Quotes from Gringo by Chesa Boudin

(53)

My mother Kathy’s father, Leonard, was a founding partner of a law firm that defended the Allende administration after it nationalized United States-owned copper mines. The litigation was pending when Pinochet’s coup toppled the democratic government. My grandfather’s firm acquired Chile as a client largely on the strength of its long-standing relationship with the Cuban government. Over a mojito in a hotel lobby in Old Havana, long after my grandfather’s death, I learned about his work in Cuba from Luis Martinez, the former head of the Cuban national airline, Cubana de Aviacion, and a high ranking official in the Ministry of Transportation. We sat sipping the sweet minty drinks that reportedly had Hemmingway hooked from his first taste…

Luis had gray hair but was fit and energetic. He had great respect for my grandfather, he told me. Back when he was running the airline, my grandfather had saved on of their planes. It had flowin into New York to bring Cuban diplomats to a United Nations meeting, but the United States and Cuba were in the midst of diplomatic and legal feuds…

He explained that when Cuba began nationalizing large landholdings and factories, many of which had United States citizens for owners, there was an immense amount of legal work to sort out the mess. Grandpa Leonard’s firm handled much of it.

(55)

Luis gave me a parting gift that he had received from my grandfather forty years earlier: a slightly worn first edition copy of a book called The Theoretical System of Karl Marx, by Louis Boudin, my great-great uncle.

Louis and Leonard had been lawyers, fighting their battles in defense of civil liberties, labor organizations, and Third World governments in the courtroom, but my partners took to the streets when the Allende government fell. In the aftermath of the coup there were protests in solidarity with Chilean democracy in countries around the world, including the United States…

The Weather Underground also protested targeting ITT’s (International Telephone and Telegraph) Latin American division corporate office.

(57)

Allies inside el imperio have an essential role to play in any process of global change and should not be scorned.

(67)

Second, I started thinking about my first year in college when, in the wake of the Battle in Seattle, the anti-World Trade Organization protests of November 30, 1999, I got involved in the anti-globalization movement. I worked enthusiastically to recruit other students on my campus for a protest in Washington, D.C., against the IMF, the World Bank, and other international financial institutions. I wanted to take action in solidarity with the global poor and marginalized, those sectors of society that Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz would later call “discontents” in his bestselling book Globalization and Its Discontents.

(106)

I had stepped off a bus in the Caracas terminal for the first time on a rainy Tuesday afternoon in November 2004. My expectations of the city I had arrived in came from Professor Vitales, back in Chile.

(109)

At that time I knew only a couple of people in Caracas. One was Marta Harnecker… The other was Marta’s husband, Michael Lebowitz. Michael was a Marxist economist professor from Canada whose unkempt hair and puffy white beard framing a full face might have led the casual observer to confuse him with the photo of Marx on the cover of his award-winning book, Beyond Capital.

(110)

Marta asked me if I would be willing to translate into Spanish a working paper Michael has written that she wanted to be able to share with friends in the Chavez administration. It was the first of many occasions when I realized that when Marta asks for something it is very hard to say no.

(111)

Marta’s office was in the heart of the old palace. The large room had a high painted ceiling and tall wooden doors that led out onto an open-air courtyard garden with a small fountain in the middle. The suite of offices on the other side of the fountain belonged to the chief of staff, a position that changed frequently under Chavez.

(112)

She introduced me to the other people scurrying around the office as the son of political prisoners in the United States.

(113)

It was 10am before the meeting started at the round wooden table in Mara’s office. From the warm greetings that were exchanged it was obviously a meeting of friends. Still, I couldn’t help but feel nervous. In addition to Michael and Marta, the meeting included Haiman el Troudi, a presidential adviser at the time but soon to be chief of staff, and several other senior people in the government

* Haiman served for roughly a year as chief of staff before leaving the palace. Marta, Michael, and several other colleagues of their left the palace with Haiman and founded a policy think tank called Centro Internacional Miranda. As of December 2008, Marta and Michael were both in senior positions at the CIM and Haiman had recently been named minister of planning.

(116)

It was hard for me to believe that after just three full days in the country I had already participated in a meeting in the heart of the presidential palace.

In Chavez’s Venezuela it couldn’t be easy for estadosunidenses to gain political access of the sort I had stumbled into. I had found one of the few places on the planet where having parents in prison in the United States for politically motivated crimes actually opened doors rather than closed them.

(118)

If the coup that briefly toppled Chavez in 2002 had occurred in the 1960s or 1970s, while my parents were young activists, they probably would have protested the States Department or a big oil company. But to my knowledge, none of my forebears had ever had this kind of a window into radical government.

