trinity symbolically constitutes a high-intensity activism that contrasts with our inability to act. We are being acted upon. Ours is only the name in which others act for the good that is only ours if it is also theirs. In order to act, we have to take our eyes off this landscape and walk in the dark for a few moments until we reach the back of it to see the scaffolding that supports it, observe the bustle that goes on there and identify the empty stretches waiting for our action. We don’t need captains, but we do need the lucidity and courage that some of them had 37 years ago to act without fearing the reactions of the markets or the ratings of the rating agencies.”

This text was part of a book, Portugal: ensaio contra a autoflagelação (Portugal: Essay against Self-flagellation) (Almedina 2012), which, although analytical, represented the end of the idea (and resentment) of the missed opportunity. From then on, another resentment would dominate.

The resentment of the lost past

The last decade has been characterized globally by the growth of the extreme right as a politically organized expression. In Portugal, its organization was later and we have come to attribute this to the strength of the 1974 Revolution. But last March’s elections showed that Portugal was not only not immune to this wave, but was riding it more boldly than other European countries. There are points of convergence both in the causes of this global phenomenon and in the forms it takes. The most common manifestations of the far right are: xenophobic and anti-immigrant nationalism; anti-system, which encompasses more than the political system and embraces social relations; racism and sexism; the idea that all use of power is abuse of power, except when it comes to the forces of repression and security, where all abuse of power is legitimate use of power; instrumental use of democracy with the subversion of the separation of powers and the progressive trivialization of violations of liberal democratic procedures; naturalization of social inequalities; minimal social protection state or only for “us” and strong repressive state and only for “them”.

In the Portuguese case, the extreme right takes the form of resentment of two lost pasts: colonialism, as an expression of greatness and civilization, and the Salazar dictatorship, as a time of order and expectations in line with the country’s limited possibilities. As we can see, these are two pasts based on two contradictory ideas of the country’s identity. One, invoking defiant grandeur, daring out of proportion to real possibilities, and therefore successful; the other, invoking mediocrity, humility, restraint, shrewdness in managing limitations, and therefore successful. It is typical of this type of resentment that the past, whatever it may have been, was better than the present. The contradictions only become apparent when you leave the world of resentment.

The revolution of April 25 implied a profound break with both pasts. The break with the colonial past was irreversible because, to a large extent, it didn’t depend on the Portuguese but on the anti-colonial liberation movements. Despite what colonialist resentment holds, relations with the ex-colonial world continued and diversified, but obviously purged of colonial violence and geared towards reciprocal and multilaterally established benefits. In turn, the break with the dictatorial past was also intended to be irreversible, not least because the fascist regime had placed its future in maintaining the colonies. But the irreversibility of democracy was always less certain than that of the end of colonialism, not only because it depended solely on the Portuguese, but also because it soon cut the umbilical cord with the socialism that supported it at the beginning. The question of irreversibility takes liberal democracy as a fixed and unequivocal entity, which is disproved by reality every day. What is an oyster shell worth without an oyster inside? What will democracy be if the majority of citizens vote for far-right parties that use democracy to get into power but, once in power, don’t use it or accept losing it democratically?

Both concerning the case of Portugal and the global phenomenon, it has been said that the new extreme right, unlike that of the last century, does not resort to one-party fascism. On a formal level this seems to be the case, but the reality is much more complex. The neoliberalism of the post-fall of the Berlin Wall is a new stage in the class struggle that aims to eliminate the relative distribution of wealth that the social struggles of the working classes have achieved at great cost over the last century. Like human rights, democracy has been celebrated at the same time as it has been emptied of material content in the concrete lives of families. Under current conditions, the political cost of eliminating social policies in a democracy is much lower than in a dictatorship. But no one can predict until when.

The other pillar of neoliberalism has been to globalize real political and financial power (centered on a small circle of dominant countries), while keeping democratic political conflicts at national level. This mismatch, combined with the control of media opinion, sophisticated surveillance policies and technological changes in the organization of work, has almost completely disarmed social struggles for a fairer society. If these struggles cannot be rebuilt, democracy itself will be disarmed without being eliminated. President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania once said that the USA was also a one-party regime, only with the specificity that there were two. Democracy, even if empty, is always better than dictatorship, but only for those who can benefit from it. And there are fewer and fewer of them. The masks of colonialist and fascist resentment hide the faces of simple, voiceless people who feel they have lost what little they had and have no hope of getting it back.

