The Minga of Resistance : Policy Making From Below
Poole, Deborah
NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS report : u.s. policy The Minga of Resistance: Policy Making From Below Colombia’s minga marches through bogotá in november with a banner telling barack...
...Instead, the group’s members suggested that he take the initiative to listen to their words...
...A imposition...
...What begins as a refusal to engage in the idiom of national or even ethnic community thus ends as a condemnation of policies that have led to a situation in which people, like the ACIN, are moving on their own, without waiting for either nations or policies to tell them what they can and cannot achieve...
...Thus the ACIN’s call to join in minga, as a name for a collective action that is at once local and international, gains force from both its cultural and historical references to a shared experience of subjugation...
...3. LAPD report, 9, 50...
...Treating Bolivia as a Sovereign Partner 1. Author interview, October 2008...
...Another lesson we can perhaps take into the world of left policy discussion is a questioning of the temporal frameworks that restrict policy to short-term goals and established economic and political “interests...
...Minga is a Quechua word meaning “collective work” with wide currency among popular and poor sectors, both indigenous and mestizo, of the Andean republics...
...4. See Otto Santa Ana, Brown Tide Rising: Metaphoric Representations of Latinos in Contemporary Public Discourse (University of Texas, 2002), chapters 2 and 3. 5. These latter figures do not add up to the overall totals since we do not refer to so-called minor metaphors (which rarely occur) and metaphors that are neither violent nor peaceful...
...a major goal of the respect for democracy Campaign is to abolish of the misnamed national endowment for democracy...
...for three years progressive immigrant rights activists have fought proposals in Congress that would eliminate those changes in immigration policy that were won in 1964–5 by the Chicano civil rights movement—establishing family reunification as the centerpiece for immigration policy, ending the bracero program, and moving away from contract labor...
...Deborah Poole is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Program in Latin American Studies at Johns Hopkins University...
...policy that run through indigenous ideals of community life, but also because Andean authorities long ago found in the minga a useful means to organize corvée labor, first in colonial mines and then later for the roads and public works that would provide evidence for the state’s presence in their nations’ otherwise forgotten indigenous territories...
...available at cfr.org...
...Why not, they ask us, imagine policies that deterritorialize resources, and why hold on to the questionable idea that public goods must necessarily be administered by nation-states that, in many cases, are themselves deeply committed to capitalism, inequality, and impunity...
...Our task as leftist policy critics is to insist that this sidelining of popular political projects is not acceptable—either politically or as an accurate picture of what Latin America is today...
...7. Ibid...
...those who have advocated the corporate “comprehensive” bills have claimed that legalization for the undocumented was possible only if we agreed to move backward, transforming immigration policy into a much more overt labor-supply system...
...lovato will reply in the next issue...
...notes (continued from page 2) Bush is simply implementing that program on the ground...
...Although it is important to insist that “policy makers” meet the demands of indigenous organizations and respect their cultural and territorial rights, it is less easy to figure out how to make policy makers understand that move tions to the U.S...
...Her recent publications include A Blackwell Companion to Latin American Anthropology (Blackwell, 2008...
...4. Tony Phillips, “The Bolivian Crisis, the OAS, and UNASUR,” Americas Policy Program Discussion Paper, September 30, 2008, americas.irconline.org/am/5567...
...Beyond the Four Freedoms 1. See the group’s self-published document, “Strategic Leadership: Framework for a 21st Century National Security Strategy,” available at cnas.org...
...available at mama radio.blogspot.com...
...9. Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Collective Action, Social Movements and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1994...
...we are already seeing the resurrection of the corporate “comprehensive reform” proposals...
...For “policy makers,” indigenous peoples and their movements are register than and that of the United States—expressing allegiance to “the rule of law” while remaining forces to be reckoned with not as hosts who that of either indifferent to what ACIN calls “the ultimate invite, but rather as “problems” or “special interest or law, which is respect for life...
