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August
5, 2003
Terrorism
and Political Trials
The
View from Bolivia
By
FORREST HYLTON
(The following article was originally
written in Spanish for Pulso,
a Bolivian newsweekly.)
The background is as follows: in El Alto, an Aymara
city of 700,000 on the upper edge of La Paz, at 6:30 AM on the
morning of April 10, members of the Body of Special Investigations
of the Police (CEIP), under District Attorney René Arzabe,
entered the home of Claudio Ramírez, 47, militant of the
opposition party, Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), and former
mayor of his town, La Asunta, in the sub-tropical Yungas region
north of La Paz. The police, dressed in bulletproof vests and
ski masks, sporting automatic weapons, surprised Francisco "Pacho"
Cortés, 39, a former leader of the national peasant federation
in Colombia, ANUC, in the shower, throwing him to the floor naked
and kicking him, telling him to dress, and parading he, Claudio
Ramírez, and a coca growers' trade union leader, Carmelo
Peñaranda, 30-along with Ramírez' daughter and
niece, Nelly Ramírez, 17, and Betty Nina, 18-before television
cameras as leaders of a new "terrorist network" in
Bolivia.
The evidence: 36 7.62 caliber bullets
and a gas grenade, a 64-page "organic constitution"
of the Bolivian National Liberation Army (ELN), three PVC tubes,
wire and silicone. The bullets and grenade belong to Claudio's
son Omar, who was conscripted to fight against rebels in the
Cochabamba water wars of April 2000. The construction materials
belong to Claudio. They are to finish building his house.
On April 10, the press had been called
to meet at the peasant market in Villa Tunari in El Alto at 5
AMby the U.S. Embassy, not the Bolivian government. At 11 AM,
five hours after the arrests, drugs-nearly three kilos of cocaine-were
found in plastic bags. Neighborhood witnesses testify they saw
two women from the antinarcotics police, FELCN, go into the house
with said bags.
As far as the "evidence" for
terrorism, the District Attorney was of two minds: the group
had a FARC banner but ELN literature. When Bolivian President
Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, who appears to have Alzheimers,
spoke about the case at the Heads of State Conference in Cuzco,
Peru, he named Cortés as a leader of the Colombian ELN,
come to open a southern front among the coca growers in the eastern
lowlands of Bolivia. Until Uribe was confronted by the Colombian
Committee for Political Prisoners, his administration did not
deny or confirm the charges against the citizen of his cattle
republic, but the Minister of Justice and the Interior, Fernando
Londoño, himself a rightwing fanatic, has since gone on
record saying that Cortés is not wanted for subversion
in Colombia, and has enjoyed government protection as a social
movement leader. In fact, on the advice of his government, which
told him it was becoming harder to guarantee his security, Cortés
had arrived in Bolivia 4 days before his arrest in order to buy
a house and settle his family there. Since Pacho's arrest, his
wife and children in Bogotá have had to move twice because
of paramilitary threats against them. Pacho's son Andrés,
17, has had to move to Bolivia to try to free his father.)
Political trials are of recent vintage
in Latin America. Until the so-called "transition to democracy"
in the early 1980s, the preferred methods of confronting social
protest and armed insurgency had been torture, disappearance,
and forced exile, the proportion between them depending on the
period and country in question. While these methods have not
disappeared-in Colombia they continue to be preferred-the law
is now considered the most effective instrument for guaranteeing
the continuity of the ruling order: neoliberal democracy. Within
such a system, political trials delimit what Bourdieu called
the political field, defining the limits between acceptable political
protest and criminal actions. These cases cannot be considered
in national context, because they are part of the imperial political
environment; they define the reach of U.S. foreign policy.
The cases of the Colombian Francisco
Cortés, and the Bolivians Carmelo Peñaranda, Claudio
Ramírez, Nelly Ramírez and Betty Nina speak for
themselves. According to the Colombian government-which is making
"peace" with the very paramilitaries who drove Cortés,
like thousands of others, to flee his country-Cortés is
a peasant leader who was offered official protection under the
Ministry of the Interior in 1999. If he had been an insurgent
in the FARC or the ELN, most likely the State, or its paramilitary
allies in the counterinsurgency struggle, would already have
killed him. Not to speak of Claudio and Carmelo, who are ex-peasant
leaders-there's no armed insurgency in Bolivia. (Although there
are paramilitaries.) Commentators as diverse as Freddy Morales
(center-left) and Cayetano Llobet (extreme reactionary) agree
that it is a crude frame up, and due to the fact that the Bolivian
press was notified of events by the U.S. Embassy, many see the
case as a clear example of growing U.S. intervention in "domestic"
Bolivian politics. It points toward some kind of extraterritorial
law, of the kind operative for foreigners in the principal Chinese
ports before the Japanese occupation in 1942.
Since the "April 10th" case
will define the reach of U.S. antiterrorist policies in Latin
America, it is worth summing up some cases that, in the name
of the struggle against terrorism, the law has been used to put
a stop to social protest. At the beginning of the Nixon era,
the Black Panthers confronted a series of political trials that,
along with internal divisions fanned-when not created by-the
FBI, led to their undoing as the vanguard of the freedom movement
in the U.S. In 1969, the New York 21 were indicted on conspiracy
charges tantamount to terrorism, and by 1971, by which time they
had been acquitted of all charges, the Black Liberation Army
had formed (BLA). That year, Nixon declared war on drugs, which
began to infect some wings of the Black Panther Party soon after.
