19 July 21
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Our investigation shows how repressive regimes can buy and use the kind of spying tools Edward Snowden warned us about
Few pause to think that their phones can be transformed into surveillance devices, with someone thousands of miles away silently extracting their messages, photos and location, activating their microphone to record them in real time. Such are the capabilities of Pegasus, the spyware manufactured by NSO Group, the Israeli purveyor of weapons of mass surveillance. NSO rejects this label. It insists only carefully vetted government intelligence and law enforcement agencies can use Pegasus, and only to penetrate the phones of “legitimate criminal or terror group targets”. Yet in the coming days the Guardian will be revealing the identities of many innocent people who have been identified as candidates for possible surveillance by NSO clients in a massive leak of data. Without forensics on their devices, we cannot know whether governments successfully targeted these people. But the presence of their names on this list indicates the lengths to which governments may go to spy on critics, rivals and opponents. First we reveal how journalists across the world were selected as potential targets by these clients prior to a possible hack using NSO surveillance tools. Over the coming week we will be revealing the identities of more people whose phone numbers appear in the leak. They include lawyers, human rights defenders, religious figures, academics, businesspeople, diplomats, senior government officials and heads of state. Our reporting is rooted in the public interest. We believe the public should know that NSO’s technology is being abused by the governments who license and operate its spyware. But we also believe it is in the public interest to reveal how governments look to spy on their citizens and how seemingly benign processes such as HLR lookups can be exploited in this environment. The Pegasus project is a collaborative reporting project led by the French nonprofit organisation Forbidden Stories, including the Guardian and 16 other media outlets. For months, our journalists have been working with reporters across the world to establish the identities of people in the leaked data and see if and how this links to NSO’s software. It is not possible to know without forensic analysis whether the phone of someone whose number appears in the data was actually targeted by a government or whether it was successfully hacked with NSO’s spyware. But when our technical partner, Amnesty International’s Security Lab, conducted forensic analysis on dozens of iPhones that belonged to potential targets at the time they were selected, they found evidence of Pegasus activity in more than half. One phone that has contained signs of Pegasus activity belonged to our esteemed Mexican colleague Carmen Aristegui, whose number was in the data leak and who was targeted following her exposé of a corruption scandal involving her country’s former president Enrique Peña Nieto. The data leak suggests that Mexican authorities did not stop at Aristegui. The phone numbers of at least four of her journalist colleagues appear in the leak, as well as her assistant, her sister and her son, who was 16 at the time. Investigating software produced and sold by a company as secretive as NSO is not easy. Its business is surveillance, after all. It meant a radical overhaul of our working methods, including a ban on discussing our work with sources, editors or lawyers in the presence of our phones. The last time the Guardian adopted such extreme counter-espionage measures was in 2013, when reporting on documents leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. Those disclosures pulled back the curtains on the vast apparatus of mass surveillance created after 9/11 by western intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency (NSA) and its British partner, GCHQ. In doing so, they instigated a global debate about western state surveillance capabilities and led to countries, including the UK, admitting their regulatory regime was out of date and open to potential abuse. The Pegasus project may do the same for the privatised government surveillance industry that has turned NSO into a billion-dollar company. Companies such as NSO operate in a market that is almost entirely unregulated, enabling tools that can be used as instruments of repression for authoritarian regimes such as those in Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. The market for NSO-style surveillance-on-demand services has boomed post-Snowden, whose revelations prompted the mass adoption of encryption across the internet. As a result the internet became far more secure, and mass harvesting of communications much more difficult. But that in turn spurred the proliferation of companies such as NSO offering solutions to governments struggling to intercept messages, emails and calls in transit. The NSO answer was to bypass encryption by hacking devices. Two years ago the then UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, David Kaye, called for a moratorium on the sale of NSO-style spyware to governments until viable export controls could be put in place. He warned of an industry that seemed “out of control, unaccountable and unconstrained in providing governments with relatively low-cost access to the sorts of spying tools that only the most advanced state intelligence services were previously able to use”. His warnings were ignored. The sale of surveillance continued unabated. That GCHQ-like surveillance tools are now available for purchase by repressive governments may give some of Snowden’s critics pause for thought. In the UK, the whistleblower’s detractors argued breezily that spying was what intelligence agencies were supposed to do. We were assured that innocent citizens in the Five Eyes alliance of intelligence powers, comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and US, were safe from abuse. Some invoked the dictum: “If you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear.” The Pegasus project is likely to put an end to any such wishful thinking. Law-abiding people – including citizens and residents of democracies such as the UK, such as editors-in-chief of leading newspapers – are not immune from unwarranted surveillance. And western countries do not have a monopoly on the most invasive surveillance technologies. We’re entering a new surveillance era, and unless protections are put in place, none of us are safe.
“This is our season of escalation.”