This year, more than in previous years, “what’s needed is to cheer people up”, to remember José Afonso. And to do this we need policies and governments that tackle resentment without resentment.



Boaventura de Sousa Santos is the emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. 

 

#MayDay4Palestine – Get organised in your workplace on May 1st!

24th April 2024Leave a Commenton #MayDay4Palestine – Get organised in your workplace on May 1st!

“War & peace are very much a class issue – & Palestine is very much a trade union issue.”

By Jennie Walsh, Stop the War Coalition

War and peace are very much a class issue and Palestine is very much a trade union issue. Our power as organised working people has the potential to force the biggest change in our society. 

Since 7 October over 33,000 Palestinians have been killed, 70 per cent of them women and children. Millions are at imminent risk of starvation.

At the heart of the trade union movement lies international solidarity, which the Palestinians urgently require. marching on the streets is incredibly powerful, but when workers withdraw their labour, they can shut things down. 

We’ve seen some really inspiring actions by trade unionists around the world in demand for an end to the arming of Israel and for a free Palestine, such as transport workers in Belgium refusing to carry weapons bound for Israel and port workers in Barcelona refusing to allow them to leave their shores.

Let’s not forget the impact of the brave Rolls Royce workers in East Kilbride who refused to carry out repairs on General Pinochet’s war planes.

Every collective act, big or small, sends a message to those who are suffering in Gaza that we are with them and puts pressure on our government to stop arming Israel.

This is why Stop the War is calling on all those within the trade union movement to join and build for the May Day Workplace Day of Action for Palestine on Wednesday 1 May.

Our open letter to UK trade unionists also calls for labour movement unity in the face of attacks on the pro-Palestine campaign and our right to protest.

We are encouraging all those in work, college or university to mark International Workers’ Day by organising a walkout, a lunchtime or early morning protest, or another collective action, in demand of peace and justice for the Palestinians. 

Where those workplaces are arms or arms components manufacturers, we are clear that our enemies are not the workers making the weapons, but the government that is selling them. All actions challenging militarism and the arms industry must be workforce and union led.

And in some of those factories we are seeing groups of workers taking actions, with workplace meetings and walkouts.

There are any number of activities that union members can organise for 1 May, from collections for Medical Aid for Palestinians or other charities helping the people of Gaza, giving out leaflets around the workplace, to holding a lunchtime protest outside a workplace, or organising a meeting with a speaker from Gaza.

So get organised in your workplace on 1 May and make it a #MayDay4Palestine

Breaking our democracy is all part of the GOP plan

Thom Hartmann
April 22, 2024 7

Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), joined by fellow Republicans, speaks on Trump's involvement with January 6 during a press conference at the U.S. Capitol on February 06, 2024 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Recent reporting suggests that Trump followers, by and large, are fine with him being or becoming a dictator. It seems crazy, but there it is, irrefutable: they’d rather have Trump as a dictator than Biden or any Democrat as a “normal president.” But why?

When I was 22 years old, on the advice of an old friend, I took the Dale Carnegie Course: it was literally a life-changing experience, and I credit that course with a good bit of the successes I’ve enjoyed in business and the media in the intervening years.

In one of the early weeks of the course, we each had to get up in front of the class and act out with great emphasis this statement (almost a mantra):

“I know people in the ranks who will stay in the ranks. Why? I’ll tell you why: Simply. Because. They. Haven’t. The. Ability. To. Get. Things. Done!”

READ: What most assuredly happens when Trump sits down with the New York Times

The ability to get things done is a high value for business, but it applies to politics as well. And that’s where authoritarian strongmen come in.

The most appealing thing about a dictator is that he can “get things done.”

Dictators don’t have to worry about bureaucracies hindering them, or pesky laws and regulations. They don’t care about local opposition to their projects, or their impact on the environment.

From making the trains run on time to building an autobahn and a car company to go with it, dictators famously “get things done.”

The corollary to that old nostrum is that when things are going well, when things are working smoothly, when the people are getting what they want from their government, there is little interest in putting a dictator into office.

You have to break government pretty badly before people are willing to trade in a normal democracy for a dictatorship, but it’s sure happened before.

Germany wouldn’t have embraced Hitler if it weren’t for the depression the country had slid into because they lost WWI and were hit with fierce sanctions in the Treaty of Versailles.