It is thanks to the arduous struggles of organic intellectuals
of a destroyed movement, some of them in prison, that we know
these facts of contemporary U.S. history.
Another case is "April 7th"
in Italy, the country in which was formed, following the hot
autumn of 1969, the most radical proletarian and student movement
of the North Atlantic world. In the context of the deep polarization
that set in following the assassination of Aldo Moro by the Red
Brigades on March 16, 1978, on April 7, 1979, renowned political
philosopher Antonio Negri, along with many anonymous worker and
student militants of the far left, were detained on charges of
terrorism. Some of them were indeed engaged in clandestine armed
struggle, but not in coordination with the Red Brigades, while
others like Negri, belonged to groups that committed crimes according
to the Italian penal code at the time-but did not engage terrorism
or have a centralized command structure. According to historian
Alessandro Portelli, the "Case of April 7th" was fundamental
to the implementation of the new "emergency" legislation,
which did away with legal subtleties and constitutional niceties,
while philosopher Massimo Cacciari wrote, "the lack of evidence
is itself used as evidence of the ability with which terrorists
concealed themselves" (quoted in Portelli, The Death of
Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories, SUNY Press, 1991, 247). To
build the case, the State Attorney relied almost exclusively
on militants who had turned state's evidence (pentiti).
Thus the most powerful and radical student/proletarian
movement of the North Atlantic in the 1960s and 70s was reduced,
in the official story, to a terrorist conspiracy directed by
one group, the Red Brigades, and one revolutionary philosopher,
Antonio Negri. The imperial link came before the case itself:
beginning in 1969, in the face of rising student and worker militancy,
the CIA was involved in formulating the "strategy of tension":
terrorist acts perpetrated by the repressive organs of the Italian
State and its neofascist allies, but attributed to the far left,
like the 1980 Bologna bombing which killed 80 people in a train
station. (It is worth noting that one of the men behind the
attack, Stefano della Chiae was involved in the ultra-right wing
"cocaine coup"-so-called because of the source of funding-directed
by Gen. García Meza in Bolivia in 1980.)
Mumia Abu Jamal's is another interesting
case, because in terms of criminalizing dissent, it is the one
most similar to the case of Pacho, Carmelo, Claudio, Nelly and
Betty. Abu Jamal was an award-winning journalist and known as
the "voice of the voiceless" in his native city, Philadelphia,
where had helped found the local chapter of the Black Panther
Party and served as Minister of Information, falling under the
surveillance eye of the FBI and the Philadephia police, run by
Frank Rizzo, when he was 15. At the end of the 1970s, when Mumia
asked Frank Rizzo about his handling of the Move 9 case at a
press conference, Rizzo publicly threatened him. On December
9, 1981, Mumia was arrested as the principal suspect of the murder
of Daniel Faulkner, and in 1982 he was condemned to death. Since
each and every one of the pieces of evidence used by then-District
Attorney Ed Rendell have been exposed by the defense as false
or unreliable, it is clear that if they can murder Mumia with
legal sanction, they can kill any social activist, especially
if she is black or Latina.
If District Attorney Arzabe "proves"
that Pacho, Carmelo, Claudio, Betty and Nelly are "guilty"
of the crimes of which they are accused, it will give Latin American
governments the green light to use the law, in the name of the
war against drugs and terror, to criminalize all social protest-a
vain attempt to block the transition from the neoliberal model,
which has collapsed throughout the continent, to another, as
yet undefined. Such criminalization of protest might well encourage
the armed insurgency it is ostensibly designed to combat. One
has only to look at Colombian history for lessons.
The draconian Law of Citizen Security-which,
according to La Prensa, requires the return of the butcher
of February 12/13, Carlos Sánchez Berzaín, as Minister
of Government, to impose a strong hand-may convince many activists
that legal channels of protest are drying up. If non-violent
direct action like road blockades are punishable by law with
up to ten years imprisonment, what incentive is there to avoid
political violence? Which raises the question: is this what
the authorities want? Or will it be, as Engels said, a case
of the unintended consequences of historical action?
Forrest Hylton
is conducting doctoral research in history in Bolivia and can
be reached at forresthylton@hotmail.com.
Weekend Edition Features for August 2/3, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Meet the Real WMD Fabricator: Rolf
Ekeus
Tamara
R. Piety
Nike's Full Court Press Breaks Down
Francis
Boyle
My Alma Mater, the University of Chicago, is a Moral Cesspool
David
Vest
Sons of Paleface: Pictures from Death's Other Side
Neve Gordon
Nightlife in Jerusalem
Uri
Avnery
Their Master's Voice:
Bush, Blair and Intelligence Snafus
Robert
Fisk
Paternalistic Democracy for Iraq
Jerry
Kroth
Israel, Yellowcake and the Media
Noah Leavitt
What's Driving the Liberian Bloodbath: Is the US Obligated to
Intervene?
Saul
Landau
The Film Industry: Business and Ideology
Ron Jacobs
One Big Prison Yard: the Meaning of George Jackson
Thomas
Croft
In the Deep, Deep Rough: Reflections on Augusta
Amadi Ajamu
Def Sham: Russell Simmons New Black Leader?
Poets'
Basement
Vega, Witherup, Albert and Fleming
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