The idea that such a catastrophe is unavoidable in America is inflammatory and corrosive.
In January 1972, when I was a 13-year-old boy in Dublin, my father came home from work and told us to prepare for civil war. He was not a bloodthirsty zealot, nor was he given to hysterical outbursts. He was calm and rueful, but also grimly certain: Civil war was coming to Ireland, whether we wanted it or not. He and my brother, who was 16, and I, when I got older, would all be up in Northern Ireland with guns, fighting for the Catholics against the Protestants.
What made him so sure of our fate was that the British army’s parachute regiment had opened fire on the streets of Derry, after an illegal but essentially peaceful civil-rights march. Troops killed 13 unarmed people, mortally wounded another, and shot more than a dozen others. Intercommunal violence had been gradually escalating, but this seemed to be a tipping point. There were just two sides now, and we all would have to pick one. It was them or us.
The conditions for civil war did indeed seem to exist at that moment. Northern Irish society had become viciously polarized between one tribe that felt itself to have suffered oppression and another one fearful that the loss of its power and privilege would lead to annihilation by its ancient enemies. Both sides had long-established traditions of paramilitary violence. The state—in this case both the local Protestant-dominated administration in Belfast and the British government in London—was not only unable to stop the meltdown into anarchy; it was, as the massacre in Derry proved, joining in.
Yet my father’s fears were not fulfilled. There was a horrible, 30-year conflict that brought death to thousands and varying degrees of misery to millions. There was terrible cruelty and abysmal atrocity. There were decades of despair in which it seemed impossible that a polity that had imploded could ever be rebuilt. But the conflict never did rise to the level of civil war.
However, the belief that there was going to be a civil war in Ireland made everything worse. Once that idea takes hold, it has a force of its own. The demagogues warn that the other side is mobilizing. They are coming for us. Not only do we have to defend ourselves, but we have to deny them the advantage of making the first move. The logic of the preemptive strike sets in: Do it to them before they do it to you. The other side, of course, is thinking the same thing. That year, 1972, was one of the most murderous in Northern Ireland precisely because this doomsday mentality was shared by ordinary, rational people like my father. Premonitions of civil war served not as portents to be heeded, but as a warrant for carnage.
Could the same thing happen in the United States? Much of American culture is already primed for the final battle. There is a very deep strain of apocalyptic fantasy in fundamentalist Christianity. Armageddon may be horrible, but it is not to be feared, because it will be the harbinger of eternal bliss for the elect and eternal damnation for their foes. On what used to be referred to as the far right, but perhaps should now simply be called the armed wing of the Republican Party, the imminence of civil war is a given.
Indeed, the conflict can be imagined not as America’s future, but as its present. In an interview with The Atlantic published in November 2020, two months before the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, the founder of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, declared: “Let’s not fuck around.” He added, “We’ve descended into civil war.” The following month, the FBI, warning of possible attacks on state capitols, said that members of the so-called boogaloo movement “believe an impending insurgency against the government is forthcoming and some believe they should accelerate the timeline with armed, antigovernment actions leading to a civil war.”
After January 6, mainstream Republicans picked up the theme. Much of the American right is spoiling for a fight, in the most literal sense. Which is one good reason to be very cautious about echoing, as the Canadian journalist and novelist Stephen Marche does in The Next Civil War: Dispatches From the American Future, the claim that America “is already in a state of civil strife, on the threshold of civil war.” These prophecies have a way of being self-fulfilling.
Admittedly, if there were to be another American civil war, and if future historians were to look back on its origins, they would find them quite easily in recent events. It is news to no one that the United States is deeply polarized, that its divisions are not just political but social and cultural, that even its response to a global pandemic became a tribal combat zone, that its system of federal governance gives a minority the power to frustrate and repress the majority, that much of its media discourse is toxic, that one half of a two-party system has entered a postdemocratic phase, and that, uniquely among developed states, it tolerates the existence of several hundred private armies equipped with battle-grade weaponry.
It is also true that the American system of government is extraordinarily difficult to change by peaceful means. Most successful democracies have mechanisms that allow them to respond to new conditions and challenges by amending their constitutions and reforming their institutions. But the U.S. Constitution has inertia built into it. What realistic prospect is there of changing the composition of the Senate, even as it becomes more and more unrepresentative of the population? It is not hard to imagine those future historians defining American democracy as a political life form that could not adapt to its environment and therefore did not survive.
It is one thing, however, to acknowledge the real possibility that the U.S. could break apart and could do so violently. It is quite another to frame that possibility as an inevitability. The descent into civil war is always hellish. America has still not recovered from the fratricidal slaughter of the 1860s. Even so, the American Civil War was relatively contained compared with what happened to Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, to Bosnia after the breakup of Yugoslavia, or to Congo from 1998 to 2003. The idea that such a catastrophe is imminent and unavoidable must be handled with extreme care. It is both flammable and corrosive.
Marche clearly does not intend to be either of these things, and in speculating about various possible catalysts for chaos in the U.S., he writes more in sorrow than in anger, more as a lament than a provocation. Marche’s thought experiment begins, however, with two conceptual problems that he never manages to resolve.
The first of these difficulties is that, as the German poet and essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger put it in his 1994 book Civil Wars, “there is no useful Theory of Civil War.” It isn’t a staple in military school—Carl von Clausewitz’s bible, On War, has nothing to say about it. There are plenty of descriptions of this or that episode of internal conflict. Thucydides gave us the first one, History of the Peloponnesian War, 2,500 years ago. But as Enzensberger writes, “It’s not just that the mad reality eludes formal legal definition. Even the strategies of the military high commands fail in the face of the new world order which trades under the name of civil war. The unprecedented comes into sudden and explosive contact with the atavistic.”
This mad reality is impossible to map onto a country as vast, diverse, and demographically fluid as the United States already is, still less onto how it might be at some unspecified time in the future. Marche has a broad notion that his putative civil war will take the form of one or more armed insurrections against the federal government, which will be put down with extreme violence by the official military. This repression will in turn fuel a cycle of insurgency and counterinsurgency. Under the strain, the U.S. will fracture into several independent nations. All of this is quite imaginable as far as it goes. But such a scenario does not actually go very far in defining this sort of turmoil as a civil war. Indeed, Marche himself envisages that, while “one way or another, the United States is coming to an end,” this dissolution could in theory be a “civilized separation.”