Mussolini stepped up to take over Italy during a time of multiple crises: the echo of the flu pandemic, WWI, and an economic crash. The existing government was so weak that when he showed up with his “army” of 20,000 or so militia volunteers, the King essentially handed the country over to him.

Pinochet was able to hold Chile in part because Nixon’s sanctions had crippled the country’s economy and thrown millions out of work.

One of the most successful ways the forces of autocracy and authoritarianism have risen to power throughout history is by creating or stepping into a crisis and promising to be the “strongman” who will fix things and fix them now.


Which, of course, is why rightwing billionaires and the Republicans they own have been working so hard in the decades since the Reagan Revolution to break our government.

They want a series of terrible crises. And if they don’t happen organically, rightwingers are more than happy to create them, as we saw yesterday when Republicans in the House of Representatives refused to do anything about our southern border or to fund aid to Ukraine and the Palestinians.

Back before the Reagan Revolution — when things were working well, a third of America had a good union job, our schools were brand-new and well supplied and staffed, college was free, healthcare was inexpensive, and the biggest challenge America had was to put a man on the moon and bring him safely home — there was little demand for a dictator in this country.

Sure, women, Blacks, and queer people were demanding rights and their fair slice of the pie, but they wanted part of a pie that was already working (to mangle a metaphor). For the majority of white Americans to adopt a strongman authoritarian, first the country had to be broken and broken badly.

Republicans and their billionaire donors have been working on this project for decades.

It was originally proposed in a memo by Lewis Powell in 1971, the year before Nixon put him on the Supreme Court and he authored the decision legalizing corporate bribery of politicians.

Now the GOP and their billionaire backers are more than 40 years into their project:

Breaking our schools and students: Reagan began the process of breaking our educational system, which was once the pride of the world. He ended free college in California, cut federal aid to education by nearly a fifth, gutted civics, and almost singlehandedly created a nearly $2 trillion black hole of student debt that’s dragging down millions in the last few generations. And now rightwing haters are roiling school boards and threatening teachers to further break schools with their lust for banning books they don’t like.

Breaking our workers: Reagan also shattered the compact between workers and employers that had created and guaranteed a strong and stable middle class, the first and largest in the world. He started early in his presidency by crushing PATCO, one of only three unions that had endorsed his presidential candidacy, and then put an anti-union lawyer in charge of the Labor Department (a practice followed most recently by Trump, who put Antonin Scalia’s notorious union-busting son in that job).

Breaking our manufacturing base: George H.W. Bush broke our nation’s job market by executing the Trade Act that went into effect in 1989 and amplified the “free trade” powers of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and negotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which was signed by President Clinton. This began the steady migration of good American jobs to Mexico and China, causing over 15,000 factories to close and move, taking with them over 20 million good jobs.

Breaking our wallets: Pharmaceutical and insurance companies scored major victories during George W. Bush’s presidency. Not only did he begin privatizing Medicare with the Medicare Advantage scam, but he also put into law an absolute prohibition against the government negotiating drug prices with drug manufacturers. As a result, Americans pay as much as ten times more for drugs than do people in other developed countries.

Breaking our environment: Republicans and the fossil fuel billionaires who own them have known since the 1970s that their products were damaging our environment as well as causing tens of thousands of cancer, heart- and lung-disease deaths every year through their pollution. While President Jimmy Carter tried to do something about this in the late 1970s with his solar panels on the White House and his “Solar Bank” program that would have 20% of America’s energy produced by wind and solar by the year 2000, Reagan shut it all down when he came into office in 1981 in exchange for big contributions from the fossil fuel industry. Republicans are still working to break our environment: they regularly lie about global warming and promise to increase our nation’s dependence on fossil fuels.

Breaking our society: Republicans once talked about freedom and individual responsibility, but these were always buzzwords for letting billionaires do what they want and ignoring the needs of the poor. In reality, they delight in pitting Americans against each other, demonizing minority groups (racial, religious, gender), while promoting hateful, racist tropes like the so-called Great Replacement Theory.

Breaking our institutions of democracy: Republicans spent three years promoting the lie that Trump beat Biden in 2020. This is on top of 30+ years of promoting the idea that there is massive voter fraud in America, justifying making it harder and harder for people to vote, when in fact there is no voter fraud crisis in this country and never was (in the modern era).

