It Could Happen Here Weekly 163

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Colzon Media.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
of the week that just happened is here in one
convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
you can make your own decisions.

Speaker 3 (00:26):
This is Michael Phillips, an historian in Texas. I'm the
author of the history of racism in Dallas called Bite Metropolis,
an upcoming book on the history of eugenics in Texas
called The Purifying Knife.

Speaker 4 (00:39):
And I'm Stephen Monticelli, an investigative reporter and columnist in
Texas who covers extremism and fire right movements, as well
as dark money and other fun things.

Speaker 3 (00:49):
In twenty twenty two, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito author
the Dobbs Versus Jackson Women's Health Organization decision. Alito's majority
of opinion reversed the landmark nineteen seventy three Roe v.
Wade outcome that established a woman's constitutional right to an
abortion to the first trimester, permitted states to impose limits

(01:11):
to protect the health of the mother in the second trimester,
and gave states leeway to ban abortions and the final trimester.
The Road decision, based in a Texas case, had survived
with modification for almost half century. In Dobbs, however, the
Supreme Court denied that women held a constitutional right to
an abortion and gave the individual states the power to

(01:35):
determine whether such procedures were legal at any point during
a pregnancy. In the Dobbs case, Alito seemed to suggest
that the concept of abortion rights was a modern aberration.
MSNBC pundit Lawrence O'Donnell zeroed in on one key phrase
in Alito's opinion.

Speaker 2 (01:54):
Samuel Alito says that a right to abortion services is
not quote deeply rooted in this nation's history.

Speaker 4 (02:03):
Whatever one might think about Alito as a jurist, he
fails as an historian. In fact, for much of American history,
abortion was quite accepted. When men first formed the American
Medical Association in the eighteen forties, they had to wage
a campaign against abortion, in part to eliminate competition for
patients from midwives, who were the primary provider of such services.

(02:25):
The nineteenth century, anti abortion laws focused on the health
and safety of women primarily, and not the life of
the fetus as the modern laws tend to do, and
the anti abortion campaign at the time itself had to
do not just with limiting women's autonomy, but also with
racism and anxiety over immigration.

Speaker 3 (02:43):
Through it all, Texas became a central battlefront in the
culture wars surrounding women's bodily autonomy. One group of Texans
won women the right to an abortion in the Road case,
while another worked almost immediately to reverse row and to
criminalized choice. Meanwhile, a Dallas district attorney, Henry Wade, played

(03:05):
an under appreciated and under explored role in the battle.

Speaker 4 (03:09):
The often dower Puritans who established the British colony of
Massachusetts in the sixteen twenties may have created an oppressive theocracy,
but they proved surprisingly indifferent when it came to women's
decisions when and if to have children. Based on British
common law, the colonies in New England allowed abortion up
to the quickening, which is when women can first feel

(03:31):
fetal movement. In that era, it was the first clear
sign of impregnation. This moment varies widely for women, but
it generally happens during the fourth or fifth month of pregnancy.

Speaker 3 (03:43):
Women typically endured seven to eight live births, and the
experience was often grueling and life threatening, particularly as they
got older. Seeking relief and physical safety, women frequently terminated
their pregnancy in a variety of ways from Native Americans,
as white women learned which local herbs were considered a
bord of facins. White and black women also sought advice

(04:06):
from midwives. It provided wisdom on how to relieve mensual cramps,
Yet pregnant and breastfeed midwives provided abortion services as well.
Women attempted to end pregnancy with varying degrees of success
by consuming penny royalty or savn juniper, or a combination
of iron and quinine. They took hot baths or rode

(04:29):
horses bareback in order to cause a miscarriage.

Speaker 4 (04:32):
Before the eighteen forties, such actions provoked little or no controversy.
Even the Catholic Church adhered to the quickening standard until
after the American Civil War. By the eighteen forties, abortion
had become so deeply rooted in American history and culture
that abortionists advertise their services, albeit in euphemistic but widely

(04:52):
understood terms. These advertisements were carried in popular newspapers such
as The New York Sun and the Boston Daily Time.
Abortionists told patients they could provide quote French cures for
what was referred to as quote menstrual blockage.

Speaker 3 (05:08):
A dramanic shift happened after the eighteen forty seven founding
of the American Medical Association. Established by men, the organization
began lobbing states to ban abortions in an attempt to
discredit midwives, who represented major competition for female patients. Medical
journalists began to dismiss midwives and male doctors who provided

(05:29):
abortion services as dangerous, ill informed quacks. AMA members were
still unaware that germs existed, and they didn't clean their
hands or equipment when examining wounds or during surgeries, thus
causing many of their patients to die of sepsis. So
called regular doctors often used dangerous treatments such as bleeding

(05:51):
to treat illnesses. Yet, in spite of their high body count,
AMA members persuaded major press outlets such as The New
York Times the sensationally cover cases in which women died
during abortions performed by midwives. This created momentum for the
enactment by eighteen eighty of laws banning and criminalizing abortion.

(06:12):
Every single state except Kentucky were stake courts that already
rendered such procedures illegal.

Speaker 4 (06:18):
The drive against abortion wasn't all that it seemed. Abortion
opponents were worried that the wrong women were. In other words,
white wealthy women were choosing to limit how many children
they had. The fertility rate for white women fell by
almost fifty five percent between eighteen fifty and nineteen thirty.
Horatio Storer, the leading anti abortion crusader at the time,

(06:42):
railed against non infanto mania among upper class white women,
a trend that the sociologist Edward A. Ross would call
quote race suicide. President Theodore Roosevelt later argued that white
women had a patriotic duty to bear at least four children.
Logically fit Anglo Saxons quote have only one child or

(07:03):
no child at all, while the Irish, Italians and Jews
have quote eight or nine or ten. Theodore Roosevelt warned,
it is simply a question of the multiplication table. He wrote,
the future of American civilization, Roosevelt believed depended on reproductive math.
White women could not be allowed to become voluntary non

(07:25):
combatants in a racial demographic war.

Speaker 3 (07:28):
In the eighteen eighties, Texas was still seen by much
of the country as an unsophisticated frontier, but was home
to a highly influential doctor with a national following, Ferdinand
Eugene Daniel, who became editor of the Texas Medical Journal,
a eugenesis with a national audience. The surgeonets served in

(07:48):
the Confederate Army and argued that masturbation and homosexuality were
dangerous indications that individual came from a family line that
not fully evolved or was biologed logically regressing fully evolved
individuals he believed had less of a sex drive and
kept their minds on intellectual pursuits. Daniel argued that before

(08:10):
the Civil War, Americans had endangered their future by bringing
Africans into the country as slaves, and were compounding the
error by allowing what he called quote the dregs of
Europe Jews, Greeks, Italians, and others to immigrate to the
United States. The only way to say America's biological future,
he said, was by cash strating not just gay men

(08:32):
and masturbators who would cause the evolution of white America
to swing in reverse, but also to sterilized as sexually promiscuous,
the mentally ill, those with disabilities, and the criminal element
as well.

Speaker 4 (08:45):
Daniel could be surprisingly supportive of abortion rights under limited circumstances, however,
if it ensured that well off white women had long
and fruitful careers as mothers. Daniel wrote approvingly of how
electric currents might be used to end ectopic pregnancies, cases
in which fertilize eggs attached to the Filippian tubes or

(09:06):
elsewhere outside the uterus, which can be dangerous and can
kill or leave a woman infertile. Both outcomes undesirable for
a eugenicist like Daniel, who cared for fit white patients.

Speaker 3 (09:19):
In eighteen eighty seven issue, he published an account of
a debate among doctors held by the Medical Society and Terrell, Texas.
The topic was whether saving the life of a mother
was the only acceptable reason to allow an abortion. Some
doctors in the debate argued that abortion was morally acceptable
for quote, an intelligent and chaste woman who had gotten

(09:41):
pregnant after being deceived by a scoundrel into participating in
pre marital.

Speaker 4 (09:46):
Sects because of sexual double standards. Several of these Texas
doctors argued that such women would no longer be considered
a socially acceptable mate by a high status man, and
thus should be denied the chance to become an quote,
ornament and useful member of society. Regardless of Texas's abortion law,
a surprising number of doctors in the state performed abortions,

(10:08):
not only to save women's lives, but to save the
reputations and to relieve them of the financial and physical
hardships of unwanted pregnancies.

Speaker 3 (10:16):
In eighteen ninety nine, Ueca, Texas Mary Wheat, discovered she
was pregnant and sought an abortion. The procedure had been
illegal in Texas since eighteen fifty six, a year before
the recently formed American Medical Association began a campaign to
prohibit abortion in every state. By eighteen eighty, the AMA

(10:37):
had achieved its goal. In spite of the ubiquitous spans,
abortions were frequent and there were a large number of
doctors willing to provide the prohibited medical procedure. Wheat, called
Maddie by friends and family, found such a physician, doctor S. M. Jenkins.

Speaker 4 (10:54):
Texas law at the time had not eliminated abortion, but
instead had driven the practice under Because of this, doctors
received little or no training in how to perform such
procedures that proved fatal for Maddy Wheat, Doctor Jenkins performed
the abortion in the home of women identified by the
local press only as Missus Smith, and he made a mistake.

(11:14):
She got increasingly and dangerously ill, and then after ten
days of this ordeal, Jenkins rushed Wheat into Waco's City Hospital.
He claimed she was suffering a severe attack of dysentery.
She then died, and an autopsy revealed a bowel perforation
which had been left during the botched abortion. Law enforcement
arrested Jenkins on November first for the operation, charging him

(11:36):
with murder.

Speaker 3 (11:37):
Jenkins's trial did not go as prosecutor's planned. Jenkins testified
that the fetus Wheat was caring had died and that
the abortion was an attempt to save her life. According
to a reporter for the Houston Post, Jenkinson's attorney were
pleased with how the trial was unfolding. Quote, the defense
seemed to be well satisfied with their showings so far.

(12:00):
Public opinion had changed considerably in favor of the defendant.
The newspaper told its readers, But then the trial came
to an abrupt and shocking end.

Speaker 4 (12:10):
While the court was in session, Hugh Wheat, the brother
of the deceased woman, stood aimed at gun at doctor Jenkins, and.

Speaker 5 (12:17):
Pulled the trigger.

Speaker 4 (12:19):
A bullet fatally struck the physician just underneath the ribs.
As the assassin fled, Jenkins's brother in law, John Halligan,
shot back, but missed that a murder trial ended in
another homicide is not surprising in a place as violent
as nineteenth century Texas, But because of the modern image
of Texas as reliably and even harshly anti abortion, it

(12:40):
might be startling that the public one hundred and twenty
five years ago actually sympathized with a doctor who faced
prison after his patient died as a result of an
incompetently performed abortion.

Speaker 3 (12:52):
Abortion politics were far more unpredictable in the American past
than Samuel Lito had asserted. In seven twenty three, anti
vice activist Anthony Comstock of Connecticut successfully lobbied the Congress
the past legislation known as the Compstack Act that made
distribution to the US mail or common carriers of birth
control devices or any information about birth control or how

(13:16):
to obtain an abortion a federal crime.

Speaker 4 (13:19):
Social reformers noted that bearing multi children often shorted women's
lives and drove their families into poverty, and they battled
for women to gain control over the reproductive choices. One
such reformer was Margaret Sanger of New York, the daughter
of a radical Irish father and mother who died at
fifty after burying eleven children. Sanger coined the term birth

(13:40):
control in nineteen fifteen, and, just before World War One,
launched a movement that promoted contraception as sexual and political
reform aimed to reduce human misery. She had to flee
the country in nineteen fourteen because her publication The Woman
Rebel intentionally defied the Comstock Law and promoted the distribution
of information about contraception through the United States Postal Service.

(14:04):
When she returned to this country, she was an international
celebrity for women's rights and free speech, and she opened
a family planning clinic, which faced continual police harassment. Lack
of access to birth control, Sager complained, led to abortion,
as she has said in a nineteen fifty seven interview
with reporter Mike Wallace on CBS News.

Speaker 6 (14:25):
Why did you do it?

Speaker 7 (14:26):
I realized that you had an intellectual conviction that birth
control was a boon demand kind. But I'm sure that
others have that conviction too, and so what I'd like
to know is this, what events, what emotions in your
life made Margaret Sanger a crusader for birth control.

Speaker 8 (14:46):
Well, mister Wallace, it's hard to say that any one
thing has made won't do this or that. I think
from the very beginning, I came of a large family.
My mother died young children. That made the impression on
me as a child. As a trained nurse went among
the people, I saw women who asked to have some

(15:10):
means whereby they would have to have another pregnancy too
early after the last child, the last abortion, which many
of them had. So there's a number of things that
are one after the other that really made you feel
that you had to do something.

Speaker 4 (15:25):
It may surprise many today that the woman who founded
the American Birth Control League, which later evolved into Planned
Parenthood of America, actually opposed abortion and advocated easing access
to birth control as a means of making advantage. Meanwhile,
around the time of Sanger's interview with Mike Wallace, Texas
doctors became friendlier to abortion rights. But before we get

(15:47):
into that quick eyebreak.

Speaker 3 (16:00):
In nineteen sixty three, the Houston Chronicles survey doctors about
their views of abortion. About eighteen thousand abortions took place
in Texas every year, the newspaper reported in that quote,
an increasing number of doctors believed abortion should be legal
for reasons beyond saving the life of the mother. Texas

(16:20):
women fought fiercely for the right to control their bodies.
In North Texas, the Women's Alliance, the first Unitarian Universalist
church in Dallas, launched an education campaign about the need
for the state to reform its abortion laws. Meanwhile, doctor
U Savage of Fort Worth, the president of State Association
of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, lobbied the Texas Medical Association to

(16:44):
draft a statement supporting abortion rights. The state's abortion ban was,
he said, in conflict with actual practice of reputable hospitals
across the state. Doctors regularly provided abortion care when a
woman's life was in danger, and they interpreted that mandate broadly.
In nineteen sixty nine, members of the Texas Medical Association

(17:06):
who were surveyed approved liberalization of abortion. Laws by an
overwhelming vote of four thousand, four hundred and thirty five
to five hundred and thirty six.

Speaker 4 (17:16):
The Texas legislature even considered loosening abortion restrictions in its
nineteen sixty seven and nineteen sixty eight sessions, although neither
effort was successful in spite of support from conservative state
Senator George park House and a growing number of churches
and physicians. In the end, activists carried the day. Two
Texas lawyers, Linda Confie and Sarah Weddington, took up the

(17:39):
cause of Norma McCovey, who had sought an abortion in Dallas.
Almost a century earlier, Texas doctors had argued whether to
allow an abortion for unmarried upper class women so they
could contribute to the gene pool by bearing children with
comparably privileged men. Those Victorian doctors did not have someone
like McCovey in mind.

Speaker 3 (17:58):
Largely neglected by our parents, but Covey had suffered abuse
at the hands of men throughout her life and was
a frequent drug user. After giving up one child for
adoption and having another taken by her mother, in nineteen
sixty nine, she was pregnant for a third time while
she was living in Dallas. McCovey tried to end the
pregnancy herself with a home remedy of peanuts and cast roil,

(18:22):
but she only succeeded in making herself nauseous. She's eventually
told about an illegal clinic, but when she got there,
Dallas police had already shut down the clinic. Quote nobody
was there, she said later it was an old dentist office.
Then I saw dried blood everywhere and smelled this awful smell.
She believed that she falsely claimed that she had been

(18:44):
gang raped by African American men. A doctor might be
willing to provide her an abortion. She was unsuccessful, but
a doctor referred her to an attorney who connected her
with a pair of lawyers who were seeking to challenge
the Texas anti abortion law. Attorneys Linda Coffee and Sarah
Weddington filed a class action suit against Dallas District Attorney

(19:06):
Henry Wade, claiming that the Texas anti abortion law, which
allowed the procedure only to save the patient's life, violated
the constitutional right of privacy.

Speaker 4 (19:17):
Before his name would forever be linked with the history
of American abortion law. By the time of Norman mcovy's suit.
Henry Wade enjoyed a reputation as one of the most
successful district attorneys in the country. His reputation in Dallas
was built on ruthlessness, racism, and the advantages a brutally
unfair criminal justice system in Texas gave him. Wade would

(19:38):
claim a ninety percent conviction rate, but in many of
those cases he faced off against poor defendants that were bullied,
lied to, and coerced into confessions by Dallas police officers.
In one infamous murder case, Tommy Lee Walker, an African
American man with several alibi witnesses, was threatened with a
beating if he didn't sign a confession. He was misled

(20:01):
about the consequences of signing an admission of guilt and later
died in the electric chair. In nineteen fifty six.

Speaker 3 (20:08):
Wade reportedly joked quote, any prosecutor could convict a guilty man.
That takes a real pro to convict an innocent man.
Emmanuel Wade provided to prosecutors after the Civil Rights Era,
provided tips for excluding African Americans and Mexican Americans from juries.
Wade left the District Attorney's office in January nineteen eighty eight,

(20:30):
and as of twenty eight, nineteen criminal defendants convicted by
his team had been exonerated through DNA evidence.

Speaker 4 (20:37):
During his time as district attorney, Wade directed police to
raid gay bars and vigorously prosecuted violators of the state
sodomy laws that banned oral and anal sex, including a
straight couple arrested in Dallas in nineteen sixty one. While
Wade may have racked up wins against badly outmatched targets
before Row, he bungled his most famous case, murder covered

(21:00):
by Dallas radio reporter Gary Delon of KLi s Am and.

Speaker 9 (21:06):
Garry comes Lee osrog he accused assassin Cat the riff
us leading the way, Then a strutted right Delice officers
shot running up, shot has run out, Andrew osrags leel

(21:30):
osra has sat him A shot has long out here,
strugglers be.

Speaker 10 (21:35):
In place, show.

Speaker 11 (21:37):
Has rung up and.

Speaker 9 (21:41):
Leean osrag mee osrad has les been shot.

Speaker 3 (21:46):
On November twenty fourth, nineteen sixty three, Dallas nightclub owner
Jack Ruby had murdered Lee Harvey Oswald, he accused assassin
of John Kennedy, as he was being escorted by police,
in front of the nationwide TV audience. The case should
have been open and shut. Wade's staff won a conviction
in March nineteen sixty four, but the verdict and death

(22:09):
sentence Ruby received was unanimously overturned by the Texas Court
Criminal Appeals on October fifth, nineteen sixty six, in part
because the judge should have granted a change of venue,
but also because Wade's team had introduced improperly obtained evidence
at the trial. Ruby was awaiting a new Trialway died
of pneumonia cancer in nineteen sixty seven.

Speaker 4 (22:29):
The Wade team apparently did similarly sloppy work in the
Roe v.

Speaker 5 (22:33):
Wade case.

Speaker 4 (22:34):
In abortion cases, Wade's office had generally prosecuted amateur abortion
providers who had killed or badly injured their clients, and
the Dallas DA's office in the City Police had not
focused on enforcement of abortion laws on the books. Legal
experts would later characterize the Dallas DA's office filings and
the Row case as perfunctory, especially compared to the exhaustive

(22:56):
constitutional research done by Weddington and Coffee. This Assistant General j.
Floyd won no allies on the Supreme Court when he
opened his argument with comments considered sexist and condescending even
by the standards of nineteen seventy three. When the Supreme
Court rendered its verdict, Wade reportedly never bothered to read

(23:16):
it best.

Speaker 12 (23:17):
Kate Justice, I pleased the court.

Speaker 8 (23:22):
It's an old Joe, But what a argument man argues
against two beautiful ladies like this.

Speaker 5 (23:27):
They're going to have.

Speaker 9 (23:28):
The last word.

Speaker 3 (23:30):
No one laughed, and a Texas legal team would win
a landmark legal victory. On January twenty second, nineteen seventy three,
news anchor Walter Cronkite made the earthshaking Roe v. Wade
decision the lead story on the CBS Evening News Good Evening.

Speaker 12 (23:46):
In a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court the day legalized abortions.
The majority in cases from Texas and Georgia said that
the decision to end the pregnancy during the first three
months belongs to the woman and her doctor, not the government.
Thus the anti abortion laws of forty six states were
rendered unconstitutional.

Speaker 6 (24:06):
Stay with us through this ad break to learn more.

Speaker 4 (24:19):
Took a while for the country and particularly Texans, to
absorb the news about the Roe decision. Supreme Court ruling
was announced on the same day as another big news
story that over the next few days absorbed attention south
of the Red River. Cronkite was on the air when
the press secretary of a former giant of Texas politics
called the newsman to tell him a former president had died.

Speaker 12 (24:40):
Thank you very much, Tom, I'm on the air right
at the moment. Can you hold the line just a second.
I'm talking to Tom Johnston, a press secretary for Lyndon Johnson,
who was reported that the thirty sixth President of the
United States died this afternoon in an ambulance plane on
the way to San Antonio, where he was taken after
being stricken at his rant, which the LWJ Ranch in

(25:01):
Johnson City, Texas.