But this possibility does not sit well with the doomsaying that is his book’s primary purpose. Nor is it internally coherent. Marche seems to think that a secession by Texas might be consensual because Texas is a “single-party state.” This would be news to the 46.5 percent of its voters who supported Joe Biden in the 2020 election. How would they feel about losing their American citizenship and being told that they now owe their allegiance to the Republic of Texas? If we really do want to imagine a future of violent conflict, would it not be just as much within seceding states as among supposedly discrete geographic and ideological blocs?
The secession of California as well as Texas is just one of five “dispatches” that Marche writes from his imagined future. He begins with an eminently plausible and well-told tale of a local sheriff who takes a stand against the government’s closure for repair of a bridge used by most of his constituents. The right-wing media make him a hero figure, and he exploits the publicity brilliantly. The bridge becomes a magnet for militias, white supremacists, and anti-government cultists. The standoff is brought to an end by a military assault, resulting in mass casualties and creating, on the right, both a casus belli and martyrs for the cause. Marche’s other dispatches describe the assassination of a U.S. president by a radicalized young loner; a combination of environmental disasters, with drought causing food shortages and a massive hurricane destroying much of New York; and the outbreak of insurrectionary violence and the equally violent responses to it.
All of these scenarios are well researched and eloquently presented. But how they relate to one another, or whether the conflicts they involve can really be regarded as a civil war, is never clear. Civil wars need mass participation, and how that could be mobilized across a subcontinent is not at all obvious. Marche seems to endorse the claim of the military historian Peter Mansoor that the pandemonium “would very much be a free-for-all, neighbor on neighbor, based on beliefs and skin colors and religion.” His scenarios, either separately or cumulatively, do not show how or why the U.S. arrives at this Hobbesian state.
Marche’s other conceptual problem is that, in order to dramatize all of this as a sudden and terrible collapse, he creates a ridiculously high baseline of American democratic normalcy. “A decade ago,” he writes, “American stability and global supremacy were a given … The United States was synonymous with the glory of democracy.” In this steady state, “a president was once the unquestioned representative of the American people’s will.” The U.S. Congress was “the greatest deliberative body in the world.”
These claims are risible. After the lies that underpinned the invasion of Iraq and the abject failures of Congress to impose any real accountability for the conduct of the War on Terror, the beacon of American democracy was pretty dim. Has the sacred legitimacy of any U.S. president been unquestioned, ever? Did we imagine the visceral hatred of Bill Clinton among Republicans or Donald Trump’s insistence that Barack Obama was not even a proper American, let alone the embodiment of the people’s will?
This failure of historical perspective means that Marche can ignore the evidence that political violence, much of it driven by racism, is not a new threat. Even if we leave aside the actual Civil War, it has long been endemic in the U.S. Were the wars of extermination against American Indians not civil wars too? What about the brutal obliteration of the Black community in Greenwood, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921—should that not be seen as an episode in a long, undeclared war on Black Americans by white supremacists? The devastating riots in cities across America that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, and in Los Angeles after the beating of Rodney King in 1992, sure looked like the kind of intercommunal violence that Marche conjures as a specter from the future. Arguably, the real problem for the U.S. is not that it can be torn apart by political violence, but that it has learned to live with it.
This is happening again—even the attempted coup of January 6 is already, for much of the political culture, normalized. Marche is so intent on the coming catastrophe that he seems unable to focus on what is in front of his nose. He writes, for example, that the assault on the Capitol cannot be regarded as an insurrection, because “the rioters were only loosely organized and possessed little political support and no military support.” The third of these claims is broadly true (though military veterans featured heavily among the attackers). The first is at best dubious. The second is bizarre: The attack was incited by the man who was still the sitting president of the United States and had, both at the time and subsequently, widespread support within the Republican Party.
In this context, feverish talk of civil war has the paradoxical effect of making the current reality seem, by way of contrast, not so bad. The comforting fiction that the U.S. used to be a glorious and settled democracy prevents any reckoning with the fact that its current crisis is not a terrible departure from the past but rather a product of the unresolved contradictions of its history. The dark fantasy of Armageddon distracts from the more prosaic and obvious necessity to uphold the law and establish political and legal accountability for those who encourage others to defy it. Scary stories about the future are redundant when the task of dealing with the present is so urgent.
People walk through Grand Central Terminal in New York City. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images
‘WE’RE NOT SURE JUST WHAT THAT MEANS YET’—After weeks of skyrocketing Omicron cases and feeling like everyone you know, and their brother, has Covid —a surge that has led deaths to surpass 2,100 a day, the highest since early 2021 —experts are saying that a period of reprieve is in sight.
Even Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesotawho is known for nevercelebrating victory against Covid too early and correctly projecting Omicron’s destructive path as a “viral blizzard,” says we may have a moment to breathe in a few weeks once the new variant completes its rapid burn through the country.
Nightly talked with Osterholm about what we know about the approaching lull in the pandemic and how it should inform our behavior and public policy. This conversation has been edited.
Describe the lull that you and other experts say is in sight.
When we talk about a lull, we’re not sure just what that means yet. Maybe case numbers will come back down to baseline and what they were before Omicron showed up, but maybe they’re not going to be. But nonetheless, they’ll still be substantially lower in incidence than we saw in December, early January.
We’re following closely what’s happening in countries that experienced Omicron before we did, and it’s notable. If you look at South Africa right now, the number of cases increased dramatically from a baseline, hit the peak and then came down sharply. But if you look today, they still have almost 12 times as many cases a day as they did before Omicron occurred.
But what’s even more concerning is what we’ve seen in the United Kingdom. If you look there, and it appears to be tied to school kids and their parents — we saw cases come down 10 days ago, we saw them level off, and go back up again. Over the last two days, they’re going back up, not dropping. And so that could also signal that this tail is going to be more volatile than you might imagine.
I think that we could very easily see another variant emerge. I don’t know that to be the case, but I don’t know any scientific evidence would support it wouldn’t.
I know you don’t have a crystal ball, but how long do you expect this lull to last before we see another variant?
I actually do have a crystal ball! It’s just coated in 5 inches of mud.
But we don’t know. This is where humility has to be the main point we keep reinforcing. I saw some of the talking heads six weeks ago who said, “Well, don’t worry, this surge won’t be that bad because we have vaccines. It’s not going to be like 2020.” Some of them now are the very people saying how bad this is.
