You can't drink gold, so just swallow bullets

Last week, Ollanta Humala's government has marked another black page in the history of Peru. In a country that has been marred by social conflict as a result of mismanaged extractive industries - a sad continuum across governments of the past two decades - five people have been killed during a peaceful protest march in the town of Celendín, Cajamarca province. One day later, some 20 combat-armed policemen threw Marco Arana, one of the figureheads of an indefinite strike against a huge mining project planned in the province, brutally off a bench in a park of Cajamarca city. He was forcefully grabbed by the head (a jaw was broken), pushed to the ground, hit several times in the kidneys (having passed a severe kidney operation earlier this year) and then abducted to prison [see video below, in Spanish], where he was held without charge and further beaten. His lawyer was refused due access to her client by police officers who could not present any credentials, upon which the officers maltreated Arana's lawyer as well. Apparently, Arana's only crime was to have worn a cardboard sign around his neck saying "Yes to life, No to gold" in a public space during a state of emergency.

Once again, peaceful protest has shown how powerful it can be, considering that the regrettable answer of a seemingly powerless government has been to resort to lethal violence. To be honest, it really takes my breath away to see how far governments are willing to go to safeguard investment commitments made by extractive industries in a region that has patently objected such environmentally damaging investments in its livelihoods. Even more so, when the current president was elected by promising Cajamarca's electorate to respect their decision not to support mining projects in their region, for "you cannot drink gold, so it is of utmost importance to protect natural water sources such as your beautiful lakes and prevent their contamination".

All these lofty promises have been mysteriously forgotten, as President Humala is fully committed to have the infamous Conga mining project started, a Newmont Mining Corporation investment that will affect four precious lakes - essential sources of clean water for the nearby communities - by converting them into depositories for toxic mining waste. Of course, promises have been made to treat the water and turn it into Peru's purest drinking water, but evidence of such practices are scant, not to say inexistent, in the country. Even one of Peru's star projects in terms of social and environmental responsibility turned out to be a fraud, deforming newborn lamas and contaminating nearby rivers.

What strikes me most is how the government has unequivocally sided with private industry, instead of being the gatekeeper that veils over the balance between the public's and the private sector's interests. How else to explain that national police officers are being transported by buses from the Yanacocha mine company (daughter holding of Newmont Mining)? Human rights violations as the ones described above, committed in plain daylight, in front of twenty cameras, while the region's provincial and local authorities have been drawn away from the scene to the capital, do not occur unless they are sanctioned from the highest level downwards.

I cannot even figure how these policies go down, from top government figures into the heads of the national police. It sure is no bed-time story material, judging from the police man's reaction to a Cajamarca inhabitant asking him why the police is treating citizens in such a horrible, irrespectful way: "Because you are a bunch of dogs, you son of a bitch!" And then to figure that this has been happening at a far wider scale over the past year in Syria, under the all-seeing eye of the international community, as world leaders are belt-tightening their way through domestic crises and smother their electorate with election-proof foreign policies...

For those interested, here is more information on the criminalisation of social protest and Marco Arana, and the social conflict as a result of the planned Conga Mining project. There is also a petition running on Avaaz, in case you would like to support the communities of Cajamarca in their struggle.

Ecuadorian democracy in action

As promised, Correa v El Universo was to be continued. In fact, already the week after the Supreme Court's ruling in the case, president Correa invited the whole crême de la crême of the international diplomatic community present in Quito, to assist his pardoning of the condemned directors and editorialist, as well as the authors of the book El gran hermano. The Ecuadorians, the actual target audience in this case of their democratic system and press freedom, were invited to watch the screening of Correa's speech outside the presidential palace.



Mostly, it was a self-congratulatory speech, highlighting the righteousness of his own position and pointing out the lack of journalistic ethos of the international media, who hadn't bothered asking him for his version of the facts when reporting on the Court's ruling. At the very end of his speech, Correa took an interesting turn countering the accusations of disrespecting press freedom and freedom of expression. "Our answer," he says, "are the kids going to Millennium schools, disabled people accessing well-functioning health care facilities, and first class highways connecting our cities." In short, socio-economic well-being trumps democratic principles, an argument not unfamiliar with some other rulers across the globe. (Did I hear you say Paul Kagame or Lee Kuan Yew?)

In the weeks following this mediatic show, huge billboards in support of the president and his policies appeared across those very same highways (paid for with public money, needless to say). Conveniently, this coincided with the start of a huge march of indigenous peoples in defense of water, protesting against the reckless public policy to promote huge mining investments across the Andes. Even before the protesters made it to Quito, Correa didn't leave an opportunity go by without disqualifying the protesters' motives and arguments, arguing that the march has blatantly failed.

As the protesters were about to march into the capital, the president tried to cut their roads of access and means of transport. In the meantime, he started rallying his own supporters with the same buses he forbid the indigenous people to use to enter Quito. From all over the country thousands of pro-Correa protesters marched to his palace to express their support for his government. Ironically, if these people already knew why they were in Quito (except for the free transport, food and drinks, that is), most answered quite vehemently that they were here "to protect our democracy".