Reverend Dr. William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, told VICE News that his organization is leading a Selma-to-Montgomery style, four-day march from Georgetown, Texas to the statehouse in Austin where there will be a rally. The 27 mile trek will be spread out across several days, starting Tuesday, July 27 and ending Friday, July 30, to ensure activists don’t get sick in soaring summer temperatures. “We’ve got to start understanding that the attack on voting rights is an attack on the possibility of democracy,” he told VICE News in a phone call on Sunday. Georgetown was selected as the starting point due to the town’s history in taking down the Klu Klux Klan, Barber said. In 1923, the town's district attorney convicted four members of the local Ku Klux Klan for assaulting a traveling salesman. This legal action against the Klan in Texas was unusual at the time, as the white supremacist organization was deeply embedded in state politics. The Texas march will tie into a summer of "non-violent action” that the Poor People’s Campaign has organized as they advocate for progressive initiatives like voting rights, a $15 minimum wage, and the end of the filibuster. Their events have already included protests in Senator Joe Manchin’s West Virginia and a recent event at the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. Democrats in the Texas statehouse have made national headlines in recent weeks as they've fled the state and denied a quorum in order to try to block the restrictive Republican-backed voting bill. Since arriving in Washington, D.C. last week, members have met with lawmakers on Capitol Hill and the Vice President. Today, the Poor People’s Campaign will demonstrate outside the Supreme Court on the anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention, gathering women from around the country to protest voting rights and the $15 minimum wage. For Barber, the attacks on voting rights in statehouses across the country constitute an attack on all Americans. “It's not race or class,” he said. “It's race and class.” “We’re not just talking to the statehouse [in Austin]. We’re there to say to the Congress: we need congressional help. We need federal movement,” Barber added. “The only way to that is through the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.” The For the People Act, a sweeping legislative attempt to standardize elections and overhaul the campaign finance system, recently failed to advance in a procedural vote in the Senate. All Republicans voted against the measure, killing the bill using the Senate filibuster, a rule that any senator can use to require sixty or more votes in order to advance a piece of legislation. Barber says the passage of the two major federal voting rights bills is “Not either or. We’re not looking for a carve out. We’re looking for an end to the filibuster, period.” “This is our season of escalation,” added Barber. |
illions of people are inseparable from their phones. Their devices are within reach – and earshot – for almost every daily experience, from the most mundane to the most intimate.
Joe Biden. (photo: Melina Mar/Getty Images)
Give Joe Biden credit. As a 78-year-old mainstream politician, he’s made some surprisingly bold moves domestically when it comes, for instance, to climate change — even if his plans have been quite literally paralyzed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and his coterie of Republican extremists. So perhaps it’s not exactly good news when, on one issue, they seem to agree with him. I’m thinking of the Biden administration’s urge to launch a new Cold War with China and make Taiwan, not Kabul or Baghdad, the hot spot of the planet.
At least, it’s good to see that progressives have taken note of the increasingly depressing reality of the Biden version of foreign policy in Asia. Recently, more than 40 progressive groups signed an eloquent letter calling on “the Biden administration and all members of Congress to eschew the dominant antagonistic approach to U.S.-China relations and instead prioritize multilateralism, diplomacy, and cooperation with China to address the existential threat that is the climate crisis.” If not, as anyone knows who’s been paying attention to the heat and fire that have overwhelmed much of a megadrought-stricken American West, we face something like doom on this visibly overheating planet of ours. Those groups, in turn, seem to have some support in the House of Representatives at least from progressives like California Congressman Ro Khanna.
Sadly, China isn’t the only place where Biden and his foreign-policy crew seem determined to replay the long-gone Cold War era. As TomDispatch regular Aviva Chomsky, author most recently of Central America’s Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration, points out today, the president’s new plan for Central America, supposedly aimed at the “root causes” of migration to this country, is the disappointing equivalent of ancient history when solutions are actually available. He’s once again offering that region the kind of “aid” that helped create today’s “migrant crisis.” No, he’s not Donald Trump at the border, but he’s ensuring a planet on which Trump and crew will undoubtedly thrive.
In the cases of both China and Central America, some new thinking is deeply overdue. Unfortunately, in the mainstream world of Washington, it shows little sign of arriving any time soon.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
arlier this month, a Honduran court found David Castillo, a U.S.-trained former Army intelligence officer and the head of an internationally financed hydroelectric company, guilty of the 2016 murder of celebrated Indigenous activist Berta Cáceres. His company was building a dam that threatened the traditional lands and water sources of the Indigenous Lenca people. For years, Cáceres and her organization, the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, or COPINH, had led the struggle to halt that project. It turned out, however, that Cáceres’s international recognition — she won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015 — couldn’t protect her from becoming one of the dozens of Latin American Indigenous and environmental activists killed annually.
Yet when President Joe Biden came into office with an ambitious “Plan for Security and Prosperity in Central America,” he wasn’t talking about changing policies that promoted big development projects against the will of local inhabitants. Rather, he was focused on a very different goal: stopping migration. His plan, he claimed, would address its “root causes.” Vice President Kamala Harris was even blunter when she visited Guatemala, instructing potential migrants: “Do not come.”