Speaker 3 (25:03):
News of the road decision had to compete not only
with coverage of Johnson's death in the planning for his funeral,
but also the recently negotiated American withdrawal from the Vietnam War.
No one could have guessed how deeply this one decision
would reshape the makeup of the Democratic and Republican parties
over the next half century. Americans divided almost evenly. Soon

(25:25):
after the Supreme Court announcement, a Gallop survey indicated that
forty six percent supported a woman's right to choose and
forty five percent opposed granted women access to the abortion care.
In the days following the Road decision, reactions were often surprising.
Wa chris Well, the arch conservative pastor of First Baptist

(25:46):
Church in Dallas, the largest Southern Baptist congregation in the nation,
initially applauded the court. Perhaps the pastor, who had repeatedly
warned thirteen years earlier that the election of a Catholic
John Kennedy as president would mark the end of religious liberty,
was relieved that the Supreme Court was not controlled by
the Vatican. By the late nineteen seventies, Chriswell would emerge

(26:09):
as a national leader of the religious right and would
help make opposition to abortion gay rights a centerpiece or
Republican politics. Shortly after Rowe, however, he struck a very
different tune. Quote I've always felt that it was only
after the child was born and I had a life
separate from its mother that became an individual person, Chriswell said,

(26:31):
And it always therefore seemed to me that's what's best
for the mother and the future should be allowed.

Speaker 4 (26:38):
Opposition to the legalization of abortion quickly formed and would
build to homicidal intensity over the decades. In nineteen seventy, three,
years before the Row decision, when abortion was still illegal
in Texas, Michael Schwartz, a student at the conservative private
University of Dallas in the suburb of Irving, staged what
might have been the first anti abortion protest in America

(27:00):
and history. He held a sit in at the Planned
Parenthood headquarters, not far from downtown Dallas because the organization
provided assistance to pregnant women planning on traveling to states
where abortion was already legal, not unlike situations that Texans
faced today.

Speaker 3 (27:16):
The movement soon came to be dominated by right wing Republicans,
and the occupations of clinics soon became violent. Abortion opponents
pouring noxious chemicals into clinic ventilation systems, anti choice extremists
that fire to clinics, bombed them, and even murdered doctors
and clinic staff providing abortion care. One set of Texans

(27:38):
may have won the decisive battle for abortion rights in
the past half century, but a different set of Texans
would lead the charge to reverse those gains.

Speaker 4 (27:46):
Strangely enough, the backlash to abortion rights included norma McCovey.
One day, Flip Benhim, a leader of the extremist anti
abortion group Operation Rescue, approached her while she was autographing
copies of a book she had authored called I Am Row.
They became friends, and she later claimed that she changed
her mind about abortion when she saw photos of fetuses

(28:08):
at different stages of pregnancy. After being baptized in a
swimming pool by evangelicals in nineteen ninety five, an event
filmed and widely disseminated in the anti abortion movement, McCovey
became a popular fixture at anti abortion protests. At first,
McCovey embraced Evangelical Protestantism, and by nineteen ninety eight she
converted to Catholicism, but towards the end of her life,

(28:31):
while being interviewed for a twenty twenty documentary called Aka
Jane Rowe, McCovey confessed that her religious conversion had been
a scam and that she had been financially benefiting from
her transition into a star of the evangelical anti abortion circuit.

Speaker 6 (28:49):
Did they use you as a trophy? Of course, I
was the big fish. Do you think they would say
they used them?

Speaker 8 (28:57):
Well, I think it was a macheble fine.

Speaker 11 (29:00):
You know.

Speaker 6 (29:00):
I checked their money and they put me out in
front of the.

Speaker 11 (29:03):
Cameras and tell me what site.

Speaker 6 (29:05):
That's what I'm saying.

Speaker 3 (29:07):
McCovey died in twenty seventeen at her home in Katie, Texas.
By that point, anti abortion politics had become orthodoxy in
the Republican Party. In two thousand and eight, the state
passed the misleadingly named Women's Right to No Act, which
mandated the physicians share misinformation about alleged fetal pain during

(29:28):
abortion with women who sought the procedure. In twenty thirteen,
a state Senator Wendy Davis a Fort Worth stage of
dramatic thirteen hour filibuster Senate Bill five, legislation that banned
abortion after twenty weeks, required clinics to meet the same
demanding standards as hospitals and surgical centers, and required doctors

(29:49):
performing the procedure to hold admitting privileges at nearby hospitals.
Davis's filibuster stopped the bill from being voted on before
midnight June twenty fifth, mandated end of the legislative session.
She killed the legislation for the time being, and the
pink tennis shoes she wore became a symbol of abortion
rights activism around the world. However, Rick Perry called a

(30:12):
special session of the legislature the next day in Senate
Bill five passed. Her efforts propelled her into the twenty
fourteen gubernatorial race, but she was crushed by Greg Abbott
by twenty one point margin.

Speaker 4 (30:26):
In recent years, Abbot has led the charge to erase
many of the gains women have won in the fight
to control their bodies.

Speaker 7 (30:33):
We will promote policies that limit the growth of.

Speaker 6 (30:38):
Government, not the size of your dreams.

Speaker 4 (30:43):
Under Abbot, Texas has passed some of the most intrusive
and extreme anti abortion laws that tightly regulate women's bodies.
In twenty twenty one, Texas passed Senate Bill eight, which
banned abortions after the six week of pregnancy. It made
performing an abortion a first or second degree felony unless
the mother's life is in danger or there is risk
of substantial impairment of a major bodily function. The vagueness

(31:06):
of that latter provision has terrified Texas doctors into not
providing care to several women who have shown up in
emergency rooms at death's door. Texas physicians have become less
willing to perform emergency abortions than they were in the
days before the Road decision, even as far back as
the nineteenth century.

Speaker 3 (31:23):
In twenty twenty three, the Texas Supreme Court denied Kate
Cox of Dallas the right to end a pregnancy, even
though our fetus suffered from full trisomy eighteen, the severe
genetic anomaly that guaranteed that the child, if it survived pregnancy,
would only live minutes. If a pregnancy continued, Cox may
have lost the ability to have children in the future.

(31:45):
She fled this state in order to obtain an abortion
where a procedure remained illegal. In twenty twenty three, Amanda
Zerwarski almost died waiting for a life saving abortion when
doctors hesitated to provide care because they feared criminal prosecute.
For years, abortion ride activists had chanted pro life, that's
a lie, you don't care if women die. In fact,

(32:08):
the state legislature and Governor Greg Abbott did nothing, as
the deaths of pregnant women in Texas sword fifty six percent.

Speaker 4 (32:17):
In twenty twenty one, Johnson Lee Barnica, a mother of one,
was joyful when she realized she was pregnant. She hoped
to deliver a sibling for her daughter, but on September
twenty first, seventeen weeks into her pregnancy, she was miscarrying,
with the fetus pressing against her cervix and about to
exit the womb. Barnica's life was in danger, but doctors

(32:37):
at HCA Houston Healthcare Northwest told her and her husband
that because of Texas's law, they could do nothing until
the fetus' heartbeat had stopped. Fearing criminal charges, doctors refused
to medically accelerate the delivery of the dying fetus and
let forty hours pass. Barnica writhed in agony, begged to
be allowed to see her daughter, and a fatal bacterial

(32:59):
in fact ravaged her body. She would die three days later,
leaving her young child without a mother.

Speaker 3 (33:06):
On October twenty eighth, twenty twenty three, eighteen year old
Neva Crane was six months pregnant. She began vomiting and
she became soaked in sweat during a baby shower at
her home in Beaumont. She too was miscaring. Her boyfriend
drove her to nearby Baptist hospitals. Of Southeast Texas, where

(33:27):
they waited for five hours in a waiting room before
doctors diagnosed her with strapped throat and gave her a
prescription for antibiotics. Sent home or conditionally worsened, Crane was
driven to another hospital in town Christa's Southeast Texas, Saint Elizabeth.
Her fever soared to one hundred and two and she
was bleeding, but her doctors continue to do nothing but

(33:48):
administer antibiotics. Eventually, she was wheeled into a third emergency room.
Doctors gave her two ultrasounds, two, in their words, confirm
fetal demise. Crane's mother, who had long been opposed to abortions,
screened at the medical staff to help her dying child.
Cranes suffered for twenty hours before her heart failed.

Speaker 4 (34:10):
Bernica and Crane's stories were revealed by the investigative news
outlet Pro Publica just days before the twenty twenty four
presidential election. Democratic nominee Kamala Harris made abortion rights a
central part of her doomed campaign. When an anticipated red
wave expected to bring a Republican majority in the twenty
twenty two congressional elections fizzled and a number of abortion

(34:32):
rights initiative passed even in traditional Republican strongholds like Kansas
and Ohio. Many pundits believe that a Dobbs effect had
heralded a permanent political realignment or at least the upcoming
presidential election results. This phenomenon clearly failed to materialize for Harris.
Abortion rights referenda passed in seven states, including Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada,

(34:58):
and New York in November twenty twenty five, but they
foundered in Nebraska and South Dakota, as well as Florida
because the support of fifty seven percent of voters fell
short of the required sixty percent supermajority. In Texas, Trump,
once a pro choice person but now the proud instigator
of the Dobbs decision, carried fifty six percent of the vote.

(35:19):
One of the most prominent Trump supporters, University of Texas PhD.
Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, might soon be in
a position to see his dreams of a national ban
on the so called abortion pill, mifepristone, and even the
reversal of the nineteen sixty five Griswold v. Connecticut's Supreme
Court decision that overturned state laws banning control pills and devices.

Speaker 3 (35:42):
When Harris lost, anti abortion extremists exuberantly celebrated Trump's triumph.
Neo Nazi Nick Fuentes, who if right wing rap artists
Kanye West got to go to dinner in twenty twenty two.
At Trump saw the Republican victory as an opportunity to
reduce swomen to the status property. Hey, we control your bodies.

Speaker 1 (36:03):
Guess what.

Speaker 6 (36:04):
Guys win again.

Speaker 13 (36:06):
Okay, men win again, and yes, we control your bodies. Hi,
I'm your Republican congressman. Hi, I'm your Republican congressman. It's
your body, my choice.

Speaker 4 (36:22):
Texas government has become big enough to regulate women's bodies
and small enough to fit inside of its citizens' bedrooms.
Even though abortion rights have always enjoyed far greater support
than Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has suggested the right
of women to control their own bodies and get the
vital medical care they need to prevent bodily harm or
their premature deaths seems on the precipice of vanishing. This

(36:46):
grim reality is not deeply rooted in America's history or traditions,
but unfortunately it is the current status quo, and Texas
has played a major role in bringing us to this place.
I'm Stephen Machelli, I'm Michael Phillips. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 6 (37:22):
Welcome to it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. I
hope you've been enjoying the holiday season. I know I have,
or at least I've been trying to. It's difficult because
I keep getting distracted by this funny feeling like there's
something watching over me, up in the sky, something buzzing around,
And at first I thought this might just be Santa's sleigh,

(37:44):
but then I realized no, no, no, no no, this
is actually a drone. And oh boy, am I not
the only one. Drone fever is just sweeping the nation
right now with the new Jersey drone panic somehow making
headline based on unconfirmed and very disputable reports. The new

(38:06):
Jersey drone thing isn't real. This is mass hysteria. Almost
all of these incidents of UFOs, UAPs or mysterious drones
are actually just like regular airplanes going to the airport,
airplanes that you can track online via flight radar. These
aren't nuclear scanning drones, These aren't secret government military projects.

(38:27):
These are either like legal, registered hobbyist drones in some cases,
but really just mostly airplanes. A few weeks ago, there
was a really cloudy day over the New Jersey coast
and that day all of the drone sightings stopped because
you couldn't see up in the sky, you couldn't see
the airplanes. But yeah, the New Jersey drone panic isn't real.

(38:51):
The reason why there's blinking lights flying over LaGuardia is
that those are airplanes taking off and landing at an airport.
This whole panic was boosted by unconfirmed social media reports
and local news sites trying to gain clicks, and somehow
this just broke through into the national mainstream discourse. But
fears over invasive drones isn't necessarily unfounded though. The ones

(39:15):
that you should be worried about aren't UFOs or nuclear
scanning drones, but are actually police drones, which are becoming
all the more commonplace. More and more cities this year
have adopted police drone programs. So for this episode, I'm
going to rerun my episode from early in twenty twenty
four about police drones. Now, in the past year, there's

(39:39):
also been a great increase in the reporting on police drones,
including a fantastic Wired investigation titled the Age of the
Drone Police is Here. They analyzed nearly ten thousand individual
flight records from July twenty twenty one September of twenty
twenty three, containing more than twenty two point three million coordinates.

(40:01):
The investigation showed that poor communities, especially working class and
immigrant communities, were disproportionately surveilled with police drones in Cheula Vista,
flying over neighborhood blocks on the west side more than
ten times longer than blocks on the suburban east side.
And considering Trump's second term, fears over widespread police surveillance

(40:25):
are only more relevant, especially in immigrant communities, and even
in instances where drones like this fly over places like
abortion clinics, and these fears are not unfounded. In twenty twenty,
the San Diego Union Tribune discovered that the Cheulavista Police
Department was sharing its license plate reader data directly with ICE.

(40:45):
Now it's still unclear how many drones Cheulavista PD currently has,
but as of twenty twenty two, they had thirty two
of these high definition camera mounted drones, drones which have
now done over twenty one thousand flights since twenty eighteen.
All of this will get discussed more in depth in
the episode, but for an update later, I discuss a

(41:09):
court case to secure the public's right to access drowne footage,
and this case is still ongoing. Last spring, the city
tried to appeal to the California Supreme Court, who ultimately
declined to take up the case, basically reaffirming the lower
court's ruling against the police to withhold drone footage. This

(41:29):
case is once again back to trial court to finalize
details of how certain footage should be released. So, without
further ado, here's my episode from the twenty twenty four
Consumer Electronics Showcase, Police Drones and you welcome to it

(41:53):
could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. Now, last week I
spent a few days in Las Vegas for the Consumer
Electronics Showcase. Most of the time of the convention, I
was just walking around the show floor looking at various
new types of surveillance equipment, AI products, and various other
bullshit that was being pedled to the many industry attendees

(42:16):
of CEES. But I was also able to go to
a few panels. Now panels are really interesting because you
get to hear people who are working inside industries talk
about stuff that they don't usually really publicly talk about
very much. And on the first day of the convention,
I went to a panel about drone technology. Half of
the panel was about how Walmart is launching new delivery

(42:37):
drones in Dallas, Texas. The other half was about police drones.
And that's what we're going to be talking about here today,
how the police are using drones, why they're using drones,
and how you can probably expect to be seeing a
lot more drones up in the sky piloted by either
an AI or a police officer. So let's get started.

(43:00):
Cheula Vista is the southernmost kind of medium sized city
in California, with the population of two hundred and seventy
eight thousand people. Cheulavista has a police force of two
hundred and eighty nine sworn officers, as well as one
hundred and twenty civilian employees. On top of their nearly
three hundred officers, they operate a drone fleet ten hours

(43:21):
a day, seven days a week, launching high deff camera
mounted drones from four locations throughout their small city. I'm
going to quote from an article from the MIT Technology Review,
which did a deep dive onto Cheulavista's police drones back
in February of twenty twenty three. Quote. Cheula Vista uses
these drones to extend the power of its workforce in

(43:43):
a number of ways. For example, if only one officer
is available when two calls come in, one foreign armed
suspect and another for shoplifting, an officer will respond to
the first one. But now cvpd's Public Information Officer, Sergeant
Anthony Molina, says that dispatchers can send a drone to
surreptitiously trail the suspected shoplifter unquote. And this really gets

(44:07):
at the heart of how these drones are going to
get used. They exist to funnel more people into the
criminal justice system. Instead of having to choose between two calls,
one of which actually could relate to saving someone's life,
the other just a petty crime, now the police can
easily follow someone doing a petty crime while responding to
other calls and eventually catch up. It's a way to

(44:28):
just expand the amount of people that can be arrested
and thrown into jail. Nowadays, drones are pretty common tools
for police. Over one five hundred departments currently use drones,
usually for special occasions though like search and rescue, crime
scene documentation, protest surveillance, and sometimes tracking suspects, But at

(44:49):
the moment, only about a dozen police departments regularly dispatch
drones in response to nine to one one calls, the
first of which was Cheu La Vista PD launched their
quote drone as first Responder program back in twenty eighteen
with the goal of having an unmanned aerial system or
drone be proactively deployed before an officer is on SENE.

(45:14):
Now we'll hear from Chief Roxanna Kennedy of the Chula
Vista Police Department talking on the drone technology panel at CEES.

Speaker 14 (45:24):
We are seven miles from the Mexico border, and we
are the second largest city in San Diego County.

Speaker 11 (45:30):
So we have about two hundred.

Speaker 14 (45:31):
And ninety officers and we serve a community of about
three hundred thousand. Because of the close proximity into the door,
we have a lot of people that travel back and forth.
We have a drone program that I'm awfully proud of,
and we are responding proactively to calls for service in
our community, and so we have drone station from botfent

(45:54):
locations throughout our city.

Speaker 11 (45:55):
We have pilots in command that are on the roadtop,
and then we.

Speaker 14 (45:59):
Have a operation center where we have smart officers that
are part one to seven pilots that fly the drones.

Speaker 11 (46:06):
So we are responding now to calls for service.

Speaker 14 (46:09):
On average, an officer on seeing a drone pen on
seeing that, sharing information with our officers live streaming that
information on our cell phones or in our computers that
we're seeing information about the call.

Speaker 11 (46:22):
Within ninety seconds on average.

Speaker 14 (46:25):
And so what it's doing for us in sual Vista
and for our community is we are providing information rapidly,
real time information to officers so that they can make
better decisions so that everyone goes home safely. We say,
the community safer, the officers are safer, and the subjects
that we encounter are safer.

Speaker 11 (46:44):
So we're only proud of what we're doing.

Speaker 6 (46:46):
The way police are able to deploy drones used to
be a lot more limited. The use of drones is
regulated by the FFA, the Federal Aviation Administration. In most cases,
the FFA requires that both hobbyists and please departments only
fly drones within the operator's own line of sight. But
starting back in twenty nineteen, agencies and vendors can start

(47:08):
applying for a beyond visual line of sight or bev
loss waiver from the FFA to fly drones remotely, allowing
for much longer flights in restricted airspace. Chula Vista Pedi
was the first department to get a BEVLOST waiver. The
MIT Tech Review estimated last year that roughly two hundred
and twenty five more departments now have one as well.

Speaker 14 (47:31):
Another thing that I always talk about because I think
it's critical, is the concept of why they're using drones,
what the benefit is to the community with the use
of our drones. And I truly believe that when my
officers can pick up their cell phone before they respond
to the call and they can look and see the scene.

Speaker 11 (47:54):
What's happening where the individual is.

Speaker 14 (47:56):
If the person's facing in the middle of the park,
there are no children and there are no there's nobody
that's within the reach of this individual harmy, you might
not have to rush into that scene so quickly. Officers
can dsciate make better decisions. And I mean this is
just a game changer for law enforcement and right now

(48:16):
you know, we were the first agent agency to be
involved in the integrated pilot program with the FAA.

Speaker 11 (48:23):
We're very proud of that that.

Speaker 14 (48:24):
They trusted us enough for us to be the organization
that brought forward all these these ideas that are now
being utilized in law enforcements. Now.