Anybody who does any model that predicts more than four weeks out, be careful. Because their models are based totally on pixie dust. If in the first week of November, just as Omicron was emerging, someone said, “I’m going to model it for the next 30 days,” you would have never picked up any of this.
Is that what we should expect at this point in the pandemic — a period of reprieve and then a new variant?
I see people wanting to immediately say we’re heading to the endemic stage. I’m a card-carrying epidemiologist of 46 years. I’ve written a lot about epidemics, and pandemics and endemics, and I can’t tell you for the life of me what the hell endemic means right now.
If we go into a four-month period of relatively limited transmission, is that endemic? Well, then what happens if in September, we see a new variant emerge that suddenly causes an Omicron-like situation?
We have to be careful about the choice of terms. Is this virus going to go away? The answer is no. Will it cause future challenges? The answer is likely yes. We will not likely see the kind of immunity that will come from either vaccination or from previous infection that will be sustainable. You saw the Israeli data today; they’re recommending a fourth dose for everybody 18 years of age and older.
Only a third of people who have had two doses of vaccines — so they’re vaccine friendly — have gotten a booster, which we know has been important in reducing the risk of serious Omicron infection. So do you think we’re going to do better with a fourth dose?
We’re going to have to learn to live with this virus. But at the same time, I’m optimistic that if we can really put in place very aggressive and well-described systems for testing and drug deployment, we can surely do a lot to reduce serious illness.
Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. We had a couple more questions for Osterholm, including on Omicron-specific vaccines and what life will look like in The Lull. Read on, and reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at mward@politico.com, or on Twitter at @MyahWard.
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Speaking of vaccines — Pfizer announced today it’s starting clinical trials for an Omicron-specific vaccine. Shouldn’t we be more worried about the next variant?
That’s exactly it. First of all, companies should not be deciding what the next vaccine should be. They should be manufacturing the vaccines that the public health and regulatory world determine are important. So I think this is putting the cart before the horse to have companies out there pursuing, and even in a sense promoting, vaccines for specific variants.
When the lull comes, what should our behavior look like? Should this period affect vaccine and mask mandates and other public health measures?
I think most mandates are going to go out the window. I think society is going to demand it.
I think most of the behaviors — it won’t matter what we say — they will be, in a sense, an attempt to be as normal as they were before Omicron hit, or for that matter, before Covid hit. We might not like the wind, but it’s going to blow. We can’t stop it.
And so I think the challenge is going to be: Will we at that time continue to do everything we can to get more people vaccinated, particularly kids, to get people who are at high risk to get their additional booster dose? We’re going to have to continue that.
The second thing is we need to do everything we can to continue to expand testing capacity. What I don’t want to see happen is: We may not be using all the tests, so we throw them away. No, at this point, we’ve got to have a surge capacity and be prepared for what happens if we do see an Omicron-like surge in the fall. What will we be doing for the health care workers? Will we have more? I think salaries, and we’re looking at benefits, for health care workers to stay on the job. What kind of support can we provide health care workers, many of them who are suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome?
Then if another surge doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. You can say it was wasted. I would rather always be sorry for something I did rather than something I didn’t do.
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WHAT'D I MISS?
— Hoyer: Voting rights bill, BBB ‘very much alive’:House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer remains optimistic that Democrats will pass the voting rights legislation and the Build Back Better bill despite roadblocks but offered few details about how that could happen. “I do not buy your characterization of the Voting Rights Act being ‘dead’ in the Senate,” Hoyer told POLITICO Playbook co-author Rachael Bade. “It certainly is not in the shape I’d like it to be in, but we’re not going to forget about that.”
— Judge presses ahead with April trial for several Oath Keepers:A federal judge insisted today that the first criminal trial for Oath Keepers who entered the Capitol on Jan. 6 open in Washington this April, a timeline he said he was committed to despite vocal objections from some defense attorneys who worry they wouldn’t have enough time to wade through a massive — and growing — trove of digital evidence. Judge Amit Mehta set the April 19 date for a subset of the 22 Oath Keepers charged with a sweeping conspiracy to obstruct the transfer of presidential power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden.
— Cuellar on FBI raid: I intend to win reelection; the investigation will clear me:A defiant Rep. Henry Cuellar declared that he would seek — and win — reelection, six days after an FBI raid of his home and campaign offices. In a video statement recorded outside of his childhood home, the senior Texas Democrat vowed that his name would be cleared in the probe and thanked supporters. But he offered no explanation for why the FBI searched his property less than six weeks before he faces a tough primary against progressive challenger Jessica Cisneros.
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AROUND THE WORLD
U.S. Embassy Charge d'Affaires Kristina Kvien and Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Rostyslav Zamlynskii speak to the media following the unloading of weapons, including Javelin anti-tank missiles, and other military hardware delivered on a National Airlines plane by the United States military at Boryspil Airport near Kyiv in Boryspil, Ukraine. | Sean Gallup/Getty Images
TENSIONS HEADACHES— Biden said he told Russian President Vladimir Putin that the United States would deploy thousands of troops to Eastern Europe if Russia continues its military buildup along Ukraine’s border or mounts a renewed invasion of the country, Quint Forgey writes.
But the American president also said he would not send troops into Ukraine, even as the White House warned that Russia was likely to move its forces across the border at any moment.
Biden’s remarks came after Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin placed the roughly 8,500 troops “on a heightened preparedness to deploy,” Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby said at a news briefing on Monday, with the “bulk” of those troops intended to bolster the NATO Response Force.
NATO has not yet activated that multinational force in response to Russia’s aggression, although the alliance announced on Monday that several of its European member states were deploying additional ships and fighter jets to Eastern Europe and putting new forces on standby. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov on Tuesday accused the United States of “escalating tensions” by putting the troops on high alert, telling reporters that Moscow was “watching these U.S. actions with great concern.”
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PARTING WORDS
FILLING IN THE GRID— The launch of the website Grid earlier this month represented the latest bet that the market for explainer journalism still exists in the digital space.
Months before Grid brought on board any writers or staff, the new digital media organization hired APCO Worldwide to help with its launch. The global marketing and consulting firm, which is headquartered in D.C. but is a registered lobbyist for various clients based in the UAE, confirmed to POLITICO that it “provided consulting services for Grid during the first half of 2021.”