As it happens, more military and private development aid of the sort Biden’s plan calls for (and Harris boasted about) won’t either stop migration or help Central America. It’s destined, however, to spark yet more crimes like Cáceres’s murder. There are other things the United States could do that would aid Central America. The first might simply be to stop talking about trying to end migration.
How Can the United States Help Central America?
Biden and Harris are only recycling policy prescriptions that have been around for decades: promote foreign investment in Central America’s export economy, while building up militarized “security” in the region. In truth, it’s the very economic model the United States has imposed there since the nineteenth century, which has brought neither security nor prosperity to the region (though it’s brought both to U.S. investors there). It’s also the model that has displaced millions of Central Americans from their homes and so is the fundamental cause of what, in this country, is so often referred to as the “crisis” of immigration.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the U.S. began imposing that very model to overcome what officials regularly described as Central American “savagery” and “banditry.” The pattern continued as Washington found a new enemy, communism, to battle there in the second half of the last century. Now, Biden promises that the very same policies — foreign investment and eternal support for the export economy — will end migration by attacking its “root causes”: poverty, violence, and corruption. (Or call them “savagery” and “banditry,” if you will.) It’s true that Central America is indeed plagued by poverty, violence, and corruption, but if Biden were willing to look at the root causes of his root causes, he might notice that his aren’t the solutions to such problems, but their source.
Stopping migration from Central America is no more a legitimate policy goal than was stopping savagery, banditry, or communism in the twentieth century. In fact, what Washington policymakers called savagery (Indigenous people living autonomously on their lands), banditry (the poor trying to recover what the rich had stolen from them), and communism (land reform and support for the rights of oppressed workers and peasants) were actually potential solutions to the very poverty, violence, and corruption imposed by the US-backed ruling elites in the region. And maybe migration is likewise part of Central Americans’ struggle to solve these problems. After all, migrants working in this country send back more money in remittances to their families in Central America than the United States has ever given in foreign aid.
What, then, would a constructive U.S. policy towards Central America look like?
Perhaps the most fundamental baseline of foreign policy should be that classic summary of the Hippocratic Oath: do no harm. As for doing some good, before the subject can even be discussed, there needs to be an acknowledgement that so much of what we’ve done to Central America over the past 200 years has been nothing but harm.
The United States could begin by assuming historical responsibility for the disasters it’s created there. After the counterinsurgency wars of the 1980s, the United Nations sponsored truth commissions in El Salvador and Guatemala to uncover the crimes committed against civilian populations there. Unfortunately, those commissions didn’t investigate Washington’s role in funding and promoting war crimes in the region.
Maybe what’s now needed is a new truth commission to investigate historic U.S. crimes in Central America. In reality, the United States owes those small, poor, violent, and corrupt countries reparations for the damages it’s caused over all these years. Such an investigation might begin with Washington’s long history of sponsoring coups, military “aid,” armed interventions, massacres, assassinations, and genocide.
The U.S. would have to focus as well on the impacts of ongoing economic aid since the 1980s, aimed at helping U.S. corporations at the expense of the Central American poor. It could similarly examine the role of debt and the U.S.-Central America Free Trade Agreement in fostering corporate and elite interests. And don’t forget the way the outsized U.S. contribution to greenhouse gas emissions — this country is, of course, the largest such emitter in history — and climate change has contributed to the destruction of livelihoods in Central America. Finally, it could investigate how our border and immigration policies directly contribute to keeping Central America poor, violent, and corrupt, in the name of stopping migration.
Constructive Options for U.S. Policy in Central America
Providing Vaccines: Even as Washington rethinks the fundamentals of this country’s policies there, it could take immediate steps on one front, the Covid-19 pandemic, which has been devastating the region. Central America is in desperate need of vaccines, syringes, testing materials, and personal protective equipment. A history of underfunding, debt, and privatization, often due directly or indirectly to U.S. policy, has left Central America’s healthcare systems in shambles. While Latin America as a whole has been struggling to acquire the vaccines it needs, Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua rank at the very bottom of doses administered. If the United States actually wanted to help Central America, the emergency provision of what those countries need to get vaccines into arms would be an obvious place to start.
Reversing economic exploitation: Addressing the structural and institutional bases of economic exploitation could also have a powerful impact. First, we could undo the harmful provisions of the 2005 Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Yes, Central American governments beholden to Washington did sign on to it, but that doesn’t mean that the agreement benefited the majority of the inhabitants in the region. In reality, what CAFTA did was throw open Central American markets to U.S. agricultural exports, in the process undermining the livelihoods of small farmers there.
CAFTA also gave a boost to the maquiladora or export-processing businesses, lending an all-too-generous hand to textile, garment, pharmaceutical, electronics, and other industries that regularly scour the globe for the cheapest places to manufacture their goods. In the process, it created mainly the kind of low-quality jobs that corporations can easily move anytime in an ongoing global race to the bottom.
Central American social movements have also vehemently protested CAFTA provisions that undermine local regulations and social protections, while privileging foreign corporations. At this point, local governments in that region can’t even enforce the most basic laws they’ve passed to regulate such deeply exploitative foreign investors.