Speaker 6 (48:33):
I've watched a lot of videos of police talking about
why they're using drones, of drone training companies talking about
why police drones are so important. In one video on
their website, this guy from Skyfire Consulting was talking about
how police may not have had to kill tam or
Rice if they simply had a drone watching beforehand so
they could see that it was a toy gun, which

(48:56):
is a ridiculous thing to say, because in the nine
one call that jump started this entire police interaction, it
was expressed that the caller thought the gun was probably
a toy. And this notion that is simply if police
have more ability to surveil, they'll be able to respond
safer and apply less deadly force, I think is a

(49:17):
pretty suspect premise. Now, the effectiveness of drone technology and
law enforcement is challenging to verify and quantify the MIT
Tech Review cannot find any third party studies showing that
drones reduce crime, even after interviewing CVPD officers as well
as drone vendors and researchers quote, nor could anyone provide

(49:39):
statistics on how many additional arrests or convictions came from
using drone technology. I was able to find some data
on cvpd's website talking about how many drone initiated interactions
resulted in arrests, but quantifying additional arrests seems to be
a little challenging. Now if you look at cheul to

(50:00):
PD's own drone response to stats, the vast majority of
deployments I estimate around seventy percent are for what the
director of investigations for the privacy rights group the Electronic
Frontier Foundation refers to as quote crimes of poverty unquote,
which he believes will be the target of most drone
policing as opposed to violent crime. Nearly thirty percent of

(50:22):
Chula Vista's drone deployments are for what's categorized as disturbances.
Almost fifteen percent are for psychological evaluations, ten percent are
for quote, check the area and information, over seven percent
are for welfare checks. Six point five percent is for
quote unknown problem and over six percent is for suspicious

(50:45):
person and another six percent for traffic accidents. Now, some
drone deployments do result in patrol units not having to
be dispatched, but CVPD also says that drones have assisted
in thousands of arrests. And I'm really not sure if
having a drone following someone around is the best thing

(51:05):
for a fifty one to fifty psych evaluation. The presence
of a police officer doesn't always make the situations better either,
but I don't see having a drone be a really
calming presence if you think someone needs mental help. Funding

(51:32):
a whole fleet of heavy duty surveillance drones and paying
dedicated operators costs money. Now it's unclear to me how
many drones to Levista PD currently has, and on their
website they list ten different drone models currently being in
their fleet, most of them really expensive DGI drones like
the DGI Matrix, the DGI Inspire, the DGA Phantom, the

(51:55):
dj Maverick, as well as drones from a few other
random companies. But nevertheless, Chief Kennedy is very grateful for
their local Police Foundation for heading up the funding for
their DFR drone first Responder program. Let's hear from her.

Speaker 11 (52:12):
I don't know if anyone here.

Speaker 14 (52:14):
Is in law enforcement, but many agencies use drums and
there are all different types of drones that are available.
I call them reactive drums or ones that are like
the tactical drums that you can use to go in
on a hostage situation or a missing person, to check
in the.

Speaker 11 (52:31):
Canyon areas, or you know, interior drones. We have drunes
of grow underneath.

Speaker 14 (52:36):
Beds, go inside addicts, all types of different drones, and
many organizations have drones like that, but a DFR drone
is very unique and different because these drones are flying
as you can imagine, eighteen thousand missions. It puts a
lot of wear and tear on them. But that is
one of the biggest challenges beyond the that of funding.

(52:57):
So we don't have huge budgets that are abouted for
drone programs, and so we've had to be very, very
creative in our police department, and we were very blessed
to have a police Foundation that has taken on the
responsibility to help us really start our drone program and
continue going forward. So funding is always going to be

(53:18):
a challenge and dependent upon.

Speaker 11 (53:21):
The drone that you use. There are some drones that
you can't get any as.

Speaker 14 (53:25):
You can't use for assets seizure funding, nor can you
get grants for because sometimes when it comes to foreign
may drones there are many challenges as well. So you
have to think of that and then we deal with legislation.
Right now, that's the new challenge that we all have.
We have to bite some battles. Like I said, I'm agnostic.
I want to use what's the best drum out there

(53:47):
and protect the information and we do that with encrypted
software programs that are on private servers. But you'll see
that there's a lot of discussion about drones and what drones.

Speaker 11 (53:59):
We should use right now.

Speaker 6 (54:01):
We'll get back to the chief's offhanded mention of legal
battles in a bit here. But Chula Vista's budgetary situation
may not be as dire as the chief makes it
out to be. On top of their current fifty five
million dollar operating budget. Back in twenty twenty, the Loprenza
newspaper revealed that departments in San Diego County had secretly

(54:23):
been getting hundreds of millions of dollars in high tech
police equipment including armored vehicles, facial recognition and phone breaking software,
license plate readers, drones, ria gear, among other miscellaneous technology
as a part of a DHS grant program due to
their close proximity to the US Mexico border. Chula Vista

(54:44):
was one such department, and as of twenty twenty, so
four years ago, they had already received over one million
dollars in grant funds from this DHS program, titled the
quote Urban Area Security Initiative. Considering Chief kend these budgetary concerns,
drones actually have a lot of upsides financially, as they

(55:05):
are often a lot cheaper than alternative surveillance methods, as
well as being relatively easy to deploy remotely, either with
a joystick or just by clicking a point on a
map from a comfy office building. Issues around this ease
of use was pointed out by Dave Moss, the director
of investigations for the privacy rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation,

(55:26):
who was quoted in the MIT article saying, quote, up
until the last like five to ten years, there was
this unspoken check and balance on law enforcement power money.
You cannot have a police officer standing on every corner
of every street. You can't have a helicopter flying twenty
four seven because of fuel and insurance is really expensive.
But with all these new technologies, we don't have that

(55:49):
check and balance anymore. That's just going to result in
more people being pulled through the criminal justice system. Unquote.

Speaker 14 (55:56):
My officers constantly are on the air. Now, is you
as more available in US? One available because it's getting
them more information. Think about the fact that you can
look at your cell phone. I could be anywhere in
the world and I can look at kit lets me
know whenever there's.

Speaker 11 (56:10):
A drone flock, and I can walk.

Speaker 14 (56:12):
I can have visual awareness, aial overlay of what's happening
in my community, no matter.

Speaker 11 (56:19):
Where I am.

Speaker 6 (56:21):
Advancements in technology are leading to further normalization of police surveillance.
Ten years ago, would people react to news of a
twenty four hour police drone program the same way they
would now? What was once the threat of Big Brother
has since become a very sought after, unfetishized nanny state.

(56:44):
In the v for Veneta graphic novel, anarchist writer Alan
Moore imagined a fascist Britain characterized by surveillance cameras around
every corner, and now cities around the country are setting
up their own street mounted cameras linked to private security
cameras and ring door cameras to create a network of
life coverage around a whole city which is instantly accessible

(57:06):
to police. The more widespread consumer adoption of new technologies
like small camera mounted drones and doorbell cameras, the more
acceptable it seems for police to add to such technology
to their arsenal of surveillance tools. It almost becomes expected
to Levis Tipdi has routinely declined to answer why their

(57:27):
drones are always recording, both to and from the scene,
and the department has put in a lot of effort
into managing the backlash against their expanding drone program.

Speaker 11 (57:37):
And I'll tell you one thing.

Speaker 14 (57:39):
Even some of the after this, they were very concerned
about drones in the sense of privacy.

Speaker 11 (57:44):
What are you doing with these drones?

Speaker 14 (57:46):
As you're responding, you're trying to gather data and information
to spy on us, right, And we have had to
go to a lot of detail and explaining that as
our drama lifsaw is immediately it is recording because that's
the information and gather for us as that drone responds,
the camera is already going all three miles down the

(58:06):
roads where the scene is and giving us vital information
as the officers are responding. But one of the criticism was,
go on the way back, is your drone just going
in my backyard?

Speaker 11 (58:17):
What if we're smoking marijuana in our backyard? And I said,
you're in California, doesn't really matter about way?

Speaker 1 (58:22):
Well, let that wa go right.

Speaker 14 (58:24):
But we said, okay, we gave your concern, and so
what we did was we worked with the software company
that we were with, and they created an automatic so
that as a drone returns, it automatically tilts to the horizon,
so we're not recording anything. If another call came out,

(58:45):
we can immediately we'll go back in it or fight
map it for us and the share that information later on.

Speaker 11 (58:51):
But the goal is to listen to your community as well.

Speaker 6 (58:55):
Chief Kennedy's claim here is difficult to back up because
CVPD have refused to show with the public any of
the drone footage they routinely collect. But if we take
the Chief at her word here anyway, she admits that
the drone goes back to recording at street level as
soon as there's another nine one one call as they
record everything on the way to a scene. And the

(59:16):
way she phrases this whole tilt feature is quite misleading
because the camera never actually stops recording. She just claims
that it tilts slightly upwards in between nine one one calls,
but it's still capturing footage up to three miles away
the entire time it's in the air. Police in Cheulavista

(59:36):
have flown over eighteen thousand missions with their drowns. That's
a lot of footage. When talking about the privacy concerns
had by some residents of Chewulavista, Chief Kennedy really emphasized
how much her and the department really care about listening
to community feedback and how data transparency is so important
to CVPD.

Speaker 14 (59:57):
Community engagement is a si, especially in law enforcement, because
there are so many challenges when it comes to misinformation
that's out there, and whenever you're a part of what's
deemed as a government, everyone thinks that you have some
ulterior motive when you're involved with any type of technology,
and so we have worked really hard to build very

(01:00:20):
strong relationships with every aspect of our community. So it
was about in twenty fifteen when we started talking about
the concept and the possibility of drones, and I laughed
with chant and said, George Jentsen, because that's my story
that I used to and I love it because I
made fun off my guys. When they said that we
want to fly drunes, I said, oh, come on, now,
what are we in beet George jetson flying rap the cars.

Speaker 11 (01:00:41):
And then I saw today they talked about a blind car.

Speaker 14 (01:00:44):
So it happens, it happens, all right. And so with
the community, we started having these conversations. We created a
working group, and we started doing community forums. We started
asking the community about what would you think if we
were able to do something like this. We even went
to some of the organizations that may not.

Speaker 11 (01:01:04):
Always be so supportive of these types of groups.

Speaker 14 (01:01:07):
We work with the ASLVIE and ask for their input
on our policy. So before we ever flew the drune,
we call it the krawl lolock run Base. We're still
at the very end of crawl. We're not into lock
yet and we've been doing it again also for five years.

Speaker 11 (01:01:25):
So you have to make certain that you're transparent, and.

Speaker 14 (01:01:29):
We provided all types of information that are available if
you go to. All you have put in is jobs
to place drums and it'll come up with us and
you can look at all the things that we do,
all the information that we share, the flight maps that
we share. I mean, it's just super important to have
those community forums.

Speaker 11 (01:01:49):
Every year.

Speaker 14 (01:01:50):
We do a community forum twice a year where we
ask for input from our community.

Speaker 6 (01:01:55):
Later on in the panel, Chief Kennedy said that CVPD
is quote unquote extremely transparent about their flight data and
quote unquote have nothing to hide relating to their use
of surveillance drones, which is a curious claim considering the
fact that CVPD has historically kept all drone footage hidden

(01:02:17):
from the public and has fought in court to do so.
Despite the chief's emphasis on the police's commitment to transparency
and the importance of listening to community feedback, even going
as far as to consult the ACLU when developing their
drone program, for years now, the Cheulavista Police Department has

(01:02:38):
denied all FOYA and public records requests for any drone
footage in response. Are Tuno Castnares, a Cheulavista resident and
owner of the local bilingual newspaper Loprenza, filed a lawsuit
against the city. CVPD argued that all drone footage should
be categorically exempt from the public records requests on the

(01:02:59):
basis that the footage could be used for a future investigation.
Just last December, only a few weeks before Cees, the
California Fourth District Court of Appeals ruled that this blanket
exemption is invalid and that not all drone first responder
footage could be classified as a part of uppending or
ongoing criminal investigation, pointing to examples such as nine one

(01:03:23):
one calls about a roaming mountain lion or a stranded motorist.
And police were not happy about this ruling. I'll talk
about their reaction at the end of the episode, but
controlling the narrative about the drone first responder program has
been of the utmost importance to Trulavista Police, as the

(01:03:43):
chief herself expressed at the panel, and we're real.

Speaker 11 (01:03:47):
Good about telling our story.

Speaker 14 (01:03:49):
If you don't tell your own story in law enforcement,
other people will tell it for.

Speaker 11 (01:03:52):
It and it might not be the right story.

Speaker 14 (01:03:55):
So we've gotten a really good at sharing on our
social media and through YouTube channels and everything.

Speaker 6 (01:04:03):
Successfulies of what we're doing that is quite the claim there,
to paraphrase the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Without public access to
their drone footage, it makes it very difficult to assess
how much privacy you have in Cheula Vista and whether
police are even following their own rules about when and
whether they record sensitive places like people's homes, backyards, or

(01:04:28):
public protests. And that's why this recent ruling and the
legal precedent it sets is a huge win for actual
transparency and marks the first step towards the public finally
getting a look at how these drones are being used
in Scheula Vista. With drone first Responder programs is spreading

(01:04:59):
to police departments across the country modeled after the one
in Chula Vesta. Combined with the increasing presence of stationary
street level cameras, the ability for police to be watching
everywhere without the need for on the ground officers creates
what the EFF refers to as quote, a fundamental change
in strategy, with police responding to a much much larger

(01:05:20):
number of situations with drones, resulting in pervasive, if not persistent,
surveillance of communities unquote. Speaking of persistent surveillance. Near the
end of the panel, The Chief announced that to Lavesta,
PD is planning to expand their ten hour a day
drone first responder program to a constant twenty four hour

(01:05:42):
a day drone surveillance program. More than doubling the department's
capacity to have eyes in the sky would mean a
lot more work hours for drone operators, as well as
a large increase in the amount of video files being
stored indefinitely, but Chief Kennedy claimed that they're looking into
offsetting costs by replacing some of the drone piloting team
with AI assisted piloting and autonomous devices.

Speaker 14 (01:06:06):
You've clearly been the leader with thrones's first responder technology.

Speaker 11 (01:06:12):
Looking forward, what is the future hold for department?

Speaker 4 (01:06:15):
I assume you're spending a lot of time telling others
about the program edition using drones, but beyond that, what's up.

Speaker 14 (01:06:23):
Well, my hope is that we'll be moving towards twenty
four hour operations. Right now, we're from sunrise to sunset,
we go till close to ten o'clock at night, which
goes a little bit beyond that.

Speaker 11 (01:06:35):
And then one of the challenges, and I.

Speaker 14 (01:06:37):
Know you're only getting like a little piece of the
information about exactly how we're doing this, but from the
four different locations that we fly on each of the rooftops,
we have what's called the piloting command, and that piloting
command is contracted through a company and we and they
just have visual awareness of the sky and they work
in coordination with our drone pilot inside our operations center.

(01:07:01):
But that's a huge expense for us to pay lead
for each site right now with the operations that we
have to pay about one hundred thousand dollars per year,
So that's four hundred thousand dollars for four locations beyond
all the other processociating and so if you get expense
and my hope is that and we keep hearing about
you've see some of the testing and we've been testing

(01:07:23):
it as well in our area. Are what's called drone
in the box or there's some of the systems that
are out there right now that organizations are using that
are autonomous, and so we're getting there, but we're not
quite there because it's very different when you're dealing with
flying over people and you're flying into areas where the

(01:07:44):
drone was to drop out the sky and harm people
in our community. That could create tremendous challenges for us,
so we're very As I mentioned the crawl phase, So.

Speaker 6 (01:07:54):
To explain how these AI autonomous drones would work, It's
essentially this box the size of a truck bed that
can either be mounted in like a police pickup truck
or be stored on various rooftops around the city, and
someone just needs to point at a place on a
map and the drone will fly in pilot itself around
obstacles and basically circle around an area to do surveillance,

(01:08:17):
and you can call it back when you're done. This
would require a whole bunch of drones to just be
launching and being piloted by themselves. You wouldn't have to
train random police officers to become FAA licensed pilots, and
you could just have the whole thing in the box
like it's called drone in the box. And these are
only going to become more common and cheaper. Imagine having

(01:08:37):
ten of these throw out a city, launching from like
ten different rooftops, being able to fly around by themselves,
constantly going around in communities, constantly going to GPS coordinates
linked to the nine one one calls, creating a whole
wealth of footage instantly available to police live streamed from
the air. Matt Sloane, the founder of Skyfire Consulting, a

(01:08:59):
company here in Atlanta that trains law enforcement agencies on
the use of drones and DFR programs, thinks that we'll
start seeing autonomous deployment of police drones within the next
year or two, as police budgets increase and become allocated
for unmanned aerial systems. He referred to the state of
drone use by police as quote rapidly escalating. Jeu la

(01:09:21):
Vista likes to market itself as a pioneer of this
smart city movement, which consequently makes them able to receive
a whole bunch of grant funding.

Speaker 5 (01:09:31):
Now.

Speaker 6 (01:09:32):
The idea of the smart city is built around having
a massive amount of data to automate certain city services.
So for this idea to work, there needs to be
a way to collect that data, and these drones are
a major part of that. The website for the city
of Cheu la Vista also lists projects like electronic transportation,

(01:09:53):
adaptive traffic signals in app for non emergency city services,
as well as quote crime map and police dispatch modernization
unquote as also being smart city initiatives.

Speaker 14 (01:10:07):
We have what's called five nine one, and that allows
my officers to hear incoming nine more one calls before
dispatch even puts it into the system. They can hear
what's going on there, and that is tremendously in.

Speaker 11 (01:10:21):
Valuable to them.

Speaker 14 (01:10:23):
We have so many different layers of technology that have
really showcase the value.

Speaker 6 (01:10:29):
Live nine one one is a new piece of software
that allows patrol officers to listen to live stream to
nine one one calls directly and pinpoints the location of
the caller via GPS. Now, I don't even have time
to get into the many reasons that this could be
a bad idea, but simply put, police do not need
to respond to every call that goes into nine one one,

(01:10:51):
let alone be giving random cops this ability to self
dispatch on their own. It just seems like that could
have many many consequences. But anyway, back to drones. According
to a twenty twenty article in the newspaper Loprenza, cities
in San Diego County like Chula Vista, have received equipment
such as tethered drones used for stationary surveillance, poll cameras,

(01:11:14):
license plate readers, and cell phone cracking technology used to
circumvent passwords from the Urban Area Security Initiative DHS grant program.
A lot of these technologies have use in the Smart
City Idyllic plan for data collection to automate city services.
After the drone panel was over and I was walking

(01:11:34):
around the show floor at CEES, I couldn't help but
notice all of the smart cameras and AI image recognition
systems being advertised for law enforcement applications. Software that can
almost instantaneously scan through a wealth of footage and track
people's movements, run facial recognition, and identify every article of clothing.

(01:11:57):
Versions of this type of software are already in US
use by many police departments, and they will only get better, cheaper,
and more common. In effect, what this does is remove
a lot of the detective leg work. Instead of having
to manually map someone's movements and track down what niche
etsy shirt someone's wearing, these aisystems can now do this

(01:12:17):
all automatically. To quote the MIT Tech Review article on
cvpd's DFR drone program quote. As the technology continues to spread,
privacy and civil liberty groups are raising the question of
what happens when drones are combined with license plate readers,
networks of fixed cameras, and new real time command centers
that digest and sort through video evidence, this digital dragnet

(01:12:41):
could dramatically expand surveillance capabilities and lead to even more
police interactions with demographics that have historically suffered from over policing. Unquote.
Pedro Rios, a human rights advocate with the American Friends
Service Committee and a member of Chula Vista's Community Tech Council,
was quoted in the MITA article saying, quote people in

(01:13:02):
the community have no awareness of what images are captured,
how the footage is retained, and who has access. It's
a big red flag for a city that says it's
at the forefront of the smart city movement. Unquote.

Speaker 14 (01:13:15):
These drawns, they're revolutionizing the world. I mean people who
are not taking drawn seriously right now, who will be
left behind. We have flown eighteen one hundred and fifty missions.
You can go on a web page, you can see
the flight data. We're extremely transparent. We share all that

(01:13:35):
with our community. We have no need to hide. We
are in the business of saving wise and I believe
drones are one of the.

Speaker 11 (01:13:41):
Best escort folks.

Speaker 6 (01:13:44):
If they truly have nothing to hide and are extremely
transparent about the use of their camera mounted drones. I
wonder why they've spent years in court fighting to keep
every second of drone footage from being seen by the public. Luckily,
after Chief Kennedy talked for like thirty minutes about how
much they care about community engagement and how transparent they

(01:14:06):
are with their flight data, I was able to ask
the Chief how their commitment to transparency relates to the
recent lawsuit she just lost over hiding drone footage. And
I also threw in a question about drones at protests.
Let's take a listen. Yeah, a question for the chief.

Speaker 15 (01:14:23):
So, I know you talked about the importance of listening
to the community and community engagement, and I'm not sure
this is the case for your department, but other departments
who've kind of followed suit, for your example, have been
using drones to surveil first time in activity stuff. And
I know you recently lost a court case regarding the
availability of drone footage, so I'm curious about the kind

(01:14:44):
of what the rationale for that footage is and how
that plays into this idea of trying to be transparent
with the community for how these drones are being used.

Speaker 14 (01:14:55):
That's kind of going to be a little bit difficult
for me to answer because the court case is still
moving forward.

Speaker 11 (01:15:01):
It's an active case. If you read it, we didn't
lose the case.

Speaker 14 (01:15:07):
It was recommended to go to a lower core to
go back for some clarification under three categories.

Speaker 6 (01:15:14):
Now this is either a straight upply or a huge
cope and a gross mischaracterization. But more on that in
a sec I think.

Speaker 11 (01:15:22):
It's really important.

Speaker 14 (01:15:24):
As I mentioned, there are ethics involved in the ethical
responsibility that you have as a law enforcement agency is
super important. So how you utilize your drones and how
you do outrage with your community is fundamentally important. And
so we don't use our drones for if there was

(01:15:47):
a protest, We would not use our drones if there
was if it turned into a riot.

