Octubre, mes de la revolucion de 1944!

:: No hay respuestas magicas ni metodos milagrosos para resolver los problemas que enfrentamos, simplemente los de siempre: busqueda de entendimiento, educacion, organization, accion... y la clase de compromiso que persiste apesar de las tentaciones de desilucion, apesar de los tantos fracasos y pocos exitos, inspirado ...por la esperanza de un futuro mas brillante (Noam Chomsky)

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A finales del siglo XIX la economía guatemalteca comenzó a depender enormemente en la industria cafetera. Dicha transición intensificó la explotación colonial, el racismo y el autoritarianismo en el país... A través de medidas legales y sociales los campesinos se vieron obligados a dejar sus pequeños cultivos y a comenzar a trabajar en plantaciones. En las plantaciones los campesinos estaban a la disposición de los hacendados (dueños de las plantaciones)... Los hacendados usaron la autoridad que tenían sobre los campesinos para meterlos a la cárcel injustamente y abusar de ellos física y sexualmente.

Al comienzo del siglo XX, distintos grupos campesinos demandaron que el gobierno interveniera en contra del mal trato de los hacendados... Por diez años, entre 1944 y 1954 el gobierno intentó de una manera tangible responder al clamor del pueblo...

En junio de 1944 estudiantes universitarios y maestros de la capital, desafiaron el poder del dictador Jorge Ubico con una huelga y manifestaciones públicas a las que pronto se agregaron elementos de todos los sectores sociales.

Los movimientos pacíficos de junio derrocaron a Ubico. El triunvirato militar que les siguió en el mando, entregó luego la presidencia al general Ponce, a quien la Asamblea Nacional nombró presidente provisional. Pero como el pueblo de Guatemala ya no estaba dispuesto a soportar otra dictadura militar, el 20 de octubre de 1944 el Ejército Nacional apoyado por las masas trabajadoras, se sublevó y derrocó al general Ponce.

Después de las elecciones democráticas celebradas en diciembre de 1944, dos presidentes reformistas, Juan José Arévalo y su sucesor Jacabo Árbenz, restringieron muchas de las prerrogativas y privilegios de la oligarquía cafetera... Los nuevos gobiernos ratificaron una constitución social-democrática, restringieron el trabajo forzado, legalizaron los sindicatos, promulgaron un código de trabajo, expandieron el derecho al voto, y aprobaron una reforma agraria de gran escala...

El periodo de reforma terminó abruptamente en 1954, cuando la CIA derrocó a Árbenz.

Remember the Immigrant

We serve a God who directs us to care especially for those most vulnerable in society. Our Scriptures tell us of God's special concern for the "alien" or the "stranger," or as more contemporary translations say--the immigrant.

For the Lord our God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes. God defends the cause of the orphan and the widow, and loves the immigrant, giving the immigrant food and clothing. And we are to love those who are immigrants, for God's people were immigrants in Egypt (Deuteronomy 10:17-19)

We ask God to open our eyes to the struggles of immigrant workers, for we know that:

We must not take advantage of a hired worker who is poor and needy, whether the worker is a resident or immigrant living in our town. We must pay the worker the wages promptly because the worker is poor and counting on it. (Deuteronomy 24:14)

God's desire is that those who build houses may live in them,

And that those who plant may eat. (Isaiah 65:22)

And yet we know this is not possible for many in our midst.

We know of:
farmworkers who cannot feed their families,
construction workers who have no homes,
nursing home workers who have no health care,
restaurant workers who could not afford a meal in the restaurant.


We know that too many immigrant workers among us are not receiving the fruits of their labor, nor the justice required by the courts.

God charges our judges to hear disputes and judge fairly, whether the case involves citizens or immigrants. (Deut. 1:16)

But our laws do not adequately protect immigrants. Our legal and social service programs exclude many immigrants. Our education programs undervalue immigrant children.

God tells us that the community is to have the same rules for citizens and for immigrants living among us. This is a lasting ordinance for the generations to come. Citizens and immigrants shall be the same before the Lord. (Numbers 15:15)

When an immigrant lives in our land,

We will not mistreat him or her. We will treat an immigrant as one of our native born. We will love an immigrant as ourselves, for God's people were once immigrants in Egypt. (Leviticus 19:33-34)

And a special word to those who employ immigrant farmworkers:

Make sure immigrants get a day of rest. (Exodus 23:12)

To those who craft our immigration laws and policies, we lift up God's command:

Do not deprive the immigrant or the orphan of justice, or take the cloak of the widow as a pledge. Remember that God's people were slaves in Egypt and the Lord our God redeemed them from there. (Deut. 24:17-18)

To all of us who seek to do God's will, help us to:

Love one another as God has loved us. Help us to treat immigrants with justice and compassion that God shows to each of us.


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This was one of the prayers that were shared last night at the rally in opposition to the new immigration law in Arizona. It was distributed in pamphlets by Interfaith Worker Justice (www.iwj.org).

