Speaker 1: Colzon Media.
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Speaker 3: This is Michael Phillips, an historian in Texas. I'm the
Speaker 3: author of the history of racism in Dallas called Bite Metropolis,
Speaker 3: an upcoming book on the history of eugenics in Texas
Speaker 3: called The Purifying Knife.
Speaker 4: And I'm Stephen Monticelli, an investigative reporter and columnist in
Speaker 4: Texas who covers extremism and fire right movements, as well
Speaker 4: as dark money and other fun things.
Speaker 3: In twenty twenty two, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito author
Speaker 3: the Dobbs Versus Jackson Women's Health Organization decision. Alito's majority
Speaker 3: of opinion reversed the landmark nineteen seventy three Roe v.
Speaker 3: Wade outcome that established a woman's constitutional right to an
Speaker 3: abortion to the first trimester, permitted states to impose limits
Speaker 3: to protect the health of the mother in the second trimester,
Speaker 3: and gave states leeway to ban abortions and the final trimester.
Speaker 3: The Road decision, based in a Texas case, had survived
Speaker 3: with modification for almost half century. In Dobbs, however, the
Speaker 3: Supreme Court denied that women held a constitutional right to
Speaker 3: an abortion and gave the individual states the power to
Speaker 3: determine whether such procedures were legal at any point during
Speaker 3: a pregnancy. In the Dobbs case, Alito seemed to suggest
Speaker 3: that the concept of abortion rights was a modern aberration.
Speaker 3: MSNBC pundit Lawrence O'Donnell zeroed in on one key phrase
Speaker 3: in Alito's opinion.
Speaker 2: Samuel Alito says that a right to abortion services is
Speaker 2: not quote deeply rooted in this nation's history.
Speaker 4: Whatever one might think about Alito as a jurist, he
Speaker 4: fails as an historian. In fact, for much of American history,
Speaker 4: abortion was quite accepted. When men first formed the American
Speaker 4: Medical Association in the eighteen forties, they had to wage
Speaker 4: a campaign against abortion, in part to eliminate competition for
Speaker 4: patients from midwives, who were the primary provider of such services.
Speaker 4: The nineteenth century, anti abortion laws focused on the health
Speaker 4: and safety of women primarily, and not the life of
Speaker 4: the fetus as the modern laws tend to do, and
Speaker 4: the anti abortion campaign at the time itself had to
Speaker 4: do not just with limiting women's autonomy, but also with
Speaker 4: racism and anxiety over immigration.
Speaker 3: Through it all, Texas became a central battlefront in the
Speaker 3: culture wars surrounding women's bodily autonomy. One group of Texans
Speaker 3: won women the right to an abortion in the Road case,
Speaker 3: while another worked almost immediately to reverse row and to
Speaker 3: criminalized choice. Meanwhile, a Dallas district attorney, Henry Wade, played
Speaker 3: an under appreciated and under explored role in the battle.
Speaker 4: The often dower Puritans who established the British colony of
Speaker 4: Massachusetts in the sixteen twenties may have created an oppressive theocracy,
Speaker 4: but they proved surprisingly indifferent when it came to women's
Speaker 4: decisions when and if to have children. Based on British
Speaker 4: common law, the colonies in New England allowed abortion up
Speaker 4: to the quickening, which is when women can first feel
Speaker 4: fetal movement. In that era, it was the first clear
Speaker 4: sign of impregnation. This moment varies widely for women, but
Speaker 4: it generally happens during the fourth or fifth month of pregnancy.
Speaker 3: Women typically endured seven to eight live births, and the
Speaker 3: experience was often grueling and life threatening, particularly as they
Speaker 3: got older. Seeking relief and physical safety, women frequently terminated
Speaker 3: their pregnancy in a variety of ways from Native Americans,
Speaker 3: as white women learned which local herbs were considered a
Speaker 3: bord of facins. White and black women also sought advice
Speaker 3: from midwives. It provided wisdom on how to relieve mensual cramps,
Speaker 3: Yet pregnant and breastfeed midwives provided abortion services as well.
Speaker 3: Women attempted to end pregnancy with varying degrees of success
Speaker 3: by consuming penny royalty or savn juniper, or a combination
Speaker 3: of iron and quinine. They took hot baths or rode
Speaker 3: horses bareback in order to cause a miscarriage.
Speaker 4: Before the eighteen forties, such actions provoked little or no controversy.
Speaker 4: Even the Catholic Church adhered to the quickening standard until
Speaker 4: after the American Civil War. By the eighteen forties, abortion
Speaker 4: had become so deeply rooted in American history and culture
Speaker 4: that abortionists advertise their services, albeit in euphemistic but widely
Speaker 4: understood terms. These advertisements were carried in popular newspapers such
Speaker 4: as The New York Sun and the Boston Daily Time.
Speaker 4: Abortionists told patients they could provide quote French cures for
Speaker 4: what was referred to as quote menstrual blockage.
Speaker 3: A dramanic shift happened after the eighteen forty seven founding
Speaker 3: of the American Medical Association. Established by men, the organization
Speaker 3: began lobbing states to ban abortions in an attempt to
Speaker 3: discredit midwives, who represented major competition for female patients. Medical
Speaker 3: journalists began to dismiss midwives and male doctors who provided
Speaker 3: abortion services as dangerous, ill informed quacks. AMA members were
Speaker 3: still unaware that germs existed, and they didn't clean their
Speaker 3: hands or equipment when examining wounds or during surgeries, thus
Speaker 3: causing many of their patients to die of sepsis. So
Speaker 3: called regular doctors often used dangerous treatments such as bleeding
Speaker 3: to treat illnesses. Yet, in spite of their high body count,
Speaker 3: AMA members persuaded major press outlets such as The New
Speaker 3: York Times the sensationally cover cases in which women died
Speaker 3: during abortions performed by midwives. This created momentum for the
Speaker 3: enactment by eighteen eighty of laws banning and criminalizing abortion.
Speaker 3: Every single state except Kentucky were stake courts that already
Speaker 3: rendered such procedures illegal.
Speaker 4: The drive against abortion wasn't all that it seemed. Abortion
Speaker 4: opponents were worried that the wrong women were. In other words,
Speaker 4: white wealthy women were choosing to limit how many children
Speaker 4: they had. The fertility rate for white women fell by
Speaker 4: almost fifty five percent between eighteen fifty and nineteen thirty.
Speaker 4: Horatio Storer, the leading anti abortion crusader at the time,
Speaker 4: railed against non infanto mania among upper class white women,
Speaker 4: a trend that the sociologist Edward A. Ross would call
Speaker 4: quote race suicide. President Theodore Roosevelt later argued that white
Speaker 4: women had a patriotic duty to bear at least four children.
Speaker 4: Logically fit Anglo Saxons quote have only one child or
Speaker 4: no child at all, while the Irish, Italians and Jews
Speaker 4: have quote eight or nine or ten. Theodore Roosevelt warned,
Speaker 4: it is simply a question of the multiplication table. He wrote,
Speaker 4: the future of American civilization, Roosevelt believed depended on reproductive math.
Speaker 4: White women could not be allowed to become voluntary non
Speaker 4: combatants in a racial demographic war.
Speaker 3: In the eighteen eighties, Texas was still seen by much
Speaker 3: of the country as an unsophisticated frontier, but was home
Speaker 3: to a highly influential doctor with a national following, Ferdinand
Speaker 3: Eugene Daniel, who became editor of the Texas Medical Journal,
Speaker 3: a eugenesis with a national audience. The surgeonets served in
Speaker 3: the Confederate Army and argued that masturbation and homosexuality were
Speaker 3: dangerous indications that individual came from a family line that
Speaker 3: not fully evolved or was biologed logically regressing fully evolved
Speaker 3: individuals he believed had less of a sex drive and
Speaker 3: kept their minds on intellectual pursuits. Daniel argued that before
Speaker 3: the Civil War, Americans had endangered their future by bringing
Speaker 3: Africans into the country as slaves, and were compounding the
Speaker 3: error by allowing what he called quote the dregs of
Speaker 3: Europe Jews, Greeks, Italians, and others to immigrate to the
Speaker 3: United States. The only way to say America's biological future,
Speaker 3: he said, was by cash strating not just gay men
Speaker 3: and masturbators who would cause the evolution of white America
Speaker 3: to swing in reverse, but also to sterilized as sexually promiscuous,
Speaker 3: the mentally ill, those with disabilities, and the criminal element
Speaker 3: as well.
Speaker 4: Daniel could be surprisingly supportive of abortion rights under limited circumstances, however,
Speaker 4: if it ensured that well off white women had long
Speaker 4: and fruitful careers as mothers. Daniel wrote approvingly of how
Speaker 4: electric currents might be used to end ectopic pregnancies, cases
Speaker 4: in which fertilize eggs attached to the Filippian tubes or
Speaker 4: elsewhere outside the uterus, which can be dangerous and can
Speaker 4: kill or leave a woman infertile. Both outcomes undesirable for
Speaker 4: a eugenicist like Daniel, who cared for fit white patients.
Speaker 3: In eighteen eighty seven issue, he published an account of
Speaker 3: a debate among doctors held by the Medical Society and Terrell, Texas.
Speaker 3: The topic was whether saving the life of a mother
Speaker 3: was the only acceptable reason to allow an abortion. Some
Speaker 3: doctors in the debate argued that abortion was morally acceptable
Speaker 3: for quote, an intelligent and chaste woman who had gotten
Speaker 3: pregnant after being deceived by a scoundrel into participating in
Speaker 3: pre marital.
Speaker 4: Sects because of sexual double standards. Several of these Texas
Speaker 4: doctors argued that such women would no longer be considered
Speaker 4: a socially acceptable mate by a high status man, and
Speaker 4: thus should be denied the chance to become an quote,
Speaker 4: ornament and useful member of society. Regardless of Texas's abortion law,
Speaker 4: a surprising number of doctors in the state performed abortions,
Speaker 4: not only to save women's lives, but to save the
Speaker 4: reputations and to relieve them of the financial and physical
Speaker 4: hardships of unwanted pregnancies.
Speaker 3: In eighteen ninety nine, Ueca, Texas Mary Wheat, discovered she
Speaker 3: was pregnant and sought an abortion. The procedure had been
Speaker 3: illegal in Texas since eighteen fifty six, a year before
Speaker 3: the recently formed American Medical Association began a campaign to
Speaker 3: prohibit abortion in every state. By eighteen eighty, the AMA
Speaker 3: had achieved its goal. In spite of the ubiquitous spans,
Speaker 3: abortions were frequent and there were a large number of
Speaker 3: doctors willing to provide the prohibited medical procedure. Wheat, called
Speaker 3: Maddie by friends and family, found such a physician, doctor S. M. Jenkins.
Speaker 4: Texas law at the time had not eliminated abortion, but
Speaker 4: instead had driven the practice under Because of this, doctors
Speaker 4: received little or no training in how to perform such
Speaker 4: procedures that proved fatal for Maddy Wheat, Doctor Jenkins performed
Speaker 4: the abortion in the home of women identified by the
Speaker 4: local press only as Missus Smith, and he made a mistake.
Speaker 4: She got increasingly and dangerously ill, and then after ten
Speaker 4: days of this ordeal, Jenkins rushed Wheat into Waco's City Hospital.
Speaker 4: He claimed she was suffering a severe attack of dysentery.
Speaker 4: She then died, and an autopsy revealed a bowel perforation
Speaker 4: which had been left during the botched abortion. Law enforcement
Speaker 4: arrested Jenkins on November first for the operation, charging him
Speaker 4: with murder.