Speaker 11 (01:15:55):
So if people.

Speaker 14 (01:15:56):
Were out there and they have the ability to to
speak freely to share their concerns, and if it's in
an opposition, our goal is to make sure that we
keep it safe for all parties involved on either side.

Speaker 11 (01:16:09):
So my hope is that other people look.

Speaker 14 (01:16:12):
At it the same way that we do, and hopefully
I've been able to answer it. As much as I
believe me, I'm dying to give you more than I can't.

Speaker 6 (01:16:21):
Okay, thank you for those questions.

Speaker 11 (01:16:25):
Folks were out of time. Maybe there could be questions
after the session.

Speaker 6 (01:16:28):
So yeah, there were no more questions after mine. I
kind of shut down that possibility anyway.

Speaker 16 (01:16:34):
Okay.

Speaker 6 (01:16:34):
So, first of all, the line between a protest and
a riot is meaningless. Police can declare riot for any
reason they see fit, including people being in a road marching.
I've seen this happen dozens of times, nearly hundreds of
times actually, So just moving on from that immediately, let's
go back to the court case. The city of true

(01:16:55):
Liavista did lose the argument that they were trying to make.
They did lose the case. The Fourth District Court of
Appeals ruled that claiming exemption from the Public Records Act
was unlawful and sent the case back to trial court
to hammer the details of how much footage is subject
to public disclosure and figure out a process for standardizing

(01:17:16):
the release of the footage.

Speaker 1 (01:17:18):
Now.

Speaker 6 (01:17:19):
The same day I attended this panel in Las Vegas,
January ninth, the city of Chula Vista requested an appeal
to the California Supreme Court to prevent the release of
their aerial video footage. There is a sixty day waiting
period where the High Court will decide whether or not
to take the case, and if they decline finally, it

(01:17:39):
will go back to trial court to decide on the
process of how selected drone footage shall be made publicly available.
The police are now currently claiming that making DFR footage
adhere to the Public Records Act would violate the privacy
of Chula Vista residents captured in the videos, which perhaps
demonstrates that the aerial videos should have never been captured

(01:18:03):
in the first place. I'm going to read a press
release from the city's communication manager. Quote, the city declined
to provide the copies because doing so might have violated
individual privacy rights. The city would have to manually review
and redact every video recording to protect information considered personal,
such as the images of faces, license plates, backyards, and more. Unquote,

(01:18:25):
So the city is both trying to argue that having
to manually review each requested file to determine if the
video in question is related to a pending investigation, as
well as redacting personal information captured on camera, would be
way too costly and time consuming. City officials claim that
reviewing and redacting videos from one month to obscure faces,

(01:18:47):
license plates, and backyards would take a full time employee
around two hundred and thirty days. I'm going to read
a little bit more from the city's recent statement. Quote,
while the city takes very seriously obligation to provide the
public access to public records, the city is concerned that
the Court of Appeal's opinion may compromise significant privacy concerns

(01:19:10):
of members of the public in this case or in
future requests. Unquote. Somehow, the city is missing the point
that this is the very reason the drone footage is
being requested to learn the actual nature of this highly
influential drone first responder program that's being adopted across the country.

(01:19:31):
If the existence of this footage is such a massive
privacy violation, that implies that the recording of said footage
itself implicitly violates people's privacy, and the harder police fight
to hide their sweeping collection of aerial footage, all the
more suspicious this entire program seems.

Speaker 8 (01:19:51):
So.

Speaker 6 (01:19:51):
That is what I have to say about Chula Vista's
drone first Responder program. In about a month and a half,
the Supreme Court of California will make their decision on
whether or not they're going to hear this case. If
they decline, then the precedent will be set statewide against
this exemption of the Public Records Act by hiding drone footage,
so that will be really cool, and then hopefully within

(01:20:14):
the next year, we'll finally be able to see what
some of this footage actually looks like, how good their
cameras are, how much they can zoom in, all of
the details of how much of the city they're capturing,
all this kind of stuff, how often the drones are
in the air, all of those types of things that
it will be easier to highlight once we can actually
take a look at the footage. And I assume that
going through and releasing requested files for one month will

(01:20:38):
probably end up not taking two hundred and thirty days.
But I do know how the police love to love
to stretch out these public records requests for as long
as they can. As the request that this lawsuit stems from,
it's all the way back to April of twenty twenty one,
so hopefully, hopefully more than three years later, we'll finally
get a look. Special thanks to Laprenze for starting this

(01:21:01):
lawsuit and doing all of the hard work to actually
force the police to be transparent. And if you want
to read more, I'd recommend checking out the website to
Leprenza dot org, as well as the MIT tech review piece,
which provided some really really useful information to fill in
the gaps between my own research. So yeah, thank you
for listening to It could happen here. It certainly could
happen here in terms of seeing more of these little

(01:21:23):
fuckers flying around in the air. It's it could happen here.

Speaker 16 (01:21:40):
The podcast that's happening right now, this is maybe the
foremost of the Putting Things Back Together episodes. I'm your
host Miya Wong with me as James Stout guy.

Speaker 17 (01:21:50):
He likes it to put things together.

Speaker 16 (01:21:52):
Yeah, And you know, on the subject of putting things
together over the last I don't even know three four weeks,
the question I have been asked the most by everyone
is how do I start organizing? And you know the
problem with how do I start organizing is that it's
not a question that has cleaner simple answers. Now, the

(01:22:14):
most common answer you get is just join an org.
And the problem is that most of the people who
you were hearing this from are already in an org
and want you to join their org.

Speaker 17 (01:22:23):
Yeah. Also, the problem is a lot of the orgs
that are currently dominating left to spaces in the in
the United States are trash, yeah, and bad for people,
bad people in them, bad people who are not in them.

Speaker 1 (01:22:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 17 (01:22:36):
Here's a little test you can you can do, is
your org currently sad that Basha a Lasad is no
longer governing Syria? Because if that's the case, leave yep.
And that's that's a lot of orgs that that's not me. Yeah,
that takes most of them right now. We'll come back
to orgs in a bit. But what I'll say about
orgs is that, Okay, if you know an organization in

(01:22:59):
your area that you like and you think does good
work and most importantly spends their time actually doing work
instead of either in fighting or talking about doing work,
you join them.

Speaker 1 (01:23:08):
It will be good.

Speaker 16 (01:23:08):
But the important thing about organizations and is something we'll
come back to you later. The important thing about organizations
is they have a lot of people. Yeah, And the
thing that makes organizing work is people. It's not organizations.
It's not even necessarily ideological labels. It's there being a
bunch of people who you can use and who want
to do things.

Speaker 5 (01:23:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 16 (01:23:26):
But something I realized that the more I had these conversations, right,
you know, I'm having them with friends, I'm having them
with strangers, I'm having them with other organizers. And the
more I had these conversations, the more I realize something
sort of startling you. The person listening to this almost
certainly already knows how to organize, but you don't know
that that's called organizing.

Speaker 17 (01:23:47):
Yeah, that's a very good point.

Speaker 16 (01:23:50):
I have encountered some of the most stunning or I
mean organizing that like I can't discuss the specifics of,
but like some of the best organizing I've ever encountered.
I have ran into you in the last three weeks
from people who don't think that they're organizers and started
talking to me about their stuff. I was like, what, Like,
people are winning victories that like the like hardcore committed

(01:24:10):
organizers haven't been able to do in like thirty years. Yeah,
and it's just by random people who don't think they
know how to do anything.

Speaker 17 (01:24:17):
Yeah, can I tell a little organizing story. We do
have time, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, go for it. So
I remember in like twenty eighteen, I am on a
trip with a friend. We're coming back and we see
the arrival of the migrant caravan, one of the migrant caravans,
the one that everyone decided to have a fucking cow
about right before the twenty eighteen mid terms. And at
that time, they were corraling the people of the migrant

(01:24:37):
caravan in a baseball stadium in Tijuana, and like it
was raining every day, So the baseball stadium ends up
looking like the Battle of the Psalm after like a
couple of days, right, you know, kids in leady mud
and shit, and I particularly know what to do, but
evidently there were people there who were hungry and thirsty,
and so I get three of my friend my friends.
At this time, I was still making about half my

(01:25:00):
many riding bicycles and in the other half riding so
my friends and I was supposed to do a long
bike ride. All of us are people who make a
living riding bikes, right, we're not like expert organizers. And
I was like, hey, guys, this is fucked. Which we do.
We called a friend who has a company who makes waffles.
Where we obtained like as many waffles as we could

(01:25:20):
physically carry across the border. At that time, we weren't
able to get in. We found a way to get in.
We began distributing the waffles. After that, we put something online,
people sent us money, and we continued feeding people for months.
None of us, I think, had a particular plan or
a scheduled. Yeah, it is a bit chaotic at times,
but we were able to do that, and we're with

(01:25:41):
a lot of other people. Clearly wasn't just us right,
but we were able to process tenths of thousands of
dollars and feed thousands of people. Be everyone there, And
I've seen this countless times, especially working and organizing with
well with refugees. For the most part, people are so
good at organizing each other in themselves. Like when we
got there with bottles of water and food. There are

(01:26:02):
a thousand people that who have not had sometimes to
drink for days, let alone more than a thousand, I think,
let alone something hot to eat. Right, Everybody made sure
that the children and the sick people got what they
needed first. Organizing is something that is very inherent in
us as people. It just we don't call it that.

Speaker 16 (01:26:20):
Yeah, And that's part of what I want to try
to the myth. I want to try to puncture with
this because I think, particularly in the US, but this
is true in a lot of places. There's this way
in which the organizer sort of TM capital T capital O,
the organizer gets held up as this sort of I guess,
even a particularly masculinist thing, which is it's this guy

(01:26:41):
with specialized knowledge.

Speaker 6 (01:26:43):
Yeah, and that's just not true.

Speaker 16 (01:26:46):
This brings us something that I think is actually really important,
which is what what even is organizing?

Speaker 1 (01:26:51):
Right?

Speaker 16 (01:26:52):
And the answer is that most organizing is you get
you get a group of people together, you get them
to show up to something, and then you do something right.
And the thing about this, right, that's something all of
you know how to do. If you can organize a
dinner party, right, if you can get eight people to
show up to a place to eat dinner, you can

(01:27:13):
do this. It is it is largely the same skill sets,
and all of the skill sets that make people good
organizers are skill sets that you have to develop to
you know, work a job right. You know, like one
of the things that comes up a lot in this
which is less discussed and also kind of annoying. But
you know, you have to manage it is that organizing
is about people and sometimes you have to you know,

(01:27:34):
you have to do things like you have to manage
people's egos. But like, I don't know, almost all of
you work jobs or have work jobs, right, you have
had to like deal with your boss being on one right,
you have the skills to do this. You know how
to do the interpersonal relationship stuff. It's just that you
don't think about that as organizing, even though that's that's

(01:27:56):
just what it is.

Speaker 17 (01:27:58):
Yeah, that's the core of it is get people to
do stuff like you do it every day.

Speaker 16 (01:28:04):
Yeah, And the way you do this is by building
relationships with people, right, And this isn't necessarily friendships, although
that works. And like, one of the easiest ways to
start organizing is by getting all of your friends together
because you're already friends, you have pre existing relationships, and
being like, Okay, motherfuckers, we gotta go do something. And
actually I love that The first thing that you brought

(01:28:24):
up was an admittedly sort of medium ish scale lift
version of this. But one of the very easiest things
that you can do is you can just get food
of some kind. You can either buy it or you
can make it yourself, and you and a group of
like eight people, not even eight people, you can do
it with lower I know people who've done this just solo.
Is that you can just go give food to people. Yeah,

(01:28:46):
literally it was this morning.

Speaker 6 (01:28:49):
So I'm tired.

Speaker 17 (01:28:49):
Yesterday morning, I have some mine house neighbors, right and
it was cold, and so I went out and gave
them some hot breakfast, so hot coffee. It's super easy
to do. If you are struggling wherever you are, maybe
you're finding it hard to make friends. I know that's
the thing that people often struggle, especially if you've moved
to a new place or post pandemic, or you're still
concerned with Liuvede gatherings or any of those things. Like,

(01:29:11):
if you start doing that, you will find other people
who want to do it too, Like so many of
my friends I organize with are people Like when we
had the end of Title forty two and people were
in between the fences that a lot of the people
who I organize with now or who helped people with now,
I didn't know. I just showed up with a giant
sider generator that I happened to have and some stuff

(01:29:32):
that we had to whip around a call zone for
and like, people who care about the same things as
you are generally cool and it's a good way to
make friends, and then you can go on from there.

Speaker 16 (01:29:43):
Yeah, and there's a second compounding thing here too, which
is that you know, feeding people it's a way to
build relationships with people. And also it's a really good
way for people to get to know you in general
and know that you are someone who will help them
with things. Yeah, and from there, and this is a
very common exception. I mean this is I literally had
this conversation with one of my friends who's like an

(01:30:05):
old school food not Bombs organizer. Food Nut Bombs is
a very very it's a cool organization. You can just
like found a food nut Bobs chapter. They have like
a couple of principles, or you can just do your
own thing. And I'm pretty sure it's still like the
largest anarchist project in the world. Yeah, because all it
takes is you and like three other people and you
just go feed people. But the thing is from doing that, right,

(01:30:28):
if there's other things that you're concerned about, people will
bring you their problems and you can help them doing it.
And this is a very good way to get into
other kinds of organizing because suddenly, once you start building
these relationships, everything sort of cycles and cycles, and you know,
you get involved in more and more things. Yeah, and
that's kind of a that's kind of a late stage
thing that we're sort of jumping to a bit. But

(01:30:49):
I want to go back to the beginnings of how so,
how do you get a group of people together to
do a thing? And the answer is you kind of
already know how to because you you, presumably at some
point in your life, have like organized a group of
friends to go do something, right, Like I've gotten a
group of people together to go accomplish a task.

Speaker 17 (01:31:11):
Yeah, and it could literally be anything, right like, yeah,
if you've got some people to go to a bar,
you have the skills.

Speaker 16 (01:31:18):
One way I've been thinking about it recently and in
my project is putting is thinking about it as like
putting together a heist crew.

Speaker 6 (01:31:25):
And Okay, I could vouch for this, right.

Speaker 16 (01:31:30):
The feeling of walking up to eight people and telling
them individually, I'm putting together a team and I want
you it is. It feels you can just do it.
There is nothing stopping you. Nothing in the world can
stop you from just walking up to your friend and going,
I'm putting together a team. And it feels exactly as
good as you think it would from a ice movie.

Speaker 5 (01:31:51):
It rules.

Speaker 6 (01:31:52):
It's so fun, amazing.

Speaker 16 (01:31:55):
Yeah, and and but this gets into also what kinds
of people you want to do right, because obviously you
know there's two vectors of this. There's on the one hand,
you have the aspect of okay, who do you know, right,
And a lot of organizing is just about, here is
a problem, and I know someone who has some sort
of skill or resource that can that can help deal

(01:32:17):
with it, and you put people in touch with each other,
and that's organizing. That's so much organizing is literally just hey,
like I have like a broken part of my car.
I know someone who's like a car mechanic, right, and
you put them in touch and you have successfully organized people,
and you have built relationships, and you have made all
of the sort of social web that creates organizing, you've

(01:32:39):
made it stronger. Yeah, it also just feels good because
you know and that that's an auxiliary benefit to all
of this is that it's a great It's a great
way to sort of break break the isolation we're all under.

Speaker 17 (01:32:50):
Yeah, I think the best solution for despair is I'm
thinking of a quotation here something that the busy bee
have no time for despair. But the thing that makes
me feel better about the world is that I have
seen that people can fix massive problems with very few
resources by just showing up. And like, I think, organizing

(01:33:13):
is what gives me, what allows me to enter this
period of time that we're entering into with a with
a great deal more hope than I otherwise would have done.

Speaker 16 (01:33:20):
Yeah, and do you know what else will help you
enter your situation?

Speaker 17 (01:33:25):
Is it the products and services that support this podcast.

Speaker 16 (01:33:28):
I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, but
we are not in control of the length of the ads.

Speaker 1 (01:33:34):
They just do it.

Speaker 6 (01:33:36):
We're sorry, here's.

Speaker 1 (01:33:38):
A really long period of ads. I'm so sorry. We
are back.

Speaker 16 (01:33:53):
So I want to I want to return to my
highest creer if. I don't know if you're a D
and D person, the other way you can think about
this is you're putting to either like a Dungeons and
Dragons party or like an RPG party. And the way
you need to think about this is Okay, so you've
picked a thing that you want to do.

Speaker 11 (01:34:08):
Right.

Speaker 16 (01:34:09):
You see, you've seen something in the world that is
bad and you figure it. You go, okay, I can
do this thing to solve it. And maybe and maybe
that's you know, it's literally something as simple as feeding people.
Maybe that's you know, I want to start. I want
to start doing tenants organizing. I want to start because
my rent is too high, right, people are getting evicted.
I want to start doing like immigration defense.

Speaker 14 (01:34:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 16 (01:34:28):
And from there you make a list and that list
is you know what you're interested in doing, and you
try to match what things need to be done with
people you know who have those skills. Yeah, and this
is you know this, this is this is where you
release get into the higst things, right, because everyone has
their sort of like highst role. Now, obviously, part of

(01:34:50):
this that you want is you want to create sort
of balanced teams, right. You want people who have overlapping strengths,
so you don't just have only one person who can
do a thing. And part of the way to successful
organization works over time. And I mean just how successful
organizing works is that eventually you are trying to organize
yourself out of a job, which is to say, you

(01:35:10):
want your organization to function such that if you're not
able to do it, you know, or just you're gone,
or you cycle onto a next thing, or you know,
any any number of things that can happen. You want
the organization to still be able to keep working without you,
and you want you want you're trying to get people
to be able to replace you as the person who's
like organizing the thing, right. Yeah, And at this point
we can start talking about the kinds of skills that

(01:35:33):
people need for organizing, and a lot of people and
this is unbelievably common when I talk to people, and
like especially women and especially like a lot of non
binary people and trans people particularly have this is that
people don't believe that they have any skills. And then
you talk to them for five seconds and they're like, well,
I'm good at carrying heavy objects, right, I'm good with kids,

(01:35:55):
which is a huge one. We'll get you in a second, right,
Or like, I don't know, I have a call. That's
a huge skill. There are so many different skills that
are so useful for so many things. I'm just gonna
go over lots of things that are actually really useful
to get to get people a sense of like the
kinds of things that there are. There are massive roles
for so one of the most important ones, and this

(01:36:16):
is something you can you deliberately look for. You know,
this is this is one of the things you do
at the beginning of any union organizing campaign. Someone who's
good at talking to other people and making friends. That
is a staggeringly useful person because again, most most organizing
is just talking to people and building relationships. And you know,
one of the things you do when you're when you're
doing your sort of they call it power mapping, but

(01:36:37):
when when you when you're figuring out how you're going
to organize a workplace is you find the person who
everyone likes and talks to and respects, and you talk
to that person because that person can you know, can
sort of like organize people down the chain because they
have they have their relationships already and also they're good
they'll be good at, you know, talking to new people
and and spreading your organization that way. And so, like,

(01:36:58):
you know, if you're just someone who's social or and
this is also very useful if you have a friend
who is very social, because I know a lot of
us are oporary social. But you probably have a friend
that you're thinking of right now who is very good
at conversations that is charming and is good at making friendships.
That person unbelievably useful, incredibly useful and compelling skill.

Speaker 5 (01:37:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 16 (01:37:18):
There are also things like research people who are good
at and I think people are much better at research
than they think to take like a ten a's organizing example. Right,
one of the common things you have to do is
find out stuff about a landlord, right, Yeah, and there's
the higher difficulty version of that, which isn't that hard. Also,
I want to mention this, but like going to a
courthouse and finding records about who owns property companies that

(01:37:42):
high it's not that hard. It's like you could just
do it, right, It's not as hard as you think
it is from someone saying it. But there's also even
just easier things than that, right, that all of you
probably already know how to do, which is just looking
at someone's social media profiles and finding out information about them. Yeah,
and this is very useful, yeah, for like union campaign bosses.

Speaker 17 (01:38:01):
If you've ever been a person who uses dating apps,
especially if you're a woman, Yeah, yeah, then you know
how to ocin. Actually maybe you don't credit yourself with
that skill, but one hundred percent that like, you've developed
that skill to keep yourself safe and you can use
it for good.

Speaker 16 (01:38:17):
Do you want to explain what ocenter is?

Speaker 6 (01:38:19):
And yes? How that how that process works?

Speaker 15 (01:38:21):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:38:21):
Sure?