More info about the rally:
http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2010/may/29/rally-in-opposition-to-immigration-law/

Hegemony

Writing from prison during the 1920s, Gramsci compared two Marxist notions of social control: domination, direct physical coercion of the people by state institutions like the police, army, and law in political society; and hegemony, ideological control through the production of consent by unions, schools, churches, families, and so on in civil society. Civil institutions, Gramsci thought, incalculated in people an entire system of values, beliefs, and morality that he found supportive of the established order and its dominating classes. Workers identified their own good with the good of the bourgeoisie and  helped to maintain the status quo rather than revolting. Hegemony is a worldview diffused through socialization into every area of daily life that, when internalized, becomes "common sense." Hegemony mystifies power relations, camouflages the causes of public issues and events, encourages fatalism and political passivity, and justifies the deprivation of the many so that few can live well. Hegemony works to induce oppressed people to consent to their own exploitation and misery.

In his concept of "American Fordism" Gramsci explored the development of a new kind of hegemonic regime in which trade unions would be subdued, workers would be offered a higher real standard of living, and the ideological legitimation of this new kind of capitalism would be embodied in cultural practices and social relations extending far beyond the workplace. More simply, Fordist capitalism might achieve institutional stability through the achievement of willing consent (keeping people happy) through mass consumption.

Revolutionary political transformation, Gramsci said, was not possible without a crisis of ideological hegemony--changes in civil as well as political society. Socialist movements, Gramsci concluded, had to create "counter-hegemony" to break ideological and cultural bonds and penetrate the false world of appearances as a prelude to the making of new ideas and values conducive to human liberation (Gramsci 1971 ed.; Boggs 1976).
(Peet & Hartwick, 2009)

Guatemala:

you fall heavily on my chest.
i cannot breathe.
a smile silenced by hunger.
a heart turn cold by powder.

oh hands chipped by the sun.
oh backs broken by labor.
tell me you can see beauty.
tell me you want to go on.
tell me you are still waiting for tomorrow's sun.

Critics of modern development

Ivan Illich

"We have embodied our world-view in our institutions and are now their prisoners. Factories, news media, hospitals, governments and schools produce goods and services packaged to contain our view of the world. We--the rich--conceive of progress as the expansion of these establishments. We conceive of heightened mobility as luxury and safety packaged by General Motors or Boeing. We conceive of improving the general well-being as increasing the supply of doctors and hospitals, which package health along with protracted suffering. We have come to identify our need for further learning with demand for even longer confinement to classrooms. In other words, we have packaged education with custodial care, certification for jobs, and the right to vote, and wrapped them all together with indoctrination in the Christian, liberal or communist virtues." (Illich 1997: 95)

Illich found the rational human decreasingly able to shape his or her environment because one's energies were consumed in procuring new models of the latest goods. According to Illich, rich nations imposed a straightjacket of traffic jams, hospital confinements, and classrooms on poor nations and called it "development." Yet, more people, quantitatively and relatively, suffered from hunger, pain and exposure than at the end of WWII... For Illich, the "benefits" of the modern world, even its medical systems, education, and democracy, were far from being obvious. The direction this takes is toward total abandonment of development because it inevitably involves growth that will ultimately prove falal. (From Peet and Hartwick, 2009)

Arturo Escobar

"Development can be described as an apparatus .... that links forms of knowledge about the Third World with the deployment of forms of power and intervention, resulting in the mapping and production of Third World societies.... By means of this discourse, individuals, governments and communities are seen as 'underdeveloped' (or placed under conditions in which they tend to see themselves as such), and are treated accordingly" (Escobar 1992: 23)

"Development was--and continues to be for the most part--a top-down, ethnocentric, and technocratic approach, which treated people and cultures as abstracts concepts, statistical figures to be moved up and down in the charts of 'progress'" (Escobar 1995: 44)

Civilization is not an incurable disease [Gandhi, 1910]

"The people of Europe today live in better built houses than they did a hundred years ago. This is considered an emblem of civilization, and this is also a matter to promote bodily happiness....

Formerly, they wore skins and used as their weapons spears. Now... they wear a variety of clothing, and, instead of spears they carry with them revolvers... If people of a certain country, who have hitherto not been in the habit of wearing much clothing, boots, etc., adopt European clothing, they are supposed to have a become civilized out of savagery...
Formerly, the fewest men wrote books that were most valuable. Now, anybody writes and prints anything he likes and poisons people's mind..

This is considered the height of civilization... As men progress... Men will not need the use of their hands and feet... Everything will be done by machinery.

Formerly, when people wanted to fight with one another, they measured between them their bodily strength; now it is possible to take away thousands of lives by one man working behind a gun from a hill. This is civilization...
Formerly, men worked in the open air only so much as they liked. Now, thousands of workmen meet together and for the sake of maintenance work in factories or mines. Their condition is worse than that of beasts. They are obliged to work, at the risk of their lives, at most dangerous occupations, for the sake of millionaires...
Formerly, men were made slaves under physical compulsion, now they are enslaved by temptation of money and of the luxuries that money can buy...
Formerly, people had two or three meals consisting of homemade bread and vegetables' now, they require something to eat every two hours; so that they have hardly leisure for anything else...

What more need I say? ... Civilization seeks to increase bodily comforts, and it fails miserably even in doing so...

[The English] deserve our sympathy. They are a shrewd nation and I, therefore, believe they will cast off the evil. They are enterprising and industrious, and their mode of thought is not inherently immoral. Neither are they bad at heart. I, therefore, respect them. Civilization is not an incurable disease, but it should never be forgotten that the English people are at present afflicted by it."