Another severe restriction that prevents Central American governments from pursuing economic policies in the interest of their populations is government debt. Private banks lavished loans on dictatorial governments in the 1970s, then pumped up interest rates in the 1980s, causing those debts to balloon. The International Monetary Fund stepped in to bail out the banks, imposing debt restructuring programs on already-impoverished countries — in other words, making the poor pay for the profligacy of the wealthy.
For real economic development, governments need the resources to fund health, education, and welfare. Unsustainable and unpayable debt (compounded by ever-growing interest) make it impossible for such governments to dedicate resources where they’re truly needed. A debt jubilee would be a crucial step towards restructuring the global economy and shifting the stream of global resources that currently flows so strongly from the poorest to the richest countries.
Now, add another disastrous factor to this equation: the U.S. “drug wars” that have proven to be a key factor in the spread of violence, displacement, and corruption in Central America. The focus of the drug war on Mexico in the early 2000s spurred an orgy of gang violence there, while pushing the trade south into Central America. The results have been disastrous. As drug traffickers moved in, they brought violence, land grabs, and capital for new cattle and palm-oil industries, drawing in corrupt politicians and investors. Pouring arms and aid into the drug wars that have exploded in Central America has only made trafficking even more corrupt, violent, and profitable.
Reversing climate change: In recent years, ever more extreme weather in Central America’s “dry corridor,” running from Guatemala through El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, has destroyed homes, farms, and livelihoods, and this climate-change-induced trend is only worsening by the year. While the news largely tends to present ongoing drought, punctuated by ever more frequent and violent hurricanes and tropical storms, as well as increasingly disastrous flooding, as so many individual occurrences, their heightened frequency is certainly a result of climate change. And about a third of Central America’s migrants directly cite extreme weather as the reason they were forced to leave their homes. Climate change is, in fact, just what the U.S. Department of Defense all-too-correctly termed a “threat multiplier” that contributes to food and water scarcity, land conflicts, unemployment, violence, and other causes of migration.
The United States has, of course, played and continues to play an outsized role in contributing to climate change. And, in fact, we continue to emit far more CO2 per person than any other large country. We also produce and export large amounts of fossil fuels — the U.S., in fact, is one of the world’s largest exporters as well as one of the largest consumers. And we continue to fund and promote fossil-fuel-dependent development at home and abroad. One of the best ways the United States could help Central America would be to focus time, energy, and money on stopping the burning of fossil fuels.
Migration as a Problem Solver
Isn’t it finally time that the officials and citizens of the United States recognized the role migration plays in Central American economies? Where U.S. economic development recipes have failed so disastrously, migration has been the response to these failures and, for many Central Americans, the only available way to survive.
One in four Guatemalan families relies on remittances from relatives working in the United States and such monies account for about half of their income. President Biden may have promised Central America $4 billion in aid over four years, but Guatemala alone receives $9 billion a year in such remittances. And unlike government aid, much of which ends up in the pockets of U.S. corporations, local entrepreneurs, and bureaucrats of various sorts, remittances go directly to meet the needs of ordinary households.
At present, migration is a concrete way that Central Americans are trying to solve their all-too-desperate problems. Since the nineteenth century, Indigenous and peasant communities have repeatedly sought self-sufficiency and autonomy, only to be displaced by U.S. plantations in the name of progress. They’ve tried organizing peasant and labor movements to fight for land reform and workers’ rights, only to be crushed by U.S.-trained and sponsored militaries in the name of anti-communism. With other alternatives foreclosed, migration has proven to be a twenty-first-century form of resistance and survival.
If migration can be a path to overcome economic crises, then instead of framing Washington’s Central American policy as a way to stop it, the United States could reverse course and look for ways to enhance migration’s ability to solve problems.
Jason DeParle aptly titled his recent book on migrant workers from the Philippines A Good Provider is One Who Leaves. “Good providers should not have to leave,” responded the World Bank’s Dilip Ratha, “but they should have the option.” As Ratha explains,
“Migrants benefit their destination countries. They provide essential skills that may be missing and fill jobs that native-born people may not want to perform. Migrants pay taxes and are statistically less prone to commit crimes than native-born people… Migration benefits the migrant and their extended family and offers the potential to break the cycle of poverty. For women, migration elevates their standing in the family and the society. For children, it provides access to healthcare, education, and a higher standard of living. And for many countries of origin, remittances provide a lifeline in terms of external, counter-cyclical financing.”
Migration can also have terrible costs. Families are separated, while many migrants face perilous conditions, including violence, detention, and potentially death on their journeys, not to speak of inadequate legal protection, housing, and working conditions once they reach their destination. This country could do a lot to mitigate such costs, many of which are under its direct control. The United States could open its borders to migrant workers and their families, grant them full legal rights and protections, and raise the minimum wage.
Would such policies lead to a large upsurge in migration from Central America? In the short run, they might, given the current state of that region under conditions created and exacerbated by Washington’s policies over the past 40 years. In the longer run, however, easing the costs of migration actually could end up easing the structural conditions that cause it in the first place.