Breaking our stature in the world: There was a time when Republicans stood strong against dictators: now they embrace them. In a recent rally, Trump openly praised Putin, Orbán, and Xi while trash-talking our actual allies in NATO and the EU. Republicans in the House and Senate are openly opposed to helping democratic Ukraine fight off violent aggression by dictator-run Russia. Allies that long depended on the US are now publicly questioning the wisdom of relying on us for any sort of support for democracies around the world so long as the MAGA faction controls the GOP.

Breaking our public health system: According to the British medical journal Lancet, a half-million Americans died from Covid during Trump’s presidency unnecessarily, all because of the lies he told us to try to salvage the economy for his re-election. Now we’re experiencing outbreaks of measles and other infectious diseases because MAGA Republicans like DeSantis have shattered people’s faith in our public health system. From calls to prosecute Fauci to rejecting masks and vaccinations to supporting price-gouging drug manufacturers and for-profit hospitals, they’re causing widespread death and disability and appear to delight in it.

Breaking women and girls: After a 50-year campaign against Roe v Wade, Trump finally packed the Supreme Court with Catholic fanatics who, based on the writings of a 17th century witch-burning English judge, let states again prosecute women and doctors for abortion. The GOP has now brought to the Supreme Court a case that could outlaw all birth control in America, and they’re dead serious about getting women out of the boardroom and back into the bedroom and kitchen.

Breaking our children: for the past 40 years, the GOP has led the charge to fill our schools with guns. They have been so effective at this that bullets are now the leading cause of death among our nation’s children, a horror that has not been successfully inflicted on any other nation on Earth. They’ve also fought vigorously against any effort to regulate social media, which is provoking a mental health crisis among our young people and driving an explosion of suicide.

Breaking entrepreneurs: There was a time in America when a good ticket to the American Dream was to open a small local business, grow it, and hand it down to your kids. The corner dry cleaner, pharmacy, dime store, restaurant, hotel, bank, travel agency, electronics or furniture store, etc. But ever since Reagan stopped enforcement of the Sherman Act and other anti-trust laws in 1983, it’s been all “mergers and acquisitions” all the time: every consequential sphere of American industry is now dominated by a small handful of giants who will squash anybody who tries to start a company in their sector like a bug.

Predictably, now that Republicans and the morbidly rich billionaires who own them have broken most of the social contract and systems that held the middle class together (and our middle class has gone from being almost two-thirds of us to fewer than half of us), people are looking for a change.

Politicians have been promising that change — a break with Reagan’s neoliberalism — since the 1990s.

Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama campaigned on change but missed or ignored most of their chances to stop the disintegration of the middle class, and Bush, Bush Jr., and Trump all doubled down on Reaganomics.

Finally now, many Americans — particularly “low information voters” — have reached a breaking point.

— Their kids carry hundreds of thousands of dollars of student debt.

— Forty-one percent of American families have more medical debt than they can handle.

— As Republican governors roll out voucher programs, our schools are failing and simultaneously under attack from fanatic bigots.

— Fox “News” and other hate-driven media have convinced them that the US is being “invaded” by brown-skinned people.

— They’re in a constant state of hysteria about CRT, DEI, BLM, Antifa, drag queens, Taylor Swift, and any other boogeymen they can come up with.

These are the people Republicans are counting on to support transforming America from a democratic republic into a strongman authoritarian oligarchy. The GOP’s bet is that if they can keep things broken and bad enough long enough, then people will demand a dictator “who can get things done.”

They even hatched a scheme called Project 2025 that hyper-concentrates political power in the White House, pre-positioning the next Republican president to be America’s first dictator.

The good news is that President Biden is actually doing something about each of these areas where Republicans have worked so hard for the past 43 years to break our country. And his work is producing good fruit: inflation is down, employment is up, wages are up, and consumer confidence is growing.

It’s a race against time, in a way.

If Democrats can continue to put America back together, there’s hope for a brighter, healthier future.

On the other hand, if rightwingers in Congress and the media can continue to sabotage our country (and other democracies like Ukraine and Taiwan) things may devolve to the point where we elect our first open dictator in the form of Donald Trump or some other authoritarian Republican.

A few months from now, the choice will be ours.