A spokesperson said it has no continuing role with the digital news organization, which launched earlier this month. And Laura McGann, Grid’s top editor, said in a statement that APCO did not win a competitive bidding process for a PR contract for the site. The contract, instead, has gone to DKC News, which does public relations work for Grid.
But Grid maintains links to APCO, which represents a number of major UAE clients, including the company’s state-owned oil company.
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These cases are the culmination of a years-long strategy by conservative activists — and by one activist in particular — to win a court decision invalidating affirmative action. The president of Students for Fair Admissions, the lead plaintiff in the Harvard and UNC cases, is not a student at all. It is Edward Blum, a former stockbroker who was also the driving force behind several other lawsuits asking the courts to expand the power and influence of white people.
The two cases are also the first challenge to race-conscious university admissions programs to reach the Court since Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin (2016), which imposed strict limits on affirmative action programs but did not forbid them entirely.
The Court that will decide these cases looks very different from the one that considered affirmative action in 2016. Fisher was a 4-3 decision, because Justice Antonin Scalia died several months before Fisher was handed down and Justice Elena Kagan was recused. The four-justice majority, moreover, included retired Justice Anthony Kennedy and the now-late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Scalia, Kennedy, and Ginsburg have since been replaced by three reliable conservatives: Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. So, barring an extraordinary surprise from at least two members of the Court’s 6-3 conservative majority, affirmative action is probably doomed.
Why affirmative action in university admissions is in deep trouble
After Fisher, universities may only make very limited use of race in their admissions process.
Take the Harvard case as an example. Harvard is an extraordinarily selective university. If you group all undergraduate applicants into deciles based on their academic records, Harvard still rejects more than 85 percent of applicants in the top decile. Race is one of several factors that can push an outstanding applicant who is on the cusp of admission into the pool of students invited to attend Harvard.
As a lower court that upheld Harvard’s admissions program explained, a student on the border between admission and rejection may be “tipped” into the pool of accepted applicants for a variety of reasons, including “outstanding and unusual intellectual ability, unusually appealing personal qualities, outstanding capacity for leadership, creative ability, athletic ability, legacy status, and geographic, ethnic, or economic factors.”
In practice, this means that, if two equally extraordinary applicants apply to Harvard, but one is white and the other is Latino, the Latino student is more likely to be admitted unless the white applicant has some other factor in their favor — perhaps the white student’s father attended Harvard, or perhaps the student is from a state that is underrepresented at the university.
The Harvard plaintiffs argue that even this limited consideration of race in admissions is illegal.
The Constitution generally views any policy that draws distinctions based on race as highly suspect, and a federal law — Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — imposes the same restrictions on private universities such as Harvard that the Constitution applies to public universities with affirmative action programs.
Nevertheless, in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), the Court held that the social benefits of diversity justify allowing universities to take a limited account of race when deciding who to admit as a student. “Numerous studies show that student body diversity promotes learning outcomes, and ‘better prepares students for an increasingly diverse workforce and society, and better prepares them as professionals,’” the Court explained in Grutter.
Grutter also noted that “major American businesses have made clear that the skills needed in today’s increasingly global marketplace can only be developed through exposure to widely diverse people, cultures, ideas, and viewpoints.” The Harvard and UNC plaintiffs ask the Supreme Court to overrule Grutter.
Conservative judges typically believe that the collective benefits society gains from having more diverse campuses must bow to the individual interests of college applicants. And, given the Supreme Court’s 6-3 divide, that conservative viewpoint is likely to prevail.
The Court’s decision to hear the Harvard and UNC cases adds two more major cases to the Court’s already-bulging culture war docket.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' wife co-hosted a banquet as part of a symposium that featured the founder of the Oath Keepers, the New Yorker reported.
In a story published Friday, Jane Mayer detailed Virginia "Ginni" Thomas' ties to conservative groups.
Thomas, a conservative activist and attorney, co-hosted a Remember the Ladies Banquet at the 2010 Liberty XPO … Symposium, which has been described as the "largest conservative training event in history," alongside Moms for America president Kimberly Fletcher.
The symposium also featured Rhodes, who earlier this month was arrested and charged with seditious conspiracy in connection to the Capitol riot. His arrest and charges marked the first time federal prosecutors brought sedition charges against anyone in the investigation into the Capitol siege. He has pleaded not guilty.
Rhodes is just one of many connections Thomas has to right-wing extremists and the January 6 insurrection, Mayer reported.
Fletcher, for instance, who co-hosted the banquet with Thomas, gave two speeches the day before the riot in which she spread the false claim that the 2020 election had been stolen from former President Donald Trump.
Thomas' husband, Justice Clarence Thomas, issued the lone dissenting vote. According to the New Yorker, Thomas is also involved with parties whose cases are presented before her husband in the Supreme Court.
Bruce Green, a professor at Fordham specializing in legal ethics, told Mayer that the appearance of Thomas's political activism has an impact on the perception of justice and is "awful."
"They look like a mom-and-pop political-hack group, where she does the political stuff and he does the judging," Green said.
Insider has reached out to Thomas, the Supreme Court, Fletcher, and an attorney for Rhodes for comment.
Government prepares to sell barn known as Project No 2 or Detention Site Violet, which has windowless, soundproof rooms
A menacing steel barn outside the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius where CIA terror suspects were once held in solitary confinement, subjected to constant light and high-intensity noise, is soon to go on the market.
The government’s real estate fund, which handles assets no longer needed by the state, said on Monday it was preparing to sell the notorious former “black site”, known as Project No 2 or Detention Site Violet, for an as-yet unknown price.
Part of Washington’s secret “extraordinary rendition” programme – in which suspected Islamist militants from conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq were captured and held in jails outside the US – the 10-room building served as a detention centre in 2005 and 2006.
In its windowless and soundproofed rooms, “one could do whatever one wanted”, Arvydas Anusauskas, who led a Lithuanian parliamentary investigation into the site in 2010, told Reuters. “What exactly was going on there, we did not determine.”
Lithuania’s top tourist attraction is a former Russian KGB jail in central Vilnius where 767 people were executed during an anti-Soviet uprising in the 1940s and thousands were tortured, but there are no plans to turn the former CIA facility, which has its own power generator and water supply, into a museum.
“We don’t push any buttons, so as not to turn anything on by accident,” an employee of the real estate fund said of the facility, where fluorescent lighting and the hum of air conditioning dominate the now-empty rooms.
