United States and Venezuela: A Historical Background


JAMES PETRAS • 

MAY 10, 2019



“Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world and they own it and we want it”


(Anonymous Trump official)


Introduction


US hostility and efforts to overthrow the Venezuelan government forms parts of a long and inglorious history of US intervention in Latin America going back to the second decade of the 19th century.


In 1823 US President Monroe declared, in his name, the ‘Monroe Doctrine” – the US right to keep Europeans out of the region, but the right of the US to intervene in pursuit of its economic, political and military interests.


We will proceed to outline the historical phases of US political and military intervention on behalf of US corporate and banking interests in the region and the Latin American political and social movements which opposed it.


The first period runs from the late 19th century to the 1930’s, and includes Marine invasions , the installation of US client dictatorships and the resistance of popular revolutions led by several revolutionary leaders in El Salvador, (Farabundo Marti), Nicaragua, (Augusto Sandino), Cuba (Jose Marti) and Mexico [Lazaro Cárdenas].


We will then discuss the Post-WWII US interventions , the overthrow of popular governments and the repression of social movements, including Guatemala (1954), Chile coup (1973), US invasion of the Dominican Republic (1965), Grenada (1982),and Panama (1989).


We will then exam US efforts to overthrow the Venezuela government (1998 to the present).


US Policy to Latin America: Democracy, Dictatorship and Social Movements


US General Smedley Butler summarized his 33 years in the military as a ‘muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers . . . I helped Mexico safe for American oil interest in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for National City Bank, to collect revenue . . . I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the . . . House of Brown Brothers in 1902 – 1912. I brought a light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interest in 2016. I helped make Honduras right for American fruit companies in 1903 . . . looking back on it, I could have given Al Capone a few hints’!


During the first 40 years of the 20th century the US invaded Cuba, converted it into a quasi-colony and repudiated its hero of independence Jose Marti; it provided advisers and military support to El Salvador’s dictator, assassinated its revolutionary leader Farabundo Marti and murdered 30,000 landless peasants seeking land reform. The US intervened in Nicaragua, fought against its patriotic leader Augusto Sandino and installed a dictatorial dynasty led by the Somoza regime until it was overthrown in 1979. The US intervened in Cuba to install a military dictatorship in 1933 to suppress an uprising of sugar workers .Between 1952 – 1958 Washington armed the Batista dictatorship to destroy the revolutionary July 26 Movement led by Fidel Castro. In the late 1930s the US threatened to invade Mexico when President Lazaro Cardenas nationalized the US oil companies and redistributed land to millions of landless peasants.


With the defeat of fascism (1941-45), there was an upsurge of social democratic governments in Latin America.But the US objected. In 1954 the US overthrew the elected Guatemala president Jacobo Arbenz for expropriating the banana plantations of United Fruit Company. It backed a military coup in Brazil in 1964, the military remained in power for 20 years. In 1963 the US overthrew the Dominican Republic’s democratically elected government of Juan Bosch and invaded in 1965 to prevent a popular uprising . In 1973 the US supported a military coup overthrowing democratic socialist president Salvador Allende and backed the military regime of General Augusto Pinochet for nearly 20 years. Subsequently, the US intervened and occupied Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989.


US propped up rightwing regimes throughout the region which backed US banking and corporate oligarchs which exploited resources, workers and peasants.


But by the early 1990’s powerful social movements led by workers, peasants, middle class public employees/doctors and teachers challenged the alliance of domestic and US elite rulers. In Brazil the 300,000 strong rural workers movement (MST) succeeded in expropriating large fallow estates; in Bolivia indigenous miners and peasants including coca farmers overthrew the oligarchy. In Argentina general strikes and mass movements of unemployed workers overthrew corrupt rulers allied with City Bank. The success of the popular nationalist and populist movements led to democratic elections won by progressive and leftist Presidents throughout Latin America, especially Venezuela.


Venezuela: Democratic Election, Social Reforms and the Election of President Chavez


In 1989 the US backed President of Venezuela imposed austerity programs that provoked popular demonstrations which led to the government ordering the police and military to repress the demonstrators: several thousand were killed and wounded. Hugo Chavez, a military official, rebelled and supported the populer uprising.He was captured, arrested, later freed and ran for presidential office.. He was elected by a wide margin in 1999 on a program of social reforms, economic nationalism, an end of corruption and political independence.