(119)

A month after my arrival in Venezuela, Caracas hosted an international conference called Artists and Intellectuals in Defense of Humanity. Nobel laureates, activists, painters, writers, dancers, and organizers from across the globe were invited to participate. Among them was my mom, Bernadine. My time in Venezuela had built my confidence as a translator and I was hired as one of the dozens of interpreters at the conference. It was good to have a break from the office routine and a paid job for a change. And I got to hand out with Mom when my working grouop wasn’t in session.

It was at one of the plenary events for the conference that I first saw Chavez speak. The Teresa Carreno Theatre in central Caracas was packed with thousands of red-shirt-wearing chavistas – read being the color of Chavez’s political party – by the time my mom and I made it through the security lines into the massive auditorium.

Adolfo Perez Esquivel… spoke without notes and with slow, carefully annunciated words. “In this hour of particular danger, we renew our conviction that another world is not only possible but also necessary. We commit to struggle for that other world with more solidarity, unity, and determination; in defense of humanity we reaffirm our certainty that the people will have the last word.”

(121)

[Chavez] thanked Perez Esquivel for his introduction and then mentioned a few prominent visitors he knew were in the crowd: Daniel Ortega, Ricardo Alarcon, Tariq Ali, Ignacio Ramonet, Danny Glover, Cynthia McKinney, representatives of the national labor union (UNT), that national indigenous federation of Venezuela, and the Bolivarian farmers.

Chavez began by talking about the significance of the conference, the need to build networks of intellectuals and artists fighting for humanity. He criticized the intellectuals who had announced “the end of history” and the triumph of neoliberalism.

(122)

His [Chavez’s] speaking style was erratic – wandering, switching topics, going off on tangents – yet captivating. He didn’t use notes or a teleprompter and relied on sheer charisma to carry the crowd with him on a journey that stretched around the planet, and through political theory (he cited Marti and Trotsky).

Being at such events always had a profound effect on me. Words on a page cannot capture the contagious energy they inspire. Those in attendance bear the hours of waiting admirably, celebrating their optimism, their newfound connections to state power.

(123)

Four months after I began working in Miraflores, I switched to a new office, that of Presidential International Relations…. I was now charged with following media reports on United States-Venezuela relations and Venezuela’s role in the international arena generally.

When Marta or Michael wanted me, I took time off from my new office to work with them. Marta Coordinated the organization of the Third Annual International Conference in Solidarity with the Bolivarian Revolution.

(124)

Chavez has been calling for a new socialist model but no one in the government had explained concretely what exactly this new economic system would look like.

In May 2005, my parents, Bill and Bernadine, were invited down to Venezuela and I got the change to hit the streets.

Bill and Bernadine gave talks to audiences of as many as two hundred people in Caracas and the interior at universities and cultural centers. The groups they were spoke to were primed with screenings of the Academy Award-nominated documentary The Weather Underground. I interpreted for them throughout the trip, including the public appearances.

(125)

Their talks included anecdotes about successful community-based struggles for equal education and justice in poor Chicago neighborhoods. The lessons they had learned from 1960s era freedom schools and protest movements were employed to inform today’s struggles, a focus on the present and the future rather than the starry-eyed reminiscing about the past.

We were astonished at the enthusiasm of the crowds’ reaction, especially in the interior.

(126)

People with a highly developed political analysis saw, in the film and in our presence, hopeful examples of internal resistance to imperialism norteamericano. Others simply seemed happy to have people from El Norte in their midst affirming their attempts to build a new, different society.

(140)

I had what Venezuelan’s call a chapa, a sort of Get Out of Jail Free Card, an ID or document that opens doors and solves problems. This took the form of a signed and sealed letter from the office of Presidential International Relations explaining the political significance of the film we were making. It worked its magic and in a matter of moments we were through the last round of security.

(143)

I had met at least half a dozen Chileans, like Pablo and Liza, who had come to Venezuela to work in solidarity with the Bolivarian Revolution; no doubt they had hoped that it would prove more successful than their own country’s short lived democratic revolution.

(144)

We hung out in the politically progressive expat scene in Caracas, which some Venezuelans view as an expression of international solidarity and others as political tourism. Venezuelans that dislike the Chavez government often make snide comments about gringos who were red T-shirts, or dress as hippies, suggesting that it would be better if they spent their time and money on Venezuela’s beaches than on playing games in the political system, and that they would never tolerate a government like that of Chavez in their own countries.

(149)

Two months after my stint as the fixer for the news crew in Caracas, I headed off to Medellin, Colombia, to meet my mom, Bernadine… Thought it was my first time in the city, my mom had been there on several occasions previously. All her trips to Colombia, like this one, had been on human rights missions at the invitation of a Colombian colleague, a Franciscan nun named Sister Carolina Pardo.