Speaker 3: Jenkins's trial did not go as prosecutor's planned. Jenkins testified
Speaker 3: that the fetus Wheat was caring had died and that
Speaker 3: the abortion was an attempt to save her life. According
Speaker 3: to a reporter for the Houston Post, Jenkinson's attorney were
Speaker 3: pleased with how the trial was unfolding. Quote, the defense
Speaker 3: seemed to be well satisfied with their showings so far.
Speaker 3: Public opinion had changed considerably in favor of the defendant.
Speaker 3: The newspaper told its readers, But then the trial came
Speaker 3: to an abrupt and shocking end.
Speaker 4: While the court was in session, Hugh Wheat, the brother
Speaker 4: of the deceased woman, stood aimed at gun at doctor Jenkins, and.
Speaker 5: Pulled the trigger.
Speaker 4: A bullet fatally struck the physician just underneath the ribs.
Speaker 4: As the assassin fled, Jenkins's brother in law, John Halligan,
Speaker 4: shot back, but missed that a murder trial ended in
Speaker 4: another homicide is not surprising in a place as violent
Speaker 4: as nineteenth century Texas, But because of the modern image
Speaker 4: of Texas as reliably and even harshly anti abortion, it
Speaker 4: might be startling that the public one hundred and twenty
Speaker 4: five years ago actually sympathized with a doctor who faced
Speaker 4: prison after his patient died as a result of an
Speaker 4: incompetently performed abortion.
Speaker 3: Abortion politics were far more unpredictable in the American past
Speaker 3: than Samuel Lito had asserted. In seven twenty three, anti
Speaker 3: vice activist Anthony Comstock of Connecticut successfully lobbied the Congress
Speaker 3: the past legislation known as the Compstack Act that made
Speaker 3: distribution to the US mail or common carriers of birth
Speaker 3: control devices or any information about birth control or how
Speaker 3: to obtain an abortion a federal crime.
Speaker 4: Social reformers noted that bearing multi children often shorted women's
Speaker 4: lives and drove their families into poverty, and they battled
Speaker 4: for women to gain control over the reproductive choices. One
Speaker 4: such reformer was Margaret Sanger of New York, the daughter
Speaker 4: of a radical Irish father and mother who died at
Speaker 4: fifty after burying eleven children. Sanger coined the term birth
Speaker 4: control in nineteen fifteen, and, just before World War One,
Speaker 4: launched a movement that promoted contraception as sexual and political
Speaker 4: reform aimed to reduce human misery. She had to flee
Speaker 4: the country in nineteen fourteen because her publication The Woman
Speaker 4: Rebel intentionally defied the Comstock Law and promoted the distribution
Speaker 4: of information about contraception through the United States Postal Service.
Speaker 4: When she returned to this country, she was an international
Speaker 4: celebrity for women's rights and free speech, and she opened
Speaker 4: a family planning clinic, which faced continual police harassment. Lack
Speaker 4: of access to birth control, Sager complained, led to abortion,
Speaker 4: as she has said in a nineteen fifty seven interview
Speaker 4: with reporter Mike Wallace on CBS News.
Speaker 6: Why did you do it?
Speaker 7: I realized that you had an intellectual conviction that birth
Speaker 7: control was a boon demand kind. But I'm sure that
Speaker 7: others have that conviction too, and so what I'd like
Speaker 7: to know is this, what events, what emotions in your
Speaker 7: life made Margaret Sanger a crusader for birth control.
Speaker 8: Well, mister Wallace, it's hard to say that any one
Speaker 8: thing has made won't do this or that. I think
Speaker 8: from the very beginning, I came of a large family.
Speaker 8: My mother died young children. That made the impression on
Speaker 8: me as a child. As a trained nurse went among
Speaker 8: the people, I saw women who asked to have some
Speaker 8: means whereby they would have to have another pregnancy too
Speaker 8: early after the last child, the last abortion, which many
Speaker 8: of them had. So there's a number of things that
Speaker 8: are one after the other that really made you feel
Speaker 8: that you had to do something.
Speaker 4: It may surprise many today that the woman who founded
Speaker 4: the American Birth Control League, which later evolved into Planned
Speaker 4: Parenthood of America, actually opposed abortion and advocated easing access
Speaker 4: to birth control as a means of making advantage. Meanwhile,
Speaker 4: around the time of Sanger's interview with Mike Wallace, Texas
Speaker 4: doctors became friendlier to abortion rights. But before we get
Speaker 4: into that quick eyebreak.
Speaker 3: In nineteen sixty three, the Houston Chronicles survey doctors about
Speaker 3: their views of abortion. About eighteen thousand abortions took place
Speaker 3: in Texas every year, the newspaper reported in that quote,
Speaker 3: an increasing number of doctors believed abortion should be legal
Speaker 3: for reasons beyond saving the life of the mother. Texas
Speaker 3: women fought fiercely for the right to control their bodies.
Speaker 3: In North Texas, the Women's Alliance, the first Unitarian Universalist
Speaker 3: church in Dallas, launched an education campaign about the need
Speaker 3: for the state to reform its abortion laws. Meanwhile, doctor
Speaker 3: U Savage of Fort Worth, the president of State Association
Speaker 3: of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, lobbied the Texas Medical Association to
Speaker 3: draft a statement supporting abortion rights. The state's abortion ban was,
Speaker 3: he said, in conflict with actual practice of reputable hospitals
Speaker 3: across the state. Doctors regularly provided abortion care when a
Speaker 3: woman's life was in danger, and they interpreted that mandate broadly.
Speaker 3: In nineteen sixty nine, members of the Texas Medical Association
Speaker 3: who were surveyed approved liberalization of abortion. Laws by an
Speaker 3: overwhelming vote of four thousand, four hundred and thirty five
Speaker 3: to five hundred and thirty six.
Speaker 4: The Texas legislature even considered loosening abortion restrictions in its
Speaker 4: nineteen sixty seven and nineteen sixty eight sessions, although neither
Speaker 4: effort was successful in spite of support from conservative state
Speaker 4: Senator George park House and a growing number of churches
Speaker 4: and physicians. In the end, activists carried the day. Two
Speaker 4: Texas lawyers, Linda Confie and Sarah Weddington, took up the
Speaker 4: cause of Norma McCovey, who had sought an abortion in Dallas.
Speaker 4: Almost a century earlier, Texas doctors had argued whether to
Speaker 4: allow an abortion for unmarried upper class women so they
Speaker 4: could contribute to the gene pool by bearing children with
Speaker 4: comparably privileged men. Those Victorian doctors did not have someone
Speaker 4: like McCovey in mind.
Speaker 3: Largely neglected by our parents, but Covey had suffered abuse
Speaker 3: at the hands of men throughout her life and was
Speaker 3: a frequent drug user. After giving up one child for
Speaker 3: adoption and having another taken by her mother, in nineteen
Speaker 3: sixty nine, she was pregnant for a third time while
Speaker 3: she was living in Dallas. McCovey tried to end the
Speaker 3: pregnancy herself with a home remedy of peanuts and cast roil,
Speaker 3: but she only succeeded in making herself nauseous. She's eventually
Speaker 3: told about an illegal clinic, but when she got there,
Speaker 3: Dallas police had already shut down the clinic. Quote nobody
Speaker 3: was there, she said later it was an old dentist office.
Speaker 3: Then I saw dried blood everywhere and smelled this awful smell.
Speaker 3: She believed that she falsely claimed that she had been
Speaker 3: gang raped by African American men. A doctor might be
Speaker 3: willing to provide her an abortion. She was unsuccessful, but
Speaker 3: a doctor referred her to an attorney who connected her
Speaker 3: with a pair of lawyers who were seeking to challenge
Speaker 3: the Texas anti abortion law. Attorneys Linda Coffee and Sarah
Speaker 3: Weddington filed a class action suit against Dallas District Attorney
Speaker 3: Henry Wade, claiming that the Texas anti abortion law, which
Speaker 3: allowed the procedure only to save the patient's life, violated
Speaker 3: the constitutional right of privacy.
Speaker 4: Before his name would forever be linked with the history
Speaker 4: of American abortion law. By the time of Norman mcovy's suit.
Speaker 4: Henry Wade enjoyed a reputation as one of the most
Speaker 4: successful district attorneys in the country. His reputation in Dallas
Speaker 4: was built on ruthlessness, racism, and the advantages a brutally
Speaker 4: unfair criminal justice system in Texas gave him. Wade would
Speaker 4: claim a ninety percent conviction rate, but in many of
Speaker 4: those cases he faced off against poor defendants that were bullied,
Speaker 4: lied to, and coerced into confessions by Dallas police officers.
Speaker 4: In one infamous murder case, Tommy Lee Walker, an African
Speaker 4: American man with several alibi witnesses, was threatened with a
Speaker 4: beating if he didn't sign a confession. He was misled
Speaker 4: about the consequences of signing an admission of guilt and later
Speaker 4: died in the electric chair. In nineteen fifty six.
Speaker 3: Wade reportedly joked quote, any prosecutor could convict a guilty man.
Speaker 3: That takes a real pro to convict an innocent man.
Speaker 3: Emmanuel Wade provided to prosecutors after the Civil Rights Era,
Speaker 3: provided tips for excluding African Americans and Mexican Americans from juries.
Speaker 3: Wade left the District Attorney's office in January nineteen eighty eight,
Speaker 3: and as of twenty eight, nineteen criminal defendants convicted by
Speaker 3: his team had been exonerated through DNA evidence.
Speaker 4: During his time as district attorney, Wade directed police to
Speaker 4: raid gay bars and vigorously prosecuted violators of the state
Speaker 4: sodomy laws that banned oral and anal sex, including a
Speaker 4: straight couple arrested in Dallas in nineteen sixty one. While
Speaker 4: Wade may have racked up wins against badly outmatched targets
Speaker 4: before Row, he bungled his most famous case, murder covered
Speaker 4: by Dallas radio reporter Gary Delon of KLi s Am and.
Speaker 9: Garry comes Lee osrog he accused assassin Cat the riff
Speaker 9: us leading the way, Then a strutted right Delice officers
Speaker 9: shot running up, shot has run out, Andrew osrags leel
Speaker 9: osra has sat him A shot has long out here,
Speaker 9: strugglers be.
Speaker 10: In place, show.
Speaker 11: Has rung up and.
Speaker 9: Leean osrag mee osrad has les been shot.
Speaker 3: On November twenty fourth, nineteen sixty three, Dallas nightclub owner
Speaker 3: Jack Ruby had murdered Lee Harvey Oswald, he accused assassin
Speaker 3: of John Kennedy, as he was being escorted by police,
Speaker 3: in front of the nationwide TV audience. The case should
Speaker 3: have been open and shut. Wade's staff won a conviction
Speaker 3: in March nineteen sixty four, but the verdict and death
Speaker 3: sentence Ruby received was unanimously overturned by the Texas Court
Speaker 3: Criminal Appeals on October fifth, nineteen sixty six, in part
Speaker 3: because the judge should have granted a change of venue,
Speaker 3: but also because Wade's team had introduced improperly obtained evidence
Speaker 3: at the trial. Ruby was awaiting a new Trialway died
Speaker 3: of pneumonia cancer in nineteen sixty seven.
Speaker 4: The Wade team apparently did similarly sloppy work in the
Speaker 4: Roe v.
Speaker 5: Wade case.
Speaker 4: In abortion cases, Wade's office had generally prosecuted amateur abortion
Speaker 4: providers who had killed or badly injured their clients, and
Speaker 4: the Dallas DA's office in the City Police had not
Speaker 4: focused on enforcement of abortion laws on the books. Legal
Speaker 4: experts would later characterize the Dallas DA's office filings and
Speaker 4: the Row case as perfunctory, especially compared to the exhaustive
Speaker 4: constitutional research done by Weddington and Coffee. This Assistant General j.