Washington began a hostile campaign to pressure President Chavez to accept Washington’s (President Bush) global war agenda in Afghanistan and around the world. Chavez refused to submit. He declared, “You don’t fight terror with terror”. By late 2001 the US Ambassador met with the business elite and a sector of the military to oust President elect Chavez via a coup in April 2002. The coup lasted 24 hours ..Over a million people, mostly slum dwellers, marched to the Presidential palace, backed by military loyalists .They defeated the coup and restored President Chavez to power. He proceeded to win a dozen democratic elections and referendums over the following decade. President Chavez succeeded in large part because of his comprehensive program of socio-economic reforms favoring the workers, unemployed and middle class.


Over 2 million houses and apartments were built and distributed free to the popular classes; hundreds of clinics and hospitals provided free health care in the populous neighborhoods; universities, training schools and medical centers for low income students were built with free tuition.


Thousands in neighborhood community centers and ‘local collectives’ discussed and voted on social and political issues – including criticism and recall of local politicians, even elected Chavez’ officials.





Between 1998 and 2012, President Chavez won four straight Presidential elections,several congressional majorities and two national referendums, garnering between 56% and over 60% of the popular vote.After Chavez died President Maduro won elections in 2013 and 2018 but by a narrower margin. Democracy flourished, elections were free and open to all parties.


As a result of the inability of US backed candidates to win elections, Washington resorted to violent street riots,and appealed to the military to revolt and reverse the electoral results. The US applied sanctions beginning with President Obama and deepen with President Trump. The US seized billions of dollars in Venezuelan assets, and oil refineries in the US. The US selected a (non-elected) new President (Guaido) who was directed to subvert the military to revolt and seize power.


They failed: about one hundred soldiers out of 267,000 and a few thousand rightwing supporters heeded the call. The “opposition” revolt was a failure.


US failures were predictable as the mass of voter defended their socio-economic gains; their control of local power; their dignity and respect. Over 80% of the population including the majority of the opposition – rejected a US invasion.


US sanctions contributed to hyper-inflation and the death of 40,000 Venezuelan citizens due to the scarcity of medical products.


Conclusion


The US and the CIA followed in the footsteps of the past century seeking to overthrow the Venezuelan government and seize control of its oil and mineral resources. As in the past the US sought to impose a submissive dictatorship which would repress the popular movements and subvert the democratic electoral processes. Washington sought to impose a electoral apparatus which would ensure the election of submissive rulers as it did in the past and as it has done in recent times in Paraguay, Brazil and Honduras.


So far Washington has failed, in great part because of the peoples’ defense of their historical gains. Most poor and working people are aware that a US invasion and occupation will lead to mass killing and the destruction of sovereignty and dignity.


The people are aware of US aggression as well as the mistakes of the government.They are demanding corrections and rectifications .The government of President Maduro favors a dialogue with the non-violent opposition; Venezuelans are developing economic ties with Russia, China, Iran, Turkey, Bolivia, Mexico and other independent countries.


Latin America has experienced decades of US exploitation and domination; but it has also created a history of successful popular resistance including revolutions in Mexico, Bolivia and Cuba; successful social movements and voting outcomes in recent years in Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador and Venezuela.


President Trump and his murderous cohort of Pompeo, Bolton and Abrams have declared war against the Venezuelan people but they have thus far been defeated.


The struggle continues.

BACKGROUNDER

Raid of Wet’suwet’en part of Canada’s ongoing police violence against Indigenous Peoples

February 7, 2020

In a pre-dawn raid on Feb. 6, the RCMP arrested six land defenders of the Gidimt'en clan of the Wet'suwet'en nation at a blockade protesting the Coastal GasLink pipeline project. They were released later the same day but protestors at the Gidimt'en checkpoint await another raid by RCMP. Enforcing an injunction, the RCMP have said that they will use “the least amount of force necessary.” But protesters and observers believe any action will result in police violence.  

The RCMP has been called “an occupying foreign army” by Indigenous blogger M. Gouldhawke, who does so based on the fact that the RCMP still maintain their own camp in Wet’suwet’en territory and “continue to harass people at the long-running Unis’tot’en anti-pipeline camp.”

As a young woman, 27 years ago, I stood on the line in Clayoquot Sound with land protectors trying to block logging trucks from taking down an old-growth forest. I witnessed the process of intimidation and systematic arrests by police. However, most of the people on the line were Euro-Canadian, middle class or relatively privileged folks in fleece and wool.