Improving the safety, rights, and working conditions of migrants would help Central America far more than any of the policies Biden and Harris are proposing. More security and higher wages would enable migrants to provide greater support for families back home. As a result, some would return home sooner. Smuggling and human trafficking rings, which take advantage of illegal migration, would wither from disuse. The enormous resources currently aimed at policing the border could be shifted to immigrant services. If migrants could come and go freely, many would go back to some version of the circular migration pattern that prevailed among Mexicans before the militarization of the border began to undercut that option in the 1990s. Long-term family separation would be reduced. Greater access to jobs, education, and opportunity has been shown to be one of the most effective anti-gang strategies.
In other words, there’s plenty the United States could do to develop more constructive policies towards Central America and its inhabitants. That, however, would require thinking far more deeply about the “root causes” of the present catastrophe than Biden, Harris, and crew seem willing to do. In truth, the policies of this country bear an overwhelming responsibility for creating the very structural conditions that cause the stream of migrants that both Democrats and Republicans have decried, turning the act of simple survival into an eternal “crisis” for those very migrants and their families. A change in course is long overdue.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Aviva Chomsky, a TomDispatch regular, is professor of history and coordinator of Latin American studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts. Her new book, Central America’s Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration, will be published in April.
Forced sterilization survivor and Back to the Basics Community Empowerment executive director Kelli Dillon. (photo: ABC 7)
alifornia Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed the state budget, and included in the budget is $75 million in reparations for survivors of forced sterilizations of prison inmates allowed under the state’s eugenics laws. Thousands of women—some of whom were sterilized without their consent as early as 11 years ago—are set to be paid in an effort by the state to make right its egregious and immoral sanctioning of a practice that denied incarcerated women the right to decide what to do with their own bodies.
According to ABC 7, California will be the third state in the U.S. to pay reparations to the victims of forced sterilization and the first to pay them to women who were victimized while incarcerated.
“Oh my goodness. I can’t even explain the overjoyed feeling that I have. But also the feeling of relief,” survivor Kelli Dillon—whose story sparked the investigation into the state’s eugenics practices after it was featured in the documentary Belly of the Beast—told ABC. “The advocacy, the journey of justice we’ve been on has been 20 years for me, but for some survivors has been for over 40 years.”
In fact, according to The Guardian, the history of forced sterilizations in California dates back to 1909 and was reportedly the inspiration for eugenics programs in Nazi Germany. But investigators found hundreds of women were victimized by the practice as late as 2010, even though it was illegal by then.
As for Dillon, her attorney obtained medical records showing that when she was an inmate in the Central California women’s facility in Chowchilla in 2001, the then 24-year-old underwent what was supposed to be an operation to take a biopsy and remove a cyst, but surgeons removed her ovaries during the procedure without her knowledge or consent.
The state’s new reparations initiative isn’t stopping at women like Dillon who were victimized in prison. It’s also looking to right wrongs dating back to the early history of the practice.
From the Guardian:
The new California reparations program will also seek to compensate hundreds of living survivors of the state’s earlier eugenics campaign, which was first codified into state law in 1909 and wasn’t repealed until 1979.
That law allowed state authorities to sterilize people in state-run institutions, who were deemed to have “mental disease which may have been inherited” and was “likely to be transmitted to descendants”. The law was later greatly expanded to include “those suffering from perversion or marked departures from normal mentality”. Those targeted were often Black or Latina women, though some men were sterilized as well.
“California established these egregious eugenics laws, that were actually even followed by Hitler himself, in an effort to curb the population of unwanted individuals or people with disabilities,” said the state assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo, who introduced the bill to create the compensation program.
She said, in all, more than 20,000 people were sterilized in California, including the historic cases prior to 1979 and hundreds of additional cases in the prisons documented until 2010. Many of the historical survivors have since died, but the state believes about 400 are still living, about a quarter of whom are expected to apply for compensation.
According to ABC, a “coalition of organizations” will be tasked with finding survivors, some of whom are still unaware they were sterilized in state prisons. Officials estimate individual payments of up to $24,000, starting with an initial payment of around $12,000.
Some might find it difficult to believe that the undeniably evil practice of forced sterilization went on for so long and until so recently, but if you know America, it isn’t as much shocking as it is typical of the nation’s history of cruelty towards people society deems less than—especially considering the most recent cases involve primarily Black and Latina victims, according to the Guardian.
Hopefully, every state in the nation with a similar history follows California in attempting to make amends for past evils.
“No monetary compensation will ever rectify the injustice of this,” Carrillo said. “But there is a level of dignity that is bestowed on the survivors by the acknowledgment that this happened. If we don’t do this now, when will we?”