...While policy makers might see the nation as a site from which to contest unjust stand at an opposite pole from the word policy, understood as a plan or strategy that is formulated, enacted, and imposed in re- Policy needs to be rethought killings, for the ACIN peoples, the murders are offensive not only because they violate national laws, but also because they testify to sponse to the perceived “best interests” of two in a different the hypocrisy of both their own governments or more nation-states...
...3 (1999): 3–23...
...This new political landscape holds out the promise that it will force the hand of states like Mexico, Colombia, and Peru, which have been forceful and even brutal in their attempts to silence and devalue the popular political imaginaries that call for an end both to party politics and to state sovereignties grounded in impunity and unilateral decision making...
...Indeed, the ACIN’s invitation to Obama to “join with us” is not only unusual for its directionality as an invitation extended from “below...
...Their objections to this process, however, have less to do with questions of sovereignty per se than with the fact that both of the governments that would potentially be involved in a U.S.-Colombia FTA respect some international agreements, while ignoring others, such as the International Labor Organization Covenant 169 and the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples...
...despite the regrettable error, the disagreement between lovato and Bacon—on how to interpret the immigrant deportation raids—stands...
...He never mentions the bills...
...2. See “Andes 2020: A New Strategy for the Challenges of Colombia and the Region (A Center for Preventive Action Report)” (January 2004...
...The clash at MacArthur Park started when officers tried to disperse demonstrators that moved off the sidewalk into the street threw rocks and bottles at officers.’ They go to say: ‘The officers gave a legal dispersal order...
...This understanding of politics sees words not so much as tools for diplomacy or compromise, but as a way to effect change in the world...
...Until then there should be no rush to judgment.’ ” KNBC Channel 4 News at 5 p.m...
...As they see it, the laws not only violate their constitutional rights in Colombia as autonomous territories and peoples, but they also effectively violate Colombia’s national sovereignty by making any change in the law contingent on the obligation to compensate foreign capital...
...Allow me to quote it here...
...it is also unusual for its having been extended from a specific sort of place— one located somewhere outside of the usual maps of national boundaries and contested sovereignties that constitute the terrain of bilateral policy making...
...David Bacon Berkeley, California Editor Pablo Morales replies: the sentence that Bacon quotes from lovato’s article does indeed misstate Bacon’s view, as expressed in the Dollars & Sense article that lovato cited (“the real political purpose of the iCe raids,” January/february 2007...
...it is not enough to criticize the repression of the raids while ignoring the broad program they are intended to advance, or alternatives to it...
...campaigns in the 1988 u.s...
...After congratulating him on his electoral victory, the group called on Obama to make good on his promise of change, extending an invitation to the new president to jointly fulfill “our [shared] responsibilities to Mother Earth and history...
...elections...
...Instead, they are moving ahead in ways that threaten to make the capitalist nation-state obsolete as a framework for administering democratic demands...
...The new political landscape that both the Obama administration and the left will have to confront in Latin America is one in which the ideals of democracy have already been substantially reworked “from below...
...1 (November 2007...
...The first is that we end up endorsing a “best case scenario” in which we try to mediate the definition of national interest in such a way that it effects “the least harm”—that we engage in a politics that encourages a “softer” form of imperialism, without taking on the tenets of imperialism as such...
...We do not write to ask or demand anything for ourselves,” the group told Obama...
...The Cauca-based minga of 2008 was grounded in the territorial and cultural demands of Colombia’s indigenous peoples, yet it is a movement that now extends across the Andes, engaging indigenous and non-indigenous sectors in Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru (see “Against the Law of the Jungle,” page 5...
...See also Kathryn Ledebur and Coletta A. Youngers, “ONDCP Reports No Increase in Coca Cultivation in Bolivia in 2006,” May 23, 2007: available at wola.org...
...For more information and to get involved: e-mail: respect4democracy@afgj.org phone: (202) 544-9355 respect4democracy.wordpress.com JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2009 The Minga of Resistance 1. “An Open Letter From the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca, ACIN, to U.S...