Yes, the very same democracy that their star had put to the second stage just a few weeks earlier. In defense of a democracy that delegitimises and impedes the exercise of the constitutional rights of its citizens to gather, use public roads and present individual or collective protests and proposal to the competent authorities. A democratic system in which a governor sends a letter to the president with the names of public servants who did not attend the pro-Correa protests, recommending he shows them the door. Shouldn't this democracy rather open the debate on how to finance social progress (c.q. whether or not mining is the most adequate economic policy to generate sustainable economic growth) in the face of the constitutional rights granted to nature?

Overwhelming history at the sound of a theorbo

It's Semana Santa, and Quito has a wonderful way of celebrating this week before Easter. At several sacred and less sacred locations in the city centre, top notch artists are performing several performances as part of the XI Festival de Música Sacra. Here's to living in the historical centre! I just have to walk a few blocks down the road to enjoy these musical delights. And the best part is, it's all for free!

The other night, I attended a performance of the Colombian 'early music ensemble' Musica Ficta, in the magical Iglesia de la Compañía, just a block down the road from the presidential palace. This baroque ensemble is renowned for playing Hispano-American baroque music, with scores dug up from archives in Bogotá, Quito, Cusco and other cultural centres of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. By default, these historical notes beg for equally historical instruments such as the baroque guitar, the vihuela, the shawm, the dulcian and the theorbo.

As the church got filled with the warmth of guitar strings, graceful puffs and flaring chantings, Carlos Serrano shared with his audience how thrilled they all were to be playing their baroque music in that church, the perfect setting given their historical coincidence. That comment of his made me think back at some of the texts from The Peru Reader that I had read on the Viceroyalty of Peru (stretching from the Carribean beaches of Colombia to Potosi's ore-filled Cerro Rico in present-day Bolivia), the geo-political framework of the very same period in which that music was written and the Jesuit church built.

Musica Ficta performing in the Iglesia de la Compañía

All of sudden, history came alive. Realising I was listening to 16th century music in a baroque church in Latin America, it daunted to me how alien all of this experience was to these lands. Back in the day, locals didn't compose such music; they weren't catholic; and their concept of a fun night out most certainly wasn't attending a baroque music ensemble. Those who did attend such nights out (or, more likely, afternoons), were the nouveaux riches, the local elite seeking social acceptance among the Spanish colonialists, who had imposed their rites and customs on these promised lands.

Nothing else symbolised in a better way this cultural imposition and ignorance of the local richess as the inside decoration of the church, completely guilded with gold leaf, freshly extracted from the land on which it was built, with the blood of people it had expulsed and demonised. The sounds and voices that just a minute back had sounded so warm and joyful, became distantly cool and, in a way, made me feel out of place. The performance got a whole new dimension, moving me immensly, giving me the sensation that history was overwhelming me. And that, at the sound of a theorbo...

Set your water on fire

One thing is very clear to me: our 'developed' societies are not sustainable. The sheer demand of natural resources to keep our patterns of production and consumption going far outpaces our planet's capacity. Every year we set a new record in consuming the earth's resources "available" for that year's consumption (last year we did so already on August 19th). Understandably, then, the energy business is frantically looking for new sources or techniques to keep the machine running. We may have found a winner: shale gas. At least, that's what The Economist tells us when introducing its special report on natural gas:

If the boom persists gas may take coal’s place as the world’s second-favourite fuel in just a few decades, and millions will breathe easier as a result. This is because, even were it not cheap and plentiful, gas would be attractive simply on the grounds of cleanliness. It is true that there are questions about the harm that may be done by the “fracking” process that liberates shale gas; there is an urgent need for systematic before-and-after environmental audits. But once the gas is out of the ground, it is a great deal cleaner than coal. It does not distribute neurotoxic mercury around the planet; it does not clog city air and the lungs of those who breathe it with soot and sulphur. Gas is a boon to public health.

But, how clean is shale gas really? The Dutch programme Tegenlicht recently aired a superb documentary by Josh Fox on the very topic of shale gas and hydraulic fracturing (aka fracking): Gasland. Starting with a letter he received to lease his land to a shale gas company for the sum of 100,000 USD, Josh sets out on a journey to learn why his land is worth so much. Turns out, this 'boon to public health' is more of a bomb to the health of the people living nearby extraction sites. Honestly, if you can set your tap water on fire with a lighter, or if your animals start to loose their fur for no obvious reason, something's rotten in your back yard…



Also, the claim that shale gas is that much cleaner than coal, and that we will breathe easier, is not entirely true. During the fracking process, a lot of methane - a greenhouse gas 23 times more harmful than CO2 - is released into the air. The environmental impact of shale gas is at least 20% greater than that of coal when compared on a 20-year horizon, scientists of Cornell University have argued.

The last word about shale gas hasn't been said yet, that is clear. Yet, there is a smell about the whole fracking business - especially when insiders start comparing it to the infamous Enron corporate politics (see p.5 of documents leaked to the NYT). Interestingly, this boom in shale gas has attracted foreign investment. India's biggest firm, Reliance Industries, for example, is reported to have stakes in several projects in the US. So now it's the Indians who are messing up American's back yards, for a change...