Blitz

- Fuck,

exlcamei para mim mesmo enquanto colocava a seta para a direita, seguindo a indicação do policial para que parasse o carro. Já haviam outros dois parados, parei na frente destes, chuvia ralinho, o policial chegou pedindo minha habilitação e o documento do carro que eu não tinha – não tinha por que não verifiquei antes de pegar a estrada, e minha mãe, que tinha pego o carro emprestado de minha avó, não havia deixado o documento dentro do carro como faço de costume. Notou isso já quando estava horas ao sul de Brasília, e enviou Sedex 10 para BH. Atrasamos nossa saída até meio dia esperando o correio que não chegava. Desistimos e seguimos, afinal, já havia feito metade do caminho sem documento, faria a segunda do mesmo jeito, mas pelo menos mostraria as minhas amizades Ouro Preto – almoçamos um belo tutu a mineira e fejão tropeiro – e chegariamos ainda aquela noite em Petrópolis. Até aí tudo bem, e baixar a serra também foi tranquilo, tranquilo até demais, quando leva mais de duas horas para atravessar nove quilometros entre Magé e a porra da estrada entupida no sentido dos Lagos. Foi então, logo quando o transito seguia, a cinquenta kilometros de nosso destino, que fomos parados.

Expliquei a história, e antes mesmo que se encompridasse demais, o policial já me explicou

- Pó pará, pó pará, xeu te explicar a situação, é necessário ter o documento com você a todo momento, só isso já é pragente apreender o carro, mas o negócio é o seguinte, agente tá atrás de drogas e armas, então vamos ter que revistar seu carro.

Acordei, claro, com a revista, e ele foi logo entrando pela minha porta, quando saltei, remexendo no cinzeiro, depois pelo lado do passageiro, no porta luvas, no painel, em qualquer cantinho que pudesse meter os dedos. Logo, cheirou um pedacinho ou outro de tabaco dos cigarillos que havia fumado ao longo da estrada – cigarillos cubanos que ganhei de natal de meus pais – e mandou a passageira do banco de trás saltar também, e nos mandou pegar nossas bolsas para que fossem revistadas. Me mandou levantar minha camisa, já quando outro policial chegava por lá, e explicava a “situação”, meteu a mão nas minhas virilhas, e mandou eu e o meu passageiro homen entrar na estação. Notando que meu companheiro de viajem mal falava Português, me perguntou se eu falava, respondi, Claro, sou Brasileiro! Abriu a mochila dele e minha bolsa, cheirou meu canivete, fuxicou os livros dele, e quando chegou no meu saquinho com a caixa de cigarillos e um charuto, cheirou-os, olhou dentro da segunda fileira de cigarillos, enquanto isso um outro chegou também, denovo a “situação”, e denovo, o outro, verificou minha virilha – isso foi, aparentemente, sorte minha, pois este outro havia feito meu companheiro de viajem abaixar as calças, depois as samba-canção também, na tal busca – e este, sabendo então da “situação” com os documentos, exclamou

- Então temos que revistar eles muito mesmo!

Fuxicou denovo em minha bolsa, denovo mexeu com os cigarillos, duvidoso, e depois me mandou acompanha-lo para revistar, novamente, o carro. A chuva apertou, e ele me mandou entrar no banco de trás, enquanto ele entrava no do passageiro, fiquei, como antes, de olho em suas mãos e seus bolsos enquanto fuxicava, e enquanto ele fuxicava ia me dizendo

- Deixa eu te explicar a situação, Gustavo, é Gustavo, né?

Confirmei, enquanto ele pegava do banco um pedacinho de tabaco.

- O negócio é que tem indícios de drogas no seu carro, e vocês não estão cooperando. Agente vai revistar tudinho, tudinho mesmo. Agente vai fazer vocês abrir a mala do carro, vamos checar suas mochilas, roupa por roupa, cada bolso de cada calça, e se agente encontrar droga, você sabe o que acontece, né? Você vai preso, o carro fica apreendido, você tá até sem documento, então se agente fosse na dura mesmo, só nisso agente já apreendia o carro, sacou? E se vocês continuarem não cooperando, vai ser na dura mesmo...

...interrompi o sacana

- Mas nós estamos cooperando, estamos aceitando que revistem o carro, nossas mochilas, nossos...

Mas ele me cortou

- Deixa eu terminar! O negócio é o seguinte, se você fizer agente revistar tudo, se você der o trabalho de fazer agente ir buscar as drogas, ai vai ser na dura mesmo, aí não tem conversa – você vai preso mesmo. Agora, se você entregar as drogas pragente agora, aí dá pragente conversar, aí agente vê como que faz, dá pra dar um jeito.

Disse que o compreendia, mas que não tinhamos droga nenhuma. Disse que entregaria se tivessemos, mas não temos. Disse que poderiam revistar o carro todo, o porta malas, nossas mochilas, tudo.

Ai ele forçou a barra.

- Vocês estão fazendo as coisas difíceis pragente, aí não vai ter como ter conversa mesmo então. Você veio de onde? Brasília? Po cara, tem que ser muito estúpido para transportar drogas entre estados assim, né? Você não sabe das consequências não, hein? Não sabe que você vai preso?

Não havia espaço na trela dele para meu protesto que sabia das consequências mas que não estava, afinal, transportando droga alguma. Os “indícios de drogas” que ele dizia, tentei explicar, enquanto ele continuava, eram tabaco daqueles cigarillos, a única coisa fumada no carro, quatro cigarillos daquela caixinha que ele viu, que ganhei de natal de minha mãe.

A menção de minha mãe, talvez, ocasionou ele a perguntar de quem era o carro. Expliquei que era de minha avó, e que por isso não havia percebido que os documentos não estavam no carro quando saímos de Brasília.

- Mas você não sabe que tem que ter os documentos do carro sempre com você? Como é que você pega a estrada sem documento?

Pois é, foi lá a explicação denovo, sabia, mas quando percebi a falta já estava (e aqui estiquei a história uns duzentos quilometros) pra lá de Juiz de Fora e minha vó (ou mãe, pra ele isso não deve importar) já me mandou o documento lá pra Cabo Frio (pulando a confusão de BH pra fazer a história mais simples), aonde passariamos as férias de verão.

Por alguma razão, talvez a mesma pela qual ele parou o Renault da minha avó, ele quis saber

- O que sua vó faz lá em Brasília?

É aposentada, uai!

- Mas aposentada de quê?

- Bem...

tive que explicar

... na verdade ela trabalha em casa, meu avô que era aposentado.

A pergunta, em transição, era para ser respondida então sobre a profissão dele.

- Ele já faleceu, mas era Ministro do Superior Tribunal Militar.

Alguns anos atrás, quem sabe, isso seria suficiente para o reco dizer logo “ah, desculpe então, por favor siga viajem!” e até parava o transito para que eu saísse logo e recuperasse o indevido atraso. Hoje, não sabia se o efeito seria oposto ou semelhante...

O que se passou foi o seguinte, ele continuou fuxicando pelo banco da frente um momento, repetiu que haveria conversa se eu entregasse as drogas, e repeti que não haviam drogas, e que esperariamos o quanto eles quisessem para revistar todas nossas mochilas, todos os bolsos de todas as nossas calças.

Então ele saltou do carro, saltei atrás, ele entrou na estação, fiquei no lado de fora, embaixo da sacada, ao lado do carro, disse alguma palavra ou outra de calma para as duas companhias gringas de viajem, e logo depois aquele primeiro policial que me parou veio a porta, fumando um cigarro, e disse

- Ó, você vai presizar desse documento para voltar na estrada, hein! Por que se você pega um policial que está assim, teve um mal dia, tá de mal humor, ele leva na dura mesmo, apreende o carro.

Minha resposta já foi uma mistura de “entendo” e “obrigado”, pois, imaginava esperançosamente, seguirei viajem afinal!

Ele me perguntou se estava com minha habilitação, olhou pra dentro da estação para ver se estavam com meu documento por lá, saquei ela do bolso e disse que estava com ela e perguntei se estariamos, então, liberados.

A resposta positiva ainda foi temperada com outras advertências, mas nisso já me virava para minhas amizades e dizia

- Let’s get out of here, quick.

Entramos no carro, ligava o motor enquanto dizia para os dois verificarem seus documentos e seu dinheiro. Estavam com tudo, eu dava seta para a esquerda, e largamos deixando o folego escapar e as histórias do absurdo rolar.

Traduzir-se

de Ferreira Gullar


Uma parte de mim
é todo mundo:
outra parte é ninguém:
fundo sem fundo.

Uma parte de mim
é multidão:
outra parte estranheza
e solidão.

Uma parte de mim
pesa, pondera:
outra parte
delira.

Uma parte de mim
almoça e janta:
outra parte
se espanta.

Uma parte de mim
é permanente:
outra parte
se sabe de repente.

Uma parte de mim
é só vertigem:
outra parte,
linguagem.

Traduzir uma parte
na outra parte
— que é uma questão
de vida ou morte —
será arte?

De volta para casa

Longos vôos de volta para Brasília, passando por Campo Grande e São Paulo... Logo que cheguei em solo nacional, curti uma bela xícara de café de verdade. Mimo que seja, é uma delícia de requinte que quase não existe nos frios e distantes Andes... Chegando em Brasília, me impressionei e gabei da panidiversidade de nossas padarias.

Dormi mais que doze horas... Tive um dia tranquilo em casa de descanso... Vimos fotos e desperdicei tempo online.

Dormi mais tantas horas... Tive outro dia tranquilo em casa com um churrasquinho, lendo ao lado da piscina, vendo mais fotos e mandando mais emails...

Escreverei mais quando retomar aventuras.

Santa Cruz, Bolivia Brasileira

Primeiro descansei bastante em Santa Cruz, num calor de vale de rio tropical sem saida para o mar... Lá faz calor, mas não tem brisa. Cheguei de avião, baixando a altitude rápidamente e cambiando drasticamente a pressão dentro da minha cabeça. Saí com meu ouvido infectado e destroçado. Uma cabeça de melão.

Li bastante Eça de Queirós na praça central, aonde muitíssimas pessoas convivem agradavelmente naquela sauna de cidade. Depois nos encontramos com dois mochileiros bem duros, que fazem e vendem braceletes para pagar sua comida de comedor de mercado e alojamiento de último nível, o contente Harvey de Colombia e outro Simon da Suiça, um padeiro hiponga da boa. Estes também buscavam couch surf com Carlos, um Cambazinho de 19 anos que estudou na Europa e admira fortemente esta sua cultura não-americana. Nos acolheu bem, nos levou a bolichar, e almoçamos em sua casa no dia seguinte. Interessante aprender as opiniões desta classe, estes que são literalmente sobrinhos do general Banzer. Sua tristeza não era a raça do presidente mas a incompetência de seus partidários que, contrário aos seus ideais, não foram devidamente educados em grandes centros acadêmicos europeus ou estadounidenses.