Speaker 4: Floyd won no allies on the Supreme Court when he
Speaker 4: opened his argument with comments considered sexist and condescending even
Speaker 4: by the standards of nineteen seventy three. When the Supreme
Speaker 4: Court rendered its verdict, Wade reportedly never bothered to read
Speaker 4: it best.
Speaker 12: Kate Justice, I pleased the court.
Speaker 8: It's an old Joe, But what a argument man argues
Speaker 8: against two beautiful ladies like this.
Speaker 5: They're going to have.
Speaker 9: The last word.
Speaker 3: No one laughed, and a Texas legal team would win
Speaker 3: a landmark legal victory. On January twenty second, nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 3: news anchor Walter Cronkite made the earthshaking Roe v. Wade
Speaker 3: decision the lead story on the CBS Evening News Good Evening.
Speaker 12: In a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court the day legalized abortions.
Speaker 12: The majority in cases from Texas and Georgia said that
Speaker 12: the decision to end the pregnancy during the first three
Speaker 12: months belongs to the woman and her doctor, not the government.
Speaker 12: Thus the anti abortion laws of forty six states were
Speaker 12: rendered unconstitutional.
Speaker 6: Stay with us through this ad break to learn more.
Speaker 4: Took a while for the country and particularly Texans, to
Speaker 4: absorb the news about the Roe decision. Supreme Court ruling
Speaker 4: was announced on the same day as another big news
Speaker 4: story that over the next few days absorbed attention south
Speaker 4: of the Red River. Cronkite was on the air when
Speaker 4: the press secretary of a former giant of Texas politics
Speaker 4: called the newsman to tell him a former president had died.
Speaker 12: Thank you very much, Tom, I'm on the air right
Speaker 12: at the moment. Can you hold the line just a second.
Speaker 12: I'm talking to Tom Johnston, a press secretary for Lyndon Johnson,
Speaker 12: who was reported that the thirty sixth President of the
Speaker 12: United States died this afternoon in an ambulance plane on
Speaker 12: the way to San Antonio, where he was taken after
Speaker 12: being stricken at his rant, which the LWJ Ranch in
Speaker 12: Johnson City, Texas.
Speaker 3: News of the road decision had to compete not only
Speaker 3: with coverage of Johnson's death in the planning for his funeral,
Speaker 3: but also the recently negotiated American withdrawal from the Vietnam War.
Speaker 3: No one could have guessed how deeply this one decision
Speaker 3: would reshape the makeup of the Democratic and Republican parties
Speaker 3: over the next half century. Americans divided almost evenly. Soon
Speaker 3: after the Supreme Court announcement, a Gallop survey indicated that
Speaker 3: forty six percent supported a woman's right to choose and
Speaker 3: forty five percent opposed granted women access to the abortion care.
Speaker 3: In the days following the Road decision, reactions were often surprising.
Speaker 3: Wa chris Well, the arch conservative pastor of First Baptist
Speaker 3: Church in Dallas, the largest Southern Baptist congregation in the nation,
Speaker 3: initially applauded the court. Perhaps the pastor, who had repeatedly
Speaker 3: warned thirteen years earlier that the election of a Catholic
Speaker 3: John Kennedy as president would mark the end of religious liberty,
Speaker 3: was relieved that the Supreme Court was not controlled by
Speaker 3: the Vatican. By the late nineteen seventies, Chriswell would emerge
Speaker 3: as a national leader of the religious right and would
Speaker 3: help make opposition to abortion gay rights a centerpiece or
Speaker 3: Republican politics. Shortly after Rowe, however, he struck a very
Speaker 3: different tune. Quote I've always felt that it was only
Speaker 3: after the child was born and I had a life
Speaker 3: separate from its mother that became an individual person, Chriswell said,
Speaker 3: And it always therefore seemed to me that's what's best
Speaker 3: for the mother and the future should be allowed.
Speaker 4: Opposition to the legalization of abortion quickly formed and would
Speaker 4: build to homicidal intensity over the decades. In nineteen seventy, three,
Speaker 4: years before the Row decision, when abortion was still illegal
Speaker 4: in Texas, Michael Schwartz, a student at the conservative private
Speaker 4: University of Dallas in the suburb of Irving, staged what
Speaker 4: might have been the first anti abortion protest in America
Speaker 4: and history. He held a sit in at the Planned
Speaker 4: Parenthood headquarters, not far from downtown Dallas because the organization
Speaker 4: provided assistance to pregnant women planning on traveling to states
Speaker 4: where abortion was already legal, not unlike situations that Texans
Speaker 4: faced today.
Speaker 3: The movement soon came to be dominated by right wing Republicans,
Speaker 3: and the occupations of clinics soon became violent. Abortion opponents
Speaker 3: pouring noxious chemicals into clinic ventilation systems, anti choice extremists
Speaker 3: that fire to clinics, bombed them, and even murdered doctors
Speaker 3: and clinic staff providing abortion care. One set of Texans
Speaker 3: may have won the decisive battle for abortion rights in
Speaker 3: the past half century, but a different set of Texans
Speaker 3: would lead the charge to reverse those gains.
Speaker 4: Strangely enough, the backlash to abortion rights included norma McCovey.
Speaker 4: One day, Flip Benhim, a leader of the extremist anti
Speaker 4: abortion group Operation Rescue, approached her while she was autographing
Speaker 4: copies of a book she had authored called I Am Row.
Speaker 4: They became friends, and she later claimed that she changed
Speaker 4: her mind about abortion when she saw photos of fetuses
Speaker 4: at different stages of pregnancy. After being baptized in a
Speaker 4: swimming pool by evangelicals in nineteen ninety five, an event
Speaker 4: filmed and widely disseminated in the anti abortion movement, McCovey
Speaker 4: became a popular fixture at anti abortion protests. At first,
Speaker 4: McCovey embraced Evangelical Protestantism, and by nineteen ninety eight she
Speaker 4: converted to Catholicism, but towards the end of her life,
Speaker 4: while being interviewed for a twenty twenty documentary called Aka
Speaker 4: Jane Rowe, McCovey confessed that her religious conversion had been
Speaker 4: a scam and that she had been financially benefiting from
Speaker 4: her transition into a star of the evangelical anti abortion circuit.
Speaker 6: Did they use you as a trophy? Of course, I
Speaker 6: was the big fish. Do you think they would say
Speaker 6: they used them?
Speaker 8: Well, I think it was a macheble fine.
Speaker 11: You know.
Speaker 6: I checked their money and they put me out in
Speaker 6: front of the.
Speaker 11: Cameras and tell me what site.
Speaker 6: That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 3: McCovey died in twenty seventeen at her home in Katie, Texas.
Speaker 3: By that point, anti abortion politics had become orthodoxy in
Speaker 3: the Republican Party. In two thousand and eight, the state
Speaker 3: passed the misleadingly named Women's Right to No Act, which
Speaker 3: mandated the physicians share misinformation about alleged fetal pain during
Speaker 3: abortion with women who sought the procedure. In twenty thirteen,
Speaker 3: a state Senator Wendy Davis a Fort Worth stage of
Speaker 3: dramatic thirteen hour filibuster Senate Bill five, legislation that banned
Speaker 3: abortion after twenty weeks, required clinics to meet the same
Speaker 3: demanding standards as hospitals and surgical centers, and required doctors
Speaker 3: performing the procedure to hold admitting privileges at nearby hospitals.
Speaker 3: Davis's filibuster stopped the bill from being voted on before
Speaker 3: midnight June twenty fifth, mandated end of the legislative session.
Speaker 3: She killed the legislation for the time being, and the
Speaker 3: pink tennis shoes she wore became a symbol of abortion
Speaker 3: rights activism around the world. However, Rick Perry called a
Speaker 3: special session of the legislature the next day in Senate
Speaker 3: Bill five passed. Her efforts propelled her into the twenty
Speaker 3: fourteen gubernatorial race, but she was crushed by Greg Abbott
Speaker 3: by twenty one point margin.
Speaker 4: In recent years, Abbot has led the charge to erase
Speaker 4: many of the gains women have won in the fight
Speaker 4: to control their bodies.
Speaker 7: We will promote policies that limit the growth of.
Speaker 6: Government, not the size of your dreams.
Speaker 4: Under Abbot, Texas has passed some of the most intrusive
Speaker 4: and extreme anti abortion laws that tightly regulate women's bodies.
Speaker 4: In twenty twenty one, Texas passed Senate Bill eight, which
Speaker 4: banned abortions after the six week of pregnancy. It made
Speaker 4: performing an abortion a first or second degree felony unless
Speaker 4: the mother's life is in danger or there is risk
Speaker 4: of substantial impairment of a major bodily function. The vagueness
Speaker 4: of that latter provision has terrified Texas doctors into not
Speaker 4: providing care to several women who have shown up in
Speaker 4: emergency rooms at death's door. Texas physicians have become less
Speaker 4: willing to perform emergency abortions than they were in the
Speaker 4: days before the Road decision, even as far back as
Speaker 4: the nineteenth century.
Speaker 3: In twenty twenty three, the Texas Supreme Court denied Kate
Speaker 3: Cox of Dallas the right to end a pregnancy, even
Speaker 3: though our fetus suffered from full trisomy eighteen, the severe
Speaker 3: genetic anomaly that guaranteed that the child, if it survived pregnancy,
Speaker 3: would only live minutes. If a pregnancy continued, Cox may
Speaker 3: have lost the ability to have children in the future.
Speaker 3: She fled this state in order to obtain an abortion
Speaker 3: where a procedure remained illegal. In twenty twenty three, Amanda
Speaker 3: Zerwarski almost died waiting for a life saving abortion when
Speaker 3: doctors hesitated to provide care because they feared criminal prosecute.
Speaker 3: For years, abortion ride activists had chanted pro life, that's
Speaker 3: a lie, you don't care if women die. In fact,
Speaker 3: the state legislature and Governor Greg Abbott did nothing, as
Speaker 3: the deaths of pregnant women in Texas sword fifty six percent.
Speaker 4: In twenty twenty one, Johnson Lee Barnica, a mother of one,
Speaker 4: was joyful when she realized she was pregnant. She hoped
Speaker 4: to deliver a sibling for her daughter, but on September
Speaker 4: twenty first, seventeen weeks into her pregnancy, she was miscarrying,
Speaker 4: with the fetus pressing against her cervix and about to
Speaker 4: exit the womb. Barnica's life was in danger, but doctors
Speaker 4: at HCA Houston Healthcare Northwest told her and her husband
Speaker 4: that because of Texas's law, they could do nothing until
Speaker 4: the fetus' heartbeat had stopped. Fearing criminal charges, doctors refused
Speaker 4: to medically accelerate the delivery of the dying fetus and
Speaker 4: let forty hours pass. Barnica writhed in agony, begged to
Speaker 4: be allowed to see her daughter, and a fatal bacterial
Speaker 4: in fact ravaged her body. She would die three days later,
Speaker 4: leaving her young child without a mother.
Speaker 3: On October twenty eighth, twenty twenty three, eighteen year old
Speaker 3: Neva Crane was six months pregnant. She began vomiting and
Speaker 3: she became soaked in sweat during a baby shower at
Speaker 3: her home in Beaumont. She too was miscaring. Her boyfriend
Speaker 3: drove her to nearby Baptist hospitals. Of Southeast Texas, where
Speaker 3: they waited for five hours in a waiting room before
Speaker 3: doctors diagnosed her with strapped throat and gave her a
Speaker 3: prescription for antibiotics. Sent home or conditionally worsened, Crane was
Speaker 3: driven to another hospital in town Christa's Southeast Texas, Saint Elizabeth.