IF TRUMP IS ELECTED 

 

A Brief History of Kill Lists, from Langley to Lavender

by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies Posted onApril 17, 2024

The Israeli online magazine +972 has published a detailed report on Israel’s use of an artificial intelligence (AI) system called “Lavender” to target thousands of Palestinian men in its bombing campaign in Gaza. When Israel attacked Gaza after October 7, the Lavender system had a database of 37,000 Palestinian men with suspected links to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).

Lavender assigns a numerical score, from one to a hundred, to every man in Gaza, based mainly on cellphone and social media data, and automatically adds those with high scores to its kill list of suspected militants. Israel uses another automated system, known as “Where’s Daddy?”, to call in airstrikes to kill these men and their families in their homes.

The report is based on interviews with six Israeli intelligence officers who have worked with these systems. As one of the officers explained to +972, by adding a name from a Lavender-generated list to the Where’s Daddy home tracking system, he can place the man’s home under constant drone surveillance, and an airstrike will be launched once he comes home.

The officers said the “collateral” killing of the men’s extended families was of little consequence to Israel. “Let’s say you calculate [that there is one] Hamas [operative] plus 10 [civilians in the house],” the officer said. “Usually, these 10 will be women and children. So absurdly, it turns out that most of the people you killed were women and children.”

The officers explained that the decision to target thousands of these men in their homes is just a question of expediency. It is simply easier to wait for them to come home to the address on file in the system, and then bomb that house or apartment building, than to search for them in the chaos of the war-torn Gaza Strip.

The officers who spoke to 972+ explained that in previous Israeli massacres in Gaza, they could not generate targets quickly enough to satisfy their political and military bosses, and so these AI systems were designed to solve that problem for them. The speed with which Lavender can generate new targets only gives its human minders an average of 20 seconds to review and rubber-stamp each name, even though they know from tests of the Lavender system that at least 10% of the men chosen for assassination and familicide have only an insignificant or a mistaken connection with Hamas or PIJ.

The Lavender AI system is a new weapon, developed by Israel. But the kind of kill lists that it generates have a long pedigree in U.S. wars, occupations and CIA regime change operations. Since the birth of the CIA after the Second World War, the technology used to create kill lists has evolved from the CIA’s earliest coups in Iran and Guatemala, to Indonesia and the Phoenix program in Vietnam in the 1960s, to Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s and to the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Just as U.S. weapons development aims to be at the cutting edge, or the killing edge, of new technology, the CIA and U.S. military intelligence have always tried to use the latest data processing technology to identify and kill their enemies.

The CIA learned some of these methods from German intelligence officers captured at the end of the Second World War. Many of the names on Nazi kill lists were generated by an intelligence unit called Fremde Heere Ost (Foreign Armies East), under the command of Major General Reinhard Gehlen, Germany’s spy chief on the eastern front(see David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, p. 268).

Gehlen and the FHO had no computers, but they did have access to four million Soviet POWs from all over the USSR, and no compunction about torturing them to learn the names of Jews and communist officials in their hometowns to compile kill lists for the Gestapo and Einsatzgruppen.

After the war, like the 1,600 German scientists spirited out of Germany in Operation Paperclip, the United States flew Gehlen and his senior staff to Fort Hunt in Virginia. They were welcomed by Allen Dulles, soon to be the first and still the longest-serving director of the CIA. Dulles sent them back to Pullach in occupied Germany to resume their anti-Soviet operations as CIA agents. The Gehlen Organization formed the nucleus of what became the BND, the new West German intelligence service, with Reinhard Gehlen as its director until he retired in 1968.

After a CIA coup removed Iran’s popular, democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, a CIA team led by U.S. Major General Norman Schwarzkopf trained a new intelligence service, known as SAVAK, in the use of kill lists and torture. SAVAK used these skills to purge Iran’s government and military of suspected communists and later to hunt down anyone who dared to oppose the Shah.

By 1975, Amnesty International estimated that Iran was holding between 25,000 and 100,000 political prisoners, and had “the highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture that is beyond belief.”

In Guatemala, a CIA coup in 1954 replaced the democratic government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman with a brutal dictatorship. As resistance grew in the 1960s, U.S. special forces joined the Guatemalan army in a scorched earth campaign in Zacapa, which killed 15,000 people to defeat a few hundred armed rebels. Meanwhile, CIA-trained urban death squads abducted, tortured and killed PGT (Guatemalan Labor Party) members in Guatemala City, notably 28 prominent labor leaders who were abducted and disappeared in March 1966.