They were not hit with billy clubs, or called derogatory names, such as “squaw” or “chug.” To the state, Indigenous protesters represent a much greater threat than environmentalists demanding a park.

 

An anti-logging protestor is carried away by RCMP after being arrested for blocking Macmillan Bloedel logging trucks at the entrance to Clayoquot Valley in July 1993. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chuck Stoody

Britain’s illegal rule

Canada’s unlawful domination over Indigenous Peoples was articulated from the moment of the country’s inception.

Prior, imperial rule was enacted through imperial policies from Great Britain, such as the Gradual Civilization Act, the pre-cursor to the invasive and controlling Indian Act.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police were established in 1873 as the North-West Mounted Police. They were the enforcers of the recently formed Anglo-settler state’s policies and to ensure that the Métis, Cree and Saulteaux did not take control in the northwest.

The Hudson’s Bay Company had recently closed shop and left behind a “European void” in the former Rupert’s Land, an area soon reclaimed by the Métis. Louis Riel was summoned to lead the Métis in their struggle to protect their community. He would later be hanged as a political prisoner, but he was not Canada’s first Indigenous political execution.

On Nov. 27, 1885, eight Indigenous men were also hanged by the state for their role in the Northwest Rebellion, also known as the North-West Resistance, as written about in William Cameron’s 1926 book Blood Red the Sun.

The North-West Resistance in 1885 was a five-month insurgency against the Canadian government, fought mainly by the Métis and their First Nations allies. Here Poundmaker, Big Bear, Big Bear’s son, Father Andre, Father Conchin, Chief Stewart, Capt. Deane, Mr. Robertson and the court interpreter in Regina, Sask. (O.B. Buell/Library and Archives Canada/C-001872), CC BY

Imperial domination can be seen as a matter of class, gender and “race” with white ruling-class supremacy. Prompted by upper-class advisers such as Donald Smith (a.k.a. Lord Strathcona), John Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, sent an army west to kill the Métis and take their lands, making way for the national railway project.

With the assistance of police, the state decimated the Métis at Red River in 1870, again in 1885 and then subsequently flooded the area with Anglo, Protestant, anti-French and anti-Native settlers. In 1961, the RCMP reprinted a Prince Albert Daily Herald article in their magazine, Quarterly, which claimed that Louis Riel was “mainly responsible for the unsettled conditions which led to the founding of the Force….”

According to a 2012 Globe and Mail article, strands of the rope used to hang Riel for treason were given to former Manitoba premier Duff Roblin as well as to the RCMP who guarded Riel in his cell.

Respecting sovereign Indigenous nations

Many Indigenous Peoples seek the earlier nation-to-nation relationships spelled out in the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and the British North America Act of 1867. And some Indigenous activists look forward to restoring sovereign and self-governing lands in a way prior to the imposition of empire in Turtle Island, imagining how this could look today.

Today, Indigenous people own less than one per cent of all lands in Canada. This process has clearly been both unlawful and unethical.

Later in life, when I worked in the Yukon co-facilitating a racism-reduction project, “Together for Justice,” I came to understand a few things about the RCMP. I learned that some individual RCMP members wanted to be seen as kind human beings, which is challenging given that they work for a gun-carrying, para-military force with a history of violence against Indigenous Peoples. At that point, the organization was contending with its role in a number of Indigenous prison deaths, including that of Raymond Silverfox, who perished in his cell from pneumonia at the age of 43.

The RCMP see themselves as having two roles: one of law enforcement and the other of community policing. It is through the second of these roles where their opportunity to be most helpful or humanitarian resides. If police were successful at addressing and stopping violence against women and keeping women and children safe, we would see a different kind of society. 

 

Ta'Kaiya, front, and Sii-am Hamilton, holding a sign, are seen standing with Indigenous youth demonstrating support for the Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs in northwest B.C. opposing the LNG pipeline project, in front of the B.C. legislature in Victoria on Jan. 24, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Dirk Meissner

The RCMP have long had the disdainful role of enforcing the Indian Act, restricting the movement of on-reserve status Indians, arresting Indigenous people for using ceremony, and for the kidnapping of Indigenous children from their families to the internment camps known as “residential schools.”

Here in Tiohtià: ke/Montreal, on the territory of the Kanien’kehá: ka, police are remembered for their role in the Oka Crisis/Mohawk resistance.