Speaker 3: Her fever soared to one hundred and two and she
Speaker 3: was bleeding, but her doctors continue to do nothing but
Speaker 3: administer antibiotics. Eventually, she was wheeled into a third emergency room.
Speaker 3: Doctors gave her two ultrasounds, two, in their words, confirm
Speaker 3: fetal demise. Crane's mother, who had long been opposed to abortions,
Speaker 3: screened at the medical staff to help her dying child.
Speaker 3: Cranes suffered for twenty hours before her heart failed.
Speaker 4: Bernica and Crane's stories were revealed by the investigative news
Speaker 4: outlet Pro Publica just days before the twenty twenty four
Speaker 4: presidential election. Democratic nominee Kamala Harris made abortion rights a
Speaker 4: central part of her doomed campaign. When an anticipated red
Speaker 4: wave expected to bring a Republican majority in the twenty
Speaker 4: twenty two congressional elections fizzled and a number of abortion
Speaker 4: rights initiative passed even in traditional Republican strongholds like Kansas
Speaker 4: and Ohio. Many pundits believe that a Dobbs effect had
Speaker 4: heralded a permanent political realignment or at least the upcoming
Speaker 4: presidential election results. This phenomenon clearly failed to materialize for Harris.
Speaker 4: Abortion rights referenda passed in seven states, including Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada,
Speaker 4: and New York in November twenty twenty five, but they
Speaker 4: foundered in Nebraska and South Dakota, as well as Florida
Speaker 4: because the support of fifty seven percent of voters fell
Speaker 4: short of the required sixty percent supermajority. In Texas, Trump,
Speaker 4: once a pro choice person but now the proud instigator
Speaker 4: of the Dobbs decision, carried fifty six percent of the vote.
Speaker 4: One of the most prominent Trump supporters, University of Texas PhD.
Speaker 4: Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, might soon be in
Speaker 4: a position to see his dreams of a national ban
Speaker 4: on the so called abortion pill, mifepristone, and even the
Speaker 4: reversal of the nineteen sixty five Griswold v. Connecticut's Supreme
Speaker 4: Court decision that overturned state laws banning control pills and devices.
Speaker 3: When Harris lost, anti abortion extremists exuberantly celebrated Trump's triumph.
Speaker 3: Neo Nazi Nick Fuentes, who if right wing rap artists
Speaker 3: Kanye West got to go to dinner in twenty twenty two.
Speaker 3: At Trump saw the Republican victory as an opportunity to
Speaker 3: reduce swomen to the status property. Hey, we control your bodies.
Speaker 1: Guess what.
Speaker 6: Guys win again.
Speaker 13: Okay, men win again, and yes, we control your bodies. Hi,
Speaker 13: I'm your Republican congressman. Hi, I'm your Republican congressman. It's
Speaker 13: your body, my choice.
Speaker 4: Texas government has become big enough to regulate women's bodies
Speaker 4: and small enough to fit inside of its citizens' bedrooms.
Speaker 4: Even though abortion rights have always enjoyed far greater support
Speaker 4: than Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has suggested the right
Speaker 4: of women to control their own bodies and get the
Speaker 4: vital medical care they need to prevent bodily harm or
Speaker 4: their premature deaths seems on the precipice of vanishing. This
Speaker 4: grim reality is not deeply rooted in America's history or traditions,
Speaker 4: but unfortunately it is the current status quo, and Texas
Speaker 4: has played a major role in bringing us to this place.
Speaker 4: I'm Stephen Machelli, I'm Michael Phillips. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 6: Welcome to it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. I
Speaker 6: hope you've been enjoying the holiday season. I know I have,
Speaker 6: or at least I've been trying to. It's difficult because
Speaker 6: I keep getting distracted by this funny feeling like there's
Speaker 6: something watching over me, up in the sky, something buzzing around,
Speaker 6: And at first I thought this might just be Santa's sleigh,
Speaker 6: but then I realized no, no, no, no no, this
Speaker 6: is actually a drone. And oh boy, am I not
Speaker 6: the only one. Drone fever is just sweeping the nation
Speaker 6: right now with the new Jersey drone panic somehow making
Speaker 6: headline based on unconfirmed and very disputable reports. The new
Speaker 6: Jersey drone thing isn't real. This is mass hysteria. Almost
Speaker 6: all of these incidents of UFOs, UAPs or mysterious drones
Speaker 6: are actually just like regular airplanes going to the airport,
Speaker 6: airplanes that you can track online via flight radar. These
Speaker 6: aren't nuclear scanning drones, These aren't secret government military projects.
Speaker 6: These are either like legal, registered hobbyist drones in some cases,
Speaker 6: but really just mostly airplanes. A few weeks ago, there
Speaker 6: was a really cloudy day over the New Jersey coast
Speaker 6: and that day all of the drone sightings stopped because
Speaker 6: you couldn't see up in the sky, you couldn't see
Speaker 6: the airplanes. But yeah, the New Jersey drone panic isn't real.
Speaker 6: The reason why there's blinking lights flying over LaGuardia is
Speaker 6: that those are airplanes taking off and landing at an airport.
Speaker 6: This whole panic was boosted by unconfirmed social media reports
Speaker 6: and local news sites trying to gain clicks, and somehow
Speaker 6: this just broke through into the national mainstream discourse. But
Speaker 6: fears over invasive drones isn't necessarily unfounded though. The ones
Speaker 6: that you should be worried about aren't UFOs or nuclear
Speaker 6: scanning drones, but are actually police drones, which are becoming
Speaker 6: all the more commonplace. More and more cities this year
Speaker 6: have adopted police drone programs. So for this episode, I'm
Speaker 6: going to rerun my episode from early in twenty twenty
Speaker 6: four about police drones. Now, in the past year, there's
Speaker 6: also been a great increase in the reporting on police drones,
Speaker 6: including a fantastic Wired investigation titled the Age of the
Speaker 6: Drone Police is Here. They analyzed nearly ten thousand individual
Speaker 6: flight records from July twenty twenty one September of twenty
Speaker 6: twenty three, containing more than twenty two point three million coordinates.
Speaker 6: The investigation showed that poor communities, especially working class and
Speaker 6: immigrant communities, were disproportionately surveilled with police drones in Cheula Vista,
Speaker 6: flying over neighborhood blocks on the west side more than
Speaker 6: ten times longer than blocks on the suburban east side.
Speaker 6: And considering Trump's second term, fears over widespread police surveillance
Speaker 6: are only more relevant, especially in immigrant communities, and even
Speaker 6: in instances where drones like this fly over places like
Speaker 6: abortion clinics, and these fears are not unfounded. In twenty twenty,
Speaker 6: the San Diego Union Tribune discovered that the Cheulavista Police
Speaker 6: Department was sharing its license plate reader data directly with ICE.
Speaker 6: Now it's still unclear how many drones Cheulavista PD currently has,
Speaker 6: but as of twenty twenty two, they had thirty two
Speaker 6: of these high definition camera mounted drones, drones which have
Speaker 6: now done over twenty one thousand flights since twenty eighteen.
Speaker 6: All of this will get discussed more in depth in
Speaker 6: the episode, but for an update later, I discuss a
Speaker 6: court case to secure the public's right to access drowne footage,
Speaker 6: and this case is still ongoing. Last spring, the city
Speaker 6: tried to appeal to the California Supreme Court, who ultimately
Speaker 6: declined to take up the case, basically reaffirming the lower
Speaker 6: court's ruling against the police to withhold drone footage. This
Speaker 6: case is once again back to trial court to finalize
Speaker 6: details of how certain footage should be released. So, without
Speaker 6: further ado, here's my episode from the twenty twenty four
Speaker 6: Consumer Electronics Showcase, Police Drones and you welcome to it
Speaker 6: could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. Now, last week I
Speaker 6: spent a few days in Las Vegas for the Consumer
Speaker 6: Electronics Showcase. Most of the time of the convention, I
Speaker 6: was just walking around the show floor looking at various
Speaker 6: new types of surveillance equipment, AI products, and various other
Speaker 6: bullshit that was being pedled to the many industry attendees
Speaker 6: of CEES. But I was also able to go to
Speaker 6: a few panels. Now panels are really interesting because you
Speaker 6: get to hear people who are working inside industries talk
Speaker 6: about stuff that they don't usually really publicly talk about
Speaker 6: very much. And on the first day of the convention,
Speaker 6: I went to a panel about drone technology. Half of
Speaker 6: the panel was about how Walmart is launching new delivery
Speaker 6: drones in Dallas, Texas. The other half was about police drones.
Speaker 6: And that's what we're going to be talking about here today,
Speaker 6: how the police are using drones, why they're using drones,
Speaker 6: and how you can probably expect to be seeing a
Speaker 6: lot more drones up in the sky piloted by either
Speaker 6: an AI or a police officer. So let's get started.
Speaker 6: Cheula Vista is the southernmost kind of medium sized city
Speaker 6: in California, with the population of two hundred and seventy
Speaker 6: eight thousand people. Cheulavista has a police force of two
Speaker 6: hundred and eighty nine sworn officers, as well as one
Speaker 6: hundred and twenty civilian employees. On top of their nearly
Speaker 6: three hundred officers, they operate a drone fleet ten hours
Speaker 6: a day, seven days a week, launching high deff camera
Speaker 6: mounted drones from four locations throughout their small city. I'm
Speaker 6: going to quote from an article from the MIT Technology Review,
Speaker 6: which did a deep dive onto Cheulavista's police drones back
Speaker 6: in February of twenty twenty three. Quote. Cheula Vista uses
Speaker 6: these drones to extend the power of its workforce in
Speaker 6: a number of ways. For example, if only one officer
Speaker 6: is available when two calls come in, one foreign armed
Speaker 6: suspect and another for shoplifting, an officer will respond to
Speaker 6: the first one. But now cvpd's Public Information Officer, Sergeant
Speaker 6: Anthony Molina, says that dispatchers can send a drone to
Speaker 6: surreptitiously trail the suspected shoplifter unquote. And this really gets
Speaker 6: at the heart of how these drones are going to
Speaker 6: get used. They exist to funnel more people into the
Speaker 6: criminal justice system. Instead of having to choose between two calls,
Speaker 6: one of which actually could relate to saving someone's life,
Speaker 6: the other just a petty crime, now the police can
Speaker 6: easily follow someone doing a petty crime while responding to
Speaker 6: other calls and eventually catch up. It's a way to
Speaker 6: just expand the amount of people that can be arrested
Speaker 6: and thrown into jail. Nowadays, drones are pretty common tools
Speaker 6: for police. Over one five hundred departments currently use drones,
Speaker 6: usually for special occasions though like search and rescue, crime
Speaker 6: scene documentation, protest surveillance, and sometimes tracking suspects, But at
Speaker 6: the moment, only about a dozen police departments regularly dispatch
Speaker 6: drones in response to nine to one one calls, the
Speaker 6: first of which was Cheu La Vista PD launched their
Speaker 6: quote drone as first Responder program back in twenty eighteen
Speaker 6: with the goal of having an unmanned aerial system or
Speaker 6: drone be proactively deployed before an officer is on SENE.
Speaker 6: Now we'll hear from Chief Roxanna Kennedy of the Chula
Speaker 6: Vista Police Department talking on the drone technology panel at CEES.
Speaker 14: We are seven miles from the Mexico border, and we
Speaker 14: are the second largest city in San Diego County.
Speaker 11: So we have about two hundred.
Speaker 14: And ninety officers and we serve a community of about
Speaker 14: three hundred thousand. Because of the close proximity into the door,
Speaker 14: we have a lot of people that travel back and forth.