...what is disturbing about lovato’s misstatement of my work is that he uses it to dismiss the idea that the raids advance any political program beyond the growth of the enforcement bureaucracy itself...
...60, (May 2008): 27...
...NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS report : u.s...
...and KCBS 2 News at 5, both on May 2. 7. As in: “The president of the Los Angeles Police Protective League released this statement earlier today...
...By calling their movement a minga, the indigenous participants call attention to both the work that must go into politics and the idea that that work must be collective...
...expanding ways for people to come to the united states with rights (not as guest workers...
...As commentators in this issue note, the task of taking on policy—especially in an era of hope—is riddled with dangers...
...See Douglas McLeod and Benjamin H. Detenber, “Framing Effects of Television News Coverage of Social Protest,” Journal of Communication 49, no...
...Democracy Promotion’ in Bolivia,” Americas Policy Program column, October 31, 2008, americas.irconline.org/am/5638...
...Our officer gave a legal dispersal order and were met with the violence...
...and rejecting free trade treaties and structural adjustment policies that displace people and force them to leave home...
...lovato argues that the sole economic motivation of enforcement is giving fat contracts to administration cronies like Halliburton...
...policy The Minga of Resistance: Policy Making From Below Colombia’s minga marches through bogotá in november with a banner telling barack obama: “We don’t want the free trade agreement...
...free trade agreement (FTA) and the Colombian government’s “Laws of Dispossession and other institutional norms that legalize the loss of our lands, our fundamental freedoms, and our rights...
...President-Elect Barack Obama,” Santander de Quilichao, Cauca, Colombia, November 10, 2008...
...MALA: Framing Peace as Violence 1. The full report, titled “An Examination of May Day 2007 MacArthur Park,” was issued in October 2007 and can be downloaded at lapd online.org/assets/pdf/final_report.pdf...
...this gives a free pass to the backers of the corporate reform of immigration policy, and drops out any connection to displacement caused by trade and economic policies abroad...
...Nor are they waiting for us to define democracy for them...
...that’s like saying the iraq war was fought to profit Halliburton...
...To do this, we can take inspiration and ideas from the many movements like ACIN whose calls for autonomy and popular action constitute a de facto rejection of both partisan politics and the nation-state’s claims to exercise exclusive moral and legal jurisdiction over such things as resources, nature, and human lives...
...That is important...
...24 by Deborah Poole O n november 10, 2008, the association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca (ACIN) sent a letter to Barack Obama...
...policy makers are so intimately tied up with a government, and a state, that has and will continue to act in the name of “interests” not our own...
...Political movements in places like Oaxaca, Cusco, and Cauca are not waiting for policy makers to attend to their demands...
...6. The Andean Information Network, “Bolivian Coca Growers Cut Ties With USAID,” June 27, 2008: available at ain-bolivia.org...
...alan weinstein, co-founder of the ned, boasted to The Washington Post: “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the Cia...
...the ned was created by Congress in 1983 and is more than 90% funded by u.s...
...5. Laura Carlsen, “The Failure of U.S...
...A similar dislocation of sovereign authority constitutes the grounds for their objec first challenge for a left call to policy, then, is to avoid this language...
...in 2006, ned and usaid spent $26 million in an effort to defeat venezuelan president Hugo Chávez...
...Without denying the continuing importance of fighting for justice and human rights in the moment, it might be worth asking ourselves what sorts of temporalities we inherit and how they limit our imaginations when we always assume that the nation-state—and its cycles of national-level electoral politics—forms the only framework within which to engage in policy and policy critique...
...KTTV-FOX Ten O’Clock News aired a similar report...
...Yet how to do this if U.S...
...Minga, however, is a concept that has traveled not only because of the “natural” cultural solidarities CHriS KneSTriCK / CHriSTiAn PeACemAKer TeAmS (CPT.Org) JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2009 report: u.s...
...Policy needs to be rethought in a different register than that of either interest or imposition...
...2. We base our riot-suppression narrative on McLeod and Detenber’s “protest paradigm...