Last month, Indigenous young people occupied the B.C. Ministry of Energy, Mines and Petroleum office in Victoria in solidarity with Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs who have opposed the Coastal GasLink pipeline in northern B.C. The occupation ended with arrests by Victoria police.

While we know that prejudice may be rooted in social attitudes, and can be transformed, those who work for the RCMP are required to perform social violence, maintain the status quo and do what folk-singer Billy Bragg identified as “defend wealth.”

Author
Catherine Richardson

Director, First Peoples Studies Program, Associate Professor, School of Community and Public Affairs, Concordia University

 

Click here for more articles in our ongoing series about the TRC Calls to Action.

BALLOONS: WHAT HAVE THEY EVER DONE FOR US?

 The contribution of the balloon to the history of air power

by Squadron Leader Alan Riches

 In 1996 the Royal Air Force Historical Society established, in collaboration with its American sister organisation, the Air Force Historical Foundation, the Two Air Forces Award, which was to be presented annually on each side of the Atlantic in recognition of outstanding academic work by a serving officer or airman. It is intended to reproduce some of these papers from time to time in the Journal. This one was the winning RAF submission in 2001. Ed

 Introduction 

One of the more enjoyable aspects of my job in Defence Studies (RAF) is giving lectures on air power to University Air Squadron students. I often start by asking them the following question: when was a manned aircraft first used for a military purpose? A simple enough question; however, although there are often a number of ‘spotters’ in the audience, no one has yet given me the correct answer. In fact, it is widely accepted that the first military use of a manned aircraft occurred on 26 June 1794, when the French used a balloon to observe Austrian troop movements at the Battle of Fleurus. I use this question to make two points: firstly, that air power is not just a twentieth century phenomenon – its history goes back over two hundred years; and secondly, that for the first half of its history, air power could only be generated by means of the humble balloon. Given that balloons have played such a seminal part in the history of air power, it is perhaps surprising that so little has been written about their use. What may also be surprising is the wide range of military uses to which the balloon has been put. British Air Power Doctrine (AP 3000 3rd Edition), which was published last year, identifies seven core capabilities of air power and outlines the roles.

That are derived from them. For those who are not familiar with this publication, the seven core capabilities are: Information Exploitation; Control of the Air; Strategic Effect; Indirect and Direct Air Operations; Combat Support Air Operations; Force Protection; and 25 Sustainability. The purpose of this article is to show that a role for balloons has been found, or at least envisaged, in respect of all seven core capabilities. It is important to stress at the outset that I shall only be considering the use of balloons - not airships, dirigibles, blimps or zeppelins. The addition of a source of power – other than the wind - makes for an entirely different kind of platform, one which is beyond the scope of this article.

READ ON

#WATERISLIFE 

Buried in mud: Wildfires threaten North American water supplies

The Rim Fire burned 256,000 acres of the Stanislaus National Forest and Yosemite
 National Park in 2013. (USDA Forest Service, Chris Stewart)

February 11, 2020 

As rain offers a welcome relief to fire-scorched Australia, concerns over flash floods and freshwater contamination cast a shadow on the joy. Already, massive fish kills have been reported due to heavy ash and sediment in local stream.

Local reservoirs and municipal water supplies might become so polluted from the fires that the current water supply infrastructure will be challenged or could no longer treat the water.

Flash floods and water contamination after large-scale wildfires are emerging as real hazards in Australia and many other places, threatening drinking water, ecosystems, infrastructures and recreational activities.

Water supply from forests is at risk

In many ways, this is not surprising. Forests provide water to 90 per cent of the world’s most populous cities, and most of these forests already yield degraded water quality. Forests also provide other essential water services like flood control, hydroelectricity, fishing and recreational opportunities.

---

Read more: With costs approaching $100 billion, the fires are Australia's costliest natural disaster

---

Our recent global analyses clearly showed Australia’s water supply was at high risk from wildfires. We also found areas on every continent except Antarctica face similar risks. In North America, larger and more severe fires have created new challenges for forest and water managers.

The 2015 Stouts Creek Fire in Oregon led to more runoff and erosion. (Kevin Bladon)

Post-fire water hazards

Wildfires can have many detrimental impacts on water supplies. The effects can last for multiple decades and include drinking water pollution, reservoir sedimentation, flash floods and reduced recreational benefits from rivers.