The European court of human rights heard in 2018 that prisoners at the site, used as a training facility by Lithuania’s intelligence service from 2007 until 2018, were shaved on arrival and blindfolded or hooded, with their legs shackled.
Earlier this month it was revealed that the Lithuanian government had paid Abu Zubaydah, the so-called “forever prisoner”, €100,000 ($113,319) in compensation for the treatment he suffered at the site, following the court’s ruling that the government had violated European laws banning torture.
Zubaydah, was captured in Pakistan six months after 9/11, accused of being a senior member of al-Qaida, and has been held without charge ever since. He is unlikely to have suffered the most brutal forms of torture in Lithuania that the CIA applied elsewhere – he was waterboarded 83 times in a single month in Thailand – but he was subjected to sensory and sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, loud noise and harsh light.
A summary of the US Senate’s report into the CIA’s torture program released in 2014 referred to “Site Violet”, though it withheld the identity of the country in which the building was based.
The creation of the site prompted tensions between different elements of the Bush administration, with the US ambassador to Lithuania complaining bitterly that the state department had been cut out of the planning process and kept in the dark.
The Senate report also noted that by the time the black site was opened, CIA personnel were suffering “mission fatigue vis-a-vis their interaction with the program” – a reference to the trauma that agents experienced as a result of participating in torture.
The detainees who were brought there had also been subjected already to so much “enhanced interrogation” – the CIA’s euphemism for torture – that many had been “all but drained of actionable intelligence”.
The CIA and lawyers for the Bush administration attempted to justify Zubaydah’s torture by claiming he was a very senior figure in al-Qaida, but it emerged he was not a member of the organisation.
Other prisoners held at the site included Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-professed mastermind of the 11 September 2001 attacks.
The site was closed in 2006 after Lithuania refused to admit a third prisoner, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, to hospital. All three men are still in detention at the US detention centre in Guantánamo Bay.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to consider limiting the scope of a landmark federal environmental law as it took up for the second time an Idaho couple's bid to build on property the federal government has deemed a protected wetland.
The justices will hear an appeal by Chantell Sackett and her husband Mike Sackett, who own property in Priest Lake, Idaho where they hoped to build a home, of a lower court ruling favoring the government.
The court will consider what test courts should use to determine what constitutes "waters of the United States" under the landmark 1972 Clean Water Act, the answer to which determines whether the property is subject to regulation, requiring owners to obtain permits in order to carry out construction.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2007 determined that the Sacketts' land was part of a wetland and that they were required to obtain a permit under the Clean Water Act before beginning construction, which they had failed to do.
"The Sacketts' ordeal is emblematic of all that has gone wrong with the implementation of the Clean Water Act," said Damien Schiff, a lawyer at the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation, which represents the Sacketts.
There has been lengthy litigation and political debates over how much of a connection with a waterway a property must have in order to require a permit, with the Supreme Court issuing a ruling in 2006 that led to further uncertainty.
Four justices at that time said the law governed land with a "continuous surface connection" to a waterway while Justice Anthony Kennedy, who cast the deciding vote in the 5-4 case and has since retired, said the law extended further to areas that had a "significant nexus" to a waterway.
The new case gives the justices an opportunity to embrace the more stringent test proposed by the four justices, which business groups favor. Lower courts have found that Kennedy's test controls because he was the key vote.
The last three presidential administrations have sought to clarify the issue through regulations. Democrat Barack Obama embraced broader federal reach, while his Republican successor Donald Trump took the opposite approach. Democratic President Joe President Biden's administration is currently working on a new regulation.
The Sacketts' case reached the Supreme Court once before, with the justices ruling unanimously in 2012 that the couple could challenge in court an EPA compliance order imposing financial penalties until they restore the affected land. The area was filled in with gravel and sand after they purchased the property in 2004.
The litigation continued since then even as the regulations evolved. The EPA has since dropped its compliance order for the Sacketts but still has sought to require a permit.
The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year ruled against the Sacketts, finding that the EPA had "reasonably determined" that the property was subject to Clean Water Act regulation based on Kennedy's "significant nexus" test. The Sacketts' lawyers then appealed the case to the Supreme Court.
The justices are expected to hear the case in their next term, which begins in October and ends in June 2023.
Recently, critical race theory burst onto the national scene in a way that probably is somewhat unrecognizable to those who have studied it. Having coined the term yourself, what has your experience been as you’ve seen it become this sort of intellectual boogeyman?
Well, one of the very first articles I wrote was “Race, Reform and Retrenchment.” The entire point was to anticipate that reform would inevitably reproduce retrenchment and backlash. That has been the history of progress around race in the United States: Modest reform creates tremendous backlash. And sometimes the backlash is more enduring than the reform.
Consider we had about a decade of Reconstruction. And we had about seven decades of white supremacy, racial tyranny, utter and complete exclusion. We had probably a good decade, maybe a decade and a half, of active civil rights reforms. And then three, four decades of conservative retrenchment, reactionary responses to these reforms that allow for people to say what they’re saying now, which is that anti-racism is racist, your civil rights violate my civil rights. These are very old and repetitive ideas. So the reform, retrenchment frame is now taking place in the midst of a tremendous resurgence of anti-democratic, anti-inclusionary politics. And, in the context of a new distribution channel that is 24 hours, amplified by completely unaccountable information sources in the Internet. There used to be that saying that a lie gets around the world three times before truth gets its boots on. I’d say now a lie gets around about a million times before truth wakes up and says, “What is happening?”
You watch definitions of work — and words — that you know what they mean be completely turned inside out by power. I mean, that’s what it is. The power to define what your words mean, the power to define what this area of study is. The power to define it in order to destroy it.
You’ve heard critical race theory called “divisive,” “state-sanctioned racism” — can you define what it is and what it isn’t for the lay person?
Critical race theory is a prism for understanding why decades after the end of segregation, over a century and a half after the end of slavery, after genocide has occurred, why racial inequalities are so enduring. Initially, critical race theory focused on law’s role in creating racial inequalities and continuously facilitating them. We were that second generation after the formal collapse of segregation to go into institutions to see the ways that these institutions — largely created during a time where most marginalized people of color were not part of them — function. What are the ways that those institutional structures continue to protect the interests that were created in slavery and that are its descendants?
The middle class was basically created through federal policy that was then distributed in a discriminatory way because of local control. A hundred and twenty billion dollars created the suburbs and did so in a racially discriminatory way. GI Bill created the middle class in a racially discriminatory way. So these are all critical ways of looking at our society.