Mas disto se faz a Brasileirada de Santa Cruz, uns que se distinguem com orgulho dos indígenas do altiplano. Lá, minifundios de batata e quinoa mantem um campesinato nas margens da fome. Aqui, há cana e soja, a mesma que já infectava o Mato Grosso e tanto mais de nosso Brasil...

Santa Cruz é mais Brasileira também em sentir uma cidade larga, alastrada pela mata e sem nenhuma montanha no horizonte para limitar seu domínio. Santa Cruz é até cheia de Brasileiros de verdade, uma cidade que consegue fazer mais comércio e mais facilmente com nosso país do que com os povos de arriba monte.

Onde há latifúndio, há luta. E é lá nos entornos de Santa Cruz aonde lutam o MST-Bolivia, movimento joven que segue as práticas e estratégias de ocupação de terra do nosso MST. Tive a oportunidade, através de uns contatos da Via Campesina, de me encontrar com o Silvestre Saisari, um dos dirigentes do Movimento. Fizemos uma boa entrevista, e gostaria de socializa-la aqui em nosso país. As opiniões do pessoal que luta como nós mas que se mantem criticamente distantes dos aliados no governo são, em minha opinião, muito valiosas para nossa compreensão do que se passa e do que espera-se que passará agora com um governo MASista ainda mais forte do que antes. Oxalá que tenham vitórias, os co-Movimentistas, e oxalá que tenham um bom aliado no Palácio Quemado e na Assembléia Plurinacional.

Sucre y enfermedad

Do sal dos desertos ao calor das termas ao frio duma cidade a mais de 4 mil metros, em algum lugar neste difícil trecho de viagem adoecí... Cheguei sentindo-me fugido a Sucre, que se diz capital de uma Bolívia que não é nem Camba como Santa Cruz mas também ainda não é Colla como La Paz... Naquela primeira noite em Sucre já sentia tanta dor que não conseguia dormir após 3.30, liguei para os meus pais e entrei com Avalox. Não há Novalgina que aguente...

Sucre foi então curtamente sofrida, apesar de ser em geral uma cidade até boazinha, cheia de chocolaterias e pracinhas tranquilas. Vimos um lindo museu de arte indígena, isso sim valeu a pena, sendo que não estavamos com tempo ou disposição para quedar o suficiente na região e passar uns dias no campo. Um verdadeiro renacimento é proclamado e exposto na história dos últimos trinta anos quando artesãs começaram a receber apoio para seu trabalho através de uma ONG e grupos acadêmicos. Trabalho de tear como nunca havia visto antes - indescritível.

Também assistimos a um forte filme sobre trabalho infantil no Cerro Rico, que se passa até mesmo na exata mina em que estávamos dois dias antes em Potosí. Chama-se "The Devil's Miner" e recomendo para quem não terá logo a oportunidade de conhecer Potosí em pessoa. Pena que o documentário não demonstra a espessura do sofrimento, foca na vida de uma família, e assim perde de vista a pluralidade de mineiros embriagados pelas ruas assim que terminam sua mita diária ao Diabo.

Comemos, lavamos roupa, e comprei alguns regalos... Foi uma fraca despedida da companheira de viagem Élisabeth, estando doente, distraido, fraco, sem nenhum fogo de vida. Gostaria de mais tempo, enstando saudável, em Sucre. Há muito lá da história da independência. Mas, já quando saia de lá só queria casa, cama, os lábios cheios de uma mulher que pudesse cuidar de mim quando mal assim, um chazinho dos bons... Pensava, logo isso, logo aquilo, mas ainda faltava um pouco mais de Bolivia.

The Southwest Corner

Depois de sair de La Paz pela última vez esta viajen, segui através de Oruro para tomar um tren até Uyuni, a base turística do cantinho sodoeste da Bolivia, nas margens do maior salar do mundo. Foi uma semana intensa de viajens e aventuras... pouco sono tranquilo e confortavel, nao durmi nunca no mesmo lugar duas vezes, e várias vezes só dormi em uma cama por parte de uma noite.

De Uyuni saimos em uma Land Cruiser guiados por Franz e sua irmä Lisele, eu, Eliza, Élisabeth (que haviamos conhecido no Peru), e tres novos amigos, o economista italiano engraçadíssimo Carlo, sua parceira de viajen alemä Laura, e outro amigo chucrute Friedrich 'Frederico,' um psicólogo de negócios que acredita em Econ101 e no 'mercado livre' fielmente. As vezes o interessante de mochilar pelo mundo é se relacionar (até bem) com pessoas com as quais normalmente nunca dariamos um minuto de nosso dia.

No primeiro dia visitamos o salar, almoçando em uma de suas lindas ilhas cobertas de cactus milenares. Assistimos o por do sol do salar, vendo as cores dançarem em volta de montanhas e vulcöes ao redor da imensidäo branca. Naquela noite, dormimos em um incrível hotel de sal nas margens do salar... o chäo era de sal grosso, as paredes de blocos de sal, assim como as mesas, cadeiras, até as camas (menos o colchäo, claro). Coisa estranha... Mas quase que faz sentido. Quase.

O segundo 'dia' começou antes do alvoreçer, para ver o tal já do meio do deserto de sal. Isso sim foi magnífico. O clarear do horizonte logo já irradiava tudo como se fosse meio dia, antes mesmo do sol se fortalecer suficientemente para atravesar as nuvens do horizonte. E quando os raios finalmente quebraram as nuvens, todas as cores floreciam nas montanhas, nas nuvens, no mundo inteiro.

Seguimos do deserto de sal por desertos de pedras e areias e arbustinhos e cactus tao pequenos que pareciam uma plumagen nas encostas dos Andes, vimos várias lagoas de cores e minerais diferentes, varias formaçöes vulcanicas espetaculares, e eventualmente paramos em um refúgio para dormir as margens da Laguna Colorada, vermelha como só o sangue de uma mártir! Infelizmente, este por do sol eu näo ví por estar me recuperando de alguma enfermedad de viajero... (vomitei bastante ao lado da famosa Árvore de Pedra...) Mas aquela noite encontramos gente incrível no refúgio: Javier e Asa, um casal que está aventurando de bicicleta do Panamá ao Uchuaia, fazendo parte de um documentário sobre mudanças climáticas que chamará Going South. Ele é um engenheiro florestal formado no Brasil, entäo conversamos muito sobre desmatamento, especialmente sobre o cerrado, reforma agrária, e política Sul Americana.

O terceiro dia também iniciou as 4 da manhä, vimos o sol nascer nos gêisers que incendeiam o deserto - é lindo como em Yellowstone, mesmo que sejam menores, mas é ainda mais excitante por poder caminhar por entre os olhos de lama e minerais ferventes, desaparecer-se em meio as fumaças de enxofre, e buscar o sol nascente e a lua poente por entre esse labirinto que parece de outro planeta.

De lá, passando por mais desertos e vulcöes e lagoas, eventualmente fomos desayunar, descansar e retomar nossas forças em uma nascente de água quente. Que paz. De lá, horas em uma sacudida e arduosa estrada de volta pra Uyuni, parando só para almoçar e visitar o pequeno povoado de San Cristóbal.

Este povoado predominantemente indígena se baixou do cerro para crescer com a indústria mineiradora de lá, mas sua famosa igreja de pedra estava fechada agora para forasteiros porque sofreram um roubo de toda sua prataria (inclusive o cajado que säo Cristóbal segurava, que teve seus dedos quebrados no crime). A comunidade disse näo haver roubos antes, quando tal crime era punido com morte na tradiçäo andina, mas agora com a mineraçäo e o crescimento do povoado e a entrada de gente de outras comunidades pelo trabalho nas minas, tudo está mudando.... ainda assim tem seus caciques, eleitos anualmente, sua justiça comunitária, seu sincretismo de orar em um grande altar de pedra após sair da festa na igreja, e uma alma santa que nos recebeu por lá e nos contou muito de sua comunidade mantinha um forte argumento por esse indigenismo. Gostaria de poder ter ficado mais tempo aprendendo com ele sobre sua comunidade, mas logo seguimos sacudindo pela estrada...

De Uyuni foi uma contínua sacudiçäo de ônibus para Potosí, e uma chegada menos que calorosa as 3 da manhä. Ao acordar, no sábado, a única opçäo de conhecer as minas que fizeram a colonizaçäo espanhola e mudaram a economia Europeia era de seguir direto para o Cerro Rico, e quando voltamos a cidade de Potosí já fechava em sí mesma num estupor bêbado de fim de semana de mineiros e mulheres sofridas.

Mas as minas... você tem que entrar nas entranhas daquela montanha de séculos de exploraçäo para poder sentir o que realmente se passou e ainda se passa por lá... A Presença do diabo näo é meramente alegórica, nem muito menos turística. A gringaiada que ignore esta verdade e a trate como um tour. Mas que todo, todo es mentira neste mundo. Todo es mentira, la verdad. As minas ''cooperativas'' escondem o sofrimento e egoísmo e medo e desgosto pela vida aos quais os mineiros foram sujeitos des da época dos aventureiros espanhóis, e agora seguem ciegos siempre siempre ciegos, se colonizando e se escravizando pela pouca prata que ainda sangra daquela montanha.

Saindo na próxima manhä com uma breve mirada na Casa de la Moeda, vimos a prisäo sobre-terrânea que os espanhóis fizeram construir para trazer a prata e o diabo da montanha para o resto do mundo, e estampar nisso tudo as caras dos reis espanhóis e imperadores alemäes. Nada era Boliviano se näo o sofrimento e o trabalho - e ainda hoje, suas moedas mesmas que usamos aqui para pagar as Salteñas (coisas que, mesmo quando säo daqui, fingem serem de Salta) näo säo feitas em território nacional... algumas vem do Chile, outras do Canadá, as notas da Europa... Isso é um país proletário, que näo é nem dono nem produtor de suas próprias ferramentas, seus trens vem de Pittsburg, suas maquinas editoras de Nova Iorque, seus ônibus säo segunda mäo do Japäo e do Brasil...

Potosí é sofrida, colonial, difícil... Logo saímos de lá para Sucre. Sucre é a pobre riqueza que explora a própria irmä mais velha, mas menor e envergada pelo trabalho forçado...

Evo de nuevo!