Speaker 17 (01:38:21):
So open source intelligence is it's an acreum doesn't really
need to exist. It's gathering information of open sources, things
that are openly accessible, right as opposed to like humint,
which is like being a spy, or singint, which is
capturing signals. Open source information is you're creeping someone's Instagram,
creeping their Facebook, looking at the weird fucking shit that

(01:38:42):
they put on good Reads.

Speaker 1 (01:38:43):
Right.

Speaker 17 (01:38:43):
All the data that is out there, largely on the Internet,
about us. A lot of people put a lot of
information on the Internet, and it's very easy. And I
would imagine that if you're under fifty and maybe if
you're over fifty two, like you just know how to
do this because it's what you do anyway you want
to find out about someone, And especially if you are

(01:39:04):
a person who goes on dates with people who you
haven't met before and haven't been introduced to by a
mutual friend, but you meet on the internet, you probably
already do this to keep yourself safe.

Speaker 16 (01:39:13):
Yeah, and this is something that's very useful for I mean,
there's so many use cases for this, right There's you know,
there's the very obvious ones where you're dealing with the
local Nazi and you're trying to organize around like running
them out. People say from them and you can find
information about them. But I mean, it's useful for cops
who are beating people. Is useful for like politicians particularly,
It can be very useful for it's useful for landlords.

(01:39:35):
This happens all the time. It can be very very
useful for bosses and union campaigns. Unions have like teams
of researchers usually to like do this kind of stuff.
But the thing is also and this is something I
don't think people understand. Those guys, like the people they're
hiring to be researchers are just you, but they got
a job being a researcher for a union. Like they
have the same skills as you. They know how to

(01:39:56):
like Google stuff, and they know how to look through
people's like data profiles and like look through their their
facebooks and their Instagrams and like A big one, A
big one that that the rich people especially do not
think about, is like cash app and venmo oh venop
because yeah, yeah, because because people's peoples trying, people just

(01:40:17):
leave public transactions out there like that. That's how they
got what's his name, the congressional magates. Can I legally
call him the congressional pedophile? I guess they call him
the accused pedophile?

Speaker 17 (01:40:27):
Yeah, yeah, the man credibly accused of sleeping with an
underage woman lots of times, you know.

Speaker 16 (01:40:33):
And one of the ways they found that was that
and also like paying paying for that right, yes, which
is which is rape. By the way, I want to
be very clear about that, like, yeah, having sex with
someone who is underage is rape.

Speaker 6 (01:40:43):
It is always rape, you know.

Speaker 16 (01:40:45):
And the way people found that was that they just
looked through like his cash app history and they found
all of these money transfers to people. You know, this
is all very very simple stuff. That's that's very very
useful organizing wise, that you already know.

Speaker 1 (01:40:59):
How to do.

Speaker 15 (01:41:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 17 (01:41:00):
Pinterest is another absolute back to people. Yeah, so much
people on a pinning that they be pinning.

Speaker 16 (01:41:07):
You know, if if you're hearing some of these things
and you think that you can figure out how to
do this. That's also a huge skill. Finding people who
are willing to learn things and willing to learn new
skills is a huge benefit to organizers because you know this,
this gives you, Like, this gives you a flexible person, right,
it gives it gives you someone you can like flex

(01:41:28):
into into any of a bunch of roles that you need.
And also can you know, pick up skills to learn things.
Having a car, being able to drive, and I know
a lot of you don't do this, but if you
do do this, this is you immediately, even if you
literally cannot contribute anything else to a project. Being able
to just drive a bunch of water to a place,
oh yeah, huge, staggeringly useful.

Speaker 17 (01:41:48):
The amount of things that people can't access because they
can't get there, it's vast, especially when I when I
talk to migrants, right, have recently arrived in the US.
They don't have a US cell phone, they can't uber.

Speaker 5 (01:42:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 17 (01:42:01):
Oftentimes nowadays you can't even pay for mass transit with cash.
You have to have a special card and then you
have to get to the place to get the card. Right.
The problems you can solve by being able to drive
someone five miles are enormous, especially in the US where
everything is designed around everyone owning a motor car at
all times.

Speaker 5 (01:42:19):
Yep.

Speaker 16 (01:42:20):
Yeah, And like transport based skills are also very useful.
I mean, if you hike a lot, that's a very
very useful skill. There's a lot of sort of mutual
aid projects. There's a lot of you know, I mean
even things like setting up summer camps is the thing
that like leftist groups do right, and being able to
hike very good for that. It's good for things like
wilderness rescue. There's a lot of you know, the jams,

(01:42:40):
like the work you do that has to do with
like going in helping migrants. Like being able to hike
is staggeringly useful skill.

Speaker 17 (01:42:48):
Yeah, yeah, it's very like, it's useful, it's important. It's
okay if that's not something you can physically do or
you know that that works for the way you like
to live your life. Like another thing I was thinking
of which can be mass important and people don't realize
is if you know how to take off a tail
light and replace the bulb in it. Yes, Like we're
entering a time when people with DAKA, people with TPS.

(01:43:11):
People who are undocumented, people are on temporary migration statuses
are going to be definitely afraid of any interaction with
law enforcement. If you can change the bulb on someone's
tail light or their turn signal indicators of US in
the UK, then you can meaningfully protect that person in
a really important way. And it can literally take ten minutes.

Speaker 16 (01:43:32):
And this is something that you can scale up depending
on how much skill you have. Right, there's even just
very basic auto maintenance stuff is very useful for stuff
like this. But you know, like if you're a carpenter, right,
if you're an electrician, you do some kind of trade work, right,
you do plumbing, right, That is the thing that is
massively useful to a lot of people. There's a lot

(01:43:54):
of other kind of just skills that you have from
your job that can be very useful. I mean, having
someone to manage spreadsheet, oh yeah, yeah, is staggeringly useful.
And another one that I think people don't understand that
they really have, but like being able to set up
a meeting and like having a thing that lets you

(01:44:15):
be like, okay, here's when everyone is free. Like you
probably have to do this for your job or just
for you know, trying to get your friends to go
even just like be on a call together or like
go have food or like just do anything. That is
what literally, genuinely one of the most important skills you

(01:44:35):
can possibly have as an organizer is the ability to
just sort of like go talk to people and be like, hey,
can you show up to this thing here?

Speaker 1 (01:44:42):
Yeah?

Speaker 16 (01:44:42):
And that is that is so much of just what
organizing is. Can you be here at this time? And
then trying to figure out a time.

Speaker 17 (01:44:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 16 (01:44:49):
So we're going to close out this sort of skill
section with some I think just sort of like domestic
ese skills that I don't think people realize are super useful.
If you have a button maker, you are instantly the
same most useful person in any organization.

Speaker 1 (01:45:02):
I love that.

Speaker 16 (01:45:03):
Yeah, well, you could obtain a button maker. They're very
easy to use. But if you have one or you
know the person who has the button maker, and suddenly
you can just crank out buttons for every single event
they rule. Everyone loves them. It helps, It helps me enormously.
It's awesome.

Speaker 17 (01:45:19):
That's a badge for those us in the Commonwealth. Also,
if you have a sewing machine, Yeah, I was about
to mention that, yeah, yeah, you're a hero.

Speaker 12 (01:45:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 17 (01:45:29):
One of my friends recently made me a little patch
and it's really cool and I like it and putting
all my stuff. But if you can sew, like, that's
a skill that I do not have. And it's so
great when people can fix stuff for someone or you know,
make stuff fit someone. You know, if you're a person
who finds it hard to get clothes that you like

(01:45:49):
to wear that make you feel good and someone one
of my friends could do that. And one of my
friends was making clothes for another friend for like a
renaissance fair, and like it was the nicest thing I've
seen someone do for someone else in a very long time.
It really made her like, yeah, feel like nice and

(01:46:11):
cared for. And like you might think that like this
is just a weird little thing that you like to
do with your sewing machine, but you can meaningfully really
make someone feel cared for using that.

Speaker 16 (01:46:19):
Yeah, And that's a huge part of what organizing is right,
and and that that goes into one of the things
that is also an appreciable skill that's very useful, is
I mean just like being nice to people, being kind
to people, and having people around who are good at
like keeping groups together. Yeah, and that's its own distinct
kind of person is someone who can you know, keep

(01:46:41):
all of the people who are involved in a thing
enjoying being around each other. That's that's that's a kind
of person who's very valuable. And it's something that you
can look for, you know. And if that's not you,
like you can there's something you can you know, find
in your friends. You can find in the sort of
the people around you.

Speaker 17 (01:46:56):
Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 16 (01:46:58):
There's also something that I think you can tell when
an organization is collapsing, because this is like the first
thing with the quality drops drawing and graphic design are
very very useful because a big part of what you
do organizing is like you make a flyer and you
put a flyer on a bunch of telephone poles to
tell people that there's a thing happening. Yea, and yeah,

(01:47:19):
you know, and this is also something you know later
on you might be making a social media presence, but
just having good artists and having good graphic design people
is enormously useful for this kind of stuff. Yeah, And
along this line, these things like making music and there's
a bunch of different ways this can go this can
be an immediate thing where you know, like you have
people on a picket line, right and everyone's singing songs

(01:47:40):
and this is great. We love this also, and this
is another thing that you can be thinking about in
terms of what skills you have and what things you
can create benefit shows. This has been a huge part
of a lot of how some of the Union stuff
up here has been getting funded is by just having
like punk benefit shows. And if that's the thing that
you can do, well, you know, people in bands, you
know people who make music, you know people who just

(01:48:01):
make stuff who are willing to contribute it to the cause,
that's great.

Speaker 17 (01:48:06):
I remember one of we had one night last September
so cold. We were in the desert and I'm like
a thousand people, right, and we were at that point
we were really struggling to feed everyone, even you know,
because there was so few of us. But my friend
bought out like their guitar and some bongo drums they had,
and I think I had my harmonica in my truck,
and like we were sitting around with these. We had

(01:48:27):
some seek guys, had some Weiga folks come from China,
and then some Kourdish people and they were all displaying
their different music and it was so nice like that,
taking people out of a shitty situation for a moment
with music. Again, like, don't underestimate how important that it.
Don't feel like if you have that skill, it's not
a useful one.

Speaker 16 (01:48:46):
No, And this is something I've been starting to say
more and more. If you need a three brained way
to say this to someone who like is is like
a curmudgety marksist who hates fun. Moral is it terrain
of struggle that this is. There's a reason why morale
is one of the most important factors of military campaigns.
You can't get people to do things if they're too

(01:49:08):
depressed to do it. Yeah, And being able to raise
people's morale, it's it's this massive if you want again,
want to go into technical language, is a massive force
multiplayer right, It makes everyone you have enormously more effective,
the better they feel about themselves and the better they
feel about the situation they're in. And things like music,
things like art, I mean things like pulling pranks.

Speaker 6 (01:49:30):
This thing, yeah, if you were, if.

Speaker 16 (01:49:32):
You were a good practical jokester, this is a staggeringly
useful skill. Both like in terms of you know, you
need to be careful about whether you're you're playing your
pranks on like other people in the org. But like
you know, if you know how to just like pull pranks,
this is a really really useful thing in like union campaigns,
tenants organizing. There are a lot of people who you

(01:49:53):
can prank and it's very funny and it lowers their
morale and it raises your morale.

Speaker 17 (01:49:58):
Yeah, and I can bet to you music as are
like like morale is a terrain of struggle. Like the
other memory I have last year of playing guitars is
in Rajava, being inside at night because everyone was getting
drone struck all the time and it was dangerous to
be driving around, sitting around with some ZD friends and
like we spent all night playing the ood, which is

(01:50:19):
like a it's like a guitar with a gord on
the bottom of it. To describe it, like it's a
string instrument. It's a string instrument, is what it is.
And like that made everyone so happy. We had such
a nice evening. Everyone was able to like get through
it's a relatively difficult thing. Like, you know, it sucks
that people are being killed and just for driving around

(01:50:41):
are existing, and they're bombing all this c really infrastructure,
and the power keeps going out and all these things, right, like,
but there's a reason that those people have kept ood
around after fifteen thirteen years of war, and it's because
it is important, and so don't overlook that.

Speaker 16 (01:50:57):
And you know, and resisting fear is in a huge
aspect of this, right, A lot of the ways that
people like a lot of the ways that you demobilize people.
This is, this is why regimes like this spend a
lot of effort trying to make people afraid. He is
that it makes it harder for you to act. And
things that you know, the things that make you less afraid,
even if they sort of seem silly, are very very important.

(01:51:21):
And you know, on sort of this note, one of
the things that you know, as you've assembled your group
of people, right, one of the things that that that's
important to be able to sort of have a grasp
on is that you can't just do organizing by having
it only be the capital, the serious thing, the captialty
organizing thing all the time. Your organization will not hold together.

(01:51:42):
There has to be actual like bonds formed between you
and the people you're organizing. With and the people you're
trying to help.

Speaker 17 (01:51:50):
I don't want to call out any organization in particular,
there is an organization that perceives organizing to exist solely
in the realm of wearing a high based vest and
carrying a clipboard and getting people to write their email
addresses down and then telling them to attend things. And
like maybe there are several organizations like that.

Speaker 1 (01:52:07):
I don't know.

Speaker 17 (01:52:08):
I've just I've perceived one locally. If you don't have
those bonds that like those interpersonal relationships, like these things
won't hang together. Like yeah, So many of my happiest
organizing memories, like again going down James's memory Lane, I
guess I have a memory of like Christmas Eve last year,

(01:52:28):
twenty twenty three, me and my friends have been out.
I know some of them listen because some of them
have come across from different states to help us at
Christmas Holidays, which is nice. And it was cold, and
we had been feeding people all day, and then we'd
heard some people in another location that we'd gone to find,
and then we got to the end of the day
and like, rather than just going home, I had a
bunch of we had some MRIs left the refugee emory

(01:52:50):
sort of vegan. Lots of us are vegan, so we
were like, we're not going to find any other vegan
food in the middle of nowhere out here, so we'll
set around eating the little vegan MREs and like just
talking and like sharing some thoughts and things we experience
over the last months of doing this, And like, it's
those moments that make you're organizing groups so much stronger.

(01:53:11):
No one's telling anyone to do anything, you know, there's
genuine bonds and that the love and friendship we build
up between each other doing things that are very important.
Don't overlook the value of those because it's extremely valuable.

Speaker 16 (01:53:24):
And this is something that I think you can understand
in your own life pretty easily, where Okay, if a
random person on the street walks up to you and
tells you to go do something, are you going to
do it?

Speaker 6 (01:53:36):
It's like no, why? No?

Speaker 16 (01:53:38):
Probably not, Like I don't know, Maybe it's something like
really sort of, hey, there's children in a burning building.
We're going to run in and grab them, but like
the odds are no, you're going to ignore them. But
if your friend goes and tells you to do the
same thing, and you know you've been friends with them
for a long time and you really care about them,
the odds of you doing it are much much higher.

(01:54:00):
And that's that's all organizing is. It's finding ways to
You have a thing to do, and you go talk
to people and you ask if they want to help
you do it. Yeah, And the stronger your relationships are,
the more lucky that is to happen. And that's why
it's very important to do things like you know, just
like having potlucks, like bringing snacks to meetings. Oh yeah,
and like you know, even if you're doing a potlucks,

(01:54:21):
it's good to you know, you do like one capital
capital T organizing thing, right, you get like a little
bit of work done, but mostly everyone's just sort of
relaxing and eating chili or whatever.

Speaker 17 (01:54:31):
Yeah, if you're a baker, you know you can bay people.
It's a wonderful thing to shut god.

Speaker 11 (01:54:37):
Yes.

Speaker 9 (01:54:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 16 (01:54:38):
And just knowing how to cook. I realized I forgot
to mention this one. Knowing how to cook is a
staggeringly useful skill and it's useful in literally every literally
any kind of organizing you can possibly be.

Speaker 6 (01:54:49):
And it is a thing.

Speaker 16 (01:54:50):
It is a skill that is useful in like it's
useful in war zones. It's useful like literally, no matter
what organization you are in, if you can cook for people,
oh yeah, and you don't even and you don't have
to be like a good cook. It's just like you
can show up with food that you have made. You
have instantly made this whole thing more successful.

Speaker 17 (01:55:08):
Yeah, definitely, Like I've had some wonderful meals in water
and and I've deeply appreciated those people. More broadly though,
those ties like the way we organize without the state.
The reason I believe that that is the way we
should organize and the way we will continue to organize
in a way that we can make the state irrelevant
is because we understand each other as people and care

(01:55:30):
about each other as people, and then we approach our
organizing holistically, right with everyone in it, knowing this person
is good at this, but they're struggling with this right now,
and I care about them, so I'm not going to
make them do that right now. That is how we
can build sustainable communities in a way that state cannot
and in a way that capitalism cannot. Right, because fucking hurts,

(01:55:51):
rent a car doesn't care or know about its employees
in a way that we who organize with people and
care and I love one anob do and like that's
why our organizations will always be stronger than those created
by capitalism of the state.

Speaker 16 (01:56:08):
Yeah, unfortunately, speaking of capitalism of the state, we're taking
our last ad break, would you.

Speaker 17 (01:56:13):
Yeah, hopefully it's a torndica.

Speaker 6 (01:56:26):
We are back.

Speaker 16 (01:56:26):
So I want to wrap things up by doing a
couple of doing a few things. I want to talk
about some kind of basic organizing things that you're going
to have to do that are not very difficult but
are extremely important. And second, I want to talk a
bit about how we did the first organizing project that
I ever was involved in, which was tenants organizing, Because
it's really not that hard, right, if you just go

(01:56:50):
do the thing, it will happen. Yeah, and suddenly it
ceases to be this like, oh, this domain of expert
knowledge and there's like, oh, this is a really difficult thing.
If you just I don't know, you go give food
to someone and suddenly you've done that and it's happened.
So there are things that are important to like basic
organizing stuff, knowing how to book rooms from like churches,

(01:57:14):
from libraries, from whatever meeting spaces, and also knowing how
to book rooms in places that like accommodate disabilities is
a huge thing because a lot of people book meetings
in places are a wheelchair accessible and it's a fucking fiasco.
And you can avoid that very easily, but you have
to put a little tiny bit of work into it.

Speaker 5 (01:57:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 17 (01:57:35):
Literally, I reached out to a friend to book a
room last night because I knew they would get at
that stuff.

Speaker 16 (01:57:41):
Yeah, you know, there's arranging people's schedules, getting people show
up for stuff, things you can do to prepare if
what you're doing is basically all the things we've been describing, right,
getting together a bunch of people to do a thing
that is technically forming an organization. Yeah, Now, how formal
informat you want it to be, or just you know,
maybe it's just your organizing project or whatever. There's things
you usually want. You want some kind of email so

(01:58:02):
people can contact you in tandem with the email. Something
that's very helpful that I think younger people tend not
to think about is getting Google Voice. Yes, when Google
Voice lets you set up a voicemail account so people
can call you and leave phone messages. I mean, everyone
should just do this because this is the way that
a lot of older people communicate.

Speaker 14 (01:58:20):
Right.

Speaker 6 (01:58:20):
They won't send you an email, but they will leave
you a voice.

Speaker 16 (01:58:22):
Message, and it's very very useful for this. Childcare is
something that's important. I did, I mean a lot is
probably too strong of a word, but like I did
childcare when I was organizing, and it wound up being
really helpful because there's a lot of people with kids,
and so you know, there's a couple of ways that
this could work. One is that you know, you have
everyone bring their kids. You have like a little space,
you bring them like coloring stuff, you bring them toys,

(01:58:43):
you bring them games, and you just sort of watch
everyone for a while. And as an organizing thing, again,
if you're good with kids, that's very useful, staggeringly useful
organizing skill.

Speaker 5 (01:58:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 16 (01:58:54):
Another way this stuff happens is, you know, everyone pulls
together ten bucks and you hire a babysitter, Yeah, for
a bunch of kids. And that's a very useful organizing
a thing.

Speaker 17 (01:59:04):
Yeah, I organize with people who have kids. I remember
four years ago, fuck me twenty twenty, a long time ago,
and also yesterday. But like we were organizing to feed
and house people and we were having a big Thanksgiving dinner,
and like, some of my friends have very young children
and they bought them And I think it's actually really

(01:59:24):
cool to do that. A like for those kids, it
is normal that, like we look after people in our community.
This is what we do and ever since I've been little,
this is what we did, and like it's also very
nice for people. Like a lot of my friends also
brought their children down to the border, especially last year
when we had because there were children there anyway, right, Yeah,

(01:59:46):
some of my friends who bring their children down and
their kids would play with the other kids, and like
it doesn't matter that some of the kids are Kurdition
and some of the kids are from China and some
of them are from Columbia or whatever. Like they'll get
along just fine. When they're four or five years old.
They don't care. They want to kick a ball or
see a Teddy Bear or something. And I think it's
really good for your children to you know, you're bringing

(02:00:06):
them into a world which is cruel and at times unequal,
and like your kids seeing that, like we can make
a difference and we can do this. I think it's
one of the best educations you can give your children.