What experiences as a young person helped inform your work? I know your parents were [politically] active?
When I was in fourth grade, off I go to this new Christian school — before we knew anything about the politics that motivated some of the Christian academies to come online — and find out that I’m one of two Black people in the school. Also, apparently my presence there is a surprise for some of the parents; we’d assumed they’d know Black people are Christians, too. But that wasn’t the point of the school. So there ensued a three-year confrontation with how Christianity and racism were not practices alien to each other in that school. It didn’t help that I was the kid who won the academic contest and went to represent the school in the region. I would always get a talk: “Remember, you’re representing us.” A lot of anxiety about that. My cheers that I brought to the school, because I was a cheerleader, like, “Um, we can’t do that. That’s a little too …” I know they were basically saying “too Black.” But it really came to a head in a class where one of the teachers read Revelations to apply to the civil right protests that were going on. She was literally teaching that the civil rights movement and then the Black Power movement, that we were in the final days and these Black activists were basically demons. And every day my hand was up: “My brother was one of those people.” And so I’m fighting back, and off to the office I go for intentional disobedience. It was the beginning of understanding how school can discipline us away from confronting the truths about our society and try to weaponize us, to be agents of some of these ridiculous ideas. And I was like, “Ma, you’ve got to get me out of this school.”
How did you have the courage to speak up then?
So my parents, they’re called race men and women of the 20th century. The motto of some of them was “lifting as we climb.” My grandmother was in a Black women’s club movement. My mother had integrated the local lunch counter and the local pool, partly because her father was the town physician for Black folks, so they were able to do some of that without having the backlash — you’d get fired for doing that. So I think that came from her background straight to me. And my father’s father was a minister, also given some degree of independence. So together their understanding was when we sit down at the dinner table, you need to have something to say about what you’ve seen in the world, what have you contributed to the world, what is your thinking. And so they would hear from me my efforts to put together what it meant in the world to be this little Black kid. [Laughs.] And so speaking my mind, at least to the world, was encouraged — they sometimes had a little issue when I said: Well, how come this particular unfairness is happening in the home? But the environment encouraged critical thinking and reflection and instilled a responsibility to address unfairness or address racism where I saw it. It just so happened it was in my classroom.
When you see all those parents out protesting at school board meetings about critical race theory being taught in the classrooms, what do you think?
I think that the Republican right-wing outrage machine is very, very powerful. I see the money behind it. I see the slick, high-production-value videos and booklets, and I see the common language and phrases, and I just know it’s a campaign. A campaign that is nicely framed as grass roots when, in fact, it is not. I see the fingerprints of the think tanks that for some time have been rooting around for something that would catch fire. And I see that parents, some of them, if you just follow some of the organizations — the Moms for Liberty — you see this is a regeneration of activists who have been in various formations. It plays well on TV, and it is a show. It’s like reality TV, which is not necessarily reality.
And I think: Where is the outrage about the things that really are putting children at risk? And there are things that are really putting children at risk, right? It is not critical race theory. And when I look at the list of topics now banned because they’re discriminatory, I can’t help but notice what’s not there: eugenics, “The Bell Curve,” things that if there really, really was concern about teaching our children ideas that are divisive and that cause us not to share in our common heritage of Americans, it would be a whole different list.
It seems that critical race theory came into the [national] conversation as a backlash to progress made after the killing of George Floyd and a grappling with long-standing, systemic issues.
Absolutely. Think about it: The George Floyd situation was a generational moment. Right? It was huge. Every state in the union had a march. The majority of people out there were not of color. Language was being shared widely for the first time: “systemic racism,” “institutionalized patterns of marginality,” “racial power.” People were saying these words in a way that they hadn’t — ever! Yet, and this is where some of the problem is, it’s like those songs where everybody knows the chorus and they sing the chorus at the top of their lungs. And then [the rest of the song is]: Mmmuuhmm da da da da mmmmmmmerm — that’s kind of the situation we had. With no real literacy beyond that, with no capacity to actually say: Okay, so tell us what that means, what needs to be done. Tell us what the policies are that allow us to unravel the institutionalized forms of inequality that you are now talking about.
And if you don’t have the ability to do it, you’ve picked a fight with a giant, and you don’t have ammunition. You don’t have troops, you don’t have the war plan to respond to it. And you know the reasons why are that this is new for many people. This was produced by a singular moment, and that moment is increasingly looking like it may be singular if we’re not prepared in this moment to actually say: This really is what structural racism is. It’s not this stuff that these other people are talking about.
Yes. And he actually used Martin Luther King to support the idea. What can be more a statement of racial power than to use a martyr who died for a particular cause, to use his name in order to say that he would support eliminating further discourse about the cause that he died for? I mean, what could be more an example of this sort of boundless capacity for contradiction for hypocrisy? He was a critical race theorist before there was a name for it. So that would be bad enough if they were just using Martin Luther King as a justification, but the fact that some of these folks are also saying we need to take Martin Luther King’s books, or a story of his March on Washington, out of the curriculum even as they’re using it to justify it.
We cannot allow all of the lessons from the civil rights movement forward to be packed up and put away for storage. Because if that happens, anything and everything that speaks of diversity and fairness and inclusion will always be vulnerable to: Well, that’s just critical race theory. And so you have to recognize that the effort to pack all this together is not just about critical race theory. It’s about the entire justice project.
So how do you think about reform in a way that doesn’t cause one step forward, seven steps back?
It’s my constant question. You know, one of the things that I think about — a lot — is if we were to go back and talk to, I don’t know, Frederick Douglass in 1874 or any of the Black congressmen who were elected to serve Congress or any of the senators or the lieutenant governors who were Black or the majority who in South Carolina actually ran their governments there before the great coups that ended that experiment in multiracial democracy — if we were to say, “Look, this is what happened.” [Laughs.] “What now would you do differently? What could have been done differently?” — what would they tell us? Did they have any idea that they would be wiped out of politics altogether? Did they have any idea that some of them would be killed? Did they have any idea that race riots would be political coups? And if they had that idea, what would they have done differently?
We have been kind of raised with the assumption that everything is always forward, with the assumption that democracy is just in our DNA, and certain things are just never going to happen. Moving forward, we have to acknowledge that being vigilant and productive about preventing this kind of thing from happening again is not simply a matter of singing “Kumbaya,” it’s not just a pat on the back, it’s really looking deeply into our institutions and into our culture to understand why these things keep happening.