Evo Morales e Álvaro García Linera foram reeleitos com mais de 60% dos votos e o Movimiento Al Socialismo ganhou dois terços da Assembléia Parlamentar. Esta é uma vitória ainda maior que as de 2005 e da Assembléia Constituinte, e as expectativas para este segundo governo säo igualmente maiores. Se espera que os bloques e 'compromises' do primeiro governo, quando o MAS näo controlava o Senado, que tinha que aprovar toda legislaçäo do Congresso, e também na Assembléia Constituinte, agora cederäo para a implementaçäo completa da política MASista. Esta agora é a maior oportunidade para reconstruir o Estado Boliviano e o socialismo Latinoamericano.

Evo Morales and Álvaro García Linera were reelected with more than 60% of the vote and the Movimiento Al Socialismo won two thirds of Congress. This is an even greater victory than in 2005 and the Constitutional Assembly, and the expectations for this second term are equally higher. The blocks and compromises of the first term, when MAS did not control the Senate, which had to approve all legislation from Congress, and also in the Constitutional Assembly, are now expected to give way to the full implementation of the MASista agenda. This now is the greatest opportunity to reconstruct the Bolivian State and Latin American socialism.

Houve uma grande festa na Plaza Murillo... Conhecí muita gente boa. Dançamos nas ruas até a polícia fechar a praça. Foi um evento lindo.

There was a great party at Plaza Murillo... I met many good people. We danced in the streets until the police closed the square. It was a beautiful event.

Time to think....

Today almost everything shuts down in Bolivia for the elections. No public transport, and supposedly only cars with special permits can circulate. Hence, I have more quiet time to think, to sit online, and to write to you...

One thing that has been predominantly on my mind is how difficult I find it to escape my middle-class habits... I feel far more comfortable in wealthier parts of town, and in wealthier countries in general. I recognize that I will not commit class suicide, and with this comes an uneasy understanding that I will also have to juggle blindly my privileges.... potable tap water, for example, an amazing privilege I just can't let go very easily when considering a place to raise my future family.

But in general there is a deeper sadness when I consider the cultural differences between me and most of those around me.... waiting in line, for example, to buy bus tickets, to get information at a kiosk, or anything, is a practice which I undertake naturally but which also seems wholy alien to people around me. I cannot expect to be attended when I am 'waiting in line' since the attendants themselves don't even recognize that there is (or would be) a line!! Add to this a whole list of other differences... here are some noted in Church this morning: dogs being taken through a stroll, cell phones ringing, an armed policeman...

My habitual reaction is to declaim the lack of respect - my reaction is to consider my exogeneity and ignorance - the result is my sad confusion....

In some ways, when I am lied to, when I am left to undergo discomforts that any would feel, when I understand how the chaos makes life more difficult for most involved... I simply stomp my feet and damn the falta de educaçäo, the lack of 'education' in the cultural sense, not the formal academic sense.

On the other hand, the discomforts are still my own, from my own contrast of experience and expectation. Take this example:

When traveling from La Paz to Cochabamba on a daytime bus, we stopped for lunch at a road junction. Our bus supposedly had a bathroom in it, but it was piled up with buckets and clearly out of order. I tried to talk to one of the three agency representatives who travelled with us on the bus, I asked him why those things were in the bathroom and why we couldnt use it. Well, we were stopped, and I clearly could have used the bathroom at the restaurant, and the young man was clearly angry with my questions. His anger expressed itself, inclusively, in speaking so quickly and with such slangs and hard accent that I was sure not to understand him. It felt like being barked at.

The problem for me wasn't so much that there was no functional bathroom, but that I was told there would be one. An untruth that may not have been intentional on the part of the agent who sold me the ticket, since he couldn't know the status of the bus, and tells the situation as it is supposed to be, whether or not the actual state of the buses conform to that. In addition, the bother for me was the complete disrespect the bus agent at the stop willingly expressed to me. There was no attempt to patch up an un-service... in fact, there is no concept of customer service. There is what you get, and complaints are never welcome. In fact, complaints are seen as a disrespect on the customer's part. Perhaps by expecting and complaining about that situation I was asserting an inferiority of their expected and regular state. Hence my deserved being-barked-at, which can only make sense like this, as an after thought of my own, which may not even occur in the mind of he who barked... for him, perhaps, I was just another offensive gringo.

If I could vote today I could come face to face with this dilemma: the ideological choice I would like to make would mean having my white urban privileges confronted directly. Yet, what I have is the inevitable blind oppression: even seeking out the comfort I (thought I) paid for in a trip is an act that reasserts a class and race structure that continues to oppress an impoverished majority... There aint no ballot box there, and there isnt any action I can take that would easily shed my expectations of 'proper manners' that any people should have.

This is more than the differences of culture easily explained such as "forks or chopsticks". Those who use forks and knife at a table might consider it barbaric to suck your noodles or rice from a bowl... Those who use chopsticks might consider it barbaric to butcher one's food on one's own plate... But both can recognize the "civilizing" intention behind it all.

Contrast that with the talking loudly in museums, getting in front of each other and never considering lines, hacking on the sidewalks, doorsteps, and even inside buildings, and generally just honking one's way about town as though there were no lanes, no lights, and as though it were the case that cars in front of you could magically disappear at the sound of one's horn...

Where is the civilizing intent in that?

And fuck that charge against "civilization" made by Daniel Quinn.... Blame industrial society, blame bureaucracy... but there still seems to be a wiiiiide gap between all of that an a set of social manners that express recognition and respect for the other.

There is either a disconsideration of what "the good life" (Vivir Bien) would entail, eg., stepping on other people's hacked luggies must be "just fine and dandy", or worse, there must be a simple disregard for the other - a selfishness, an egoism that is sin in any culture, religion, time or place. That is the disrespect I fear plagues so much of our world...

Now, lest I be misunderstood, I am not leaning back towards those arguments that "the underdeveloped are so because of their own problematic cultures". I would sooner think these cultural problems of poor social habits are a result of political and economic situations that constitute the so called "underdeveloped" as the other side of the coin of "development for some". Yet, of course, this doesn't excuse the mal-educados (the ill-mannered) from their responsibility for improving social habits. This also doesn't mean that improving social habits can solve political and economic problems... Nor does it mean that only political and economic "solutions" can affect these social habits. Call it "dialectic" and give it an -ism if you would like, but the point is that in real life things are complicated, families raise their young, and political and economic changes affect the context in which this takes place... There is little that can be done outside of raising one's own young, and dealing as lovingly as we can with our peers... be it to reprimand them when they need to be shown back to the narrower path of recognizing-the-other, or be it to follow them ourselves on that path when as we try to stumble alongside it...

Enough rambling for now... later I will write about the events of today's election.

Aprendendo...

Hoje tive um bom dia. Soube preparar minha viajen de Cochabamba de volta para La Paz. Saí tranquilo após um delicioso jantar com amigos de lá, Daniel que nos hospedou, sua parceira Hannah and roommate Josepha, e a parceira de viajen que deixei por lá, Eliza. Também foi bom e aproveitei a amizade de Rodrigo antes de voltar... buena onda!

Dormi bem na estrada, e mal posso descrever a beleza do nascer do sol junto a cordilheira!!! Quando radiava o lado do Illimani, que brilho divino! O nascer do sol transluzia por uma grande imagen do Sagrado Coraçäo em um pano fino na frente do onibus.

Cheguei, busquei hospedagen cerco ao centro, me alojei e fui atrás de passagens de tren para Uyuni. Quem tem boca vai a roma, mesmo que rode pela cidade até chegar... rodei pela estaçao central, baixei o Prado, e cheguei a uma oficinia fechada até segunda, já no confortável Sapocachi. Bem, até lá, curto La Paz.

Comi salteñas com jugo de durazno na plaza Avaroa. Que paz, que nao sabia havia em La Paz. Terei uma cozinha para usar esse fim de semana. Logo, terei novamente amizades de viajen e aventuras ao sul. Logo, também, conto mais daqui, das eleiçoes... com tempo, até escrevo em inglês.

La Piramide e além!

Hoy fiz uma puta caminhada nas montañas ao norte de Cochambamba. Acordei cedo com o irmäo de Daniel, chamado Rodrigo, com quem estamos quedando de couch surf aqui em Cochabamba. Seu pai nos levou até a beira da cidade, já quase uns 3 mil metros, e seguimos subindo por várias horas mais.

Quando chegavamos já ao pé da tal montaña llamada el Piramide, já nao sabia se teria folego para subir toda... mas seguimos, chegamos ao topo, e de lá ví um outro pico, com uma rocha arrendondada, que seguia mais além da piramide. Descansamos um pouco neste primeiro pico e descidimos continuar até o próximo.... Logo que continuamos percebi que havia um terceiro pico entre a piramide e este outro arrendondado... Mascando coca, tomando agua e bolachas nos picos, seguimos de um para o outro, e depois o outro... escalamos as rochas to pico arrendondado, já a uns 4 mil metros fácil, e decidimos näo baixar ainda mas continuar...

Havia de lá mais três picos, seguindo do oeste à leste. Da piramide seguiamos direito ao pico do meio entre estes mais altos, e pensávamos baixar depois deste... subimos este outro pico, do qual já näo se vê mais da cidade de Cochabamba, escondido atrás da piramide... Chegamos ao topo, e nossa ruta planeada para bajar já se tornava täo íngreme que näo se podia descer... Duas alternativas: voltar por onde viemos, ou seguir deste pico para o outro a mais de 5 mil metros através das rochas que os ligavam, fazendo um crest da codilheira.

Chegamos ao segundo pico, e lá nos quedamos mais um tempo.... putz, que lindo é estar lá. Fotos nao foram tiradas, e bem por que nenhumas fotos poderiam realmente capturar a beleza daquele lugar, a altura em que estávamos, e a emoçao de ter subido tanto já em só umas 4 ou 5 horas. É uma experiência única que deve ser vivida pessoalmente para realmente poder aprecia-la.

Já depois começamos a descer do segundo pico para um passe, e de lá pelo braço leste do vale, oposto ao que tinhamos subido, contornando várias lagoas e riachos e cachoerinhas de montanha bellísimas! Bajamos forte até la laguna Wara Wara, wara significando ''vento'' em Quechua, e o lugar fazendo jús a seu nome. Lá tomamos nosso almoço, e sacamos que deviamos continuar a descer em um passo mais forçado, pois ainda haviam uns 10 kilometros para voltar, e já era entäo umas 4 horas...