Speaker 6 (02:00:19):
Yeah, and it's something that's good for everyone involved.

Speaker 17 (02:00:23):
Yeah, exactly, And it's also very I think one of
the things I see a lot wh people are organizing
thing with refugees of the end House is like they're
just people, Like you don't need to be afraid of them,
Like they don't want to hurt your children. And having
your children around shows that, like you have grasped they're
just people, and that you feel safe and your children
are safe around them. And I think that that's valuable too.

(02:00:44):
You're giving both parties some dignity in that moment.

Speaker 6 (02:00:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 16 (02:00:48):
There are some other very basic things that I think
are very important. If you've never done this before, I'm
going to talk a little bit about how you run
a meeting. Yeah, And you would think that this doesn't matter,
and until you watch a group of one hundred people
who don't know how to do this attempt to get
anything done and they it just is a fiasco.

Speaker 6 (02:01:06):
And this is even true sort of smaller groups.

Speaker 16 (02:01:08):
Yeah, So I'm going to give you how to run
a meeting one oh one, Okay, A very common way
to organize meetings that people use all over the world
and it's very effective. Is you have two things. You
have an agenda and you have a stack. And those
are like the technical terms for them. The agenda, I mean,
is an agenda, right, you know what an agenda is.
You put the things that you need to do on it.
And another thing that's very helpful with these is you

(02:01:30):
know you're going to be operating at our time constraints
because people don't have forty five hours to be in meetings,
and my god, you don't want to be in a
meeting for that long. Yeah, you know. Knowing how long
roughly you want to talk about these things is very
very useful and making sure that you're of moving the
conversation through the stuff on the agenda because you have
more stuff you need to talk about. All of this again,

(02:01:51):
like this all sounds very obvious, and again you know
how to do it, But until you've been in a
room where people have not realize they need to do this,
you don't understand how I put.

Speaker 17 (02:02:01):
On this stuff gets the pain of it not happening.

Speaker 16 (02:02:04):
God, I have watched rooms full of like sciet these
are like professional scientists, right, this is an entire room
of one hundred feet of people with physics PhDs who
don't know how to run a meeting, and it's a
shit show. And all of this stuff could have been
avoided with some very very simple things. Yes, the other thing,
and this is genuinely a piece of social technology, right,
it is the stack. It is very simple, right. You

(02:02:25):
have one person who is the stack keeper, and whatsone
wants to talk? You have one person talking at a time,
and what someone wants to talk, they raise their hand,
they make some kind of signal to the stack keeper,
and that person writes their name down, and so you
now have a list of who gets to talk in
what order. And so you go down the list and
people get the say things. And again you know how

(02:02:46):
to do this. This is not like a complicated thing.
But again I have watched people who collectively have like
more PhDs than like I earn money in a week,
Like who.

Speaker 6 (02:02:57):
Know, I can not be able to pick this out.

Speaker 1 (02:03:00):
You do.

Speaker 16 (02:03:00):
I believe in you. I believe in you, dear listener,
that you can do this. Yeah, there's a very common
Sometimes this is one person and sometimes this is two people.
A very common way to do it is to have
a stack taker and then have someone who's the facilitator,
and the facilitator's job is to call on the people
and to try to like move the conversation forwards and
get and make sure make sure everyone's involved. And also

(02:03:21):
another important part of this, and this is again something
you'll know from your stupid work meetings, is you have
to get people like me to shut up. Your meetings
can't just be one person giving a speech. You have
to cut them the fuck off and you have to
get to the next person.

Speaker 17 (02:03:36):
Yeah, and doing that courteously is a skill.

Speaker 6 (02:03:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 16 (02:03:39):
Yeah, And finally, on this note, there's a lot of
if you want to go into the like more technical stuff.
Part of the things that facilitators use and part of
you know, the formal name for this is like the
progressive stack, but it's just a thing that's very useful
in organizing is you want to make sure everyone in
a room is engaged and talking and that it's not

(02:04:00):
just three people who talk all the time. Yeah, and
you know, and so the idea of the progressive stack,
right is you're trying to find the most marginalized people
in degrees, people who are least likely to speak, and
you're trying to get them in first. And sometimes this
is literally just like hey, someone hasn't been talking in
a meeting this whole time, and you can like ask
them what they think about something, or asked if they
have anything to say, and a lot of times they will,

(02:04:20):
but they just don't feel confident enough.

Speaker 6 (02:04:22):
To say it.

Speaker 16 (02:04:22):
And this is this is a very very important skill
for a facilitator or just even you could just do
this in a meeting too, right, Like you can be
the person who goes like, hey, do you have this
this person have anything to contribute? And that is an
enormous thing. Sometimes it can be you know, sometimes it
can be a little bit awkward, but it's a very
important thing because you're just losing out on people who

(02:04:43):
have really really valuable ideas and contributions and plans. And
if you just let the same three people give speeches,
you can't get to the stuff that's actually useful.

Speaker 17 (02:04:55):
Yeah, definitely, if you've been a teacher or in any
way what you know, probably have had you have this skill.
You might not consider it a skill, but even if
you've been a TA in grad school something like that,
you probably know how to do this.

Speaker 16 (02:05:08):
Yeah, so I'm gonna put all of this together briefly,
and I'm going to run through basically how we started
the first organizing project I ever day, which was a
tenants union in Chicago.

Speaker 6 (02:05:18):
Okay, so this is based on my memory.

Speaker 16 (02:05:20):
It's been a long time since I did this, but
my basic memory of what we did was. Okay, So
one of my friends is an experienced organizer. I was
like a tiny baby, right this this was my first
offline organizing project ever.

Speaker 6 (02:05:32):
Right, I had no idea what was doing.

Speaker 16 (02:05:33):
I thought I was a guy, which like that, that's
how much of a fiasco, Like little tidy baby bo
who doesn't know anything this was, you know. And so
my friend talked to some people that he knew, and
he knew that I, you know, I was interested in
getting involved in tennants organizing.

Speaker 5 (02:05:48):
And we we like.

Speaker 16 (02:05:48):
Went to a cafe and we sat down and we
ate and we just talked about what we wanted to do,
what our plans were, what things we needed to do
to get this organization set up. We talked about ideological stuff,
and that's actually is something that's important too, is part
of organizing is getting people to think intentionally about their
actions and think politically about their actions. Yeah, and that's

(02:06:11):
something that's very useful. You also have to make sure
that you're not forming a book club. Like book clubs
are fine, but you need to make sure you're organizing group.
If you try to do a thing, has it just
become a book club. But that's you know that that
was something that was very useful to us. And you know,
we started making a plan. And our plan was, okay,
we made a bunch of flyers and then we went
out and I did this and I walked around through
a bunch of streets and put them a light post

(02:06:32):
or whatever, and then we put them like we hung
them up in the buildings of tenants, you know, because
you can just like walk up the stairs, right and
you just put them on the walls. And you know,
we had this flyer, this firehead information. This flyer said, okay,
we're starting a tenant's union. If you have tenant, if
you have issues with your landlord, or you want to
talk about tenants stuff like, come here. At this time,
we had an email you can send us stuff. We

(02:06:52):
had a phone number that you could call. Yeah, you know,
and so okay, and so parallel to this, we like,
I forget if it was a church or if it
was some building, some center or something, we booked a room.
We were kind of lucky in that we had like
local press people nice who we sort of knew. And
this is another useful like if knowing a journalist can

(02:07:13):
be a very useful skill, because one way to get
a project off the ground, if you're trying to get
to a bunch of people, is by finding a journalist
who is willing to cover it. Because you know, we're
we're finding founding like the first tenants union in this place,
right yeah, and you know, so we had media coverage
and we got kind of screwed with when this event
eventually came together because there was like three feet of
snow that night, but people still came, like people still
came in the blizzard, Like a lot of people showed

(02:07:35):
up for this. What are things that we do? We also, like,
you know, we just we just started talking to people, right,
We started talking to tenants about their problems. We just
you know, we talked to our friends, we talked to
the people they knew. We ended up talking to someone,
you know, And this is the thing that just happens
as it spreads by word of mouth, right, people start
contacting you. We ran into a really long time tenants
organizer in the city who had a bunch of incredible

(02:07:57):
stories about how our corrupt politicians got jobs by portraying
the old tenets organizers, right, And like I said, the
thing is, you know, another thing that happens in projects
is you'll you'll sometimes you'll just you just pick up
someone who's you know, has been doing this since like
the sixties. Yeah, and it rules because they have a
wealth of experience and they want to they want to
do stuff. We plotted out what we were going to

(02:08:17):
do at our meeting.

Speaker 6 (02:08:18):
You know, we were going to do some political education.

Speaker 16 (02:08:20):
We were gonna have a bunch of time for people
to talk about stuff, and we were gonna, you know,
get get people to understand what we were doing, how
they could start organizing. And then we did it, and
I unfortunately don't remember much of what we talked about
because I was off in another room taking care of
a bunch of people's kids, which was very nice, But
I don't I don't remember what we talked about. But
like that, you know, but like you all of those things, right,

(02:08:41):
all of those steps from the start of you get
five of your friends to go eat dinner, and you
talk about what you want to do through Someone makes
a flyer in like Microsoft or whatever. You make it
in like PowerPoint, M that's publisher.

Speaker 6 (02:08:55):
What's what's what's the one? I'm blinking, I haven't used
it in so long? The one you make greeting cards in.
I really thought.

Speaker 16 (02:09:05):
Program and I've forgotten it is you see this to
make Christmas cards? But like, you know, okay, so we
made a flyer and then we walked around and put
the flyers up and we made it. We made an email,
you know, we got a space together, we figured out
what we wanted to do, and then we did it.
And you know, and there's a bunch of organizing from there, right,
But like we had started a thing, and you can
do every single one of those steps. And if you

(02:09:27):
can't personally do one of those steps, you can think
of a person who you know, who you can bring
in to help you do these things. Because organizing you
already fucking know how to do it. Yeah, you just
have to go out there.

Speaker 5 (02:09:37):
And do it.

Speaker 6 (02:09:38):
Yep.

Speaker 17 (02:09:39):
You can have faith.

Speaker 16 (02:09:41):
Yeah, and this has been it could happen here, go organize.

Speaker 10 (02:10:05):
Hello and welcome to AcrAB and here I'm Andrew Sage,
I run Andrews on YouTube, and I'm here with.

Speaker 6 (02:10:12):
The voice of Garrison Davis.

Speaker 10 (02:10:15):
Hello, Hello, Hello, and today we're going to continue our
journey through Latin American anarchisms and their histories with a
sort of a four for one.

Speaker 6 (02:10:24):
Special exciting, exciting, very exciting.

Speaker 10 (02:10:28):
We talked about Peru, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Cuba sofa,
as well as the Mapuche struggle in Chile and Argentina.

Speaker 5 (02:10:38):
And now was the time to explore what was going.

Speaker 10 (02:10:40):
On at the top of the South American continent, the
territory of the former Grand Colombia, and that is the
territories of Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, and Venezuela. But if this
is the first time you're hearing about Grand Columbia, let
me give a quick and a brief historical context. Grand

(02:11:01):
Columbia was a short lived political entity that emerged in
the early nineteenth century during Latin America's struggle for independence
from Spanish colonial rule. It was formed in eighteen nineteen
and it encompassed the territories, like I said, of present
day Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama as well as some
parts of northern Peru, western Guyana, and northwestern Brazil. The

(02:11:23):
republic was envisioned by Simon Bolivar, who are dreamt of
uniting the former Spanish colonies into.

Speaker 5 (02:11:28):
A powerful federation.

Speaker 10 (02:11:30):
They'll be able to resist foreign intervention and secure the independence.
The Congress of Angostura declared the creation of Grand Columbia,
with Bolivar as its first president. The public was a
centralized state with a strong executive branch, so unsurprisingly, tension
soon arose among the constituent regions due to their differences

(02:11:52):
in political vision, economic interests, and regional identities. Centralized governance
had alienated local elites, and debates over federalism versus centralism
deepened existing divisions. Plus Bolivard's increasingly autocratic rule I mean
he literally tried to push for a lifetime presidency obviously

(02:12:12):
sparked internal opposition, so Grand Columbia was facing external threats
from Spanish royalist forces and internal fractures. By eighteen thirty,
Bolivard had to resign from the presidency, disillusioned by the
failure of his vision, and the same year Grand Columbia
dissolved into three separate nations. Venezuela, Ecuador, and the Republic

(02:12:34):
of New Grenada, which later on split into Columbia and Panama.
Unlike the other countries of South America that we've covered,
these countries had far less large scale anarchist movements, but
will still take a look at what little impact anarchists
did make in the past two centuries in these places.
This whole series, by they wouldn't be possible without the

(02:12:54):
scholarship of Anhill Capelletti, whose research I drew upon heavily
for this historic review. I suggest reading his book Anarchism
in Latin America for further details. Let's first take a
look at the history in Ecuador at the turn of
the twentieth century. Ecuador was ruined from a liberal revolution
that had just taken place in the country. The country

(02:13:14):
was shifting as industrialization creeped in, the bourgeoisie on the rise,
and feudal landowners were losing their grip on power. A
new secular cultural wave was also beginning to take shape
as the clerical authorities began to lose their power. The
workers naturally needed a voice in this process, and they
found it first with the rise of the Partiro Liberal Obrero.

Speaker 5 (02:13:36):
With the Liberal Workers' Party in nineteen oh six.

Speaker 10 (02:13:40):
Around the same time, on New Year's Eve of nineteen
oh five, the confederac Delcuador was founded in Guayaquil, a
city that would become a hub for worker activity. Both
organizations shared a vision rooted in social reform and work empowerment.
It was also around this time that the Cuban anarchist
Miguel Albuquerque made a name from self in Ecuador. Originally,

(02:14:02):
he had come seeking assistance with Cuba's independent struggle, but
eventually found himself playing a key role in Ecuador's labor movement.
He established the side that the e Host del Trabajo
or the Society the Sons of Labor, and other anarchist
groups would also begin forming, contributing to the struggles taking
place at the time. The first recorded strikes with anarchist
influence took place in nineteen nineteen, where workers in the

(02:14:25):
graphic arts industry organized the demand back conditions. By nineteen
twenty two, Guyaquil was the epicenter of a massive general strike,
shaped in part by the anarchist Nicolists, who were obviously.

Speaker 5 (02:14:37):
Right in the thick of it.

Speaker 10 (02:14:39):
The strike was driven by dissatisfaction among the workers, particularly
among the cities, urban laborers and dark workers who were
facing really poor wages, long hours, and deteriorating living conditions
talors all this time. The strike culminated in a violent
crackdown by government forces. Also tales all this time, with

(02:14:59):
estimates jet in that hundreds of workers were killed when
the military suppressed the revolts. Most workers returned to their
jobs after that, but the trolley workers continued their strike
until the twenty first of November, when most of their
demands were.

Speaker 6 (02:15:12):
Mect How much like crossover was there between like revolutionaries
or like you know, workers rights people or anarchists in
Cuba and places like this, because I assume there was
like a lot more like growing sentiment in Cuba based
on how that whole situation turned out in the next
like twenty thirty years, and I feel like there would

(02:15:33):
be a decent, like a decent number of cross or
at least like some travel between some of these other
like nearby places for.

Speaker 10 (02:15:40):
Sure, because Cuba has been gained independence much in theater
than the rest of its last America neighbors, places like
Mexico and Central America and Granitic Columbia and the rest
of South America. They all gained the independence, and Cuba
was still under the Spanish thumb and their remain under
the Spanish thumb until they ended up having to struggle

(02:16:00):
with the Americans as well and eventually to gain their
one independence. I mean, it's all one one big pond.
I like to see the Caribbean Sea. So there would
have been a lot of transfer and communication between these
independent Latin America and republics and Cuba, which was still
at the time of colony.

Speaker 5 (02:16:19):
That was really interesting to see.

Speaker 10 (02:16:20):
What when you know, these Cuban characters sort of show
up in the parts and ended I've stirring up some trouble.

Speaker 6 (02:16:26):
Totally well, and it shows just how like popular the
nineteen twenties were kind of like everywhere, Like yeah, whether
looking at like labor movement in the United States or
like everything that you've been talking about these last few
episodes about Latin American anarchism. Like always in like the
nineteen twenties, there was always just like crazy shit going
down consistently for sure.

Speaker 10 (02:16:48):
Unfortunately, nineteen twenties is also the time of a lot
of decline for a lot of the anarchist movements because
nineteen twenties follows you know, the rise of the USSR,
and a lot of people ended up abandoned in anarchism
and following that sort of popularity at the time.

Speaker 6 (02:17:05):
Well, and similarly, once we start getting into like the
early thirties, I remember in the last few episodes that
you've done, you see the resurgence of like right wing populism,
like really hard.

Speaker 5 (02:17:15):
Yes, we tend to see a lot of resurgences.

Speaker 6 (02:17:18):
And like all this like revolutionary potential that's been growing
the past few decades all gets like co opted or
channeled into like right wing nationalism of right wing populism,
and like that's a whole whole other pivot that happens,
not just the more like you know, communism's statust one
in like the twenties.

Speaker 5 (02:17:35):
Do see a resurgeons. We do see resurgions in the
writing populism. Yes, we also see a resurgeons in the
anarchist politics. You remember, the thirties was also the.

Speaker 10 (02:17:45):
Time of the Spanish Civil War, sure, and so in
that time you had the anarchists picking up steam again,
and you also had following that civil war, a lot
of the anarchists from Spain spread out into a lot
of the former colonies in Latin America.

Speaker 6 (02:18:00):
I think part of that rebirth is just because of
how tied anarchism and anti fascism is.

Speaker 5 (02:18:04):
That's true.

Speaker 6 (02:18:05):
I think inadvertently, the rise of fascism they actually give
birth to the rise of more anarchists as people get
involved in anti fascism because of these things are so like,
you know, sister movements in many ways. I think that
may be a contributing factor. That's certainly how I kind
of got into this sort of stuff was through anti fascism,
and and I suspect that that may have also been

(02:18:28):
the case even one hundred years ago.

Speaker 5 (02:18:30):
For sure.

Speaker 10 (02:18:31):
For sure, I think every story needs a good villain, unfortunately,
and the story of anarchism, I mean, the fascists tend
to make really, really impactful antagonists.

Speaker 5 (02:18:44):
I think. Indeed, at the same.

Speaker 10 (02:18:56):
Time we also had an Ecuador to have these strikes
going on, anarchists doing you know that thing that anarchists
like to do, which is a study group. Many such cases,
many such cases, many such cases. But I mean it
is an important aspect of struggles that's sort of consciousness racing. Yes,
So these anarchists in particular in Guyaquille, they founded these

(02:19:18):
Centro their Studio Socialists, which was a libertarian study group
in Guayaquille, and then a decade later, in nineteen twenty
the anarchists also established a Centro Gremial Sindicalista or the
Synicalist Guild Center, which had a mission to an end
liberate all the oppressed of the earth by bringing them
into a libertarian syndicate that will replace the present system

(02:19:41):
and opposing all political and religious doctrines as destructive and
prejudicial to the rights and aspiration of workers endcode. As
in the rest of the region, their publications played a
key role in spreading the ideas again early twentieth century,
late nineteenth century, the anarchists were make in papers. Yeah,

(02:20:02):
use papers, newspapers, newspapers.

Speaker 6 (02:20:04):
I mean it is a bit of a blueprint for
what anarchism continues to be in many ways, even with
like the rise of destroyism in the in the past
new past decade or so, in like popular anarchism, less newspapers,
more more zines being held together by possibly one or
fewer stables.

Speaker 10 (02:20:23):
And I like to think that I also continue that
tradition and you and I as well by creating this
kind of totally what do you and visual content?

Speaker 6 (02:20:31):
I am a zine enjoyer, I have I have any zines,
but we also have to evolve with the times in
some ways. Not everyone's going to be reading newspapers, not
everyone's going to be reading booklets. Unfortunately, as much as
I encourage people to do so, I do think there
is value in attacking the information ecosystem that people more
often use. That includes you know, podcasts, that includes your

(02:20:55):
fantastic videos on YouTube, Thank you, thank you, and yeah,
I agree for sure, for.

