Defying Threats, Thousands Take to the Streets
BOGOTA, Oct 12 (IPS) - Arbitrary arrests, menacing warnings from the army and harsh crackdowns on protesters did not daunt the tens of thousands of Colombians who took to the streets over the last three days to protest against the rightwing government of Álvaro Uribe.

The Democratic Coalition, which groups trade unions, student groups, and associations of blacks, peasants and indigenous people, called the nationwide protests, which began on Wednesday and continued Thursday and Friday. Activists and human rights groups denounced threats and abuses by military and paramilitary groups. The organisers said Thursday that seven protesters were injured when the police tried to break up the demonstrations, and the press reported Friday that a total of 15 people were wounded.

The organisers also reported the arrest of community leader Isaac López, who was accused of ties to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the main rebel group involved in Colombia’s decades-long armed conflict. López, the leftwing Alternative Democratic Pole candidate for mayor in the town of Cartagena del Chairá in the southern department (province) of Caquetá, was arrested Wednesday on his way to the local protest, said the organisers.

In September, leaflets were circulated by the army urging people not to take part in the planned protests: "Do not participate in acts of terrorism. Do not let them continue to use you as cannon fodder. Do not go to the FARC demonstration. Do not be an accomplice to terrorists and murderers."

Agriculture Minister Andrés Felipe Arias accused the demonstrators of links to the FARC. "That claim is aimed at diverting attention from the real aims of the national campesino (peasant farmer) mobilisation," Diana Nocua, one of the organisers of the nationwide demonstrations, told IPS. "We are independent, and we are defending the rights of the victims of persecution and anti-democratic measures."

The demonstrators protested the free trade agreement negotiated with the United States, the privatisation of water utilities and the health and education systems, the current labour legislation, and incentives offered to foreign companies and investors, which they described as "a disgraceful giveaway of national sovereignty." They also took aim at cuts in funding for health and education in rural areas, demanded the repeal of the government’s "national development plan", land laws and mining code, and called for the cancellation of concessions granted to foreign extractive companies since Uribe became president in 2002. (emphasis mine)

In addition, the Democratic Coalition called the demobilisation of the ultra-rightwing paramilitary United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC) a "farce" and demanded respect for the collective land rights of black and indigenous communities. In response, Minister Arias told the media that in the southwestern department of Cauca, 12,000 hectares of land have been distributed to indigenous communities. But the Cauca Regional Indigenous Council (CRIC) replied in a communiqué that land assigned to 12 displaced families formed part of an indigenous reserve and had been claimed by the Kokonuko native community for more than 25 years. Arias, meanwhile, said three more purchases of land for rural families had been suspended until the demonstrations came to a halt, and warned that the protesters would not be allowed to block roads "because the security forces will enforce respect for public spaces."

The organisers of the protests issued a communiqué with the names of seven people -- one woman, five men and one minor -- who were injured. "Civilians who gathered peacefully in Mondomo, Cauca, were attacked by the military police and counterinsurgency forces, who sprayed tear gas and ground glass, used explosives and fired shots," said the statement.

Similar crackdowns by the police and anti-riot police (ESMAD) were reported in areas near Cali, in the western department of Valle del Cauca, which affected children and elderly persons, and led to the arrests of 11 people.

In the central department of Huila, two military trucks parked across a highway blocked 1,200 campesinos from marching to the provincial capital, Neiva. According to the Rural Press Agency, Jorge Garzón said the campesinos were organised and ready to join the demonstration in the city, "but they are not letting us pass."

In Ibagué, the capital of the central department of Tolima, some 4,000 campesinos gathered in parks and public spaces around city hall. "They came in on Tuesday from different municipalities where they face serious persecution and arrest. But their health conditions are beginning to worry us," said Diana Nocua.

There have been similar demonstrations and complaints of harsh police action in most of Colombia’s regions over the past three days. The "Black Eagles", the largest paramilitary group made up of "demobilised" members of the AUC, which took part in a high-profile but controversial demobilisation process, were reportedly involved in some of the violent incidents.