Mas pra descer todo Santo ajuda, e foi fácil. Tomamos quase que uma linha reta, cortando a carretera que descia do lago, e cruzando até várias vezes la senda que bajava por dentro de las curvas de la carretera. Já cerco de las 6 y media, bajavamos hastá lo começo de la ciuidad... llegamos a las 6.45, y tomamos un taxi colectivo hasta lo valle de la ciudad...

Ducha, descanso, y depois um bom burrito alá fajitas, con mucha chela y alegria. Rodrigo dormiu des de que voltamos, e já nos buscou quando já tarde tinahmos saído, mas Daniel e Eliza me acompanharam, e encontramos alguns outros amigos depois do juego de Bolívar con un equipo cruçeño. Bolívar gaño dos a uno, e provabelmiente vá a gañar el campeonato nacional en los próximos juegos de la final. (Juegavan en Cochabamba por que havian empatado ya en los últimos dos juegos en La Paz y Santa Cruz).

Agora estou morto de cansado... foi um lindo dia. Estas montanhas säo as mais belas que tenho visto des das Rochosas no Colorado e Wyoming... Realmente incríveis. E a experiência de subi-las é até mais emocionante, pois näo levavamos os tradicionais equipamentos Coloradenses como mapa com altitudes, tarps, e first aid kits de medicamentos Europeus... ao invés levavamos o basico Andino: muita coca, agua, galletas, solo un abrigo cada, um canivete, päo y sardina. Nao há los guardaparques y no há rutas ciertas... solo se sube y baja por donde se puede, so no las carreteras y una senda en el final.

Pois mira, além da piramide, já nao se via nem ouvia a cidade... Já estavamos acima da tree line, já seguiamos nas supra-renais e coca mais que nas próprias pernas... Já miravamos abajo como condores, e já com aquela rocky mountain high de querer chegar ao próximo pico e querer subir ainda um pouco mais, e um pouco mais...!

E isso tudo gracias a el couch surfing. Realmente é o melhor modo de se viajar.

Ahora para los gringos que no compreenden nada de nuestras lenguas... pô, tem que se virar as vezes, né¿!

The mountains north of Cochambamba, in the Tunari National Park, are abso¡fucking!lutely gorgeous. It is an amazing challenge to hit 4 thousand meters and keep going, and it is amazingly ecstatic to bag not only one 5k+ peak, but from there to another right on the same stretch!!! Then down a mountain pass over a delicious cold cold Andean lake, and a straight line down along the opposite arm of the valley we went around. Reward: good food, local brew, and a priceless experience. Amen.

Cochabamba

A estrada de La Paz para Cochabamba é relativamente boa... plana, através do planalto seco do noroeste boliviano, depois que a estrada separa-se do caminho para Oruro começa a atravessar uma serra, muitas montanhas marrons, mais baixas que no Peru, e depois de muito sobe roda e desce, chega-se ao vale aonde se esparraaaaama a cidade de Cochabamba.

Mas, de estilo especialmente nosso, o fato do ônibus ''ter'' um banheiro a bordo näo quer dizer que este näo tenha ''acabado''... haviam vários baldes entulhados no banheiro, que aparentemente näo funcionava... umas 8 horas de viajem, com várias paradas no caminho aonde näo se tem a oportunidade de descer para usar o banheiro, e uma curtíssima de 15 minutos para almoçar, de onde o ônibus vai saindo sem nem verificar se todos estäo abordo! Putz... é foda quando neste paísinho metade do que se como e bebe dá diarréia...

Mas amanhä seremos recebidos por um couch surfer daqui, quem sabe descansados e mais animados possamos vir a curtir esta outra louca cidade boliviana! Amen!

And now for all yall gringos...

Cochabamba is a sprawling city at a valley that takes a loooong time to wind down after crossing several mountains on the way from La Paz. The mountains aren't as tall or as beautiful as in Peru, and the first half of the trip is across the dry brown bolivian plateau... Mind: just because the bus company says there are bathrooms, doesnt mean those work. and that matters when you are in an 8hour trip, and with a bad stmoach....

shiiiit

write more soon

La Paz!!!

La Paz is a big city... harsh, sure, but also somewhere you can find a more calm, more clean, more quiet part of town where to enjoy some quality food and drink. Mira, Sapucachi is a great place to live, and would have been wonderful to couch surf if any of the 5 people we tried contact were to have responded (laaaame). Having rested and gotten more used to the city, it was even possible to enjoy walking about town, checking out the main university (UMSA), and having a good vegetarian buffet for 24 bolivianos (about 3usd).

It is indeed Latin America... UMSA students occupy an entire building demanding (something about) summer courses, the police in heavy riot gear chill outside the front door of the building and people go by casually... The electoral offices have huuuuuuge lines, and, again, heavily armed police all about. It turns out the (conservative) courts nixed almost some half million voter registrations... yet, all seem quite sure of an Evo victory. The questions pertain mostly to whether they will also control both houses of congress, and which mayor offices, etc... Note: many leftists here are quite dissatisfied with Evo and MAS, making even a ''voto nulo'' campaign (none of the above, nix the elections). Especially around UMSA. Moreover, most peasant organizations are organic with MAS, taking on complete electoral support now... the other side of this coin is a weak Via Campesina of independent social movements as in Brazil... The work now is mostly with MST-Bolivia, which I will hopefully visit around Santa Cruz later this month, the last week or ten days before returning to Brasília.

Till then, off to Cochabamba for the week, back for the elections (I may possibly tag along a Spanish delegation that will be observing the elections in some indigenous communities of the Altiplano, cross your fingers and toes!!! Otherwise, I will be at Plaza Murillo!). Then next week meeting some other backpacking friends and heading south to Oruro, Uyuni and Potosi. Then taking a flight from Sucre to Santa Cruz, since, hehehe, there are no real roads that way ;)

Loki at me, I can be in Gringoland wherever I go!!

There is a hostel chain in Peru and Bolivia called Loki. They are committed to providing a safe and fun environment for backpackers. By safe they mean you can be surrounded by nothing but Ausies, Kiwis, Brits, USers, Germans, Israelis, and most other brands of pasty folk speaking English with the widest diversity of accents... By fun they mean that they actually pack in 200 such gringos in the hostel with its very own burger-n-guinness bar. Result: a piece of Gringoland in the heart of La Paz.

Don't get me wrong: if you don't speak any Spanish, and if you don't *want* to speak any Spanish, this is a wonderful place for you! You can watch the rugby or basketball or UEFA game and try to get laid with that hot blonde Kiwi or that cute Irish redhead... There are costume parties sometimes, and an all English speaking tourism agency right there, so you only need to leave the building on a tourist bus with a foreign guide to an extreme adventure experience in, which is this country again? No matter... the mountain bike is still gringo made, so you can trust it and break your arm on the steepest route of the world, or you can rent gringo made gear to scale that 5000m mountain with some name you can't and don't really care to pronounce.

Best of all, you can repeat this diversity of experiences in some three other cities! Can you imagine how wonderful, to be able to travel with the same gringo folk through the same drinking nights with the same gringo music across various different places? A hostel-hopping good time!

The diversity of a corn cereal isle in a USer supermarket!

In how many different places can we replicate the same lifestyle you could have had without ever having flown half way across the world and into a completely different country?

I bet I can paint corn pops blue and sell them in another box and make bank. As long as I can include it at Loki's complementary breakfast, until 1pm for the hungover!

La Paz...

鄭小塔: ...tell me more about la paz

me: there is a huge sprawling slum on the higland above... (The famous city of El Alto.) then you drive along a big highway on the edge of a mountain, (like dangling off a cliff) and below in the valley is the ''rich'' city, that looks like the same big slum, but with big buildings here and there... it looks like a boiling bubbling mass of people inside a bowl made of mountains. the mountains are beautiful, snow capped, but the lower you go, the dryer it gets... the more brown... until you get to that ugly brick exposed brown.. the city is all in construction. it looks like everything is a half done construction... so no one can really live in it yet

...and when you get down here... the cars twist all around each other, and the people move in between them like water through rubble. the honking is even worse than in peru, smaller cities, sure, then that might explain... and the streets all go either up or down... nothing is flat. nothing is straight for too long. it is as though the life of the people here falls crookedly onto each others', like the buildings and the street lines adjusting themselves to the harsh ground all around.

鄭小塔: ....haha, i guess i like chaotic cities... i think i'll like la paz

me: :)
if only it were safer...

鄭小塔: em..how's the man got robbed?

me: (a fellow Brazilian who came from Peru the same day) he got into a taxi... the taxi picked up another tourist. drove into an alley with both of them. other men showed up, said they were police, needed to investigate their passports. looked through his passport and bag, took his laptop, gave the passport and bag back to him. and they took away the other tourist... they probably took alot more from him. maybe took everything, and dropped him off in some far away place... it is really horrible.

Frontera hasta La Paz

A long day it was to cross borders into Bolivia... a bus, a van, another bus, a boat, that bus, a walk, a taxi... Never assume you know what is to come, always keep a spare few coins and short bills for the travel. And keep safe. A friend was robbed first few minutes in La Paz, hurray, a classic game of 'I took a wrong cab at the wrong time and place'...

MAS posters and grafiti all about... yet in a gringo oh so gringo hostel. A contrast I cant even begin to describe...

Remember that consolidations come from struggles, that are waged far afield from the resulted stays... Kataristas and comunistas and capitalistas all pull the centering state apart...

Defend it with the paid flag wavers¿

Sure MAS will be reelected.

But what is to come¿

What can they do, if a liberal twist remains in the unwillingness or inability to truly decapacitate and decapitate the oligarchy¿

Call it 'revolution', call it 'patria o muerte', invoke the ghosts of el Che all that you want....

no GueMing, no cutting necks, no truly systematic change... and that, even for only a possible gneeration...

for old Bolsheviks were buried in the 30's.

and we now look onto a whole new century.

what is to come¿

what is to be done¿

Titicaca

The life of the lake is dying. The peasant people's that used to compliment their farming with fishing can no longer do so, and so submit themselves to the industry of tourism, where a proletariat hussles up and down mountains 30 kilos of gringo pampering gear, or the harshness of a faked culturicity of dances that are simply pra inglês ver.

Yet a short time can yield a rich experience... the islands's very geography makes more or less sheep, more or less papas and maize grow. The families hold micro-plots throughout, integrating interests and spreading risks and tasks... 3 years rotation and 3 years fallow... no llamas or sheep enough for fertilizer, but also no chemicals that vitiate. A self-sufficiency that can't sustain the gas and oil and rice and clothes that come from the continent... And so, where are they to go¿

When canadian trout catch is sold at 20 centavos de Sol per kilo....

When no fish outside farms can yield the weight and wealth for complimenting the dry peasantry...