Speaker 14: We have a drone program that I'm awfully proud of,
Speaker 14: and we are responding proactively to calls for service in
Speaker 14: our community, and so we have drone station from botfent
Speaker 14: locations throughout our city.
Speaker 11: We have pilots in command that are on the roadtop,
Speaker 11: and then we.
Speaker 14: Have a operation center where we have smart officers that
Speaker 14: are part one to seven pilots that fly the drones.
Speaker 11: So we are responding now to calls for service.
Speaker 14: On average, an officer on seeing a drone pen on
Speaker 14: seeing that, sharing information with our officers live streaming that
Speaker 14: information on our cell phones or in our computers that
Speaker 14: we're seeing information about the call.
Speaker 11: Within ninety seconds on average.
Speaker 14: And so what it's doing for us in sual Vista
Speaker 14: and for our community is we are providing information rapidly,
Speaker 14: real time information to officers so that they can make
Speaker 14: better decisions so that everyone goes home safely. We say,
Speaker 14: the community safer, the officers are safer, and the subjects
Speaker 14: that we encounter are safer.
Speaker 11: So we're only proud of what we're doing.
Speaker 6: The way police are able to deploy drones used to
Speaker 6: be a lot more limited. The use of drones is
Speaker 6: regulated by the FFA, the Federal Aviation Administration. In most cases,
Speaker 6: the FFA requires that both hobbyists and please departments only
Speaker 6: fly drones within the operator's own line of sight. But
Speaker 6: starting back in twenty nineteen, agencies and vendors can start
Speaker 6: applying for a beyond visual line of sight or bev
Speaker 6: loss waiver from the FFA to fly drones remotely, allowing
Speaker 6: for much longer flights in restricted airspace. Chula Vista Pedi
Speaker 6: was the first department to get a BEVLOST waiver. The
Speaker 6: MIT Tech Review estimated last year that roughly two hundred
Speaker 6: and twenty five more departments now have one as well.
Speaker 14: Another thing that I always talk about because I think
Speaker 14: it's critical, is the concept of why they're using drones,
Speaker 14: what the benefit is to the community with the use
Speaker 14: of our drones. And I truly believe that when my
Speaker 14: officers can pick up their cell phone before they respond
Speaker 14: to the call and they can look and see the scene.
Speaker 11: What's happening where the individual is.
Speaker 14: If the person's facing in the middle of the park,
Speaker 14: there are no children and there are no there's nobody
Speaker 14: that's within the reach of this individual harmy, you might
Speaker 14: not have to rush into that scene so quickly. Officers
Speaker 14: can dsciate make better decisions. And I mean this is
Speaker 14: just a game changer for law enforcement and right now
Speaker 14: you know, we were the first agent agency to be
Speaker 14: involved in the integrated pilot program with the FAA.
Speaker 11: We're very proud of that that.
Speaker 14: They trusted us enough for us to be the organization
Speaker 14: that brought forward all these these ideas that are now
Speaker 14: being utilized in law enforcements. Now.
Speaker 6: I've watched a lot of videos of police talking about
Speaker 6: why they're using drones, of drone training companies talking about
Speaker 6: why police drones are so important. In one video on
Speaker 6: their website, this guy from Skyfire Consulting was talking about
Speaker 6: how police may not have had to kill tam or
Speaker 6: Rice if they simply had a drone watching beforehand so
Speaker 6: they could see that it was a toy gun, which
Speaker 6: is a ridiculous thing to say, because in the nine
Speaker 6: one call that jump started this entire police interaction, it
Speaker 6: was expressed that the caller thought the gun was probably
Speaker 6: a toy. And this notion that is simply if police
Speaker 6: have more ability to surveil, they'll be able to respond
Speaker 6: safer and apply less deadly force, I think is a
Speaker 6: pretty suspect premise. Now, the effectiveness of drone technology and
Speaker 6: law enforcement is challenging to verify and quantify the MIT
Speaker 6: Tech Review cannot find any third party studies showing that
Speaker 6: drones reduce crime, even after interviewing CVPD officers as well
Speaker 6: as drone vendors and researchers quote, nor could anyone provide
Speaker 6: statistics on how many additional arrests or convictions came from
Speaker 6: using drone technology. I was able to find some data
Speaker 6: on cvpd's website talking about how many drone initiated interactions
Speaker 6: resulted in arrests, but quantifying additional arrests seems to be
Speaker 6: a little challenging. Now if you look at cheul to
Speaker 6: PD's own drone response to stats, the vast majority of
Speaker 6: deployments I estimate around seventy percent are for what the
Speaker 6: director of investigations for the privacy rights group the Electronic
Speaker 6: Frontier Foundation refers to as quote crimes of poverty unquote,
Speaker 6: which he believes will be the target of most drone
Speaker 6: policing as opposed to violent crime. Nearly thirty percent of
Speaker 6: Chula Vista's drone deployments are for what's categorized as disturbances.
Speaker 6: Almost fifteen percent are for psychological evaluations, ten percent are
Speaker 6: for quote, check the area and information, over seven percent
Speaker 6: are for welfare checks. Six point five percent is for
Speaker 6: quote unknown problem and over six percent is for suspicious
Speaker 6: person and another six percent for traffic accidents. Now, some
Speaker 6: drone deployments do result in patrol units not having to
Speaker 6: be dispatched, but CVPD also says that drones have assisted
Speaker 6: in thousands of arrests. And I'm really not sure if
Speaker 6: having a drone following someone around is the best thing
Speaker 6: for a fifty one to fifty psych evaluation. The presence
Speaker 6: of a police officer doesn't always make the situations better either,
Speaker 6: but I don't see having a drone be a really
Speaker 6: calming presence if you think someone needs mental help. Funding
Speaker 6: a whole fleet of heavy duty surveillance drones and paying
Speaker 6: dedicated operators costs money. Now it's unclear to me how
Speaker 6: many drones to Levista PD currently has, and on their
Speaker 6: website they list ten different drone models currently being in
Speaker 6: their fleet, most of them really expensive DGI drones like
Speaker 6: the DGI Matrix, the DGI Inspire, the DGA Phantom, the
Speaker 6: dj Maverick, as well as drones from a few other
Speaker 6: random companies. But nevertheless, Chief Kennedy is very grateful for
Speaker 6: their local Police Foundation for heading up the funding for
Speaker 6: their DFR drone first Responder program. Let's hear from her.
Speaker 11: I don't know if anyone here.
Speaker 14: Is in law enforcement, but many agencies use drums and
Speaker 14: there are all different types of drones that are available.
Speaker 14: I call them reactive drums or ones that are like
Speaker 14: the tactical drums that you can use to go in
Speaker 14: on a hostage situation or a missing person, to check
Speaker 14: in the.
Speaker 11: Canyon areas, or you know, interior drones. We have drunes
Speaker 11: of grow underneath.
Speaker 14: Beds, go inside addicts, all types of different drones, and
Speaker 14: many organizations have drones like that, but a DFR drone
Speaker 14: is very unique and different because these drones are flying
Speaker 14: as you can imagine, eighteen thousand missions. It puts a
Speaker 14: lot of wear and tear on them. But that is
Speaker 14: one of the biggest challenges beyond the that of funding.
Speaker 14: So we don't have huge budgets that are abouted for
Speaker 14: drone programs, and so we've had to be very, very
Speaker 14: creative in our police department, and we were very blessed
Speaker 14: to have a police Foundation that has taken on the
Speaker 14: responsibility to help us really start our drone program and
Speaker 14: continue going forward. So funding is always going to be
Speaker 14: a challenge and dependent upon.
Speaker 11: The drone that you use. There are some drones that
Speaker 11: you can't get any as.
Speaker 14: You can't use for assets seizure funding, nor can you
Speaker 14: get grants for because sometimes when it comes to foreign
Speaker 14: may drones there are many challenges as well. So you
Speaker 14: have to think of that and then we deal with legislation.
Speaker 14: Right now, that's the new challenge that we all have.
Speaker 14: We have to bite some battles. Like I said, I'm agnostic.
Speaker 14: I want to use what's the best drum out there
Speaker 14: and protect the information and we do that with encrypted
Speaker 14: software programs that are on private servers. But you'll see
Speaker 14: that there's a lot of discussion about drones and what drones.
Speaker 11: We should use right now.
Speaker 6: We'll get back to the chief's offhanded mention of legal
Speaker 6: battles in a bit here. But Chula Vista's budgetary situation
Speaker 6: may not be as dire as the chief makes it
Speaker 6: out to be. On top of their current fifty five
Speaker 6: million dollar operating budget. Back in twenty twenty, the Loprenza
Speaker 6: newspaper revealed that departments in San Diego County had secretly
Speaker 6: been getting hundreds of millions of dollars in high tech
Speaker 6: police equipment including armored vehicles, facial recognition and phone breaking software,
Speaker 6: license plate readers, drones, ria gear, among other miscellaneous technology
Speaker 6: as a part of a DHS grant program due to
Speaker 6: their close proximity to the US Mexico border. Chula Vista
Speaker 6: was one such department, and as of twenty twenty, so
Speaker 6: four years ago, they had already received over one million
Speaker 6: dollars in grant funds from this DHS program, titled the
Speaker 6: quote Urban Area Security Initiative. Considering Chief kend these budgetary concerns,
Speaker 6: drones actually have a lot of upsides financially, as they
Speaker 6: are often a lot cheaper than alternative surveillance methods, as
Speaker 6: well as being relatively easy to deploy remotely, either with
Speaker 6: a joystick or just by clicking a point on a
Speaker 6: map from a comfy office building. Issues around this ease
Speaker 6: of use was pointed out by Dave Moss, the director
Speaker 6: of investigations for the privacy rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
Speaker 6: who was quoted in the MIT article saying, quote, up
Speaker 6: until the last like five to ten years, there was
Speaker 6: this unspoken check and balance on law enforcement power money.
Speaker 6: You cannot have a police officer standing on every corner
Speaker 6: of every street. You can't have a helicopter flying twenty
Speaker 6: four seven because of fuel and insurance is really expensive.
Speaker 6: But with all these new technologies, we don't have that
Speaker 6: check and balance anymore. That's just going to result in
Speaker 6: more people being pulled through the criminal justice system. Unquote.
Speaker 14: My officers constantly are on the air. Now, is you
Speaker 14: as more available in US? One available because it's getting
Speaker 14: them more information. Think about the fact that you can
Speaker 14: look at your cell phone. I could be anywhere in
Speaker 14: the world and I can look at kit lets me
Speaker 14: know whenever there's.
Speaker 11: A drone flock, and I can walk.
Speaker 14: I can have visual awareness, aial overlay of what's happening
Speaker 14: in my community, no matter.
Speaker 11: Where I am.
Speaker 6: Advancements in technology are leading to further normalization of police surveillance.
Speaker 6: Ten years ago, would people react to news of a
Speaker 6: twenty four hour police drone program the same way they
Speaker 6: would now? What was once the threat of Big Brother
Speaker 6: has since become a very sought after, unfetishized nanny state.
Speaker 6: In the v for Veneta graphic novel, anarchist writer Alan
Speaker 6: Moore imagined a fascist Britain characterized by surveillance cameras around
Speaker 6: every corner, and now cities around the country are setting
Speaker 6: up their own street mounted cameras linked to private security
Speaker 6: cameras and ring door cameras to create a network of
Speaker 6: life coverage around a whole city which is instantly accessible
Speaker 6: to police. The more widespread consumer adoption of new technologies
Speaker 6: like small camera mounted drones and doorbell cameras, the more
Speaker 6: acceptable it seems for police to add to such technology
Speaker 6: to their arsenal of surveillance tools. It almost becomes expected
Speaker 6: to Levis Tipdi has routinely declined to answer why their
Speaker 6: drones are always recording, both to and from the scene,
Speaker 6: and the department has put in a lot of effort
Speaker 6: into managing the backlash against their expanding drone program.