...ned and usaid are heavily involved in el salvador’s current presidential election in an effort to defeat the fmln candidate who is ahead in the polls...
...3. Roger Burbach, “The Rise of Food Fascism: Allied to Global Agribusiness, Agrarian Elite Fomenting Coup in Bolivia,” Global Alternatives News, June 30, 2008, globalalternatives.org/node/87...
...policy If we are to engage in the project of articulating something like a “policy agenda” from the left, we should start by questioning the idea that policy constitutes a device for administering life through the prism of the nation-state...
...We have lost many lives defending these words, which we have . . . backed up with our civil resistance...
...8. Hillel Nossek, Annabelle Sreberny, and Prasun Sonwalkar, “Introduction,” in Media and Political Violence (Hampton Press, 2007), 1–22...
...interests” who crosscut and disrupt the neat geopolitics of sovereignty and capital flows...
...2. Shira Gordon, “Bolivia: Beyond the Rhetoric,” Columbia Political Review 7, no...
...As such, the word minga would seem to ments like the minga are not just a gaggle of special interests, but people who are actively redefining the landscape of both politics and policy making...
...guaranteeing real legal status (permanent residence visas) for the undocumented...
...These are the words that we have shared through Colombia since October 10, through the Minga of Resistance, a national mobilization we convened as indigenous people, in association with other peoples and processes...
...to justify this, these advocates (including many democrats) claim employers face vast labor shortages if they don’t get the labor they want at a price they want to pay...
...in nicaragua, in 1990, the ned spent more than $20 per voter to influence the presidential elections—more than had been spent per voter by both the mondale and Bush sr...
...NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS report: u.s...
...migration is a human right, but people should have alternatives for economic development that make migration voluntary, and not the sole means of survival...
...The danger it holds is that states and their policy makers can more easily continue to ignore progressive political movements on the grounds that they move in their own territories, outside the framework of national economies and laws...
...3. Council on Foreign Relations, “U.S.–Latin America Relations: A New Direction for a New Reality,” Independent Task Force Report no...
...In asking for a “change in the relation between the United States and the indigenous peoples of the world,” and in denouncing the murders of more than 2,100 “indigenous peoples in the past six years,” the ACIN letter avoids locating indigenous peoples in any specific national context...
...6. KCAL 9 News at 4 p.m...
...this was wholly my own editing blunder, not lovato’s...
...available at cfr.org...
...The Respect for Democracy Campaign About the campaign: the respect for democracy campaign is a project of the alliance for global Justice that favors broadbased, participatory democracy and opposes efforts to undermine democratic processes around the world...
...there’s more to the war than that, and there’s more to immigration enforcement than contracts and the growth of a repressive bureaucracy...
...progressive immigrant-rights organizations and most of the labor movement today advocate alternatives that focus on ending employer sanctions, raids, and the criminalization of work and migration...
...In coming days, it will become clear what transpired...
...A second danger is that we succumb to the policy worldview in which groups like the Minga of Resistance are conflated with identities or sectors that are imagined to compete with the identities and interests of national states...
...They also, of course, reclaim it from long histories of state-led attempts to organize and control collective politics and community organization...
...taxes, but it has no meaningful public oversight...
...1 With these brief words, the ACIN made clear to Obama—and to us— that politics in this region of the world is no longer going to be articulated in the mode of the petition, but rather in the active mode of moving forward...
...After all, among the many other things that ACIN and other indigenous organizations are forcing us to question is the assumption that the only alternative to “privatization” is “nationalization...
...the sentence should have read: “david Bacon posits that the crackdown is purposefully meant to trigger a political crisis that will pressure Congress to approve the migration policy the government has been pushing for all along: a temporary guest-worker program...
...this has led to many abuses, such as ned funding and coordination of the groups that overthrew Haiti’s elected government in 2004...
...This is clearly the case for movements that call, for example, for subsistence economies and autonomous modes of governance that seem to resonate with the neoliberal state’s calls for decentralized economies and “local responsibility...
Vol. 42 • January 2009 • No. 1