When tourism is the harsh and degrading and ocasional support it is...

Can there be a turn to an electoral populist compromise as here in Bolivia¿

Can there be a solidification of a mass movement that escapes the repression of the 'terrorists'¿

Peru, and I have left it, is left alone...

...leave it to them to shift the gears of our continents path, from the Chilean economic 'growth' or the Colombian military ossification, to the populist innovations of Bolivia and Venezuela.... donde quedan los Peruanos¿ Donde vamos nos Latinos nos quedar¿

Machu Picchu 2

Machu Picchu, for those of you who can't understand the languages of my continent, was a wonderful experience. It is an ancient ruin perched between two mountains at the curve of a deep river... A old sacred city to which the Quechua people took refuge during the Spanish onslaught, and which was left to forgetfullness untill Yale took it over... What is to be described, how can it be told, what it is like to be at such a place¿ A gringo could go there and appreciate the stones, the mountains, the mistique of the place.... but only a south american, even if adopted as I am, an truly take in the burning emptiness of the ''what we could have been'' and the values that built that place. Let no romanticism whitewash the imperialism that built it, the newness that contrasts with the millenarian Tiwanaku and Guarani peoples, and the painfulness of a classist religious exclusivity... but, still, it is not like the ongoing genocide, like the capitalist imperialism that places gringos there with their mcdonalds and pasty-fleshed women posters... what is to be done¿ to acknowledge it, even, is to go out of one's way in that international but not internationalist play ground. a pluricultural country, even, would negate Collantisuyu, in which I now write... Waikis, learn our world. Learn this in the pain in which it is deserved. That is the hammer that harshens the glow of the past glories that linger in the mountain forests mists of Machu Picchu. Friends gave me prayer flags to flutter on trees of a mountain.... may those prayers incarnate loving karma to that place, to our world, to the passing flourishing decay of the cultures that trample each other on the thin mountain air, of the jungle moisture below raining all about the jagged mountains all about.

Machu Picchu

Aventuras aventuras, como näo! Estive em Machu Picchu ontem, que tinha outro nome em seu tempo... Há um encanto com o que fomos (me fazendo agora de filho adotivo de nossa América) e oque poderiamos vir a ser, mas ao mesmo tempo uma estranheza no compreendimento que os povos que construiram aquelas lindas cidades e templos também o fizeram sobre os templos de outros povos, que seu império expandiu como os árabes em realezas polígamas que transformavam outras culturas em suas próprias, que todo imperio é imperialista... aí, perde-se todo o romanticismo sobre aquela gente e seus Incas... mas ganha-se, ou digo somente pessoalmente, ganhei uma visäo comparativa de civilizaçöes: se ambos impérios Inca e espanhol fizeram genocídios, pode-se comparar a medida de adaptaçäo dos outros povos à cultura ''vencedora'', e ví mais vestígios dos outros povos pré Incas em suas ruinas que vejo agora destes todos em nossas igrejas católicas... vejo a melhoria de esgotos e eletrecidade (para alguns) que vieram com a contínua colonizaçäo européia, mas vejo agora a morte das centenas de espécies de milhos e batatas e outras plantas que os povos dos Incas criaram e recriaram em seus terraços. Aonde cheguei? Aonde estou chegando? Nesse vai e vem de histórias sobre histórias, de impérios sobre impérios, de culturas sobre culturas, fico até tonto como os que caminham sobre essas montanhas sem se adaptar ao ar fino... mas me encontro cada vez mas. Fui até um pouco mais irmäo latino dos portadores Peruano-Quechua naquela trilha classista de turistas romanticos... Aprendi mais sobre eles e sobre mim mesmo. E assim vou... Por el suelo agora, cada vez mais, e mesmo ciego, sigo. Seguirei. Estou contente.

Valle Sagrado

We visited the Valle Sagrado for a day... A few notes: tour agencies never fill a bus, so they subcontract a bus and guide, who actually set the tour. You can get an idea of the tour from the agency, but never be too sure of details... Ideally, if possible, book it straight with the guide. We also found that you can get a single-language tour, with, possibly, more information than splitting the time into two languages. Costs a little, more, but still, off season, no more than 30 soles.

The tour is a mix of craft markets and ruins. The markets aren`t too different than in town, so it would be best to just spend time visiting the ruins. We only saw, really, Pisaq and Ollataytambo. The first is much larger than we could visit in such a short tour... The guide information is good, but it would be good too to return another day on our own to actually see the rest of the place. If one has got enough plata, you can spend a whole morning there, and a whole afternoon at Ollataytambo. Better that way...

With enough time, but not enough plata, bus your way to Pisaq for a day, try to find an improvised guide in town... They may or may not know much, but if you get a good improvised guide, twould be ideal. Same at Ollataytambo.

Lunch stops at either Urubamba or Calca. They said the former at the agency, but the tour actually went to the latter. Eliza and I packed sandwiches and granola, so instead of having a 20 soles lunch, we took a motor-shaw (a motorized rickshaw hehehe) around town and stopped out at their market. Unlike tourist markets, here they dont sell traditional trinkets and clothes, but clothes that say Adidas n such crap on it instead, cheap food and stuff the locals want. A very good experience to see the way people really live around here. Cheap fruit too, but don´t recommend any other food you can wash... There I bought some nice wool longjohns for 10 soles. A good deal too.

Tomorrow we leave for the Inca Trail. Excited. News from Machu Picchu next week.

Love.

SEIS Ruinas

Normally people pay some 30 soles for a day tour of four ruins near Qosqo. In just 3 or 4 hours, people are taken to one after another by bus or van, receive some info at the sites, and get back into town. Instead of doing that, Julian suggested that we take a kombi to a certain stop, then another up the mountains, for a total of 1.60 soles. It dropped us off at the highest of those ruins, Tambomachay, where we bought the needed Boleto Turistico (most of the profits of which go to Lima instead of staying here, sadly...). Those are small ruins with interesting stories, which we were able to catch from a few of the different guides other people paid ;) Climbing above the ruins you can reach a small indigenous community, which is as worthwhile to visit as the ruins themselves. From there you can climb down the other side straight towards the next ruins, Poca Pocara, and then you notice you could have probably walked across the community towards Tambomachay and seen those ruins without passing through the front gate and having to buy the Boleto... (but you should buy the Boleto anyway, more on that below).

Poca Pocara is more interesting than the first, and there too a guide offered us a free preamble to the ruins, a good 5 minute teaser, for further information he would charge for later. The pramble was very very informative, but the further guidance seemed more speculative, and we did not feel bad missing out on it. These ruins are very good to walk through and envision the activities there... From there you can also glimpse the old Quechua road that has fallen into disuse above the asphalt highway.

Continuing walking down from those ruins, you pass through another community along the side of the road. There are a few places there when you could eat. But we packed a picnic instead. Along the road there we met up with a Canadian who was coming down alone from a mountain hike. We offered her company down towards the city so she didnt have to go alone, and she came with us for some of the way.

We reached a point where the highway curves around a long way, but where our kombi driver pointed out a footpath that shortcuts and passes through another set of ruins not on the traditional tour. The woman who sold us the Boleto told us not to take such a route, since it is less safe to be away from the road, but there was a group going through that path on horses right in front of us, and we felt secure to follow them, so we did. We got to see the extra ruins, much of it still under excavation, which where said to be a temple to the moon. There, above a large rocky cliff, overlooking shepherd boys with their sheep and women washing their clothes by a creek, we took our picnic. It was quite wonderful to rest, on our own, behind a rocky edge, laying down in the sun, shielded from the wind... A peaceful silence that no tour could ever provide.

From there we kept along the path towards the ruins of Qenqo, where we again got some free info from other people`s guides. The amazing thing about that place is the work on bare rocks inside caves which were used to embalm mummies. There were also smaller, less excavated ruins nearby, which the locals called Qenqo Chico, which are also not on the traditional tours. The wonderful thing there was to find a carved altar on the bare rock where the Quechua still make offerings of coca leavest o Pachamama. There was also an amazing large rock shaped like a doorway, which in an Indiana Jones movie or Tolkien novel would surely open into a secret passage. There was a hole on the rock the size of a tennis ball, which I poked into looking for a trigger or other way to open the passage, and tons of huge black ants came out all about! That was where they nested their young, and they were desperately trying to fend off the invader and rescue their larvae. If the passage required one to continue proding her fingers there, it would surely require alot of strength of spirit to withstand the pain. I guess I didn`t believe in Indiana Jones and Tolkien stories enough to risk it...

From Qenqo we continue past other small food and craft stores to the largest and most amazing ruins around Qosqo, the grand complex of Saqsayhuama. There, another kind soul showed up and began giving us information about himself and the place. He is a teacher of Quechua at a small community up those mountains, and he comes down to the ruins in the afternoons after classes to give information to tourists and raise money for the school. He taught us about the ritual significance of that place, about the Quechua religion, and walked us through a ritual of offering to Pachamama and Apu. He gave us far more information than I could convey here, and without experiencing the place it would not have the same impact anyway... Above the ruins, where the towers used to stand with the altars, he crossed the security lines with us to show us the base of the towers, how it is a calendar, and how we can experience the echo of the Earth all around us from where the tower of the sun used to rise. We gave him 20 soles at the end, which is about how much we saw guides requesting at the entrance to those ruins, but we felt a bit heart crushed for giving so little to someone who gave us so much. Oxalá we can return more to his Quechua people whom he loves in the more valuable goods of the spirit than what we were able to give in lowly-but-necessary material goods...

Afterwards we completed our descent back into Qosqo, which seemed so noisy and busy with taxis and tourons all around... It was as though returning to a different realm after experiencing something higher. From the Condor to the Puma. Or even from the Puma, its head, through its heart, down towards the Serpent world below...

To walk through these places on our own, open to those who God trances their paths alongside ours even for a few hours, open to the experiences that befall us like the rain that comes with the unpredictable mountain weather, to experience on ones own feet the walk that the Quechua would take between their own places... that is how to experience this place - despite what the tour buses and the foreign cameras do to this place. It is still nothing compared to what it must have been like to live here before the invasion and occupation, what it must have been like to visit it even fifty years ago when the ruins were neglected to those who wished to trample or dismantle them, but it is still a blessing and a rarity compared to what it will be like soon when a Hyatt and a Marriot twist this place even more like the McDonalds that already encroached, below a marquee and without a big arch, at the heart of the Puma city... The new cathedrals that dismantle the Quechua people, but while I can feel the sour pain of the churches built from temple stones, the genocide-that-continues is even more painful. From the past, I feel but a pain of my history, but for now, I feel the pangs that torture me each time an old Quechua lady stretches out her strong scrawny hands from the ground up towards me asking for coins that I spend with much less care than she would...