Once this first wave of resistance was suppressed, the CIA set up a new telecommunications center and intelligence agency, based in the presidential palace. It compiled a database of “subversives” across the country that included leaders of farming co-ops and labor, student and indigenous activists, to provide ever-growing lists for the death squads. The resulting civil war became a genocide against indigenous people in Ixil and the western highlands that killed or disappeared at least 200,000 people.

This pattern was repeated across the world, wherever popular, progressive leaders offered hope to their people in ways that challenged U.S. interests. As historian Gabriel Kolko wrote in 1988, “The irony of U.S. policy in the Third World is that, while it has always justified its larger objectives and efforts in the name of anticommunism, its own goals have made it unable to tolerate change from any quarter that impinged significantly on its own interests.”

When General Suharto seized power in Indonesia in 1965, the U.S. Embassy compiled a list of 5,000 communists for his death squads to hunt down and kill. The CIA estimated that they eventually killed 250,000 people, while other estimates run as high as a million.

Twenty-five years later, journalist Kathy Kadane investigated the U.S. role in the massacre in Indonesia, and spoke to Robert Martens, the political officer who led the State-CIA team that compiled the kill list. “It really was a big help to the army,” Martens told Kadane. “They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands. But that’s not all bad – there’s a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.”

Kathy Kadane also spoke to former CIA director William Colby, who was the head of the CIA’s Far East division in the 1960s. Colby compared the U.S. role in Indonesia to the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, which was launched two years later, claiming that they were both successful programs to identify and eliminate the organizational structure of America’s communist enemies.

The Phoenix program was designed to uncover and dismantle the National Liberation Front’s (NLF) shadow government across South Vietnam. Phoenix’s Combined Intelligence Center in Saigon fed thousands of names into an IBM 1401 computer, along with their locations and their alleged roles in the NLF. The CIA credited the Phoenix program with killing 26,369 NLF officials, while another 55,000 were imprisoned or persuaded to defect. Seymour Hersh reviewed South Vietnamese government documents that put the death toll at 41,000.

How many of the dead were correctly identified as NLF officials may be impossible to know, but Americans who took part in Phoenix operations reported killing the wrong people in many cases. Navy SEAL Elton Manzione told author Douglas Valentine (The Phoenix Program) how he killed two young girls in a night raid on a village, and then sat down on a stack of ammunition crates with a hand grenade and an M-16, threatening to blow himself up, until he got a ticket home.

“The whole aura of the Vietnam War was influenced by what went on in the “hunter-killer” teams of Phoenix, Delta, etc,” Manzione told Valentine. “That was the point at which many of us realized we were no longer the good guys in the white hats defending freedom – that we were assassins, pure and simple. That disillusionment carried over to all other aspects of the war and was eventually responsible for it becoming America’s most unpopular war.”

Even as the U.S. defeat in Vietnam and the “war fatigue” in the United States led to a more peaceful next decade, the CIA continued to engineer and support coups around the world, and to provide post-coup governments with increasingly computerized kill lists to consolidate their rule.

After supporting General Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, the CIA played a central role in Operation Condor, an alliance between right-wing military governments in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia, to hunt down tens of thousands of their and each other’s political opponents and dissidents, killing and disappearing at least 60,000 people.

The CIA’s role in Operation Condor is still shrouded in secrecy, but Patrice McSherry, a political scientist at Long Island University, has investigated the U.S. role and concluded, “Operation Condor also had the covert support of the US government. Washington provided Condor with military intelligence and training, financial assistance, advanced computers, sophisticated tracking technology, and access to the continental telecommunications system housed in the Panama Canal Zone.”

McSherry’s research revealed how the CIA supported the intelligence services of the Condor states with computerized links, a telex system, and purpose-built encoding and decoding machines made by the CIA Logistics Department. As she wrote in her book, Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America:

“The Condor system’s secure communications system, Condortel… allowed Condor operations centers in member countries to communicate with one another and with the parent station in a U.S. facility in the Panama Canal Zone. This link to the U.S. military-intelligence complex in Panama is a key piece of evidence regarding secret U.S. sponsorship of Condor…”

Operation Condor ultimately failed, but the U.S. provided similar support and training to right-wing governments in Colombia and Central America throughout the 1980s in what senior military officers have called a “quiet, disguised, media-free approach” to repression and kill lists.