The precedent for the current nationwide demonstrations dates back to 1996, when coca growers protested the start of aerial spraying of their crops in the southern departments of Caquetá, Putumayo and Guaviare. At the time, the farmers stressed that they did not grow coca out of choice, or under pressure from the guerrillas, but because they had no other way to earn an income.

Over time, the campesino mobilisation expanded to other regions, where the demonstrators have traditionally been the target of harsh crackdowns. "We have suffered 30 arbitrary arrests in the last two months" in the municipalities of Tolima, Cauca and Santander, Aydeé Moreno, another of the organisers, told IPS.

One case occurred on Sept. 29, when state security agents raided the offices of the Campesino Association of the Valle del Río Cimitarra (ACVC) in the northeastern city of Barrancabermeja, and arrested four of the group’s members. And on Oct. 5, in the town of Yondó in Antioquia in the northwest, army troops tore down posters publicising the coming protests and warned local residents, according to the ACVC, that they would "burn down houses if they found new posters, because the order is to not allow the protest to be held in the region."

The same day, in Planadas in the west-central department of Tolima, campesino leader Hernando Soto was arrested by the army. Three days later, in the town of Rioblanco in the same department, two young men were seized by an infantry battalion.

The Committee of Solidarity with Political Prisoners (CSPP) said that on Tuesday a bus was blocked from carrying food supplies for the demonstrators from the town of Rovira to Playarrica, and troops stopped another bus in Chaparral (in Tolima) that was carrying campesinos. The organisations denounced that campesinos were seized and "disappeared", and that others were murdered. The victims were later accused of belonging to leftist insurgent groups, especially the FARC.

Among Ms. Klein's talents as a journalist is an uncanny ability to find connections between seemingly unrelated events - the Chilean coup of 1973 - the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989 -the tsunami of 2005 - 9/11 - Hurricane Katrina and most recently, the American invasion of Iraq. In The Shock Doctrine she documents the deliberate imposition of unpopular economic measures by right wing governments and dictatorships in the aftermath of such disasters, natural or man-made, relating them directly to the 1950's neo-liberal economic philosophy of the University of Chicago School of Economics and its best known advocate, Milton Friedman.

"The core of such sacred Chicago teachings was that the econmic forces of supply, demand, inflation and unemployment were like the forces of nature, fixed and unchanging. In the truly free market imagined in Chicago classes and texts, these forces exist in perfect equilibrium, supply communicating with demand the way the moon pulls the tides. If economies suffered from high inflation, it was, according to Friedman's strict theory of monetarism, invariably because misguided policy makers had allowed too much money to enter the system, rather than letting the market find its balance. Just as ecosystems self regulate, the market, if left to its own devices, would create just the right number of products at precisely the right prices, produced by workers at just the right wages to buy those products - an Eden of plentyful employment, boundless creativity and zero inflation." - Klein

Under the "free market" or laissez faire economic policies of the "Chicago School" all government regulation of industry, working conditions and the professions would be abolished. Schools, highways, federal parks, the post office and publicly operated services such as water supply and transportation would be privatized. The welfare system including social security would end. All government efforts to stabilize the economy through fiscal and monetary policies, public works or other means would be terminated.

Friedman and his associates were well aware that these policies were unlikely to be adopted democratically even in countries with the most conservative administrations. However, the strategy they developed for new administrations, elected or imposed, was simplicity itself. Wait for a major crisis. Sell off state-owned assets to private interests while citizens are still trying to recover. Then quickly write the changes into law.

The psychological roots of this strategy can be found in the infamous (and highly unethical) experiments conducted at McGill University by Ewen Cameron under the sponsorship of the C.I.A. and the Canadian Government. Patients, suffering from mental disorders, were subjected to electroshock treatment and a variety of drugs as well as sensory deprivation techniques with the object of reducing them to a "blank state" of infantile helplessness after which they could be reprogrammed minus their mental disorders. The experiments were singularly unsuccessful in achieving the desired results, succeeding only in destroying the lives of the unfortunate subjects. Cameron's methods, however, were identified as torture techniques in the Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation handbook and were disseminated throughout Latin America by the C.I.A.