It is beautiful...
...and it is painful
to be here

Couchsurfing

Couchsurfing is the way to travel. Eliza and I are staying with Juan Carlos and Julian in San Sebastian, an actually Peruvian neighborhood of Qosqo, we experience Peru for real and we can cook our own meals and get reliable information about how to move around town for 60 centavos instead of 6 soles, and to visit the ruins for the price of two micro rides instead of a 35 soles tour.... so much more to come on the actually city of Qosqo and the nearby ruins soon soon soon!

Llegando dolorasa y cansativamente hasta Cusco...

I got sick just before leaving on my trip to Peru and Bolivia... Xiao Ta was taking care of me, with teas and other chinese medicine, that was wonderful and I miss it now.... I got sick, I think, with the stress of graduate school applications and the impending travel, and wanting to spend time with Xiao Ta, I overlooked the date of my flight, and left a day late! Had to reschedule some flights and dar um jeitinho, and a jeitinho was figured out, and I am now in Cusco. But still with a sore throat, and sometimes a little fever... I flew from Brasilia to Sao Paulo, rested some three hours, flew through Campo Grande, landed in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, where I went to a hotel (thanks to Aerosur) for four hours, then continued on a flight to La Paz, then finally, to Cusco.

Arrived tired, but I´ve also been taking (western) medicine, and now lots of mate de coca, and joined a Swiss backpacker named Simon to split a cab to downtown, and finding a hostel. After a light lunch, I briefly visited my tour agency where I booked my visit to Machu Picchu hiking the Inca trail, and came back to the hostel, drank more tea and slept the rest of the day... Only went out again for dinner with Simon, at a balcony overlooking the Plaza de Armas, gorgeous at night, with the rain, sparkling and sprinkling on the broad slabby stones of the square. The city lights also climb up the mountain sides all around. The earth colored buildings that seem so plain at night gain a colonial air in the evening, and the mixture of Inca walls and colonial ´superstructure´ (in both the literal architectonic and more abstract sense) make this a truly wondrous place.

Tomorrow I might visit the Inca museum here in town, and meet with Eliza at the bus station in the afternoon (she flew in through Lima and is currenlty taking a bus over here). Afterwards we will go find a couch on which to surf, she may need food and rest, and we will make our plans for visiting the region. There are many ruins all around, small towns with traditional markets, and many other good things to do and see. Hopefully, my illness will soon pass and I will soon get used to the altitude (we are even higher than Boulder, I am quite sure, perhaps as high as Eldora).

As my mind settles and my body heals, I hope to find here, in the very heart of my continent, a peace which has been lacking and a rooting which has been left hanging while I bounced around Brasilia and sought more education down north again...

The Chinese

Despite my disappointment with academia and the situation in Brazil, other things did fill out my days for the past month in Brazil: helping to host three chinese visitors, who are spending one year with the MST in Brazil. They arrived through Sao Paulo but came to Brasilia soon to learn Portuguese at the Catholic Church´s Missionary Cultural Center, where they are used to giving crash courses in Portuguese to foreigners who need to quickly engage with Brazilian society. This was arranged by Paulinho, who straddles both Church and Movement, but since he was in Europe for the first month the chinese were here, he asked me to help translate and take care of them. I agreed with much excitement.

We showed them around town, they were hosted at Paulinho´s house by the rest of his family of friends, who are also my closest friends in Brasilia now, and they were taken to visit camps and settlements around the Federal District and surrounding region. I also brought them over to my house sometimes to see a different class neighborhood, experience, etc. There were many things we did together, many great conversations, about the land issue in Brazil, China, Taiwan, the rest of Asia, Latin America and the world, other political issues, many other social and cultural issues, religion, food, music, history.... So much that, unlike my previous blog entry, on this one I must admit I didnt not write much because I was too ´busy´ with my activities in Brasilia to make time to sit and write. Unfortunately, it is also too much now to ´catch up´ in any significant way, so I will only highlight a few events and a little something about each of the three.

They have Portuguese classes during the mornings, and most afternoons free, which they end up studying language, watching Brazilian movies, or sometimes going on some outings or just resting. They visited Pipiripau twice, at first more officially, going around to a few families and seeing a formal meeting, the second time we went there to work on the land of our friends who will be living in nucleus 16 (Luiz and others from Paulinho´s family, and other organizers from the national office), and ended up having lunch with the community and taking our siesta at Netinha´s house. They also visited a settlement on its two-year anniversary, Eldorado, and a few others on the region. That was a great visit because of the celebratory situation, and also because a UN/FAO delegation was going through the settlement as part of a weeklong visit to Brazil to report on the right to food to the commission on human rights. They made a very short visit, clearly, and although their work is similarly superficial, they seem to be providing, at least, generally positive reports on the situation in Brazil - that is, condemning what is to be condemned and praising what is to be praised, generally, with some complications.

The best times and experiences I had with the chinese, however, were in more personal interactions during our field visits, translating for them, and also there in town, going out for food, drinks, film, meeting university professors, or just spending good quality friend times at my house, at our friends´ house in Sobradinho, or at their school (where they also reside).

Sit Tsui is the only ´real´ chinese of the three, and even then, she is actually from Hong Kong, but taught at Shanghai and currently at the Univeristy of Beijing. She teaches cultural studies and rural sociology, and works with peasant women in organizing themselves through handcrafts and such work. She is very involved in the research and process of ´a new socialism for the countryside´, a policy of CCP since 2004, in addition to having done work elsewhere in Asia, such as India. She is the most ´academic´ of the three, which sometimes raises discomfort on the other two, but I can relate with her as well because of this... her questions, which I´ve had to translate many, are the most systematic and structured ones. She really does field work. After all, she is doing a post-doc in social movements and the agrarian question in Latin America! She, as with the others, is being funded by the HaoRan Foundation, a make-me-look-good institution for a fucked up construction development corporation in Taiwan... They hosted, however, the Via Campesina to talk about the current economic crisis last year, where Latin American peasant movement people made the contacts that is resulting in their visit now to us. Sit Tsui will return to Sao Paulo after Brasilia to do some more research and work with the MST´s national college, named after Florestan Fernandes, and from there she is still to decide where to go.

Ming Hsien is Taiwanese, very Taiwanese, and also the only one who has any peasant background. The oldest son of a peasant family from northeast Taiwan, he went to college in Taipei and stayed there working with labor movements, to which he is still attached. He is also the oldest of the three, the one with most language difficulties, but also the one who is most excited about children and most adventurous to deal with Brazilians and make his way around. He even prefered to move out of the Missionary Cultural Center to go live on his own at the Movement´s lodging in a satelite city of Brasilia! Being a social movement organizer and not an academic, as well as a pro-independence Taiwanese (still of Han ethnicity, but Taiwanese for a few centuries already), he is often at odds with Sit Tsui. After November, however, they are going separate ways, as he is going to Belo Horizonte in Minas Gerais, where the MST has a strong urban presence and where new labor movements are gaining strength. Hopefully he will learn more Portuguese now that I am gone and he can no longer get English (or often, English-with-Mandarin) translation.

Xiao Ta is the youngest of the three, and one that goes between them in many ways. She is Taiwanese, but her mother´s family emigrated only recently, with the Guomindang occupation during the 50´s, so she speaks more Mandarin than Taiwanese at home. Also, her father is a prominent labor movement organizer, while her mother is a prominent university professor. Both are very politically engaged, and she was raised in the struggle all along. But, being this new, apathetic generation of ours, she has always had to play mediation roles between generations within the movements, as well as in other ways (as between Sit Tsui and Ming Hsien, since she, after all, speaks both Taiwanese and Mandarin, identifies as being from Taiwan but culturally chinese, etc.). She graduated with a history degree, but went on to work with labor movements in many ways... played and sang in a workers´ band known in such circles, helped found and organize a documentary film directors union (since she also makes documentaries herself), and was a major force in the sex workers´ movement in Taiwan, serving as secretary of their union until she came to Brazil this year. Unlike the other two, who have clear interests in rural sociology and land issues and fomrs of social movement organization (Tsui and Ming Hsien), Xiao Ta is currently with less specific goals and broader horizons... In a way, she needed to get out of Taiwan for some time, but, given who she is, she doesnt just go on vacation backpacking... she writes grand proposals and takes on a project like this one of working for international solidarity! Just before, for example, she undertook a similar, but shorter project investigating community currencies and barter systems in Mexico and Argentina, and since she had also lived in Guatemala for six months working with sex workers, she speaks relatively good Spanish and has far greater ease speaking Portuguese than the other two.

It also turned out that Xiao Ta and started liking each other a lot....

...but soon I had to leave for Peru and Bolivia. When I come back to Brazil, however, I will do some more traveling, and she will likely be in Paraná, so I might go see her there, and travel some with her. That would be good.

Intermission

It has been a long time since I updated this blog. This has been for a variety of reasons, but first it was due to a general ‘desânimo’ (a disappointment, a disillusion that drains me of life), that came with shifting gears from Rio Grande do Sul into the life to which I returned in Brasília. I will say a little about three events that are marking of this period, from which I felt a need to withdraw into personal affections, most of which are distant now, and to put my body into work at my family’s garden and reading poetry and literature to heal the spirit.

The first event was a meeting of researchers of the Cerrado, organized by some faculty from the Center for Sustainable Development (CDS) here at UnB, during a weekend-long series of events celebrating the peoples, cultures, and biodiversity of the Cerrado. It was with this event in mind that I set my return date from my adventure in the South, so the disappointment with it was all the more marking of the contrast I felt in the experiences there and back here.

The academic presentations were reports on past research, and only 45 minutes were allotted at the end for a group discussion on how future work could be done by such a group towards the greater understanding and advocacy of healthy ties between the people who live on the Cerrado and this, our ecosystem. As a first gathering, expectations should not have been set too high, I understand, but the lack of preparation of those there still caught me off guard. Over 20 minutes were wasted at first by a woman who is neither researcher nor knows anything about the Cerrado, but enjoyed to hear herself change words around and speak of the Maya as though she were enlightening the world and all around her. She was by far the biggest waste of time, but not the only one to do so there.