These impacts represent a growing hazard as populations expand, and communities encroach onto forest landscapes.

Looking closer, wildfires change the amount of water that comes from upstream forests and the seasonal timing of water flows. Such changes complicate water resource allocation as less water might be available during periods of high demand.

When rainstorms follow large and severe wildfires, they tend to flush ash, nutrients, heavy metals and toxins, and sediments into streams and rivers. This contamination from wildfires causes problems for the health of downstream rivers and lakes, as well as safe drinking water production.

Mercury, which can be deposited on leaves and absorbed by plants, is a particular concern. During a fire, mercury may be re-emitted in large amounts and deposited in nearby lakes, wetlands and other water, where it accumulates in the food web, and into fish, that are caught and eaten by people. Indigenous communities living in fire-prone forests in Canada and who already struggle with mercury contamination might be particularly exposed.

Risks in North America

Polluted water creates many expensive, difficult and long-lasting challenges for the drinking water treatment process. For example, water remained difficult to treat for 15 years after after the 2002 Hayman fire in Colorado.

The quality of the post-fire water increased the chances of forming undesirable byproducts of water disinfection. These toxic chemicals had to be removed before the water could be supplied to more than half a million users in Denver.

But most of the fire-prone areas in North America lack large-scale vulnerability assessments of their municipal water supplies — and not because the risks are inconsequential.

In Canada and the United States, one large and severe wildfire might increase drinking water production costs by US$10 million to US$100 million. In southern California, mudslides from heavy rainfall after wildfires caused 23 deaths and produced more than US$100 million of structural damage in 2018.

Boulders moved in the 2018 Montecito mudslide. (WERF, 2018)

The financial burden of these changes is eventually carried by taxpayers. Adopting nature-friendly solutions to reduce severe wildfires in upstream forests, such as prescribed burns under controlled conditions, will lower the bill and provide better protection of water services.

Protecting the source

Forest health is already declining across Canada and the United States. This trend will likely continue because of climate change and land degradation linked to human activities.

Climate projections suggest that fires will happen more frequently and become more severe. Urban sprawl also increases the likelihood of these fires happening in the vicinity of homes.

Combined with increased rainfall and declining snowfall, this makes river flows and the quality of surface water less predictable. Consequently, water supplies become less reliable.

In light of these environmental changes and the inevitability of wildfires, countries like Canada and the United States can expect cascading hazards with impacts similar in magnitude to what is now happening in Australia.

Therefore, governments need to seize existing opportunities, such as leveraging existing data and taking advantage of growing computing power, to measure wildfire risk to water supplies. A tailored wildfire-water risk reduction strategy can help achieve better source water protection, improve infrastructure and foster preventive disaster planning.

There is no doubt we will learn more as our knowledge of Indigenous forest management practices improves. Instead of reinventing the wheel we must try to keep water in the landscape by restoring wetlands, and accept a helping hand when offered.

Because ultimately, forests and clean water resources are of paramount importance to our own future.

Authors

1. François-Nicolas Robinne
   Postdoctoral fellow in Environmental Geography, University of Alberta
2. Dennis W. Hallema
   Research Assistant Professor, North Carolina State University
3. Kevin D. Bladon
   Assistant Professor, Oregon State University

Disclosure statement

François-Nicolas Robinne receives funding from Global Water Futures and the Canadian Partnership for Wildland Fire Science (Canada Wildfire).

Dennis Hallema receives funding from the USDA Forest Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Kevin Bladon receives funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Forest Service.