So when we’re looking at something like this that makes no sense, it should tell us that there’s a deeper logic driving it. And that deeper logic goes all the way back to: We are a country that was grounded in a racial project. For the longest part, we were a White nation, and our laws said so and our Constitution was interpreted to reinforce that. That doesn’t go away just because we stopped saying it.
Is it better in your mind that critical race theory is out there being talked about, even if it’s being misused, rather than existing in its pure state but in a much smaller conversation?
That is the question of the moment, and I think we won’t know the final judgment on this until history writes this story. And that turns on who’s doing the writing. [Laughs.] Which is honestly what’s at stake right now. This is about what the future knows about this moment.
My thought, my hope, is that having put front and center in the American consciousness the importance of what histories we tell will bring constituents, parents, policymakers to the table in a way that they haven’t been in the past. To really understand that to think about race is not the problem. To be racist is the problem. And racism is not primarily a thought crime; it’s an action crime. It’s an institutional problem. So is it better that this has happened? I would say, if it turns out that it makes people who should have been conversant in these ideas realize that there is no democracy without grappling with these issues, that there’s no daylight between maintaining a multiracial democracy and being fully literate on anti-racism. If people recognize now what this has to do with January 6, if they recognize now what this has to do with the deterioration of our democracy, then it will have been a good thing. Because it’s a five-alarm situation.
In address on state television, mutinous soldiers say they have dissolved the government and suspended the constitution.
Burkina Faso’s army has announced it has deposed President Roch Kabore, dissolved the government and the national assembly, and suspended the constitution, seizing control of the country after two days of unrest at army camps in the capital.
The announcement, signed on Monday by Lieutenant Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba and read by another officer on state television, said the takeover had been carried out without violence and those detained were in a secure location. The country’s borders have also been closed, it added.
The statement was made in the name of a previously unheard of entity, the Patriotic Movement for Safeguard and Restoration or MPSR, according to its French language acronym.
“MPSR, which includes all sections of the army, has decided to end President Kabore’s post today,” it said.
It cited the deterioration of the security situation and what it described as Kabore’s inability to unite the nation and effectively respond to the challenges it faces.
The statement said the MPSR would re-establish “constitutional order” within a “reasonable time”, adding that a nationwide nightly curfew would be enforced.
The army broadcast came after two days of confusion and fear in the capital Ouagadougou, where heavy gunfire erupted at army camps on Sunday, with soldiers demanding more support for their fight against armed groups.
President Kabore’s whereabouts was not immediately known.
Security sources earlier gave conflicting accounts of Kabore’s situation, with some saying he was being detained by the coup organisers and others saying forces loyal to him had taken him to a secure location.
Earlier, Kabore’s party said he had survived an assassination attempt, but gave no details. Several armoured vehicles belonging to the presidential fleet could be seen near Kabore’s residence on Monday, riddled with bullets. One was spattered with blood.
International reaction
United Nations chief Antonio Guterres said in a statement that he “strongly condemns any attempted takeover of government by the force of arms”, calling the events a “coup”.
The United States said it was “deeply concerned” about developments in Burkina Faso, and urged a swift return to civilian rule.
Before the army statement, the African Union and the West African bloc ECOWAS both condemned what they called an attempted coup, saying they held the military responsible for Kabore’s safety.
The landlocked country, one of West Africa’s poorest despite being a gold producer, has experienced numerous coups since independence from France in 1960.
Kabore – in power since 2015 and re-elected in 2020 – had faced waves of protests in recent months amid frustration about killings of civilians and soldiers by armed groups, some of whom have links to ISIL (ISIS) and al-Qaeda.
Security situation
Al Jazeera’s Nicolas Haque said Damiba has support from many soldiers in Burkina Faso’s army who have been involved in fighting armed groups.
“He’s someone that’s been on the front lines and seen the casualties caused by the war going on in this region of the borders of Mali, Burkina and Niger,” said Haque, reporting from Dakar, Senegal.
“He had written a book about questioning the situation between West African armies and armed groups in the area.”
Haque said the chaos in Burkina Faso is playing right into the hands of these armed groups, who favour a government that is not made up of elected officials.
“That is what they have been trying to fight off – a democratically elected government in Ouagadougou,” he said. “At the backdrop of this is the lack of ability from the former deposed president in trying to deal with the ongoing security situation.”
Burkina Faso joins the ranks of several states in the region that are now under military rule. Mali, Guinea, and Chad have seen coups in recent years.
Adama Gaye, a Senegalese political commentator, told Al Jazeera that “the failure to govern” is at the heart of these recent events.
“Anybody who has been monitoring the evolution of Burkina Faso expected this to happen – the [writing was] on the wall, clearly,” Gaye said, about the military moves on Monday.
Felipe “Pipe” Henao is a young environmentalist from the small town of Calamar in southeastern Colombia. At the meeting point of the Amazon and Orinoco basins, it’s an area of abundant biodiversity and an important biological corridor to the Andes mountains.
The forest region was once only occupied by a few nomadic Indigenous communities, but has since seen waves of colonization and conflict, rubber and coca booms, FARC rebel occupation, and most recently, rampant deforestation.
“My parents came here almost 40 years ago to colonize. They came and they made a farm in the middle of the jungle, where there lived nothing but panthers, jaguars and many other animals,” Henao said in an interview with Mongabay. “When we wanted meat, we would hunt an animal. If we wanted fish, we would throw the fishing line … we were very privileged.”
Like many in the community, Henao’s parents arrived in Calamar during a colonization wave in the 1990s to grow coca, the raw ingredient for producing cocaine. Henao remembers being involved in all aspects of the coca production process when growing up, from sowing the young plants and harvesting the leaves, to negotiating sales.
Yet what had the greatest impact on Henao was the forest they lived in, teeming with wildlife. From his family’s farm to town, it would take Henao six hours by boat or nine hours walking through the forest. Now, almost all that land has been turned into pasture for 25,000 heads of cattle.
During the occupation of the region by the FARC guerrilla group, campesinos would be allowed to clear only 1 or 2 hectares (2.5 or 5 acres) for growing coca and subsistence crops, which meant deforestation was kept at a minimum. But following the signing of the 2016 peace agreement between FARC and the government, the rebels left the area and illegal groups moved in.