When more serious deliberations were raised by others, they resulted, through a windy process, in the call for a committee of four to eight researchers to prepare next year’s meeting in order to take into consideration all the other comments raised during the conversation (which ended up doubling its allotted 45 minutes). Few volunteered to actually join such a working committee, and very little concrete directions were given for the improvement of the collective work of the group. I myself raised the suggestion that next year’s presentations not constitute reports on past research, but proposals for future collective research and work with social movements already invited for collective work and present at the meeting. This suggestion seemed timely, since not few of those present repeated the consideration that a large amount of money for work in the Cerrado was (or was to be made) available through the Ministries of Social Development, the Environment, and maybe some additional government branch or another. Yet there they were, self-important academics, for the most part, licking their chops over research budgets while itching around like blind mice who know not how to get their cheese, and fearful it would “go to the Amazon instead” or rot in some office, unused. The quickness with which my comment disappeared from the conversation (about budgets and the need to research the Cerrado, things which I would imagine needed no repetition given the very nature of the meeting) was a pillar of my disappointment that day.

Yet don’t let the focus on the disappointing aspects distort the reality that, even still, good came of my participation at that event. There I ran into some people mentioned in previous posts, and such occasional encounters are of utmost importance to the building of more significant ties. Some, for example, have persisted, as with Janjão, who was there as one representative of the regional MST, and who went with me and another group to spend last weekend at a settlement in the Minas Gerais region surrounding the DF (the Federal District in which Brasília is situated) – more on that at a later post.

Yet the event as a whole left me with a sour taste in my mouth for Brazilian academia in general, and the CDS at UnB in particular. It was the third-to-last straw in my consideration of trying applications already this round here in Brazil. The second-to-last came only a few days later, when the CDS hosted the Green Party (Partido Verde) presidential candidate, Marina da Silva, past Minister of the Environment and dissident from the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores – PT), for a talk on the topic of sustainability. The disappointment here was two-fold; with CDS and with the Greens, which meant further disillusion with academia and the electoral process.

As a PT dissident, Marina’s candidacy had represented for me, when I first returned to Brazil, the possibility that a serious challenge to the current government could, at least, force it into a position of accountability. If other leftist opposition parties rallied around the Greens, the PT would simply have to straighten itself out some, or all would risk a return to the rightist coalitions built upon the social-democratic PSDB. But Marina’s challenge is not serious by any stretch of the imagination… and I do not refer to how many votes she can get or “take away” from PT. Rather, I refer to the content of the speech she gave that night – pure bureaucratic banter of green reformism in pro-business developmentalist discourse. Big conservationist transnational NGOs have her in their palms, and she has no concrete alternatives to the economic or social policies of her erstwhile party. When pressured by more critical questions from the (younger members of the) audience, she responded with the most uninspiring bullshit about “consumer choices for green products” and “good corporate examples” in the “European models.”

To make matters even more ridiculously distasteful for me, one of only nine people who were able to raise questions after her speech was that woman-with-nothing-good-to-say-and-who-likes-to-hear-her-own-voice from the above mentioned meeting! And this – mind you! – was a recognized question by the same CDS organizers who already knew that woman was a verbose bag of egoism! But none of this seemed to bother the bigwigs of the CDS, and none of that environmental reformism or consumerist cooption seemed to bother the vast majority of people who packed that auditorium, and most of those faces are already beginning to be recognized by me as the same little clique of middle-class liberals from Brasília who would likely fawn over everything that distastes me about Boulder… And I realized that this would be the setting in which I would envelop myself if I were to ingress at the CDS program and dwell among the middle-class of Brasília, and this was the second-to-last straw…

The very last straw came the following week when I went to the VIII National Bioethics Congress, to present an essay on “Agroecology of Agribusiness? Revolution or Genocide!” along with my mother, who was also presenting some other works of her own in more bio-medical ethics. My presentation was a very, very short summary of the argument about agroecology in a chapter of my thesis, but even such a short summary did not have the opportunity to be discussed during the congress. Other than the keynote speakers and very few “round” table discussions by a few other bigwigs, all other, and I mean the vast majority of the presentations, were limited to a ridiculous 10 minute interval. That did not allow for a proper exposure of a research topic, its results, an argument, or much less any debate about the issues at hand. This fact alone suffices to characterize the congress, in my view, as a complete failure, and an embarrassment to Brazilian academia.

But this is not all that is embarrassing and disappointing. The chair of my session did not even bother to show up, and this forced us to delay our already short time of presentations. Those researchers who did have time for proper presentations and Q&A’s that I saw were, for the most part, very poor speakers, with weak arguments, empty rhetoric, and uninteresting content. In particular, the speakers who addressed the “environmental crisis” focused on it as a result of some abstract “anthropocentrism” and advocated for its solution, therefore, a “planetary ethics” with no specificity whatsoever. When I, and a few others, raised questions about what such a “planetary ethics” would entail in concrete terms for the solution to the problems presented, as political alternatives, or at least social practices, the same resounding stupidity of “consumer choices” reared its ugly head, but this time the aura of importance shifted from electoral politics to the “moral high ground” of academic masturbation over –isms.

Now, I do not expect everyone, or even the majority, to agree with me, or to part from the same questions or considerations… but at least I would be satisfied if there were at least some echo to the seriousness of the work that these people claim to be doing that corresponded in any way with reality. It is as though there were three sorts of characters in this land: those Pontius Pilates who see themselves as so much more intelligent and pure than the rest for preaching “conscious personal choice” while they wash their hands; a small minority of politically engaged illiterate prophets whom they crucify; and a vast sea of ignorant and willingly-ignorant sheep who demand only the liberation of the soap-opera that kills their mind and rapes their dignity, instead of those who sacrifice themselves for a better world.

Let this image conclude, then, my account of the first twenty of my past forty days. With a decision to not subject myself to an application process into Brazilian academia for now, and while endeavoring to care for my own sanity by withdrawing into the privileges of my family’s hammock and backyard, I had felt no ‘ânimo’ to write anything… not until I busied myself with more rewarding activities, and with a new injection of life in my very physical presence, have I now been able to write again.

The occupation of INCRA / RS

I arrived by bus from the northern region of the state late on a Monday night and went to the Movement’s residence hall in Porto Alegre. I had originally planned to rest from my trip and find a ride the next day to the region of São Gabriel, several hours west into the countryside where most mobilizations are taking place in Rio Grande do Sul (most encampments have been moved there to form a critical mass in the struggle for land in that region). Once I arrived, however, I was informed about an “activity” early the next morning and decided to take part. Those within the Movement in Porto Alegre knew that a mobilization on the regional headquarters of the National Colonization and Agrarian Reform Institute (INCRA, the government agency in charge of such issues) was to take place soon, in conjunction with an escalation of mobilizations in São Gabriel, but it was only the night before that those in support capacities in Porto Alegre received confirmation of the mobilization.

After very few hours of sleep I made my way to the INCRA building, where some from the residence hall had already arrived somewhat earlier and taken their positions inside and around the building. I was entrusted to join two other comrades with the duty of keeping the front gate open when and while some 9 bus loads of landless peasant families arrived from their countryside encampments with their personal belongings (rolled up mattresses and some clothes) and additional gear and food for a lasting occupation (such as pots, stoves, rice and beans). These were busloads of encamped landless peasants from São Gabriel and, mostly, other camp sites around the northern region of the state (where the Judiciary has been consistently issuing orders for the removal of encamped families from occupied farms, from the sides of the roads, and, ultimately, even from other previously established agrarian reform settlements… With no place else to go, these landless families went to the government bureaucracy in charge of obtaining land for their settlement to pressure it to advance the process in São Gabriel, where simultaneous mobilizations were taking place, and elsewhere in the state.).

It was very, very rainy, but this didn’t matter for the mobilization. After the first few hundred people made their way into the building with their personal belongings, some of the men that had gone in first began to go back to the buses to bring the rest of their heavier gear (pots and stoves) and food (mostly rice and beans). Once most women, children and personal belongings were already inside, we understood that an attempt to close the gate would be futile to stop the occupation. One, then another, then finally all three of us that had been guarding the gate began to help carrying these heavy items. The Movement’s flags were placed at the gate and banners with slogans for agrarian reform and against the state government and its repressive actions (that had murdered another landless peasant in São Gabriel just three weeks before) were hung throughout the front of the occupied building. The entire process took place completely non-violently and people were remarkably well disciplined, with the entire building being occupied before 10am.

The bureaucrats that had actually arrived to work on time began to pack their bags to leave, telling their peers arriving late, “don’t even bother going in there, its packed with the landless.” I was not too near them to follow their conversations in depth, but it looked as though they wanted to take advantage of the situation to orchestrate their own strike – instead of working harder to attend the demands of the occupying landless peasants, they chose instead to extend their long holiday until “decent” work conditions were reinstated by their repressive government.

Soon families organized themselves into the “base nuclei” already set up at their encampments and the buses in which they came, and decided on which floor each group would settle during the course of the occupation. Personal belongings were soon spread throughout the entire hallway of all eight floors of the building, but the office spaces themselves were not occupied by decision of the Movement (also, most had been still locked, or where soon locked when the occupation began). Three kitchen groups soon began to set up their large gas-fired stoves (each with at least 5 tops) under the awning right in front of the building, an empty room near the front of the building was found and designated communal pantry, into which all foodstuffs were taken, and the coordinating committees began their articulation with the base nuclei to set their terms of negotiation. The INCRA superintendent wasn’t at his office, and his deputy refused the initial negotiation “as long as the building was occupied” (ignoring the fact that the purpose of the occupation was obviously to guarantee that a negotiation would take place and that its terms would be followed).

The first lunch was served to the 450 people occupying the building, and in the afternoon the first sector meetings began to take place to organize a lasting encampment in the occupied INCRA building (since by then it had already become clear that no easy negotiation would be forthcoming through the mere show of force and that the occupation would indeed be necessary). Companheira Isabela, who I had already met on my travel into the countryside a few days earlier, introduced me to some other comrades in her sector, education, and this determined the capacity in which I was to lend support to the occupation. We raised an inventory of the children participating in the occupation up through the 5th grade, split among ourselves the responsibilities over each grade and a daycare (ciranda), searched for spaces to use for the education activities, and decided on the class schedule for the following day. We chose the afternoon, since that was when most meetings would be taking place and parents would need to leave their children to participate fully in the collective decisions over their terms of negotiation and the next steps of the occupation, as well as building maintenance activities (cleaning, etc.).