Romani people protest the killing of Stanislav Tomáš at the hands of police in Teplice, Czech Republic, June 26, 2021. (photo: Gabriel Kuchta/Getty Images)
ast month, a harrowing video emerged of a police officer kneeling on the neck of a 46-year-old man. He pleads and writhes for six long minutes before suffocating to death. Despite the striking coincidence in circumstance, the victim was not George Floyd. He was Stanislav Tomáš, the most recent Romani victim of police brutality in Europe — this time at the hands of Czech police. Official responses have ranged from the shocking to the silent. Czech authorities immediately defended the police’s actions, tweeting “No Czech George Floyd” and claiming that their actions were proportionate to his apparent criminality. Meanwhile, grassroots solidarity protests have arisen across Europe to demand justice.
The killing of Stanislav Tomáš is not an outlier. It is a tragedy nestled within a general trend of structural socioeconomic discrimination and violence inflicted by a populace whipped into fascistic frenzies. This is now common across the entire continent. Stanislav’s case is tragically typical: a murdered Roma man from a community that struggles from discrimination in access to education, employment, sanitation, infrastructure, and housing — effectively ghettoized. Stansilav was purportedly homeless at the time of his death.
From Italy’s Matteo Salvini calling for “a mass cleansing, street by street, piazza by piazza” to the anti-Roma pogroms already taking place in France, North Macedonia, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Bulgaria, a contemporary far-right international has been waging an escalating, popular war on Roma across the continent since the collapse of communism. This is inextricably linked with the almost universally dire economic condition of the Romani people. With the withdrawal of welfare safety nets and states implementing a regime of welfare chauvinism, Romani communities are deemed a lumpen, unproductive surplus population. As has been noted elsewhere in interdisciplinary academic circles, we have seen a biopolitical shift from the “making live” hegemonic within pre-neoliberal global political economy, to the “letting die” of surplus labor in contemporary capitalism. The empirical example of the condition of the European Roma population evidences this shift.
Devastatingly, we are yet to see any coordinated, political mass movement of scale among Europe’s Roma population in response to this trend. But Romani people, spanning the entire continent, require a collective political movement with the purpose of mobilizing and organizing fellow Roma for the defense of their communities. This must be based on demands for collective emancipation from the combined threats of mob violence, police brutality, and mass poverty.
There have been many instances of organizing among Romani activists throughout history, even in the darkest and most hopeless of places. One movement in particular, however, has proven capable of mobilizing the Roma masses toward collective action. This unlikely, unique, and underappreciated movement was named the World Romani Congress (WRC).
First Congress
One weekend in April 1971, a motley crew of delegates representing twenty-three nations spanning four continents on both sides of the Iron Curtain met in Cannock House, then a small suburban boarding school in London. This meeting was convened to affirm a common identity among one of Europe’s largest and oldest diaspora: the Romani people. Funded and facilitated by the movement for nonaligned nations, with India and socialist Yugoslavia taking leading roles, it had to contend with a lack of common culture, a shared language of many variants that only half of them could speak, and a very elusive wish for unity.
By the end of the weekend there was an agreed common flag, an anthem, a national day, and a shared political project for self-determination and collective civil rights. However, this was not a copy-and-paste national liberation project that adopted the nationalist templates of the enlightenment. It consisted of a declaration of nationhood without borders, making no claim to a national territory.
This radical, seemingly impossible ideal was conjured in the aftermath of total war — a devastating war of aggression that was propagated by a fascist international coalition with the goal of eradicating Romani people, along with Jews, the disabled, and many others, from the face of the Earth. It was estimated by Adolf Eichmann, the administrator of mass murder, that over five hundred thousand European Roma were killed at the hands of the Nazis and collaborationist governments during the “Porajmos” in World War II (“the devouring,” in Romanes, refers to what most know as the Holocaust). This figure is slightly speculative: not a single Romani individual was called upon to testify during the Nuremberg trials by the Allied powers. The WRC was convened with the knowledge of this history, and that the Porajmos provided an eschatological moment for a break with this historical procession of catastrophe.
It is no surprise that the foundation stone of the WRC was laid in the internationalist ideals of nonaligned socialism. After a brief initial moment of hope, the drive for Romani emancipation in the USSR was quickly snuffed out by the Stalinist program of Russian homogenization. Meanwhile, the capitalist countries had long developed a knack for Roma persecution and dispossession to facilitate rapacious rent-seeking capital — Britain being no exception.
The symbolism of the nation-building project was closely associated with socialist Yugoslavia. Early variants of the WRC flag adopted the Yugoslav red star, now a red wheel. Slobodan Berberski, an early and active member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, was elected as the first WRC president, and the WRC anthem “Jelem Jelem” (“I walked, I walked”) was written by Balkan Romani partisan Zharko Jovanovic with explicit reference to the crimes of the fascist-collaborationist Ustaša.
Berberski laid out the WRC’s objectives in his impassioned opening speech upon accepting the presidency:
Our people must combine and organize to work locally, nationally and internationally. Our problems are the same everywhere: we must proceed with our own forms of education, preserve and develop our Romani culture. . . . We have been passive long enough and I believe, starting today, we can succeed.
The project was fundamentally about reasserting the agency of Roma through forging a political community. The long-term ambitions of the first WRC were also clear: to embark on “amaro Romano drom” — a Romani road to emancipation.