Speaker 11: And I'll tell you one thing.
Speaker 14: Even some of the after this, they were very concerned
Speaker 14: about drones in the sense of privacy.
Speaker 11: What are you doing with these drones?
Speaker 14: As you're responding, you're trying to gather data and information
Speaker 14: to spy on us, right, And we have had to
Speaker 14: go to a lot of detail and explaining that as
Speaker 14: our drama lifsaw is immediately it is recording because that's
Speaker 14: the information and gather for us as that drone responds,
Speaker 14: the camera is already going all three miles down the
Speaker 14: roads where the scene is and giving us vital information
Speaker 14: as the officers are responding. But one of the criticism was,
Speaker 14: go on the way back, is your drone just going
Speaker 14: in my backyard?
Speaker 11: What if we're smoking marijuana in our backyard? And I said,
Speaker 11: you're in California, doesn't really matter about way?
Speaker 1: Well, let that wa go right.
Speaker 14: But we said, okay, we gave your concern, and so
Speaker 14: what we did was we worked with the software company
Speaker 14: that we were with, and they created an automatic so
Speaker 14: that as a drone returns, it automatically tilts to the horizon,
Speaker 14: so we're not recording anything. If another call came out,
Speaker 14: we can immediately we'll go back in it or fight
Speaker 14: map it for us and the share that information later on.
Speaker 11: But the goal is to listen to your community as well.
Speaker 6: Chief Kennedy's claim here is difficult to back up because
Speaker 6: CVPD have refused to show with the public any of
Speaker 6: the drone footage they routinely collect. But if we take
Speaker 6: the Chief at her word here anyway, she admits that
Speaker 6: the drone goes back to recording at street level as
Speaker 6: soon as there's another nine one one call as they
Speaker 6: record everything on the way to a scene. And the
Speaker 6: way she phrases this whole tilt feature is quite misleading
Speaker 6: because the camera never actually stops recording. She just claims
Speaker 6: that it tilts slightly upwards in between nine one one calls,
Speaker 6: but it's still capturing footage up to three miles away
Speaker 6: the entire time it's in the air. Police in Cheulavista
Speaker 6: have flown over eighteen thousand missions with their drowns. That's
Speaker 6: a lot of footage. When talking about the privacy concerns
Speaker 6: had by some residents of Chewulavista, Chief Kennedy really emphasized
Speaker 6: how much her and the department really care about listening
Speaker 6: to community feedback and how data transparency is so important
Speaker 6: to CVPD.
Speaker 14: Community engagement is a si, especially in law enforcement, because
Speaker 14: there are so many challenges when it comes to misinformation
Speaker 14: that's out there, and whenever you're a part of what's
Speaker 14: deemed as a government, everyone thinks that you have some
Speaker 14: ulterior motive when you're involved with any type of technology,
Speaker 14: and so we have worked really hard to build very
Speaker 14: strong relationships with every aspect of our community. So it
Speaker 14: was about in twenty fifteen when we started talking about
Speaker 14: the concept and the possibility of drones, and I laughed
Speaker 14: with chant and said, George Jentsen, because that's my story
Speaker 14: that I used to and I love it because I
Speaker 14: made fun off my guys. When they said that we
Speaker 14: want to fly drunes, I said, oh, come on, now,
Speaker 14: what are we in beet George jetson flying rap the cars.
Speaker 11: And then I saw today they talked about a blind car.
Speaker 14: So it happens, it happens, all right. And so with
Speaker 14: the community, we started having these conversations. We created a
Speaker 14: working group, and we started doing community forums. We started
Speaker 14: asking the community about what would you think if we
Speaker 14: were able to do something like this. We even went
Speaker 14: to some of the organizations that may not.
Speaker 11: Always be so supportive of these types of groups.
Speaker 14: We work with the ASLVIE and ask for their input
Speaker 14: on our policy. So before we ever flew the drune,
Speaker 14: we call it the krawl lolock run Base. We're still
Speaker 14: at the very end of crawl. We're not into lock
Speaker 14: yet and we've been doing it again also for five years.
Speaker 11: So you have to make certain that you're transparent, and.
Speaker 14: We provided all types of information that are available if
Speaker 14: you go to. All you have put in is jobs
Speaker 14: to place drums and it'll come up with us and
Speaker 14: you can look at all the things that we do,
Speaker 14: all the information that we share, the flight maps that
Speaker 14: we share. I mean, it's just super important to have
Speaker 14: those community forums.
Speaker 11: Every year.
Speaker 14: We do a community forum twice a year where we
Speaker 14: ask for input from our community.
Speaker 6: Later on in the panel, Chief Kennedy said that CVPD
Speaker 6: is quote unquote extremely transparent about their flight data and
Speaker 6: quote unquote have nothing to hide relating to their use
Speaker 6: of surveillance drones, which is a curious claim considering the
Speaker 6: fact that CVPD has historically kept all drone footage hidden
Speaker 6: from the public and has fought in court to do so.
Speaker 6: Despite the chief's emphasis on the police's commitment to transparency
Speaker 6: and the importance of listening to community feedback, even going
Speaker 6: as far as to consult the ACLU when developing their
Speaker 6: drone program, for years now, the Cheulavista Police Department has
Speaker 6: denied all FOYA and public records requests for any drone
Speaker 6: footage in response. Are Tuno Castnares, a Cheulavista resident and
Speaker 6: owner of the local bilingual newspaper Loprenza, filed a lawsuit
Speaker 6: against the city. CVPD argued that all drone footage should
Speaker 6: be categorically exempt from the public records requests on the
Speaker 6: basis that the footage could be used for a future investigation.
Speaker 6: Just last December, only a few weeks before Cees, the
Speaker 6: California Fourth District Court of Appeals ruled that this blanket
Speaker 6: exemption is invalid and that not all drone first responder
Speaker 6: footage could be classified as a part of uppending or
Speaker 6: ongoing criminal investigation, pointing to examples such as nine one
Speaker 6: one calls about a roaming mountain lion or a stranded motorist.
Speaker 6: And police were not happy about this ruling. I'll talk
Speaker 6: about their reaction at the end of the episode, but
Speaker 6: controlling the narrative about the drone first responder program has
Speaker 6: been of the utmost importance to Trulavista Police, as the
Speaker 6: chief herself expressed at the panel, and we're real.
Speaker 11: Good about telling our story.
Speaker 14: If you don't tell your own story in law enforcement,
Speaker 14: other people will tell it for.
Speaker 11: It and it might not be the right story.
Speaker 14: So we've gotten a really good at sharing on our
Speaker 14: social media and through YouTube channels and everything.
Speaker 6: Successfulies of what we're doing that is quite the claim there,
Speaker 6: to paraphrase the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Without public access to
Speaker 6: their drone footage, it makes it very difficult to assess
Speaker 6: how much privacy you have in Cheula Vista and whether
Speaker 6: police are even following their own rules about when and
Speaker 6: whether they record sensitive places like people's homes, backyards, or
Speaker 6: public protests. And that's why this recent ruling and the
Speaker 6: legal precedent it sets is a huge win for actual
Speaker 6: transparency and marks the first step towards the public finally
Speaker 6: getting a look at how these drones are being used
Speaker 6: in Scheula Vista. With drone first Responder programs is spreading
Speaker 6: to police departments across the country modeled after the one
Speaker 6: in Chula Vesta. Combined with the increasing presence of stationary
Speaker 6: street level cameras, the ability for police to be watching
Speaker 6: everywhere without the need for on the ground officers creates
Speaker 6: what the EFF refers to as quote, a fundamental change
Speaker 6: in strategy, with police responding to a much much larger
Speaker 6: number of situations with drones, resulting in pervasive, if not persistent,
Speaker 6: surveillance of communities unquote. Speaking of persistent surveillance. Near the
Speaker 6: end of the panel, The Chief announced that to Lavesta,
Speaker 6: PD is planning to expand their ten hour a day
Speaker 6: drone first responder program to a constant twenty four hour
Speaker 6: a day drone surveillance program. More than doubling the department's
Speaker 6: capacity to have eyes in the sky would mean a
Speaker 6: lot more work hours for drone operators, as well as
Speaker 6: a large increase in the amount of video files being
Speaker 6: stored indefinitely, but Chief Kennedy claimed that they're looking into
Speaker 6: offsetting costs by replacing some of the drone piloting team
Speaker 6: with AI assisted piloting and autonomous devices.
Speaker 14: You've clearly been the leader with thrones's first responder technology.
Speaker 11: Looking forward, what is the future hold for department?
Speaker 4: I assume you're spending a lot of time telling others
Speaker 4: about the program edition using drones, but beyond that, what's up.
Speaker 14: Well, my hope is that we'll be moving towards twenty
Speaker 14: four hour operations. Right now, we're from sunrise to sunset,
Speaker 14: we go till close to ten o'clock at night, which
Speaker 14: goes a little bit beyond that.
Speaker 11: And then one of the challenges, and I.
Speaker 14: Know you're only getting like a little piece of the
Speaker 14: information about exactly how we're doing this, but from the
Speaker 14: four different locations that we fly on each of the rooftops,
Speaker 14: we have what's called the piloting command, and that piloting
Speaker 14: command is contracted through a company and we and they
Speaker 14: just have visual awareness of the sky and they work
Speaker 14: in coordination with our drone pilot inside our operations center.
Speaker 14: But that's a huge expense for us to pay lead
Speaker 14: for each site right now with the operations that we
Speaker 14: have to pay about one hundred thousand dollars per year,
Speaker 14: So that's four hundred thousand dollars for four locations beyond
Speaker 14: all the other processociating and so if you get expense
Speaker 14: and my hope is that and we keep hearing about
Speaker 14: you've see some of the testing and we've been testing
Speaker 14: it as well in our area. Are what's called drone
Speaker 14: in the box or there's some of the systems that
Speaker 14: are out there right now that organizations are using that
Speaker 14: are autonomous, and so we're getting there, but we're not
Speaker 14: quite there because it's very different when you're dealing with
Speaker 14: flying over people and you're flying into areas where the
Speaker 14: drone was to drop out the sky and harm people
Speaker 14: in our community. That could create tremendous challenges for us,
Speaker 14: so we're very As I mentioned the crawl phase, So.
Speaker 6: To explain how these AI autonomous drones would work, It's
Speaker 6: essentially this box the size of a truck bed that
Speaker 6: can either be mounted in like a police pickup truck
Speaker 6: or be stored on various rooftops around the city, and
Speaker 6: someone just needs to point at a place on a
Speaker 6: map and the drone will fly in pilot itself around
Speaker 6: obstacles and basically circle around an area to do surveillance,
Speaker 6: and you can call it back when you're done. This
Speaker 6: would require a whole bunch of drones to just be
Speaker 6: launching and being piloted by themselves. You wouldn't have to
Speaker 6: train random police officers to become FAA licensed pilots, and
Speaker 6: you could just have the whole thing in the box
Speaker 6: like it's called drone in the box. And these are
Speaker 6: only going to become more common and cheaper. Imagine having
Speaker 6: ten of these throw out a city, launching from like
Speaker 6: ten different rooftops, being able to fly around by themselves,
Speaker 6: constantly going around in communities, constantly going to GPS coordinates
Speaker 6: linked to the nine one one calls, creating a whole
Speaker 6: wealth of footage instantly available to police live streamed from
Speaker 6: the air. Matt Sloane, the founder of Skyfire Consulting, a
Speaker 6: company here in Atlanta that trains law enforcement agencies on
Speaker 6: the use of drones and DFR programs, thinks that we'll
Speaker 6: start seeing autonomous deployment of police drones within the next
Speaker 6: year or two, as police budgets increase and become allocated
Speaker 6: for unmanned aerial systems. He referred to the state of
Speaker 6: drone use by police as quote rapidly escalating. Jeu la
Speaker 6: Vista likes to market itself as a pioneer of this
Speaker 6: smart city movement, which consequently makes them able to receive
Speaker 6: a whole bunch of grant funding.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 6: The idea of the smart city is built around having
Speaker 6: a massive amount of data to automate certain city services.