“We knew that when FARC left the territory, which they had occupied for more than 60 years, the guns would be silenced, but the chainsaws would be turned on,” Henao said. “If those who gave the orders went away, who was going to protect the forest?”
“Nobody was taking their place, so some people with a lot of money came, like cattle ranchers, businessmen, and politicians, and saw empty jungle.”
According to Colombia’s Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies (IDEAM), the national deforestation rate hit a peak of 220,000 hectares (nearly 544,000 acres) in 2017, the year after the peace agreement. Deforestation figures have fluctuated in the years since, registering 171,685 hectares (424,242 acres) in 2020, according to IDEAM, showing a rising trend. And the biggest forest-related losses are in Colombia’s Amazonian region, with Guaviare department, where Henao lives, a focal point.
“I believe that the deterioration that we have in the region today is also part of the consequences of a bad implementation of the peace process,” said John Alarcan, a former FARC rebel and co-signatory of the peace agreement.
Finding solutions
Today, Alarcan leads Aso Jaguar, a youth initiative that makes art from recycled wood. He’s also completing a nursery that will provide seedlings and trees for restoration projects led by Henao, as well as providing them to communities in the areas most affected by forest loss.
Henao said that if he can involve as many people as possible and get them to change the way they relate to the environment, he hopes they’ll develop a sense of ownership that will make them more willing to protect it.
Through the organization he established, Pipe Q-ida (meaning “care for” in Spanish), he said they’ve connected with more than 150 companies and organizations in Calamar and more than 1,800 families, and mobilized more than 1,000 young people to volunteer to clean rivers, protect wetlands and plant more than 60,000 trees.
Activities like tree-planting days bring together children, families, adults, schools, the National Army—which provides logistical support and the use of trucks—and even former foes like Alarcan. Henao said the real objective of the tree planting is to create awareness.
“Even if a thousand trees fall, we will always plant one, and our message is still the same,” Henao said. “We know that every day they deforest and every weekend we plant 100, 200, 500 trees because every time we gather people to plant, we share with them our message.”
The next generation
Knowing that young people are the future of these efforts, and that they use digital platforms to entertain themselves and talk about the environment, Henao set out to amplify his message by becoming an environmental influencer: creating videos on environmental issues and providing workshops in local schools.
In many of Henao’s videos, he’s accompanied by his seven-year-old stepdaughter, Valeria RodrÃguez, known on social media as “Valeria the Guardian.” In addition to talking about environmental issues, she also leads planting workshops with other children while Henao works with adolescents and adults.
Henao said that when Valeria was four years old, she saw him recording, and when he went away, she stood in front of the camera and started to say, “Hello my fellow guardians. I’m Valeria and I invite you to nature.”
Henao and his wife, Andrea, gave Valeria space to explore. And seeing her continued interest in talking about environmental issues, Henao wrote her a script and they went into the forest to record. And she has been recording ever since.
Valeria told Mongabay that she talks with other children about the importance of taking care of nature and of the importance of the jaguar, because if it dies, so do the trees. She also emphasized the urgency of not littering, taking care of water, and not cutting down trees.
When asked about her future plans, she said she wants to make more videos, inspire people to protect the jaguar, and have her own housecat one day.
Yet for this environmental work over the years, Henao, members of his team, and even Valeria, have received threats to their lives. Henao also suffered from extortion and kidnapping and has received so many threats that he now has a full-time government-sponsored bodyguard.
And threats are not to be taken lightly in Colombia, the most dangerous place in the world to be an environmental activist. Just this week, 14-year-old Colombian Indigenous activist Breiner David Cucuñame was murdered while on patrol with an unarmed group that tries to protect Indigenous territories from invasions by illegal groups.
“We have reported deforestation head on. We have gone to court. We have reported illegal tourism. We have reported many things and it has generated so many risks for us,” said Henao, who now takes a less confrontational approach and is also conscious of how gaining greater visibility helps to decrease the risks.
Guardians of Chiribiquete
Just beyond Henao’s hometown of Calamar lies Chiribiquete, a national park the size of Switzerland. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site and home to 75,000 cave paintings, some going back more than 20,000 years, as well as at least three Indigenous communities living in voluntary isolation.
Carlos Castaño-Uribe accidently discovered the group of flat-topped mountains which contain the rock art in 1986 when he was the head of Colombia’s Natural National Parks authority (PNN). He played a fundamental role in that position to establish the national park and helping it be declared a World Heritage Site.
Yet despite its legal protections and value to humanity, Chiribiquete is under threat. According to the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP), the park lost more than 1,000 hectares (2,500 acres) of forest cover from September 2020 to February 2021, with most of the deforestation associated with the clearing of primary forest for illegal cattle pasture.
In 2018, Castaño-Uribe published a book about Chiribiquete and worked with the PNN to promote a “Guardians of Chiribirquete” conservation strategy. It’s underpinned by the idea that the best long-term solution to protecting Chiribiquete is to include the greatest number of people through civil society.
Castaño-Uribe said the book has sold 15,000 copies, with all proceeds from the sales, approximately $370,000, going into environmental education and local capacity-building activities for youth people in the areas surrounding Chiribiquete.
Castaño-Uribe said that although this is a token sum compared to the funding received by other environmental initiatives in the area, it has already done a lot to raise awareness of the need to protect Chiribiquete and is also providing funding for youth-based environmental organizations like Henao’s Pipe Q-ida.
“We are concerned about the future that we can leave to our children,” said Wilfred Guzman, a Calamar councilman. “But right now in Calamar there is a very significant group of young people and older adults who are working to improve and restore what is out there.”
Guzman works with Henao on reforesting and environmental education initiatives. And through the youth entrepreneur association that he’s a part of, Asojec, they also provide young people with opportunities to make a living through protecting the forests.
Their projects focus on sustainable harvesting of Amazonian fruits like sacha, açaÃ, copazu, borojo and moriche, to make jams, cookies, juices, ice cream and popsicles. They currently sell the products at the local and departmental levels, but the wider aim is to reach the national level, and one day export as well.
“I think that at the end of the day, our biggest objective is to be able to leave a legacy to our children [so] that our children think differently than our parents did, who mistakenly thought that they could come, cut down the trees and just have some pasture there for the cattle,” Guzman said.
“People see the forest differently. They no longer see it as an enemy. They see it as something that has a lot of richness apart from wood and oxygen. It’s what guarantees a life of tranquility and a healthy environment.”