Speaker 10 (02:21:01):
Sure, But they didn't have things like YouTube or the
Internet at the time. Instead, they had, at least in Ecuador,
their newspapers like El Proletario and El Cacajuerro and Bandera Roja,
which were carrying these syndicalist anarchismicalist ideas to the workers
across Ecuador. They also the first truly anarchist papers that

(02:21:22):
hit the country were Encion and Lose. The Axion in
nineteen twenty two nineteen twenty nine respectfully, but as we
were anticipating in the nineteen thirties brought some challenges. Marxist
Lennis thought began to dominate leftist circles and figures like
Jose Carlos Mariettegi and his general Amauta ended up wielding

(02:21:44):
significant influence in the workers struggles, and by the end
of the decade, anarchist groups found themselves vastly overshadowed as
Marcus Lenists consolidated power through unified political parties. But despite
these shifts, anarchistman Acuador was really ever entirely extinguished. It
actually continues to influence workers organizations like the Ferracio and

(02:22:06):
La guayas well into modern times. But now let's make
our way north to Columbia as a similar story and
foolds of anarchism taken route in here twentieth century. And
this is actually a fun factor because both Eli's Recluse
and Mikhail Bercunan visited Columbia recluses there for research purposes,
and Bercunen wasn't an anarchist at the time, so they

(02:22:29):
didn't directly contribute to the anarchist movement as far as
we know, in the country.

Speaker 5 (02:22:34):
By the nineteen tents, anarchist.

Speaker 10 (02:22:35):
Ideas were definitely spreading, finding a home among students, artists,
writers and workers. And this wasn't just idle philosophizing. They
also got to work building workers societies and organizing mass
actions at the May fifteenth demonstration in nineteen sixteen, which
of course met with brutal police repression. From there, the

(02:22:57):
movement came momentum in nineteen twenty Port Walter because in
Katahina went on strike, and by the following decade, and
I guess we're the forefront of workers militancy all across
the Caribbean coast, which was more connected to global struggles
in the rest of Columbia and was thus a hotbed
of organizing and unrest. If you know the geography of Columbia,
you'd know that there's a lot of jungle and mountainous

(02:23:18):
region near the middle of the country. It's that the
coast where you tend to have more of the activity
and connection with the neighboring countries in the Caribbean Sea.
Fun of fact, there's actually a lot of people in
the English speaking Caribbean aren't aware of the fact that
there are people in the Spanish speaking Caribbean who consider,
you know, coastal Colombia and Coastal Venezuela to be part

(02:23:39):
of the Caribbean. But as like the sort of niche
discourse you get an r slash ass Caribbean. The few
Anarchistablu present in Colombia were part of nearly every major uprising,
including the Baranquila Strike of nineteen ten, the labor wave
that swept Cattahina, Barankuilia and Santimurri year nineteen eighteen, the
first strike against the notoriously bloody United Fruit Company in

(02:24:02):
nineteen eighteen, the hero Dot Railroad strike and the Artisans
and Labor strike in Bogota nineteen nineteen. The oil strikes
in Baron Kabirmeha during the nineteen twenties, including one against
the Tropical Oil Company in nineteen twenty seven which cost
twelve hundred workers their jobs and painted the targets on
the backs of the organizers because how dare you mess

(02:24:23):
with oil? And then finally there was the famous Santa
Maria Banana strike of nineteen twenty eight, where workers demanded
fair wages and better treatment, and the government responded at
the behest of the United Fruit Company by claiming hundreds
of lives after the massacre. The anarchist movement in Columbia
was heavily repressed, and because of how small it was,

(02:24:46):
it didn't quite pick back up. As historian Max that
Lao noted, publications like Organization in Santa Marta and Via
Libre and Baranquilla disappeared at the late nineteen twenties. This
crackdown on anarchists, coupled with the rise in Floyd of
Bolshevik led unions, shifted the landscape, and by the nineteen
thirties anarchist organizing was all but silenced in Columbia. But

(02:25:10):
it's a part of Columbia that we're missing. She At
one point Panama was considered part of the country, so
there must been stuff happening on that little sliver of land, right,
He'd be surprised if we rewind to the mid nineteenth century.
Between eighteen fifteen eighteen fifty five, Panama saw the construction
of a trans Isthmus railroad, and this massive project was

(02:25:30):
followed by two phases of canal construction, the first by
the French between eighteen eighteen and eighteen ninety five and
the second by the US from nineteen oh forty nineteen fourteen.
These projects brought tens of thousands of workers from Europe,
Asia and Caribbean, effectually turned in Panama into a melting
part of laborers who bought their skills, their culture and
their ideas. Beijian workers, for example, that is people from Barberos.

(02:25:54):
If I recall correctly, there was a time in Barbeos's
history where there was some massive It was like a
full quarter of the country's income was just coming from
remittances from people who had had family members sending their
money from the canal project back home. And it's not
just the Cribbean there was impacted, obviously, as workers from

(02:26:16):
Europe and Asia also part of this project. And it's
the workers from Europe and particularly Spain that brought many
of the ideas of class consciousness and anarchist cynicalism that
had been bruin in that region of the world. And
such ideas were of course solely needed in the horrific
working conditions of death and disease that marked the Panama
Canal construction project. Workers organized some successful strikes in both

(02:26:39):
the French phase and the American phase of construction, both
before and after Panama gain its independence from Colombia nineteen
oh three. But it was just before the transition to
American control over canal construction that Panama officially banned anarchists
from entering the country for the anarchists that were left well.
When the Americans took over the Canal, Governor of the
Canal So in general, George W. Davis actively suppressed the

(02:27:01):
anarchist workers that remained. In nineteen oh seven or whatever,
despite that repression, two thousand Spanish workers went on strike
for better wages. In nineteen twenty four, a prominently anarchist
cynicalist group founded the Sindicato Heneral Destrabbaha Daughters, which was
Panama's first central workers union. They grew to thousands of
members and brought together a mix of ideologies anarchists and

(02:27:23):
Marxists alike, even those who would later found the Communist
Party and the Socialist Party of Panama in nineteen thirty.
But on such a small sliver of land were so
many people mixed in there, there was bound to be
a vibrant mix of ideas. And not all of the
anarchists in Panama were of the syndicalist flair. Believe it
or not, they were actually workers within Panama who aligned

(02:27:44):
themselves with Max Stuner's philosophy. They had egoists and anarchist
egoism interesting in Panama. Yeah, exactly. This blew my mind
as well. And they don't expect to see them in
such contexts.

Speaker 6 (02:27:55):
Were they reading Sterner in Panama?

Speaker 5 (02:27:57):
I'm not sure if they were readings Toner, I'm assuming so.

Speaker 10 (02:28:00):
Because otherwise how would they have come to identify with
his philosophy. But they did launch a paper called Eluniko
in nineteen eleven.

Speaker 6 (02:28:09):
That's what I was wondering is if instead of like
widely distributings actual books, like, was there like some like
Sterner influence like newspaper that people were running. Yeah, yeah,
because like that makes.

Speaker 10 (02:28:21):
Sense exactly exactly, some assuming some of the people either
would have read Still abroad or they brought Still the Inn.
And they were obviously inspired by it, and they were
skeptical of this sort of mass movement sy Nicholas those
popular at the time.

Speaker 6 (02:28:35):
Sure many people are.

Speaker 10 (02:28:37):
They were questioning its effectiveness as a strategy for anarchy.

Speaker 5 (02:28:40):
Yeah, And so they were.

Speaker 10 (02:28:42):
Focused primarily on organizing sort of smaller affiancy groups yep.

Speaker 5 (02:28:46):
And one of those groups.

Speaker 10 (02:28:47):
Ended up launching that paper, Elunico, to spread the ideas
and obviously called itself an individualist publication.

Speaker 6 (02:28:54):
That's so funny, that's so emblematic of where we still
are with it. Oh that's good, that's good.

Speaker 5 (02:29:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (02:29:03):
I also think that this kind of diversity of thoughts
and strategy is really really beautiful, and I'm glad to
see it in almost unconventional and surprise enough contexts. It's
why I consider myself an anarchist without adjectives, you know,
I really absolutely yeah. I think we benefit greatly from
conversation between these traditions and between these strategies, and so

(02:29:24):
seeing that there were more than one form of anarchism
in such a small context, it's really quite inspiring.

Speaker 6 (02:29:31):
Yeah, I am with you there.

Speaker 10 (02:29:33):
By the way, for those listeners who may not be
familiar with the anarchist egoist tradition, I know that we're
ego and egoism.

Speaker 6 (02:29:39):
Might conjure up some psychoanalytical Freudian.

Speaker 10 (02:29:45):
Yeah, it might bring some some some sort of feelings
about capitalistic individualism or like extreme selfishness and that kind
of thing, kind of like screw everybody except me. But
it's actually a much deeper philosophical bent to anarchist egoist
that I think everybody should give a chance. I actually
recently read what is considered the first manifesto of anarchism,

(02:30:07):
and it was written by this French anarchist named Anseel
and Bella Garige, and he was actually an individualist anarchist,
and you're actually in reading that end up seeing a
lot of the influences that would later sort of develop
further into anarchist individualism from the very beginning. You know,
I highly recommend reading it. It's called Anarchy a Journal

(02:30:29):
of Order. It's available on the Anarchist Library. It's a
surprisingly contemporary piece in my opinion, and it was translated
by Sean Wilbow's another anarchist scholar who I'm really inspired
by lately, and it really gets into some of the
ideas that I think we've forgotten in terms of what
it takes to achieve the complete liberation of all people.

Speaker 6 (02:30:52):
So that's Anarchy a Journal of Order.

Speaker 10 (02:30:55):
Yeah, Anarchy a Journal of Order. He ended up not
published in more than two issues due to low readership.
But that's what happens, I think when any such cases,
many such cases, many such cases.

Speaker 1 (02:31:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (02:31:08):
I will pull that up on the anarchas Library and
give that a read myself.

Speaker 10 (02:31:12):
Yeah, it happens when you're ahead of the times in
a sense, and he actually ends up becoming at least
partially relevant to the next episode I'm going to do
on the Latin America Anarchism series, because he ends up
making his way to Latin America at one point in
his life.

Speaker 5 (02:31:28):
In fact, he dies in Latin America, but we will
get to that in time.

Speaker 10 (02:31:43):
Finally returned to Venezuela as the late nineteenth century refugees
from the Field Paris Commune arrived in Caracas, bringing with
them the radical spirit of the International working Men's Association.
From a few of these immigrants, small anarchist cells emerged,
but they were stifled by the brutal dictatorship of Juan

(02:32:03):
Vincente Gomez from eighteen ninety nine to nineteen thirty five.

Speaker 5 (02:32:07):
So few in number.

Speaker 10 (02:32:08):
The anarchist immigrant efforts to form mutual societies, organized strikes,
and spread propaganda gained them a notoriety that put a
massive bullseye on them. For Gomez's persecution, he had a
midster oppression. A few sparks of anarchism did survive in
the cultural fabric. Writers like Migueli Guardo Parlo portrayed anarchists
as spiritual revolutionaries, lacking them to saints sounds familiar, does

(02:32:33):
sound very familiar, Yes, if you know, back in the
days of Saint andrew'sm There you Go. But his novel
Toto and Pueblo described anarchists as apostles of justice, which
is really fire title, I must say, as they carried
the flame of liberty into the streets.

Speaker 5 (02:32:53):
But it wasn't all pros.

Speaker 10 (02:32:55):
The early twentieth century also saw a spike in industrial strikes.
In nineteen eighteen, for example, a pivotal strike involving transit
workers included at least one known Italian anarchist named Vincenzo Kusati.
Although defeated, the strike left a mark in the country's consciousness.
Inspired by such as Strive for Freedom. Workers united through
various mutual aid societies which they were disguised as religious skills,

(02:33:18):
the anarchist influence quietly spread among bakers, bricklayers, and oil workers. Truly,
it was the oil boom of the nineteen twenties that
reshieed Venice Whelan society, and of course continues to affect
it today. While anarchistiniclist maintained underground networks in the grown
oil sector, state and corporate power proved to be too
much By the mid twentieth century, after the fall of

(02:33:39):
Gomez's regime, the rise of political parties like Acxio Democratica
cooperted many of the workers who might have otherwise embraced
anarchist syndicalism and anarchist ideals became increasingly marginalized, eclipsed by
party politics and state repression between nineteen thirty six to
nineteen forty five. In fact, anarchist repression also gained a
constitutional footing in the four of the Lara Law, which

(02:34:02):
band strikes, associations meeting through a permission from the state,
political propaganda, and basically all the usual datatorial stuff. After
the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Franco more
Spanish anarchist immigrants came to Venezuela.

Speaker 5 (02:34:14):
You see, I said they would be relevant.

Speaker 10 (02:34:15):
Yes, yes, but they didn't end up impacting Venezuela so
much As immigrants, they ended up creating a mostly self
contained scene, apparently through the founding of the Federacion Obrerariqunal
Venezuelana in nineteen fifty eight, which was affiliated to the
International Workers Association, But as I said, did make much

(02:34:38):
of a splash in the port of Venezuelan population, they
mostly affected other Spanish immigrants, so anarchist n neover developed
into an explicitly mass movement in Venezuela, but elements of
it did persist, and the unield in pursuit of freedom
were still felt even in the harshest of conditions. So
looking today at the countries that composed the former Grand Columbia,

(02:35:00):
I would argue that the spark of anarchism still hasn't died.
On Ecuador, uprisings continue to challenge extractive economies and demand
autonomous control over renditionous territories, and some anarchist collectives are
active in solidarity, providing logistical support during protests and pushing
horizontal forms of organizing in the broader social struggle. After

(02:35:20):
the twenty twenty one national strike in Columbia, some anarchist
practices have begun to infuse movements against police brutality, privatization,
and austerity measures. Mutual aid networks have all same emerged
inspired by anarchist practice to support the community's hit hardest
by economic crises. In Panama, anarchism exists on the fringes,
but it has the potential to provide inspiration to those

(02:35:42):
who are actively confronting the liberal policies, advocating for workers'
rights and engaging in anti corporate actions. Finally, in Venezuela,
economic collapse and authoritarianism of created space for anarchist ideals
to spread through grassroots initiatives, mutual aid and self organized
community groups have stepped in where the state has failed.

(02:36:03):
Across these countries, an ideas still have potency. And really
my hope is at these places continue to explore the
creativity and solidarity that are necessary for liberation, that they
continue to struggle and they go further still. You know,
Viva I labored that or power to all the people. Peace,

(02:36:48):
Hello and welcome, take it up. And here I'm Andrew Sage.
I'm also Androwism on YouTube.

Speaker 6 (02:36:54):
And I'm here once again with Garrison Davis. Happy to
be here, happy.

Speaker 10 (02:36:59):
To have here, and we're going to continue our journey
through Latin American anarchisms and their histories. We've already discussed Peru, Chile,
Argentina and Brazil, Paraguay, Cuba, Douapuce Struggle, Ecuador, Columbia, Panama,
and Venezuela. And so there are just a few territories
left that are considered Latin America, So just before we
get to Mexico and Uruguay and possibly even Quebec, I

(02:37:23):
wanted to round up all the anarchist histories in the
smaller states.

Speaker 6 (02:37:28):
You're not wrong, but it still is funny, yeah, Quebec.

Speaker 10 (02:37:32):
I mean, honestly, you could say the same for like Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique.

Speaker 6 (02:37:38):
Yeah yeah, I mean there's even a lot of anarchists
in Montreal today as a as a booming anarchist movement,
But it still is a little funny.

Speaker 14 (02:37:48):
Right, Yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:37:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (02:37:50):
I actually wanted to include explorations of Haiti and in Guadelupe,
Martinique in this episode, since it's you know, fairly small
anarchist movements there. But I mean, I suppose I could
just summarize it one time, which is that Martinique had
a section of the International at one point in eighteen

(02:38:11):
ninety five. There was also a branch of the International
in eighteen sixty six on the island of Guadeloup, and
it's very difficult to establish whether there were any anarchist
groups in Heiti. Ever, from my research there there was
an appearance of socialism more broadly as part of the
struggle against domination and taking place in the country. But

(02:38:33):
the dictato ships of Haiti have made those kinds of
movements very difficult to spring out and thrive.

Speaker 6 (02:38:41):
Yeah, I can see that.

Speaker 10 (02:38:43):
But today we're going to be focusing on the anarchist
histories and the rest of the smaller states of Central
America and the Caribbean. So we'll be covering the sparks
of anarchism in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvor, Guatemala,
Dimerican Republic, and Puerto Rico. And as with previous episode,
zosis is all possible thanks to health, capitaleties. Exhaustive work

(02:39:03):
titled Anarchism in Latin America, Bleming said, the scene first
and foremost across the lush rainforests and turquoise seas of
Central America. Historically, there were several indigenous peoples that have
called at home, and that home was violated in the
early sixteenth century as Spanish conquistadors carved bloody paths through
the region, replacing the ones fiber and pre colonial societies

(02:39:26):
with the feuder like arrangements of the incomeendo system, which
forced indigenous peoples into labor under Spanish landowners. The colonial
eras of the rise of vast plantations for cash crops
like cocoa, indigo, and later coffee Inhrition a small elite,
while indigenous and after descendant populations endured brutal oppression over
the centuries. Fast forward to the early nineteenth century, and

(02:39:48):
the wave of independence sweeping across Latin America reached Central America.
In eighteen twenty one, the region officially threw off Spanish rule,
and in eighteen twenty three, Central America gained its independence
from the Mexican Empire. For a fleet in moment from
eighteen twenty three to eighteen thirty nine, Central America united
as the Federal Republic of Central America, modeled after the

(02:40:08):
US Constitution, and encompass in modern day Guatemala, Honduras, Salvador, Nicaragua,
and Costa Rica. Whe By eighteen thirty eight, the cracks
in the federation would become in too large to ignore.
I mean, for most of its existence, the capital of
the country alternated between Guatemala City and San Southador, so
they couldn't even decide on that. Liberals and conservatives were

(02:40:29):
also split on the economy, centralization versus decentralization, and the
role of the Catholic Church, and Guatemala was kind of
resented by the other states because it had such disproportionate influence.
So political infighting and regional rivalries eventually caused the Union
to splinter. Each state went its own way. But the

(02:40:49):
collapse of the federation wasn't the end of the story,
as seas of resistance would sprout across the former territory
of the Republic. And among those seeds with the anarchists.
Let's start from Costa Rica and head north. In nearly
nineteen hundreds, in Costa Rica, you had libertarian newspapers popping
up all over the place as usual.

Speaker 6 (02:41:08):
And when you say libertarian, you don't necessarily.

Speaker 10 (02:41:13):
I mean anarchists. Yes, yeah, I refuse let them appropriate
that to it. Yes, so you had names like Eleora
social Eldra Bajo, and Ralucha, which were aquin the struggles
of local workers and the cross continental knowledge of international discourses.
But even before these publications, would you believe there was

(02:41:35):
enough anarchist danger to stay up the establishment?

Speaker 6 (02:41:38):
A very little anarchist danger is enough anarchy danger history
of the establishment.

Speaker 10 (02:41:43):
No, But to tell you how unsettled the establishment was.
So you know, we're recording this a couple of weeks
before Christmas.

Speaker 6 (02:41:52):
Right, yes, this is going to come out I think
right after New Year's Okay.

Speaker 10 (02:41:55):
And I don't know if you've gone to change for
Christmas before. If that's the thing that you've done, I have,
I okay, I have as well. And imagine eighteen ninety two, go,
it's Christmas time, you going to church, You sit down
to get your little you know, he's supposed to keep
the sermon short and sweet, let people get home to

(02:42:16):
do what they have to do. Right, But in eighteen
ninety two, Bishop Field decided to use his Christmas sermon
to one against anarchists.

Speaker 6 (02:42:26):
That that's pretty funny.

Speaker 10 (02:42:28):
Like imagine you're just trying to go home at each
a Christmas lunch and you have to listen to this
guy preach against like these are radical anarchists to come
into mess of the country.

Speaker 6 (02:42:37):
They're giving out food, they're healing the sick there.

Speaker 10 (02:42:41):
I mean to be fair, the anarchists at the time
were generally a threat to the to the clerical establishment.

Speaker 6 (02:42:47):
Sure, of course, as was our Lord and Savior Jesus
age Christ Jesus and his affinity group of twelve traveling
around the countryside stirring up all kinds of trouble, indeed
indeed seeding revolt against the Roman Empire. We gotta stop them.

Speaker 10 (02:43:06):
Yeah, I mean, rush, That's the whole kind of rooms
I could have get into, right there, sure is. Yeah,
I mean, I mean seriously, Christianity went from being a
response to the Roman Empire to be in the Roman Empire,
and that is like one of the biggest down creates
of the millennia. Yeah.

Speaker 6 (02:43:25):
No, it's a super successful recuperation. And that's why I
do find as much as it has some problems, liberation theology,
especially the version in the South, to be kind of compelling.
I wouldn't consider myself a Christian necessarily, but as of
like a religious sect goes, I am interested in in
what liberation theology kind of does and how it tries

(02:43:46):
to reradicalize forms of Christianity for sure.

Speaker 5 (02:43:51):
For sure I have some concerns about it another strands
of Christianicism, same as somebody who grows Yeah.

Speaker 6 (02:44:00):
Same.

Speaker 10 (02:44:01):
But of course this is not the place to digress
about that toffic as we do have quite a few
countries to cover.