Another founding member, Grattan Puxon, had a rich history of organizing travelling communities in Britain and Ireland against evictions. Grattan foresaw the road to emancipation through the forging of a new mimetic yet subversive nationalism. This nationalism centered round the concept of “Romanestan” rooted in whatever communities Roma people find themselves in: from Šuto Orizari to the mahalas of Mitrovica and the former Dale Farm site in Essex, England. This (inter)nationalism contains the positive nation-building components necessary to make gains in the realm of legal protections for state-recognized minorities, yet at the same time preserving the negative space to be filled by a radically diverse, ancient diaspora without baking in the dangerous exclusivity found in the nationalisms of the enlightenment. This is in stark contrast to the extreme othering and exclusivity essential to the nation-building of European fascism.
Defining Ourselves
The institution that Baberski and Puxon helped establish has inspired thousands of Roma to break traditional caricatures, self-define their communities, forge a new (inter)nationalism, and mobilize education projects, and has shone unprecedented light on the plight of Roma human rights. Today, however, it has been said that the WRC, now coming to its Tenth Congress, has become co-opted and toothless in the face of escalating threats of mass poverty, state persecution, and mob violence, including the tragic murder of Stanislav Tomáš.
In April 2021, Puxon argued in an interview with the Roma Education Fund that the European Romani movement has become fragmented and disjointed, with little cooperation or active coalition building. Elsewhere, he noted that the old institutions that his generation helped build, like the WRC, have lost their militancy and no longer have their roots in the communities that they claim to speak for. In a recollection of the events of the First Congress, he stated:
Within the fulsome recognition [of the Romani right to self-determination] lies hidden a subtle downgrading of what the Congress intended. . . . As if for 24 hours [on International Roma Day], an amnesty applies, and officialdom sets aside black prejudice.
For communities like Stanislav’s, there can be no amnesty without justice and no celebration without liberation.
The aims and objectives of the WRC were established at a time when, across the balance sheet, European Roma benefitted from basic social safety nets and more or less universal access to services, education, housing, and employment. Romani communities have been a catastrophic casualty of the neoliberal turn and the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). As a World Bank report cited in Istvan Pogany’s The Roma Café noted:
Roma are the most prominent poverty risk group in many of the countries of [CEE]. They are poorer than other groups, more likely to fall into poverty, and more likely to remain poor . . . poverty rates are more than 10 times that of non-Roma . . . nearly 80% of Roma in Romania and Bulgaria were living on $4.30 per day . . . in Hungary, one of the most prosperous accession countries, 40% of Roma live below the poverty line.
Roma communities are confined to residing in precarious marginality, unable to pay rents and meet the costs of privatized services, whilst being completely excluded from whatever scraps of public provision that remain. Despite the formal establishment of universal human rights, in a review of the Legal Situation of the Roma in Europe, the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly concluded that
Discrimination is widespread in every field of public and personal life, including access to public places, education, employment, health services and housing. . . . The economic and social segregation of Roma are turning into ethnic discrimination.
Today, cultural engagement remains a luxury for the vast majority of Roma communities. Instead of primarily focusing on facilitating opportunities for cultural engagement, the WRC should orientate itself toward the purpose of internationally organizing local communities to fight for material and economic rights: to good quality housing and/or land access with environmental security for travelers, education, sanitation, access to basic services.
This should be in conjunction with legal and political education so communities can carry this fight through the long march through the courts and, wherever necessary and possible, in nonviolent resistance. Contemporary strategy needs to be orientated around survival and defense. Puxon was himself an active participant on the barricades of the Dale Farm evictions resistance in Essex in 2011. He is a practitioner of exactly the kind of community organizing that the WRC should be coordinating today.
The WRC made spectacular gains for the international Roma community. It forged a progressive (inter)nationalism grounded in anti-fascism; inspired thousands to pick up the flag and self-identify as a community of multiplicity and diversity; raised the profile of the Roma as a large minority diaspora entitled to legal protections; and embarked on many public education programs to develop culture and reinforce a sense of agency. However, at the current historical juncture, Romani populations find themselves under a concerted, aggressive siege from violent state forces and far-right mobs hell-bent on the collective punishment and eradication of a perceived surplus population.
In Stanislav’s home country, the Czech Republic, the unemployment rate of the Roma community is between 80 and 85 percent. The majority of those with employment are in precarious work at low wages. Unsurprisingly, this has led to indebtedness at highly unfavorable rates, causing mass exclusion from social housing. Evictions have ensured effective ghettoization into holobyty — barely habitable dwellings that often lack basic amenities. It is here that progressive nation-building finds its limits. Puxon’s Romanestan is in a state of emergency. It’s time for a change of approach.
A farmer uses a shovel to move corn inside a semi trailer during a harvest in Buda, Illinois in 2019. (photo: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg)
A new report provides a roadmap to creating a post-pandemic food system with greater fairness, fewer adverse climate impacts and better health outcomes.