Speaker 6: So for this idea to work, there needs to be
Speaker 6: a way to collect that data, and these drones are
Speaker 6: a major part of that. The website for the city
Speaker 6: of Cheu la Vista also lists projects like electronic transportation,
Speaker 6: adaptive traffic signals in app for non emergency city services,
Speaker 6: as well as quote crime map and police dispatch modernization
Speaker 6: unquote as also being smart city initiatives.
Speaker 14: We have what's called five nine one, and that allows
Speaker 14: my officers to hear incoming nine more one calls before
Speaker 14: dispatch even puts it into the system. They can hear
Speaker 14: what's going on there, and that is tremendously in.
Speaker 11: Valuable to them.
Speaker 14: We have so many different layers of technology that have
Speaker 14: really showcase the value.
Speaker 6: Live nine one one is a new piece of software
Speaker 6: that allows patrol officers to listen to live stream to
Speaker 6: nine one one calls directly and pinpoints the location of
Speaker 6: the caller via GPS. Now, I don't even have time
Speaker 6: to get into the many reasons that this could be
Speaker 6: a bad idea, but simply put, police do not need
Speaker 6: to respond to every call that goes into nine one one,
Speaker 6: let alone be giving random cops this ability to self
Speaker 6: dispatch on their own. It just seems like that could
Speaker 6: have many many consequences. But anyway, back to drones. According
Speaker 6: to a twenty twenty article in the newspaper Loprenza, cities
Speaker 6: in San Diego County like Chula Vista, have received equipment
Speaker 6: such as tethered drones used for stationary surveillance, poll cameras,
Speaker 6: license plate readers, and cell phone cracking technology used to
Speaker 6: circumvent passwords from the Urban Area Security Initiative DHS grant program.
Speaker 6: A lot of these technologies have use in the Smart
Speaker 6: City Idyllic plan for data collection to automate city services.
Speaker 6: After the drone panel was over and I was walking
Speaker 6: around the show floor at CEES, I couldn't help but
Speaker 6: notice all of the smart cameras and AI image recognition
Speaker 6: systems being advertised for law enforcement applications. Software that can
Speaker 6: almost instantaneously scan through a wealth of footage and track
Speaker 6: people's movements, run facial recognition, and identify every article of clothing.
Speaker 6: Versions of this type of software are already in US
Speaker 6: use by many police departments, and they will only get better, cheaper,
Speaker 6: and more common. In effect, what this does is remove
Speaker 6: a lot of the detective leg work. Instead of having
Speaker 6: to manually map someone's movements and track down what niche
Speaker 6: etsy shirt someone's wearing, these aisystems can now do this
Speaker 6: all automatically. To quote the MIT Tech Review article on
Speaker 6: cvpd's DFR drone program quote. As the technology continues to spread,
Speaker 6: privacy and civil liberty groups are raising the question of
Speaker 6: what happens when drones are combined with license plate readers,
Speaker 6: networks of fixed cameras, and new real time command centers
Speaker 6: that digest and sort through video evidence, this digital dragnet
Speaker 6: could dramatically expand surveillance capabilities and lead to even more
Speaker 6: police interactions with demographics that have historically suffered from over policing. Unquote.
Speaker 6: Pedro Rios, a human rights advocate with the American Friends
Speaker 6: Service Committee and a member of Chula Vista's Community Tech Council,
Speaker 6: was quoted in the MITA article saying, quote people in
Speaker 6: the community have no awareness of what images are captured,
Speaker 6: how the footage is retained, and who has access. It's
Speaker 6: a big red flag for a city that says it's
Speaker 6: at the forefront of the smart city movement. Unquote.
Speaker 14: These drawns, they're revolutionizing the world. I mean people who
Speaker 14: are not taking drawn seriously right now, who will be
Speaker 14: left behind. We have flown eighteen one hundred and fifty missions.
Speaker 14: You can go on a web page, you can see
Speaker 14: the flight data. We're extremely transparent. We share all that
Speaker 14: with our community. We have no need to hide. We
Speaker 14: are in the business of saving wise and I believe
Speaker 14: drones are one of the.
Speaker 11: Best escort folks.
Speaker 6: If they truly have nothing to hide and are extremely
Speaker 6: transparent about the use of their camera mounted drones. I
Speaker 6: wonder why they've spent years in court fighting to keep
Speaker 6: every second of drone footage from being seen by the public. Luckily,
Speaker 6: after Chief Kennedy talked for like thirty minutes about how
Speaker 6: much they care about community engagement and how transparent they
Speaker 6: are with their flight data, I was able to ask
Speaker 6: the Chief how their commitment to transparency relates to the
Speaker 6: recent lawsuit she just lost over hiding drone footage. And
Speaker 6: I also threw in a question about drones at protests.
Speaker 6: Let's take a listen. Yeah, a question for the chief.
Speaker 15: So, I know you talked about the importance of listening
Speaker 15: to the community and community engagement, and I'm not sure
Speaker 15: this is the case for your department, but other departments
Speaker 15: who've kind of followed suit, for your example, have been
Speaker 15: using drones to surveil first time in activity stuff. And
Speaker 15: I know you recently lost a court case regarding the
Speaker 15: availability of drone footage, so I'm curious about the kind
Speaker 15: of what the rationale for that footage is and how
Speaker 15: that plays into this idea of trying to be transparent
Speaker 15: with the community for how these drones are being used.
Speaker 14: That's kind of going to be a little bit difficult
Speaker 14: for me to answer because the court case is still
Speaker 14: moving forward.
Speaker 11: It's an active case. If you read it, we didn't
Speaker 11: lose the case.
Speaker 14: It was recommended to go to a lower core to
Speaker 14: go back for some clarification under three categories.
Speaker 6: Now this is either a straight upply or a huge
Speaker 6: cope and a gross mischaracterization. But more on that in
Speaker 6: a sec I think.
Speaker 11: It's really important.
Speaker 14: As I mentioned, there are ethics involved in the ethical
Speaker 14: responsibility that you have as a law enforcement agency is
Speaker 14: super important. So how you utilize your drones and how
Speaker 14: you do outrage with your community is fundamentally important. And
Speaker 14: so we don't use our drones for if there was
Speaker 14: a protest, We would not use our drones if there
Speaker 14: was if it turned into a riot.
Speaker 11: So if people.
Speaker 14: Were out there and they have the ability to to
Speaker 14: speak freely to share their concerns, and if it's in
Speaker 14: an opposition, our goal is to make sure that we
Speaker 14: keep it safe for all parties involved on either side.
Speaker 11: So my hope is that other people look.
Speaker 14: At it the same way that we do, and hopefully
Speaker 14: I've been able to answer it. As much as I
Speaker 14: believe me, I'm dying to give you more than I can't.
Speaker 6: Okay, thank you for those questions.
Speaker 11: Folks were out of time. Maybe there could be questions
Speaker 11: after the session.
Speaker 6: So yeah, there were no more questions after mine. I
Speaker 6: kind of shut down that possibility anyway.
Speaker 16: Okay.
Speaker 6: So, first of all, the line between a protest and
Speaker 6: a riot is meaningless. Police can declare riot for any
Speaker 6: reason they see fit, including people being in a road marching.
Speaker 6: I've seen this happen dozens of times, nearly hundreds of
Speaker 6: times actually, So just moving on from that immediately, let's
Speaker 6: go back to the court case. The city of true
Speaker 6: Liavista did lose the argument that they were trying to make.
Speaker 6: They did lose the case. The Fourth District Court of
Speaker 6: Appeals ruled that claiming exemption from the Public Records Act
Speaker 6: was unlawful and sent the case back to trial court
Speaker 6: to hammer the details of how much footage is subject
Speaker 6: to public disclosure and figure out a process for standardizing
Speaker 6: the release of the footage.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 6: The same day I attended this panel in Las Vegas,
Speaker 6: January ninth, the city of Chula Vista requested an appeal
Speaker 6: to the California Supreme Court to prevent the release of
Speaker 6: their aerial video footage. There is a sixty day waiting
Speaker 6: period where the High Court will decide whether or not
Speaker 6: to take the case, and if they decline finally, it
Speaker 6: will go back to trial court to decide on the
Speaker 6: process of how selected drone footage shall be made publicly available.
Speaker 6: The police are now currently claiming that making DFR footage
Speaker 6: adhere to the Public Records Act would violate the privacy
Speaker 6: of Chula Vista residents captured in the videos, which perhaps
Speaker 6: demonstrates that the aerial videos should have never been captured
Speaker 6: in the first place. I'm going to read a press
Speaker 6: release from the city's communication manager. Quote, the city declined
Speaker 6: to provide the copies because doing so might have violated
Speaker 6: individual privacy rights. The city would have to manually review
Speaker 6: and redact every video recording to protect information considered personal,
Speaker 6: such as the images of faces, license plates, backyards, and more. Unquote,
Speaker 6: So the city is both trying to argue that having
Speaker 6: to manually review each requested file to determine if the
Speaker 6: video in question is related to a pending investigation, as
Speaker 6: well as redacting personal information captured on camera, would be
Speaker 6: way too costly and time consuming. City officials claim that
Speaker 6: reviewing and redacting videos from one month to obscure faces,
Speaker 6: license plates, and backyards would take a full time employee
Speaker 6: around two hundred and thirty days. I'm going to read
Speaker 6: a little bit more from the city's recent statement. Quote,
Speaker 6: while the city takes very seriously obligation to provide the
Speaker 6: public access to public records, the city is concerned that
Speaker 6: the Court of Appeal's opinion may compromise significant privacy concerns
Speaker 6: of members of the public in this case or in
Speaker 6: future requests. Unquote. Somehow, the city is missing the point
Speaker 6: that this is the very reason the drone footage is
Speaker 6: being requested to learn the actual nature of this highly
Speaker 6: influential drone first responder program that's being adopted across the country.
Speaker 6: If the existence of this footage is such a massive
Speaker 6: privacy violation, that implies that the recording of said footage
Speaker 6: itself implicitly violates people's privacy, and the harder police fight
Speaker 6: to hide their sweeping collection of aerial footage, all the
Speaker 6: more suspicious this entire program seems.
Speaker 8: So.
Speaker 6: That is what I have to say about Chula Vista's
Speaker 6: drone first Responder program. In about a month and a half,
Speaker 6: the Supreme Court of California will make their decision on
Speaker 6: whether or not they're going to hear this case. If
Speaker 6: they decline, then the precedent will be set statewide against
Speaker 6: this exemption of the Public Records Act by hiding drone footage,
Speaker 6: so that will be really cool, and then hopefully within
Speaker 6: the next year, we'll finally be able to see what
Speaker 6: some of this footage actually looks like, how good their
Speaker 6: cameras are, how much they can zoom in, all of
Speaker 6: the details of how much of the city they're capturing,
Speaker 6: all this kind of stuff, how often the drones are
Speaker 6: in the air, all of those types of things that
Speaker 6: it will be easier to highlight once we can actually
Speaker 6: take a look at the footage. And I assume that
Speaker 6: going through and releasing requested files for one month will
Speaker 6: probably end up not taking two hundred and thirty days.