Speaker 5 (02:44:09):
So the cost three Ecan anarchists were not just.

Speaker 10 (02:44:11):
Being called out by the bishops, bishops, you know, they
were also struggling, you know, print eight hour workday, such
as with the Baker strike in nineteen oh five, and
they would also demonstrate against the assassination of anarchists educator
Francisco Ferrere. They were also found the Center Day Studio
Associatist Criminal, which was a collective of intellectuals and workers

(02:44:35):
who focused on study and expanded upon anarchism. At nineteen eleven,
they would launched the journal Renovacion, which lasted an impressive
seventy plus issues. They helped organize Costa Rica's first May
Day celebration in nineteen thirteen and he resilate. As in
the nineteen twenties, groups explicitly formed for libertarian action, but

(02:44:56):
unfortunately the anarchist influence wouldn't be as impactful in the
country heading into the mid twenty youth century, as the
country faced two dictatorships. However, the defeat of the latter
in nineteen forty nine actually ushered in the most peaceful
and stable political situation in all of Latin America. I
suppose that might be because the democratic government that followed
didn't transgress US interests. They do have a US military

(02:45:20):
base in the country after all. But let me not
expeculate too much.

Speaker 6 (02:45:26):
Look who doesn't have a US military base these days?

Speaker 5 (02:45:29):
Come on, cut them some sack.

Speaker 6 (02:45:32):
That's right, that's right, Andrew. I thought you were pro internationalism,
but here we go.

Speaker 5 (02:45:40):
Yeah, yeah, look at this.

Speaker 10 (02:45:41):
Look at this, this this parochio backwards regressive. You're telling
me you don't want boots on the ground in your country.

Speaker 6 (02:45:51):
Globe emoji in bio version of internationalism.

Speaker 5 (02:46:08):
So moving on north to Nicaragua.

Speaker 10 (02:46:10):
The spark of labor organization began to flicker in the
early nineteen hundreds, but there's little evidence of any anarchists
specific influence. In nineteen eighteen, the Federalsti Nicaraguenes, or the
fo N, emerged and pulled together various mutual societies from
across the country, from shoemakers to bakers to tailors, from

(02:46:30):
Leon to Managua. But this federation wasn't anarchists and character
both conservative and liberal elites actually tried to use these
workers groups with their own ends within the fo When
the group of Socialista ended up emerging as a rebel
force to challenge these elites and their influence in the workers' movements,
but even that rebel group was a reformist in nature.

(02:46:52):
Now it is possible that libertarians from Spain and Mexico
played roles in the Steve Drow strikes of nineteen nineteen
in Corindo, which was Nicragu's major port city, but a
caste for Shure for my research, we do know that
at least one influential person was perhaps inspired by anarchism,
and that was Augusto Sandino, the leader of the Sandinista

(02:47:14):
rebellion against the US occupation of Nicagua. Sandino worked alongside
anarchists during his time in exile in Mexico. Unit's revolution
and the red and black of the Sandinistas actually came
from that anarchist influence. By the nineteen thirties, after the
US withdrawal, the labor movement had to navigate the Soumotza
family dictatorship, which was marked by the severe oppression of

(02:47:35):
anything that even smelled red. Even in the face of
state violence, unions and workers' groups continued to organize, laying
the groundwork for future resistance, including the eventual Sandinista revolution
that overthrew the Somozas. In the late seventies, some social
progress was then possible in the country, but it was
still marred by corruption and authoritarianism, made worse by the

(02:47:58):
reelection of Daniel or Day in two thousand and six.
He still holds the presidency in Nicaragua to this d
managing to steave off this swell of protest against him
between twenty eighteen and twenty twenty, of which anarchists, however
small number did indeed take part. If weteen to Hounduras. Now,
there's not too much to say about anarchists so again,

(02:48:19):
but Honduras did have a vibrant label movement. In eighteen ninety,
La Democracia, one of the country's first mutual laid societies,
emerged with a cooperative spirit that laid the foundation for
was to come. By the early twentieth century, the workers
move when in Honduras had begun to heat up even more,
particularly among miners and banana plantation laborers, two groups that
were central to the country's economy. In March nineteen o nine,

(02:48:42):
miners struck against brutal conditions and poverty wages. The response Garson,
maybe you can guess bad things, violent, brutal repression and
ding ding ding ding thing.

Speaker 6 (02:48:54):
Yeah, that is that is you know what I was assuming,
but I didn't want to, you know, make a fool
out of myself.

Speaker 10 (02:49:00):
Nineteen sixteen banana plantation workers at the Quim Food Company.

Speaker 6 (02:49:05):
What was their response, Oh, violence, murder.

Speaker 10 (02:49:09):
I assume Dinging, ding Ding four hundred strikers were four
hundred strikers were arrested and imprisoned in the infamous Castillo
de Moor. I didn't see any epvidence of mass deaths
in this particular case.

Speaker 6 (02:49:23):
Which is honestly progressive considering the time. I don't know.

Speaker 10 (02:49:28):
Mass incarceration not really that much better. I mean, they
literally got in prisoned in this castle, dungeon jail. Not
something I would want to be rats, nibblermetric tools and
stuff like that.

Speaker 12 (02:49:42):
You know, no, no.

Speaker 9 (02:49:44):
So.

Speaker 10 (02:49:45):
Following these early twentieth century strikes, workers gradually began to
build some momentum when they fight for rights, particularly during
the nineteen fifty four General Strike against the US banana companies.
This strike led to significant gains, including the legal right
to organize and the emergence of a more he afide
labor movement. Now will anarchists involve these movements as possible,

(02:50:06):
as movements do bear much of the language and hallmarks
of the anarchist cynicalis thought at the time, but identify
specific names as difficult, and there doesn't seem to be
any evidence of specifically anarchist groups.

Speaker 5 (02:50:17):
In the early labor history of the country.

Speaker 10 (02:50:19):
As in other parts of Central America, it appears that
Marxists had a bit more influence in their struggles. In
response to the workers gains, the US backed military coups
of roles to counter that progress. The nineteen sixty three
coup against President Harmone vieda Morales usher in decades of
military rule which stifled labor movements and pleasant movements, often violently.

(02:50:42):
During the nineteen seventies, the Campesino or peasant land struggles
intensified as the people demanded.

Speaker 5 (02:50:47):
Redistribution and reforms.

Speaker 10 (02:50:50):
They did get some reform under General Essualdo Lopez Ariano,
but these reforms were limited and met with the usual repression.
In transition into a young government in nineteen eighties, Honduras
remained under heavy US influence, serving as a base for
anti communist activities in Central America. Then new liberal policies
in nineteen nineties eroded many of the hard won social

(02:51:12):
and labor rights, as privatization and austerity measures deepened the
inequality in the country. Two thousand and nine coup against
President Manuel's u Liar marked another turning point in modern
hundred resistance. Silia's progressive policies, including raised in the minimum
wage and considering a Greeran reform. Imagine you're considered progressive,
even considering a careering reform. But for that thought crime

(02:51:37):
of considering a Greeran reform, he was alienated by the
business elite and the US aligned military and thus could
and this triggered, of course, a wave of militarization and
repression and protests. We met with violence and human rights
abuses usual in the years fallen. The coup movements like
Clatters Extensia unified a broad coalition of workers, indigenous crewsanist

(02:52:00):
students who were all demanding systemic change. But the essues
persist Andruas continues to face crises of poverty, violence and migration,
but grassroots organizing continues. The ground there is indeed fertile
for an anarchist resurgence, And then we come to the Salvador. Anarchists,

(02:52:21):
both local and international, played a key role in shape
in the early labor movement Spanish, Mexico and Panamanian anarchisynicalists
work with them ideas of collector resistance and workers autonomy.
One of the earliest milestones in the country was the
Union Oprera Savalorina, founded in nineteen twenty two, which united
workers under the principles of mutual aid and direct action.

(02:52:42):
Nineteen twenty four, the Ferracrion de Ravadoresta Salvador or FRTs
emerged and was initially steeped at anarchistinicalist ideas before shifting
towards Marxism in the late nineteen twenties. In the nineteen thirties,
the anarchist Centro sind Cal Libretario was founded and operated
in Sansa the Door. Unfortunately, for pretty much everybody in

(02:53:03):
the outside of door, nineteen thirty two happened the devastating
La Mantaza of nineteen thirty two. To be specific, this
was a massacre that was orchestrated by the dictatorship of
General Oh. I shouldn't have told you, I should have
asked you what you think to La matanza means un
if you've be brushed up in your Spanish.

Speaker 6 (02:53:23):
Unfortunately, no, my Spanish is actually quite famously bad. I
really should work on it.

Speaker 10 (02:53:29):
I'm sure you envy and my stumbling through all these
Spanish names throughout this series.

Speaker 6 (02:53:35):
See that's usually me. I'm just happy to have it
be someone else, so James doesn't laugh at me for
reading too many books but not practicing saying things out
loud as a kid.

Speaker 10 (02:53:48):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I feel you. I mean for me,
I think one of the difficulties I have been don
in Spanish all my life. Yeah, the difficulty is when
you're speaking at a momentum in one language, at least
in my experience, it's really difficult to switch the patterns
of pronunciation to the other language. You know, the way
that Spanish like reads vowels is different from how English

(02:54:10):
reads vowels, so it's hard to like quickly switch in
and switch out.

Speaker 6 (02:54:15):
Yeah, that's that there has always been. My struggle is
reading their vowels like my vowels, and it produces some
sometimes quite quite comical pronunciation, which is really really my bad.

Speaker 5 (02:54:30):
I can imagine, but yeah.

Speaker 10 (02:54:32):
The La Matanza of nineteen thirty two was a massacre
orchestrated by the dictatorship of General Maximiliano Frandez Martinez that
aimed to crush the peasant prison that was sparked by
systemic poverty and land dispossession. Tens of thousands were slaughtered,

(02:54:53):
many of them indigenous people, and the anarchist and labor
movements in the country suffered immense losses as activists were
either killed or forced underground. This marked the beginning of
decades of military rule designed to protect the interests of
the land owned in oligarchy, the fourteen families that practically
owned everything in El Salvor. But despite this repression, radical

(02:55:15):
organizations have persisted. The mid to lay twentieth century saw
the rise of armed revolutionary groups, culminating in the Salvadorda
In Civil War from nineteen eighty eight to nineteen ninety two.
The war pitted the primarily Marxi Leninists and socialist factions
against the US backed Selvadorra and military dictaisership. The Marxists
transitioned into a political party after the nineteen ninety two

(02:55:36):
peace accords, which ended the war but left many systemic
inequalities unresolved. In the twenty fifth century, labour struggles have
continued amid new liberal economic reforms and international financial pressures,
while the left wing Fmelon won the presidents in two
thosey nine and held power on until twenty nineteen. Its
tenure was criticized for failing to sufficiently addressed issues plague

(02:55:57):
in the country. Recent years under President I have seen
the construction of a proper mass casseral police state. What
we're going to struggle against, privatization and our sterity measures.
By the way, the rise of Achille is just really
fascinating to me, particularly from a trendardy and context, because

(02:56:18):
we have a pre surveyor murder rate situation going on.
Our murder rate has been rising steadily in the past
two decades and there's just been in general, lot of
crime is serious lately, and the response a lot I've
seen a lot of Trindadians have toward the rise of
a Chill and a Salvador. It's literally like, we do
that too, We need to do that too, Like we

(02:56:39):
need to you know, institute like a mass custual state
as well. And I feel like I'm fighting a wave.
I'm like talking to a war like really, it's really
difficult for me, I think, to challenge that because I
know some people's frustrations, but to me, my mind is
just boggled at it. You know, like you really think
we'll be complaining about r ouption all the time, right,

(02:57:02):
Like it's very openly nepatistic and corrupt in this place,
people who are like either political party that is presented
to us as the options, and yet people are so
think about the crime situation that they're willing to put
that much power in the hands of the government to
make that judgment. That's the things we know that they're
innocent people in for killers prisons. You know, we know

(02:57:25):
that journalists haven't locked of for criticizing the government. We
know that all people are locked up without charges, without rights,
without anything. And what's crazy to me is that like
people are like cheering it on until it's them, until
you happen to be unlucky enough to have a tattoo.

Speaker 6 (02:57:44):
I mean, yeah, as long as it's someone else, then
it's not them.

Speaker 10 (02:57:48):
Yeah, exactly, It's like it's fine as long as somebody else.
But like, let's say you have a tattoo or I mean,
the thing is the police. I'm sure it's the case
in VA as well, because the police are themselves a
gang anywhere in the world, but the police insure not
literally connected in some cases with gangs. In fact, there's
some gang members who end up like joining the police

(02:58:09):
force later on in their lives, and so to just
give that kind of powerity that you know, let's say
you criticize an officer, you say something that they were like,
and then before you know it, you're the one behind
boss as well. I understand the frustration, I don't understand
the response, and it remains to be seeing how Biguli's
policies continue to play out in the country. I feel

(02:58:31):
like it's a disaster reason to happen, and so in
many ways it is already a disaster.

Speaker 5 (02:58:37):
But you know, there are people.

Speaker 10 (02:58:38):
Point to oh, look, I'll see if things have got
no But I don't know how long that will last,
especially when the families that are responsible for so much
of the disparity in the country are still in their
position of power.

Speaker 5 (02:58:54):
But I digress.

Speaker 10 (02:58:56):
The spirit of mutually direct action and anti thoughtun resistance
still as a potential to persist in the country of
El Salbaro. At last, we've reached Guatemala. In nineteen twenty sixth,
the publication Orientascian Cindical started circulating in Guatemala calling for

(02:59:19):
the kind of direct grassroots union action that went around
or even opposed fiscal parties as obstacles to liberation. Meanwhile,
the Marxists in the country had a different vision. They
pushed for the formation of the Federacion Juianaloberradia Guatemala and
with that the launch of Fangaradia Proletaria, a communist led
people that aim to rally the working class behind Marxist ideas.

(02:59:40):
At the same time, Spanish and Peruvian workers alongside Guatemala
and students and workers came together to form the Committee
Peroxio and Cindical, which was the space where anarchistyndicalism truly
found its voice in Guatemala. Gres you can probably guess
the powers that be weren't going to let this kind
of artical action stand. In nineteen thirty a military Dutay
ships swept into the country, ending the Committee, effectively silence

(03:00:04):
and anarchystynicalism in Quatemala and set in the stage for
years of political oppression as the state worked tirelessly to
suppress any form of workers self organization, often with the
back end of the one and only yous say us
say us say. The mid twentieth century marked a period
of extreme violence against workers movements, passive movements, and leftists movements,

(03:00:29):
especially after the nineteen fifty four CIA backed coup. Despite
these setbacks, workers and political movements really never stopped fighting.
In the nineteen sixties and seventies, Kriller movements gainablementum inspired
by Marxist and anti imperialist ideologies, and although these movements
were frequently crushed with state violence in the Fourth massacres
and disappearances, they persisted until the end of the Civil

(03:00:51):
War nineteen ninety six. Still social inequality and economic exploitation persisted.
They moved on, especially in this sweatshop industry, have continued
to fight for workers' rights. Guatemalo today is still fighting
to breathe free. Its people are still fighting against the
continued dominance of new liberal economic policies, fighting against crop
political elites, and most importantly, fighting for autonomy French, indigenous

(03:01:13):
and working peoples. And that it's time to hit the
islands on Our first stop is the Dominican Republic. To
the efforts of Spanish immigrant workers, the ideas of mutual
aid and syndicalism found very fertile ground, particularly in the
mid eighteen eighties, where we see the emergence of the
first mutualist associations, such as La Alianza Chipayania in eighteen

(03:01:33):
eighty four and Society dad at tsinale Ecost de Pueblo
in eighteen ninety. The riverald Workers Strike in eighteen ninety six,
struck in protest against their conditions but working on the
Puerto Plata Santiago line, among the first direct actions in
the American Republic outside of its historical.

Speaker 5 (03:01:48):
Maroonages and slaver of votes.

Speaker 10 (03:01:51):
In eighteen ninety seven, the first labor union was formed,
the Union de Panaderos the son to Domingo. Not long after,
strikes erupted across the country. Bakers, cobblers, brick layers all
marched in protest, often the heart of Cologne Park, fighting
for better working conditions and respect from their employers. Fast
forward a bit, and in nineteen twenty we saw the

(03:02:12):
first Premier Congress to de Ravajadores Dominicanos convene in Santramingo,
where the Confederacion dominican and del Trabajo was born. The
demands were basic but crucial, things like the eight hour workday,
the right to strike, a salary schedule, and profit sharing.
But it wasn't just about improving their daily lives. They
also sought to fight foreign intervention. Specifically, they called to

(03:02:35):
the end to the North American occupation, which had had
a heavy presence in the region for decades. The nineteen
twenties also the rise of another powerful union, the Federacion
Locale de Travajo de Santra Remingo, which was founded by
thirty one different unions. Despite the strength of these movements,
the Dominican Republic remained under the heavy influence of foreign
powers and corrupt local elites. In nineteen forty six, the

(03:02:59):
Dominican Republics so a major strike in the sugar plantations
of La Romana and San Pedro de Macoris, and this
time the influence of Spanish anarchists who had fled the
Spanish Civil War was undeniable. Today, the anarchist presence in
the American Republic is not pronounced, but the conditions are
as with the others ripe for such a transformation. Finally,

(03:03:19):
let's jump across to Puerto Rico for a final historical review.
Puerto Rico, as we know, was a Spanish colony until
eighteen ninety eight, but after that it fell under the
control of the United States. Anarchism in Puerto Rico didn't
have quite the same impact as it did in there
By Cuba, let us men, it wasn't there pushing back
against the powers of b Anarchist militans, particularly from Spain,

(03:03:40):
made their way to Puerto Rico in the eighteen eighties,
bringing with them the fire of direct action and commitment
to the idea that workers should control their own lives.
In the liberal period between eighteen sixty eight and eighteen
seventy three, the first artist and based organizations started popping up.
These were mutual aid societies and cooperatives. They weren't exactly
radical orientation, a far cry from the anarchist of prizings

(03:04:03):
happening elsewhere in that America, but there were spaces where
workers could find solidarity and support. In eighteen ninety four,
things began to change. A monetary crisis hit, followed by
a devaluation that ten prices kyrocketing, and the population decided
to push back. This triggered a wave of strikes and
mass protests, and that's where we start to see the
direct influence of anarchists. Were not for sure that Spanish anarchists,

(03:04:26):
who had settled in Puerto Rico were active in these
early struggles, push in fremancipation and denounced in exploitation. In
eighteen ninety eight, when Puerto Rico was already under US control,
anarchists and socialists came together to form the Federacrialricnale the Rostravadories,
a group clearly inspired with the Spanish Federascriol and Richiernalespanola.
Their program was a simple yet radical one, abolished the

(03:04:48):
exploitation of workers and build a society without borders or masters.
But as with all movements, there were contradictions and splits.
In eighteen ninety nine, a major rift occurred within the Federation,
and it became clear that some of its leaders were
more willing than others to accept the support of political parties,
something the anarchists traditionally rejected. This caused those that were

(03:05:09):
true to syndicalist autonomy to form the Federastrian Libre, a
group that split from that original federation and stuck to
the principles of the First International. Yet, just a few
years later, in nineteen oh one, this same group ended
up affiliated with the conservative American Federation of Labor, which
is a very strange Bedfellow considering their earlier anarchists commitments.

(03:05:33):
But the anarchists didn't feed away just after these splits.
They didn't achieve the dawn and position in Puerto Rico's
worker movement, but they kept pushing forward anyway. And one
of the ways they did this was through the press,
as they spread ideas, shared literature.

Speaker 5 (03:05:45):
And build networks.

Speaker 10 (03:05:47):
Baz Sumana, a publication based on Kagwas, was one such example.
The anergi anarchists in Perto Rico was translated into action,
especially in the labor front where they were there and
part of strikes and eons and ongoing battles. So as
we look to Puerto Rico today, whether with the fight
for sovereignty, for labor rights, against cunalism, or whatever else,

(03:06:09):
we can remember the potential of anarchism on the island.
There are Puerto Ricans and history who understood that freedom
wasn't solely about political independence, but about deliberation of all
people from all forms of exploitation. So I just take
a step back and look at the broader picture of
labor and anarchist struggle across the region. Do the anarchist

(03:06:30):
movements were not as vibrant as elsewhere, whether indeed dormant
or dead in many cases, we still see a very
powerful thread of resistance and a very flutile ground for
anarchist development, which our comrades in these places can hopefully
flourish within.

Speaker 5 (03:06:45):
That's all for me today. You can find me a
YouTube at Androism and patroon that seem true. This is
It could Happen Here? All power to all the people. Peace.

Speaker 2 (03:06:58):
Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 6 (03:07:04):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly
in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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