Sister Carolina speaks nearly perfect English, thanks, in part, to time she spent in a sort of exile at a master’s program in clinical social work at Loyola University in Chicago from 2004 – 2006 when the threats against her in Colombia were at a peak. It was during that period she and my mom developed a close friendship and working relationship.

(152)

We were there as part of a one hundred-strong delegation of international human rights activists and journalists from fifteen different countries who wanted to learn about and support the local communities.

The plan was to visit several different communities that had been displaced by government or paramilitary violence.

(161)

We began a ceremony in which displaced people from Choco and representatives of displaced communities from other parts of Colombia, who had come along with the delegation, shared their stories about disappearances and murders of loved ones: husbands, brothers and fathers. The the internationals in the group began. An Argentine mother of the Plaza de Mayo lit a candle for her daughter who had disappeared more than thirty years ago in that country’s Dirty War against the left. A Chilean ex-political prisoner under Pinochet lit a candle for his companions who never made it out of the torture camps.  A Brazilian woman representing the MST, the Landless Workers Movement, lit a candle for peasants recently killed in Brazil while fighting for a small plot of land to plant.

Though I tried to concentrate on interpreting for my mom, there were several moments in the proceedings where I could not stop myself from choking up. I couldn’t help but think about my own biological parent’s decades in prison, my father’s continuing incarceration, and the three men who were killed during the crime my parents participated in. I considered lighting a candle and sharing their plight with the group, but then decide against it. Perhaps it was too hard to break out of my role as interpreter and take on the role of the participant, or maybe I didn’t feel up to the task of trying to explain my parents’ use of violence to these people who themselves had suffered so much. Certainly, I was self-conscious of our position as the only two representatives from the United States, a county that, directly or indirectly, had fueled the violence in all of the Latin American countries represented in our solemn gathering.

(163)

Our role there made me think of a Zapatista saying I had learned while exploring Chiapas years earlier: “If you have come to help us, please go home; if you have come to join us, welcome. Pick up a shovel or a machete and get busy.”

(194)

The reemergence of the Latin American left today is unlike previous reformist movements in the region that derived political power from vertical relationships to unions, peasant associations and party hierarchies. Today’s progressive political movements in the region tend to hae more horizontal power structures and to rely on a diverse array of social movements. These kinds of groups make up the radical left in the United States today too, but with seemingly no impact on electoral results.

(199)

They had generously invited me into their hellish world, deep inside the earth. All I could offer them in exchange was a cheap present of a few sticks of dynamite. But a small part of me also felt somehow redeemed: as a young backpackers and motorcyclist, Che Guevara has been profoundly affected by seeing the horrible conditions in the mines in Bolivia. .. Here was proof of what they said, a justification of sorts for their political perspectives.

 

Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan writer my parents encouraged me to read before I was even interested in Latin America, describes Potosi as a mine that “eats men.”

(206)

“We have a saying,” Jose answered. “singre de minero, semilla de guerrillero.” The rhyme lost is lost in translation but the meaning is the same: the miner’s blood is the seed of the guerrilla.

“Did some of you go on to form underground guerrilla organizations?”

Jose laughed a little, and told me gently that I was missing the point. He explained that after 1985 tens of thousands of Bolivian miners had no choice but to migrate away from the mines in search of a new life for themselves and their families. A few went to other countries in search of work, but more went to the campo and became farmers, especially of coca in the Chapare region, or moved into cities, especially in the rapidly growing El Alto.

(215)

Venezuela’s political experiment is still a democratic and courageous effort to invent an alternative model, based on the insistence that another way, another world is possible.

Sometimes cynicism and pessimism descend and I resign myself to the idea that these Latin American political experiments are doomed to failure. But I hope I’m wrong. Certainly never, not once, have I thought they shouldn’t be tried. Humanity can benefit from political diversity the way that it does from linguistic, cultural, racial, or religious diversity. The political status quo is antiquated and in need of urgent, radical change. Democratic political experiments like those in Venezuela, regardless of their long-term viability, inspire hope and political creativity across the globe.

(216)

The more I spoke and comprehended, the more I was able to understand what was happening in the region around me, to build friendships through my wanderings.

As I came of age, changing in myself, I found a region that was also in the midst of the most profound transformation. I came to see Latin America as a prism through which I could better understand my own roots in the radical left in the United States.

(221)

Whether at home in the United States, or abroad on the road, I will have to keep living in at least two worlds.

***

There is also video available on CSPAN  where Chesa Boudin talked about his life as a young adult in Venezuela when Hugo Chavez came to power. It’s interesting to note that in the question and answer section that he declares that he is still in contact with several Colombian activists at the time of this video.