The U.S. School of the Americas (SOA) trained thousands of Latin American officers in the use of torture and death squads, as Major Joseph Blair, the SOA’s former chief of instruction described to John Pilger for his film, The War You Don’t See:

“The doctrine that was taught was that, if you want information, you use physical abuse, false imprisonment, threats to family members, and killing. If you can’t get the information you want, if you can’t get the person to shut up or stop what they’re doing, you assassinate them – and you assassinate them with one of your death squads.”

When the same methods were transferred to the U.S. hostile military occupation of Iraq after 2003, Newsweek headlined it “The Salvador Option.” A U.S. officer explained to Newsweek that U.S. and Iraqi death squads were targeting Iraqi civilians as well as resistance fighters. “The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists,” he said. “From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation.”

The United States sent two veterans of its dirty wars in Latin America to Iraq to play key roles in that campaign. Colonel James Steele led the U.S. Military Advisor Group in El Salvador from 1984 to 1986, training and supervising Salvadoran forces who killed tens of thousands of civilians. He was also deeply involved in the Iran-Contra scandal, narrowly escaping a prison sentence for his role supervising shipments from Ilopango air base in El Salvador to the U.S.-backed Contras in Honduras and Nicaragua.

In Iraq, Steele oversaw the training of the Interior Ministry’s Special Police Commandos – rebranded as “National” and later “Federal” Police after the discovery of their al-Jadiriyah torture center and other atrocities.

Bayan al-Jabr, a commander in the Iranian-trained Badr Brigade militia, was appointed Interior Minister in 2005, and Badr militiamen were integrated into the Wolf Brigade death squad and other Special Police units. Jabr’s chief adviser was Steven Casteel, the former intelligence chief for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in Latin America.

The Interior Ministry death squads waged a dirty war in Baghdad and other cities, filling the Baghdad morgue with up to 1,800 corpses per month, while Casteel fed the western media absurd cover stories, such as that the death squads were all “insurgents” in stolen police uniforms.

Meanwhile U.S. special operations forces conducted “kill-or-capture” night raids in search of Resistance leaders. General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of Joint Special Operations Command from 2003-2008, oversaw the development of a database system, used in Iraq and Afghanistan, that compiled cellphone numbers mined from captured cellphones to generate an ever-expanding target list for night raids and air strikes.

The targeting of cellphones instead of actual people enabled the automation of the targeting system, and explicitly excluded using human intelligence to confirm identities. Two senior U.S. commanders told the Washington Post that only half the night raids attacked the right house or person.

In Afghanistan, President Obama put McChrystal in charge of U.S. and NATO forces in 2009, and his cellphone-based “social network analysis” enabled an exponential increase in night raids, from 20 raids per month in May 2009 to up to 40 per night by April 2011.

As with the Lavender system in Gaza, this huge increase in targets was achieved by taking a system originally designed to identify and track a small number of senior enemy commanders and applying it to anyone suspected of having links with the Taliban, based on their cellphone data.

This led to the capture of an endless flood of innocent civilians, so that most civilian detainees had to be quickly released to make room for new ones. The increased killing of innocent civilians in night raids and airstrikes fueled already fierce resistance to the U.S. and NATO occupation and ultimately led to its defeat.

President Obama’s drone campaign to kill suspected enemies in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia was just as indiscriminate, with reports suggesting that 90% of the people it killed in Pakistan were innocent civilians.

And yet Obama and his national security team kept meeting in the White House every “Terror Tuesday” to select who the drones would target that week, using an Orwellian, computerized “disposition matrix” to provide technological cover for their life and death decisions.

Looking at this evolution of ever-more automated systems for killing and capturing enemies, we can see how, as the information technology used has advanced from telexes to cellphones and from early IBM computers to artificial intelligence, the human intelligence and sensibility that could spot mistakes, prioritize human life and prevent the killing of innocent civilians has been progressively marginalized and excluded, making these operations more brutal and horrifying than ever.

Nicolas has at least two good friends who survived the dirty wars in Latin America because someone who worked in the police or military got word to them that their names were on a death list, one in Argentina, the other in Guatemala. If their fates had been decided by an AI machine like Lavender, they would both be long dead.

As with supposed advances in other types of weapons technology, like drones and “precision” bombs and missiles, innovations that claim to make targeting more precise and eliminate human error have instead led to the automated mass murder of innocent people, especially women and children, bringing us full circle from one holocaust to the next.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books in November 2022.

Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.