The United States spends $1.1 trillion a year on food. But when the impacts of the food system on different parts of our society — including rising health care costs, climate change and biodiversity loss — are factored in, the bill is around three times that, according to a report by the Rockefeller Foundation, a private charity that funds medical and agricultural research.
Using government statistics, scientific literature and insights from experts across the food system, the researchers quantified things like the share of direct medical costs attributable to diet and food, as well as the productivity loss associated with those health problems. They also looked at how crop cultivation and ranching, and other aspects of U.S. food production impacted the environment. Focusing on the production, processing, distribution, retail and consumption stages of the food system (not including food service), they evaluated what it would cost to restore people’s health, wealth or environment back to an undamaged state, as well as the cost of preventing a recurrence of the problems.
“Realizing a better food system requires facing hard facts. We must accurately calculate the full cost we pay for food today to successfully shape economic and regulatory incentives tomorrow,” asserts the introduction to the report, written by the foundation’s food research group.
Health impacts are the biggest hidden cost of the food system, with more than $1 trillion per year in health-related costs paid by Americans, with an estimated $604 billion of that attributable to diseases — such as hypertension, cancer and diabetes — linked to diet.
In calculating the financial burden of environmental problems, the researchers evaluated direct environmental impacts of farming and ranching on greenhouse gas emissions, water depletion and soil erosion. They also looked at reduced biodiversity, which lowers ecosystems’ productivity and makes food supplies more vulnerable to pests and disease. They determined the unaccounted costs of the food system on the environment and biodiversity add up to almost $900 billion per year.
The report examines 14 metrics — health, environment, biodiversity, livelihoods and more — to quantify what it calls the true cost of food, reflecting additional, externalized costs, incurred within the food system not covered by the price of food. These externalized costs are being incurred by the public sector, businesses and producers, consumers and future generations, the report argues. Across many of the areas, communities of color bear a disproportionate burden.
The report found that rates of diagnosed diabetes are 1.7 times higher in Latinx Americans and 1.5 times higher in Black Americans than in White Americans. And it found air pollution exposure is 41 percent higher for Black Americans than White Americans.
“This report is a wake-up call. The U.S. food system as it stands is adversely affecting our environment, our health and our society,” said Rajiv Shah, president of The Rockefeller Foundation. “To fix a problem, we need to first understand its extent. The data in this report reveals not only the negative impacts of the American food system but also what steps we can take to make it more equitable, resilient and nourishing.”
Advocacy groups hailed the Rockefeller report. Paula Daniels, co-founder of the Center for Good Food Purchasing said the report pulls back the veil on the hidden costs of food.
“If an organic apple is 99 cents and a sugary beverage is also 99 cents, there are layers of subsidies in that sugary beverage. We need to examine not only what we’re paying, but what that price reflects, the subsidized cost and the external costs — diabetes, obesity; you can quantify the health impacts,” she said.
Dariush Mozaffarian, dean of Tufts University Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, who was an adviser on the new report, said that the pandemic, coupled with Black Lives Matters and the reawakening around racial justice, has been a “Sept. 11 moment around food.”
“We’re at a tipping point. People widely recognize that the food system is broken,” Mozaffarian said, adding that most current public policies around food and agriculture are based on the 1969 White House Conference on Food, Nutrition and Health. Yet, 52 years later much of it doesn’t make sense.
“The priority in the 1950s was to get calories into the world, because the world population had quadrupled. At the same time, the best nutrition information we had was about vitamins. Vitamin deficiencies have largely disappeared; we were successful. But we didn’t anticipate the explosion of obesity,” he said.
According to the report, if U.S. rates of diet-related diseases were reduced to similar rates in countries like Canada, health care costs could be reduced by $250 billion per year.
This would require the food industry to focus on creating healthier foods and adhering to more rigorous regulations for the marketing of unhealthy foods, said Roy Steiner, senior vice president for the food initiative at the Rockefeller Foundation, which funds an array of initiatives and nonprofits.
“We created the food system with a particular objective — low-cost and abundant calories — and we didn’t understand what that impact was going to be,” said Steiner, one of the authors of the report.
Separately, the report also suggests that if the United States could reduce agricultural greenhouse gas emissions to keep the global temperature increase below 1.5°C of preindustrial levels, then some $100 billion could be saved in additional environmental costs.
Melissa Ho, a senior vice president at the World Wildlife Fund and also an adviser on the report, said that while people are increasingly aware of the connection between diet and health, they have trouble understanding the connection between the food system and environmental damage. She would like to see more performance-based metrics and tools to assess things like how much carbon a farmer or rancher is returning to the soil.
“We must shift our farming practices and systems to be more regenerative and resilient. We can do this if we realign and shift our public policies and programs to support producers and drive this transition from the ground up,” she said. Based on the way the system is set up right now, she added, it’s not easy or lucrative for farmers to transition to less harmful agriculture practices, such as not tilling or using cover crops that help build soil and prevent erosion.
“Covid exposed so much that was broken,” she said, “but building back better means supporting producers and connecting the dots to health, environment and business viability for farmers.”
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