Working People of California

CLICK ABOVE TO DOWNLOAD

Edited by
Danial Conford

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford

© 1995 The Regents of the University of California 

Working People of California

---

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

1  WORKERS IN CALIFORNIA BEFORE 1900

1  Brutal Appetites  The Social Relations of the California Mission

2  Chinese Livelihood in Rural California  The Impact of Economic Change, 1860-1880

2  WORKERS AND GROUP IDENTITY

3  Dishing It Out  Waitresses and the Making of Their Unions in San Francisco, 1900-1941

4  Okies and the Politics of Plain-Folk Americanism

5  James v. Marinship  Trouble on the New Black Frontier

3  WORKERS ON STRIKE

6  Racial Domination and Class Conflict in Capitalist Agriculture  The Oxnard Sugar Beet Workers' Strike of 1903

7  Raiz Fuerte  Oral History and Mexicana Farmworkers

8  The Big Strike

9  A Promise Fulfilled  Mexican Cannery Workers in Southern California

4  WORKERS AND POLITICS

10  To Save the Republic  The California Workingmen's Party in Humboldt County

11  Reform, Utopia, and Racism  The Politics of California Craftsmen

12  Mobilizing the Homefront  Labor and Politics in Oakland, 1941-1951

5  WORKERS IN POST—WORLD WAR II CALIFORNIA

13  Cesar Chavez and the Unionization of California Farmworkers

14  Why Aren't High-Tech Workers Organized?  Lessons in Gender, Race,  and Nationality from Silicon Valley

15  Fontana  Junkyard of Dreams

Notes

CONTRIBUTORS

CREDITS

FROM THE ARCHIVES I RECOMMEND MIKE DAVIS BOOKS AS GREAT READING COVER STORY

The American Earthquake Mike Davis and the Politics of Disaster By Adam Shatz

PHONING MIKE DAVIS is a good way of getting acquainted with his answering machine. It is a virtually futile way of getting hold of the celebrated author of City of Quartz. Before arriving in Los Angeles, where Davis lives and writes, I'd had no luck reaching him. Sitting on his porch on a warm evening this past June, I understood why: The phone rang incessantly, and Davis never once rose from his chair.

The calls last from morning to midnight. It might be the photographer Richard Avedon or the architect I.M. Pei with a request for one of Davis's legendary tours of L.A. It could be Backlash author Susan Faludi, whom Davis has introduced to young gang members for her upcoming book on masculinity, or former Crip leader Dewayne Holmes, a Davis confidante who works in state senator Tom Hayden's L.A. office. It might also be a Danish curator mounting an exhibit on the postmodern city, an organizer with the hotel workers' union, a student at UCLA's Cesar Chavez Center, or (very likely) a Hollywood screenwriter. What this motley crew has in common is a belief that Mike Davis holds the keys to understanding the city of Los Angeles, and much else. In his writings on Southern California, the American working class, and the lives of the dispossessed, Davis offers dark parables of a post-liberal America poised on the brink of ruin.

Mike Davis's reputation rests largely on City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (Vintage), his 1990 chronicle of the city's history from the socialist cooperative of Llano del Río to Blade Runner­style capitalism. The book appeared at a serendipitous moment: A full decade of Reaganism had remade American society in the image of Southern California, with its volatile mix of squalid inner cities and gated communities. But City of Quartz had merits of its own: Here was an urban history that took to heart Lewis Mumford's admonishment that rebuilding a city "involves the larger task of rebuilding our civilization." In arresting meditations on homeowners' revolts, Daryl Gates's police department, Frank Gehry's aesthetics, Anglo-Latino conflicts within the Catholic Church, and the death of the steel industry, Davis took the reader on a kaleidoscopic tour of contemporary L.A. Even as he offered vivid street-smart reportage (and frequently breathtaking prose), Davis projected a distinctive historical vision, a New Left Marxism infused with working-class nostalgia--and apocalyptic rage.

"Contemporary urban America," he flatly declared, "is more like Victorian England than Walt Whitman's or La Guardia's New York. In Los Angeles, once-upon-a-time a demi-paradise of free beaches, luxurious parks, and 'cruising strips,' genuinely democratic space is all but extinct. The Oz-like archipelago of Westside pleasure domes--a continuum of tony malls, arts centers, and gourmet strips--is reciprocally dependent upon the social imprisonment of the third-world service proletariat who live in increasingly repressive ghettoes and barrios.... Even as the walls have come down in Eastern Europe, they are being erected all over Los Angeles." Two years after the book's publication came the L.A. riots, lending Davis's analysis a luster of prophecy.

A more curious aspect of City of Quartz's appeal was its design, marrying postmodern cool and Bogartian machismo. Robert Morrow's photograph of the eerily glamorous turquoise observatory of the Metropolitan Detention Center graced the cover, while William Gibson's back-cover blurb proclaimed the book "more cyberpunk than any work of fiction could ever be." Although Davis--with his boyish frame, liquid-blue eyes, and gently weathered face--lacks any hint of menace in person, his mug shot on the inside jacket radiated tough guy: arms folded defiantly, dressed in black, glowering at the reader. He was described as "a native son" and "former meat cutter and long-distance truck driver" who incidentally "teaches urban theory at the Southern California Institute of Architecture." The packaging paid off. City of Quartz became a cult hit, appealing to readers far beyond its target audience of left-leaning urban geographers and historians--including Bruce Willis, a big donor to Newt Gingrich, who was recently glimpsed reading the book in a New York Times Magazine feature.