Since I knew that I would likely have to take my flight back to Brasília before the end of the occupation, I decided to work in the larger group of the daycare, where my leaving would cause less problems than if I had taken on the more committed responsibility over teaching one of the grades myself (or along with one other person). We chose an empty bank facility in the main floor of the building for the daycare, since its heavy double-doors would keep inside any runaway kid, and since the space could be kept relatively isolated from the busier parts of the building (in order for the smallest kids to take their naps, play at ease, etc.). The first activity in which all kids engaged was the making of signs to stake their own claim to the spaces of education. In the daycare, they stamped their little hands and feet with different color paints on a sign where we wrote “ciranda” (daycare). Still on the afternoon of the first day of the occupation, I ran an errand back to COCEARGS to pick up some toys for the children in the daycare. (Since I didn’t have any specific duties at the occupation, unlike most others, running such errands was a task more easily entrusted to me.) School materials for the children in grades 1 through 5 only arrived on the following day, when some unionized teachers from a nearby town brought donations.

During the first three days of the occupation, INCRA requested the local judiciary to issue a removal demand, but the judge refused saying that, since INCRA is a federal agency, the federal government could send in the federal police or the military to remove the occupiers without recourse to the civil courts (i.e., him). No legal claims were filled for three full days since neither the federal agency nor the local judiciary wanted to take responsibility for forcing the removal of 450 peaceful people, including children, from the public building of the bureaucracy that has been stalling their settlement and keeping them homeless, that is, landless. During this time, a public hearing took place at the state’s legislative assembly on “the criminalization of social movements” (it was called by a representative from the Communist Party who wore a very fine three-piece suit and spoke forcefully and eloquently, and held at the legislative assembly’s “citizenship and human rights commission”) and a meeting also took place in Brasília (thousands of kilometers away) between members of the Movement and the federal-level bureaucrats from INCRA. Recommendations came out of the first meeting, but the other seemed even less productive, and no direct negotiation was obtained by the fourth day of the occupation, when the judge finally caved in and signed the order for the removal of all occupiers within the next 48 hours.

During the days of the occupation a routine began to take shape, with the previous day’s leftovers being heated up for breakfast (along with a little bit of coffee, flat breads made then and there on frying pans, and lots and lots of chimarrão, i.e., mate), a few meetings during the morning and more during the afternoon, when we operated the education programs, the same rice and beans and some donated veggies (by Mauro from Integração Gaúcha) for lunch and dinner, and in the evening a movie was shown in the largest room at the top of the building through a projector brought from COCEARGS. One night we watched the first of the new Che Guevara films, on another night we watched a documentary about the popular uprising in Oaxaca in 2006, and all other films were similarly themed. There was a lot of time to get to know these people who go camp in extremely precarious conditions for months and years in the struggle for their own piece of ground, and all these conversations were fueled by lots and lots of hot chimarrão.

While I was there, I slept on a small couch on one of the hallways since I didn’t have a mattress. A 40f sleeping bag kept me nice and comfortable, though, even while it added to the way in which I stood out. Still, I soon made friends with others in that floor, helped them cleaning our bathroom regularly, and they shared with me their toilet paper, plates and silverware (since I didn’t have any with me while at the occupation). There was always a very long wait for the few showers available in a single bathroom in the first floor, so one was rigged in the bathroom of our floor, and even still I went without a shower until the third day, when I went on another errand (to bring some extra clothes for the occupiers and another piece of gear from COCEARGS for the movie showings) and accepted Jana’s invitation to shower and rest a moment with her at her apartment.

On the Friday of that week I had to leave to take my flight back to Brasília, and although I was no longer there to follow what happened, I know that the 450 landless peasants occupying the INCRA building refused to leave at the end of the 48 hours allotted in the judiciary’s removal demand. I do not know if the military police attempted to enter the building and dismantle the occupation, but I do know that a massive siege was staged in São Gabriel against the escalated mobilizations there, and those comrades decided to end their mobilization in order to avoid another conflict like the one in which Elton Brum da Silva had been murdered by the military police just three weeks prior in that very same place. Knowing of this decision, the peasants who were mobilized in Porto Alegre decided to follow in solidarity and disband their occupation as well, on the following Tuesday, a full week after the occupation had begun. It would have been unwise, they thought, to aggravate a situation in Porto Alegre against a decision of those in São Gabriel who were under far more severe repression, seeing the occupation of the INCRA building as an extension of the broader struggle being waged in the countryside itself.

The immediate goals of the occupation were not achieved, but there is a recognition that such are only the maneuvers of a long and intricate class struggle, where, as in any other struggle, there are times to advance and times to retreat. Nationwide mobilizations have already been in the works for the month of October, and the Movement in Rio Grande do Sul “jumped the gun” in launching these mobilizations on their own during early September. This was due to the particular circumstances of state repression, criminalization and judiciary blockading that have been so prominent in that state in recent times, and it demonstrates also the independence with which each regional branch of the Movement acts, as well as the independence within the sectors of the Movement in the same region. Still, the Movement has deep roots in the South and it remains strong in that state, so no one doubts that they will launch a new wave of mobilizations soon, most likely in conjunction with the series of mobilizations planned for this October.

Educar Institute

The Educar (“To Educate”) Institute is a high school conceived, built and operated by the MST that combines academic education with technical formation in agriculture (agropecuária) with a focus (habilitação) in agroecology. Since the first group began its studies in 2005, three classes have graduated with a total of about 120 peasant youth and young adults now providing technical assistance to agrarian reform settlements and other peasant communities throughout the state (such as Alan, for example, who was doing the inspection of the organic rice paddies at Filhos de Sepé). The school’s “daring proposal” is to form “peasant technicians seeking to question and debate the sustainable viability, as well as the political, economic, technical and productive viability of the current model of agriculture.” (This and all other quotes in this entry from the “Cartilha No. 1” produced by the Instituto Educar itself.)

The Institute is located in the Nossa Senhora Aparecida Settlement in the highlands of north Rio Grande do Sul, one of the oldest agrarian reform settlements conquered through the peasant occupations from which the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) would eventually be born in 1984. This is a region of deep fertile soils and rolling hills, marking a strong contrast with the low wetlands near Porto Alegre. Here, a “breadbasket” region of the country, agribusinesses still flourish with massive industrial monocultures of wheat, oats, (and during the summer) corn and soy. The community life and diversity of fruit, vegetable and animal production (especially milk) from the agrarian reform settlements contrasts harshly, then, with the endless plantations of grains, only marked by few empty farm houses used sporadically by absentee landowners.

“The history of this school has its roots in the 1980’s when, following upon the conquest of land, demands for basic necessities were also undertaken, such as: housing, education, healthcare, community centers, leisure and sport facilities as well as technical assistance for agricultural production. Technical assistance was a necessity for both the settled communities in the old Annoni plantation [where the Nossa Senhora Aparecida and eight other settlements are located] and also for the peasant communities nearby, organized through rural unions, the (now called) Peasant Women’s Movement and Church groups (Pastorais da Terra).”

“This need began to be satisfied when the MST donated 42 hectares of the above mentioned settlement, the area closest to the road and the city of Pontão, and organized “barn raisings” (mutirões) for the construction of the basic structures of the formation center then called Center for Alternative Popular Technologies (Centro de Tecnologias Alternativas Populares – CETAP). The goal was to rescue popular knowledges and to appropriate knowledge about alternative productive technologies with an agroecological dimension. By the end of the 1980’s the structure was built and the proposal for technical assistance for the settlement and peasant communities elaborated.”

“The technical group (agronomists, veterinarians and administrators from CETAP) worked in outreach technical assistance, built a seed bank, realized experiments with organic fertilizers, free range pig raising, grass fed cattle for milk production, biological control of soy pests, organized field days, systems of seed-barter, and a variety of meetings and seminars with the local peasantry for 10 full years.”

“By 2000, CETAP moved to the nearby city of Passo Fundo, where it could be nearer the majority of small farmers for whom it provided assistance (which were no longer agrarian reform settlement areas) and also because of the closer proximity to communication and information technologies. The MST organizers were pushed by their communities to set up a school for their youth, who had no other choice but to leave the countryside to study in the cities, where education was dissociated from their reality. This fact often led students to abandon their education, or abandon the countryside altogether.”

By 2004, the MST succeeds in establishing a partnership with INCRA (the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform), and in 2005 with the Federal Agro-technical School of Sertão, to create its own course for agriculture technicians with specialization in agroecology, choosing the structure of alternating periods of intensive residential education at the school and periods of work back at their own communities.

“The pedagogical strategy is to work on the construction and formation of militant agents with the capacity to analyze the social, political, cultural and economic reality, discerning the alternative technologies appropriate for the development of the countryside without depending on agribusiness. Hence, agroecology is the central focus of the education at the Educar Institute, which seeks to awaken the student’s conscience towards the harmony and coexistence between the ten million species that live on the planet and the struggle against the behaviors that destroy the equilibrium between them.”

While I visited, 42 students of mostly high school age were in residence. The students are organized into “base nuclei” of 5 or 6 members, who alternate on the daily tasks of cleaning their residential and academic space, running their kitchen, planning and leading the “mística,” organizing their library, etc. The students also have work hours (two days a week) and work days (Saturdays) where the groups alternate between operating the various productive sectors of their school: the vegetable garden, three extensive orchards, arable fields, raising animals (pigs, chickens, milk cows and sheep), healthcare (a medicinal herb garden and the production of homeopathic medicines), a bakery and the maintenance of building infrastructure. Every week day the students have classes morning and afternoon on all academic subjects of high school education. This intensive work/study schedule crams into 5 or 6 weeks the work of full semesters, allowing the students to return to their communities for a few months to live and work with their families before going back to school for another period of work/study.

The socialist ideological formation is strong at the school, not only through the communal work ethic and the socially engaged content of their academic education (especially through courses in history), but also through the practice of “místicas” every morning. The mística is an ever changing ritual of readings, songs, symbols and reflections on the history, life and struggles of the peasants and workers. The symbols usually include vegetables, fruits and grains produced, flowers, music and work instruments, flags and other symbols of the community. During Brazil’s independence day while I was there, the group of students who put together that morning’s mística read an account of the series of revolutions in 1848-49, called “Spring of Nations,” finding in that chain of nationalist bourgeois revolts the seeds of internationalist socialist revolution. Instead of singing Brazil’s national anthem, they sang the Internationale, as well as an anthem of the landless peasant movement and other songs of struggle.

The coordinator of the Institute is a respectable and intelligent peasant woman called Salete, who has been active in the land struggle since the late 1970’s, having taken part in the very first land occupation from which the MST would then be born at Encruzilhada Natalino. She has been an active force of the pedagogical formation of the landless peasant movement throughout all these years, from the organization of alphabetization programs while still at the encampments to the foundation and continued operation of the Educar Institute nowadays. The years of stories from the peasant struggles and the detailed knowledge she has of the students at Educar and others within the landless peasant movement kept me enthralled for long hours and many gourds of chimarrão… there is no way to begin to relate such an experience without living it for oneself.