Thus, in Chile in 1973, the first test of Chicago School economics, citizens were subjected to a three pronged attack - The military coup against the Socialist government of Salvador Allende by General Augosto Pinochet - the implementation of economic reform with the aid of the Chicago Boys, and for anyone foolish enough to protest - the threat of torture and death. Disappearances were common.

The success of the Chilean coup was followed by similar events in Uruguay (also 1973) and Argentina (1976).

Klein documents the implementation of Chicago School economics in Latin America , with particular emphasis on the resultant devastating social impact, ranging from massive unemployment as employers were allowed to fire workers at will, increased food costs as price controls were lifted, the loss of state owned businesses to the private sector, the transfer of wealth from public to private hands and the transfer of private debt to public hands. Throughout the Southern Cone torture and "disappearance" remained the de rigeur methods to discourage protest.

Since the seventies attempts have been made to emulate the initial "success" of free market economics in the wake of disaster by a number of governments around the world including Poland, Russia, Korea, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and, oddly enough, communist China. Elements can be found in the economic policies of Margaret Thatcher who, along with Ronald Reagan, was a great admirer of Milton Friedman. (Thatcher was also an admirer of Augosto Pinochet.)

Klein is most effective in the latter chapters of her book wherein she describes contemporary situations of which she has first-hand knowledge: Iraq and New Orleans.

In Iraq, she exposes the rush by the Bush administration to privatize two hundred essential state-owned companies as new laws were passed to attract foreign investors. At the same time, reconstruction of the country was contracted solely to American corporations -Blackwater, Bechtel, Parsons and, most famously, Halliburton. Iraqis were excluded and stood by helplessly as foreign workers were imported at low wages. Resistance to the occupation continues to be suppressed by increasingly brutal methods.

Within three weeks of Katrina, George W. Bush announced several new "hurricane relief" measures as proposed by the Heritage Foundation, among them: "automatically suspend Davis-Bacon wage laws in disaster areas," - "make the entire affected area a flat tax free-enterprise zone," - "make the entire region an economic competitiveness zone" (tax incentives and waiving of regulations.) Parents were given vouchers for use at newly founded charter schools.

The reconstruction of New Orleans was contracted by the Bush administration to - wait for it - Blackwater, Bechtel, Parsons and Halliburton all of whom, as in Iraq, were reluctant to hire local workers.

Again, to quote Klein:"The Chicago Boys' first adventure in the seventies should have served as a warning to humanity: theirs are dangerous ideas. By failing to hold the ideology accountable for the crimes committed in its first laboratory, this subculture of unrepentant ideologues was given immunity, freed to scour the world for its next conquest. These days, we are once again living in an era of corporate massacres, with countries suffering tremendous military violence alongside organized attempts to remake them into model "free market" economies; disappearances and torture are back with a vengeance. And once again the goals of building free markets, and the need for such brutality, are treated as entirely unrelated."

Klein sees mounting world-wide opposition to neo-liberalism, much of it coming, appropriately, from Latin America. Leading this movement is thrice democratically elected Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. With its high oil revenues, Venezuela has become a lender to other developing countries allowing them to avoid entering into agreements with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank both of which demand draconian economic reform in exchange for loans.

My initial impression of The Shock Doctrine was "What we have here is a 500 page recipe for paranoia." However, Klein connects the dots in her thesis so carefully that one cannot avoid the conclusion that some governments are indeed utilizing Friedmanite methods to enrich themselves and their friends by deliberately destroying the economic welfare of their respective citizenry. That being the case, perhaps the most important lesson to be drawn from The Shock Doctrine is that, without vigilance, our freedom and quality of life can be quickly compromised by rampant, uncontrolled government imposed greed in the guise of free market capitalism.

Future crises will no doubt emerge. We must learn to recognize them calmly and the possible dangers lurking in their aftermath.