Meanwhile, the man who blasted suburban escapism and took us down L.A.'s mean streets has turned his attention to the furies of nature, a move that may puzzle many of his admirers. The Ecology of Fear, which will be published next spring by Metropolitan Books, is a richly eccentric study of the social and political significance of natural disasters. Treating environmental history as a window into "larger class struggles," Davis argues that justice and ecology amount to the same thing in the Land of Sunshine. Unchecked urbanization has not only laid waste to democratic public space but "transgressed environmental common-sense," thus inviting nature's revenge. A work of distinctly millennial cadences, The Ecology of Fear conjures up a catastrophe-prone landscape governed by a geological "dialectic of ordinary disaster" and visited occasionally by cougars, snakes, and killer bees. The fire next time, it seems, may come from the sky as well as the streets.

IN THE PAST few years, Davis has retreated from the public-intellectual circuit, rarely granting interviews. "I'm really not that interesting," he protests weakly. Coming from a man so attentive to the creation of his literary persona, the self-effacement can ring a little hollow. But behind it lies the defensiveness of a proud outsider uneasy with celebrity. "Mike is a very romantic guy who has this image of himself as a working-class revolutionary," says journalist Alexander Cockburn, a longtime friend and admirer of Davis. For the better part of his adult life, Davis has been on the road: He was still making ends meet as a truck driver long after many of his friends on the left found permanent sanctuary in the academy.

With City of Quartz came the fruits--and the bruising ironies--of mainstream recognition. L.A.'s poor have seen little improvement in their lives since the riots, while Davis, who took up his pen to dramatize their plight, has acquired a small piece of the California dream, the very idea he set out to debunk. He received a $50,000 advance for The Ecology of Fear. He won a Getty Fellowship. And he entered the ranks of L.A. homeowners, the vanguard of complacency in City of Quartz, moving into a modest gray-stucco house in Pasadena, just south of the San Gabriel Mountains. (He lives there with the Mexican political artist, Alessandra Moctezuma, his fifth wife.) "Ever since I got a mortgage, I've been corrupted," Davis half jokes. "I've been dreaming about my lawn and worrying about my property values."

That said, he still has to hustle to make a living. A tenure-track position continues to elude Davis, who averages five adjunct courses a semester at various schools. "Mike is a brilliant loose cannon and also a kind of wonderful political journalist, and neither of these would be accepted by peers at a major university," says Davis's friend and erstwhile employer, Ed Soja, a UCLA geographer.

Davis, who never completed his Ph.D. in history at UCLA, has his own misgivings about the academy. As the father of two school-age children, he needs the security of a steady income, but he has not made it easy for departments to bring him on board. This spring the University of Southern California nearly offered him an endowed chair in American history. Davis, who had spray painted the university's walls with anti-Vietnam graffiti in 1965, was thrilled but warned administrators, "You'll have intractable problems if you hire me." When friends in the food-service workers' union informed him that the university was contracting out the jobs of its cafeteria workers, Davis assailed the school in the L.A. Weekly as "the most reactionary institution in L.A." A top administrator accused him of slander, and the job was given to someone else.

Even when his extracurricular politics are not the issue, Davis's pedagogical practices might well cause a university to think twice about tenuring him. Once, while teaching at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, he devised an experiment to prove that one could feel reasonably safe in any neighborhood in L.A. in the middle of the night. One of his students, a crown prince of Fiji, decided to test this idea in Hollywood. There he met a handful of drug dealers, and they ended up having a marvelous time--until they were jumped by another group of dealers, who stabbed and nearly killed the prince. Davis recalls: "When I visited him in the hospital, I told him how sorry I was, but he said, 'No, Mike, I'll never be able to thank you for this. I would never have experienced anything like it in Fiji.'" Even so, Davis was almost fired over the incident. "I had to lie low for a while after that," he says with a smile.

THOUGH DAVIS may have become an angry messenger from the streets of L.A., he doesn't originally hail from the city. "I'm a white, middle-aged working-class guy who grew up in the far outer suburbs that turn out into the desert," he says. "That's my existential relation to the metropolis."

Davis was born in the dusty California town of Fontana in 1946. (The same year, a group of Fontanan motorcyclists founded the Hell's Angels.) The Fontana of Davis's childhood wasn't paradise, but there were plenty of decent jobs in Henry Kaiser's steel mill and in trucking. The unions were strong, and management relatively liberal. Mike's father, Dwight Davis, worked in town as a meat cutter. Fontana looms large in the Davis imagination, largely as a place of lost possibilities: Over the ensuing years, Fontana's steel industry was gutted, and what replaced it were inflated land prices and untrammeled development. Indeed, remembering the fate of his hometown inspires Davis to turn toward extravagant metaphors of disaster. As he wrote in the final chapter of City of Quartz, "The former primary steelworks itself looks like Dresden, Hiroshima, or perhaps the most fitting image, Tokyo in April 1945 after three months of concentrated fire-bombing with Kaiser-made 'goop.'"

Davis's family eventually moved to Bostonia, a hamlet east of San Diego--and the crucible for the writer's catastrophist sensibility. A number of residents of this military town imagined themselves on the brink of annihilation, thanks to rumors spread by the John Birch Society that an elite unit of Chinese troops on the Mexican border was poised to invade San Diego. On the weekends, families would go to the Marine recruiting depot to hear fiery anticommunist oratory and watch soldiers toss flamethrowers into the sky. Davis joined the Devil Pups (the Marines' answer to the Boy Scouts) and counted the days before he would "go somewhere in Asia to kill people." For a while, he was "a real Cold War fanatic."

When a heart attack left Davis's father temporarily disabled, his mother took her sixteen-year-old son out of school and put him to work at the Bostonia meat factory. And there he might have stayed had it not been for a black civil rights activist named Jim Stone.

The husband of Davis's cousin Carol, Stone cut a bold, charismatic figure. In 1962 Davis accompanied Stone to a demonstration against the all-white San Diego branch of the Bank of America. It was a kind of conversion experience conducted under the most harrowing conditions. "A group of redneck sailors drenched us with lighter fluid, and one of the guys started flicking his lighter," he recalls. Under Stone's tutelage, Davis transformed himself into a political activist, working at the San Diego offices of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). He finished high school and landed a full scholarship to Reed College.

His stay in Oregon, however, was short and unhappy. Painfully aware of being a working-class kid among the children of doctors and lawyers, he became belligerent, ultimately getting himself expelled for living illegally in his girlfriend's dorm. So Davis returned to full-time activism. In 1964 he joined Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), spending the next three years organizing sit-ins and protests on the West Coast. As the Vietnam War escalated, he grew further radicalized, eventually joining the Communist Party. For nearly two years, he managed the party's bookstore in L.A., not far from FBI headquarters.

In 1969, after being fired by Dorothy Healey, the regional party leader, for hounding the Russian cultural attaché out of the store--Davis despised the Soviets and didn't like them snooping around--he enrolled in a teamsters' opportunity program. For the next four years, he hauled 240-foot trailers filled with Barbie dolls out of L.A., acquiring an encyclopedic knowledge of the city as well as of Western geography. In his spare time, he tried to master Marx's Capital and Sartre's Search for a Method and paid visits to Herbert Marcuse. Fellow left-wing truckers were rather hard to come by. "At night we'd go out to topless bars, and I'd blurt out, 'I'm a communist,' and they'd say, 'Dick's a Jehovah's Witness. Let's have another drink.'"

One day, Davis decided he had had enough and that he wanted to resume his education. A particularly jolting experience clinched his decision. "I had this job with a bus-tour company when suddenly this insanely violent strike broke out. A strikebreaker ran a bus over one of our guys, and next thing I knew I was in a room with forty guys voting on whether each of us is gonna put up $400 to hire a hit man to kill the head of the strikebreakers. I said, 'Hey, guys, this is just crazy,' and made the best speech of my life. I was outvoted thirty-nine to one. I thought to myself, 'Typical American workers'; I think I said 'pussies.' Instead of coming up with a political strategy, they reach for their guns as soon as they see a scab driving their bus. And here I am about to become a freshman at UCLA, and I'm going to get arrested for criminal conspiracy." Ironically, Davis was saved by the L.A. Police Department, which apprehended the hit men for drunk driving and seized their guns. The Westwood campus started to look like a pretty good alternative to trucking, given the dues the Teamsters union seemed to require of its members.

READ ON