Speaker 6: But I do know how the police love to love
Speaker 6: to stretch out these public records requests for as long
Speaker 6: as they can. As the request that this lawsuit stems from,
Speaker 6: it's all the way back to April of twenty twenty one,
Speaker 6: so hopefully, hopefully more than three years later, we'll finally
Speaker 6: get a look. Special thanks to Laprenze for starting this
Speaker 6: lawsuit and doing all of the hard work to actually
Speaker 6: force the police to be transparent. And if you want
Speaker 6: to read more, I'd recommend checking out the website to
Speaker 6: Leprenza dot org, as well as the MIT tech review piece,
Speaker 6: which provided some really really useful information to fill in
Speaker 6: the gaps between my own research. So yeah, thank you
Speaker 6: for listening to It could happen here. It certainly could
Speaker 6: happen here in terms of seeing more of these little
Speaker 6: fuckers flying around in the air. It's it could happen here.
Speaker 16: The podcast that's happening right now, this is maybe the
Speaker 16: foremost of the Putting Things Back Together episodes. I'm your
Speaker 16: host Miya Wong with me as James Stout guy.
Speaker 17: He likes it to put things together.
Speaker 16: Yeah, And you know, on the subject of putting things
Speaker 16: together over the last I don't even know three four weeks,
Speaker 16: the question I have been asked the most by everyone
Speaker 16: is how do I start organizing? And you know the
Speaker 16: problem with how do I start organizing is that it's
Speaker 16: not a question that has cleaner simple answers. Now, the
Speaker 16: most common answer you get is just join an org.
Speaker 16: And the problem is that most of the people who
Speaker 16: you were hearing this from are already in an org
Speaker 16: and want you to join their org.
Speaker 17: Yeah. Also, the problem is a lot of the orgs
Speaker 17: that are currently dominating left to spaces in the in
Speaker 17: the United States are trash, yeah, and bad for people,
Speaker 17: bad people in them, bad people who are not in them.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 17: Here's a little test you can you can do, is
Speaker 17: your org currently sad that Basha a Lasad is no
Speaker 17: longer governing Syria? Because if that's the case, leave yep.
Speaker 17: And that's that's a lot of orgs that that's not me. Yeah,
Speaker 17: that takes most of them right now. We'll come back
Speaker 17: to orgs in a bit. But what I'll say about
Speaker 17: orgs is that, Okay, if you know an organization in
Speaker 17: your area that you like and you think does good
Speaker 17: work and most importantly spends their time actually doing work
Speaker 17: instead of either in fighting or talking about doing work,
Speaker 17: you join them.
Speaker 1: It will be good.
Speaker 16: But the important thing about organizations and is something we'll
Speaker 16: come back to you later. The important thing about organizations
Speaker 16: is they have a lot of people. Yeah, And the
Speaker 16: thing that makes organizing work is people. It's not organizations.
Speaker 16: It's not even necessarily ideological labels. It's there being a
Speaker 16: bunch of people who you can use and who want
Speaker 16: to do things.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 16: But something I realized that the more I had these conversations, right,
Speaker 16: you know, I'm having them with friends, I'm having them
Speaker 16: with strangers, I'm having them with other organizers. And the
Speaker 16: more I had these conversations, the more I realize something
Speaker 16: sort of startling you. The person listening to this almost
Speaker 16: certainly already knows how to organize, but you don't know
Speaker 16: that that's called organizing.
Speaker 17: Yeah, that's a very good point.
Speaker 16: I have encountered some of the most stunning or I
Speaker 16: mean organizing that like I can't discuss the specifics of,
Speaker 16: but like some of the best organizing I've ever encountered.
Speaker 16: I have ran into you in the last three weeks
Speaker 16: from people who don't think that they're organizers and started
Speaker 16: talking to me about their stuff. I was like, what, Like,
Speaker 16: people are winning victories that like the like hardcore committed
Speaker 16: organizers haven't been able to do in like thirty years. Yeah,
Speaker 16: and it's just by random people who don't think they
Speaker 16: know how to do anything.
Speaker 17: Yeah, can I tell a little organizing story. We do
Speaker 17: have time, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, go for it. So
Speaker 17: I remember in like twenty eighteen, I am on a
Speaker 17: trip with a friend. We're coming back and we see
Speaker 17: the arrival of the migrant caravan, one of the migrant caravans,
Speaker 17: the one that everyone decided to have a fucking cow
Speaker 17: about right before the twenty eighteen mid terms. And at
Speaker 17: that time, they were corraling the people of the migrant
Speaker 17: caravan in a baseball stadium in Tijuana, and like it
Speaker 17: was raining every day, So the baseball stadium ends up
Speaker 17: looking like the Battle of the Psalm after like a
Speaker 17: couple of days, right, you know, kids in leady mud
Speaker 17: and shit, and I particularly know what to do, but
Speaker 17: evidently there were people there who were hungry and thirsty,
Speaker 17: and so I get three of my friend my friends.
Speaker 17: At this time, I was still making about half my
Speaker 17: many riding bicycles and in the other half riding so
Speaker 17: my friends and I was supposed to do a long
Speaker 17: bike ride. All of us are people who make a
Speaker 17: living riding bikes, right, we're not like expert organizers. And
Speaker 17: I was like, hey, guys, this is fucked. Which we do.
Speaker 17: We called a friend who has a company who makes waffles.
Speaker 17: Where we obtained like as many waffles as we could
Speaker 17: physically carry across the border. At that time, we weren't
Speaker 17: able to get in. We found a way to get in.
Speaker 17: We began distributing the waffles. After that, we put something online,
Speaker 17: people sent us money, and we continued feeding people for months.
Speaker 17: None of us, I think, had a particular plan or
Speaker 17: a scheduled. Yeah, it is a bit chaotic at times,
Speaker 17: but we were able to do that, and we're with
Speaker 17: a lot of other people. Clearly wasn't just us right,
Speaker 17: but we were able to process tenths of thousands of
Speaker 17: dollars and feed thousands of people. Be everyone there, And
Speaker 17: I've seen this countless times, especially working and organizing with
Speaker 17: well with refugees. For the most part, people are so
Speaker 17: good at organizing each other in themselves. Like when we
Speaker 17: got there with bottles of water and food. There are
Speaker 17: a thousand people that who have not had sometimes to
Speaker 17: drink for days, let alone more than a thousand, I think,
Speaker 17: let alone something hot to eat. Right, Everybody made sure
Speaker 17: that the children and the sick people got what they
Speaker 17: needed first. Organizing is something that is very inherent in
Speaker 17: us as people. It just we don't call it that.
Speaker 16: Yeah, And that's part of what I want to try
Speaker 16: to the myth. I want to try to puncture with
Speaker 16: this because I think, particularly in the US, but this
Speaker 16: is true in a lot of places. There's this way
Speaker 16: in which the organizer sort of TM capital T capital O,
Speaker 16: the organizer gets held up as this sort of I guess,
Speaker 16: even a particularly masculinist thing, which is it's this guy
Speaker 16: with specialized knowledge.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and that's just not true.
Speaker 16: This brings us something that I think is actually really important,
Speaker 16: which is what what even is organizing?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 16: And the answer is that most organizing is you get
Speaker 16: you get a group of people together, you get them
Speaker 16: to show up to something, and then you do something right.
Speaker 16: And the thing about this, right, that's something all of
Speaker 16: you know how to do. If you can organize a
Speaker 16: dinner party, right, if you can get eight people to
Speaker 16: show up to a place to eat dinner, you can
Speaker 16: do this. It is it is largely the same skill sets,
Speaker 16: and all of the skill sets that make people good
Speaker 16: organizers are skill sets that you have to develop to
Speaker 16: you know, work a job right. You know, like one
Speaker 16: of the things that comes up a lot in this
Speaker 16: which is less discussed and also kind of annoying. But
Speaker 16: you know, you have to manage it is that organizing
Speaker 16: is about people and sometimes you have to you know,
Speaker 16: you have to do things like you have to manage
Speaker 16: people's egos. But like, I don't know, almost all of
Speaker 16: you work jobs or have work jobs, right, you have
Speaker 16: had to like deal with your boss being on one right,
Speaker 16: you have the skills to do this. You know how
Speaker 16: to do the interpersonal relationship stuff. It's just that you
Speaker 16: don't think about that as organizing, even though that's that's
Speaker 16: just what it is.
Speaker 17: Yeah, that's the core of it is get people to
Speaker 17: do stuff like you do it every day.
Speaker 16: Yeah, And the way you do this is by building
Speaker 16: relationships with people, right, And this isn't necessarily friendships, although
Speaker 16: that works. And like, one of the easiest ways to
Speaker 16: start organizing is by getting all of your friends together
Speaker 16: because you're already friends, you have pre existing relationships, and
Speaker 16: being like, Okay, motherfuckers, we gotta go do something. And
Speaker 16: actually I love that The first thing that you brought
Speaker 16: up was an admittedly sort of medium ish scale lift
Speaker 16: version of this. But one of the very easiest things
Speaker 16: that you can do is you can just get food
Speaker 16: of some kind. You can either buy it or you
Speaker 16: can make it yourself, and you and a group of
Speaker 16: like eight people, not even eight people, you can do
Speaker 16: it with lower I know people who've done this just solo.
Speaker 16: Is that you can just go give food to people. Yeah,
Speaker 16: literally it was this morning.
Speaker 6: So I'm tired.
Speaker 17: Yesterday morning, I have some mine house neighbors, right and
Speaker 17: it was cold, and so I went out and gave
Speaker 17: them some hot breakfast, so hot coffee. It's super easy
Speaker 17: to do. If you are struggling wherever you are, maybe
Speaker 17: you're finding it hard to make friends. I know that's
Speaker 17: the thing that people often struggle, especially if you've moved
Speaker 17: to a new place or post pandemic, or you're still
Speaker 17: concerned with Liuvede gatherings or any of those things. Like,
Speaker 17: if you start doing that, you will find other people
Speaker 17: who want to do it too, Like so many of
Speaker 17: my friends I organize with are people Like when we
Speaker 17: had the end of Title forty two and people were
Speaker 17: in between the fences that a lot of the people
Speaker 17: who I organize with now or who helped people with now,
Speaker 17: I didn't know. I just showed up with a giant
Speaker 17: sider generator that I happened to have and some stuff
Speaker 17: that we had to whip around a call zone for
Speaker 17: and like, people who care about the same things as
Speaker 17: you are generally cool and it's a good way to
Speaker 17: make friends, and then you can go on from there.
Speaker 16: Yeah, and there's a second compounding thing here too, which
Speaker 16: is that you know, feeding people it's a way to
Speaker 16: build relationships with people. And also it's a really good
Speaker 16: way for people to get to know you in general
Speaker 16: and know that you are someone who will help them
Speaker 16: with things. Yeah, and from there, and this is a
Speaker 16: very common exception. I mean this is I literally had
Speaker 16: this conversation with one of my friends who's like an
Speaker 16: old school food not Bombs organizer. Food Nut Bombs is
Speaker 16: a very very it's a cool organization. You can just
Speaker 16: like found a food nut Bobs chapter. They have like
Speaker 16: a couple of principles, or you can just do your
Speaker 16: own thing. And I'm pretty sure it's still like the
Speaker 16: largest anarchist project in the world. Yeah, because all it
Speaker 16: takes is you and like three other people and you
Speaker 16: just go feed people. But the thing is from doing that, right,
Speaker 16: if there's other things that you're concerned about, people will
Speaker 16: bring you their problems and you can help them doing it.
Speaker 16: And this is a very good way to get into
Speaker 16: other kinds of organizing because suddenly, once you start building
Speaker 16: these relationships, everything sort of cycles and cycles, and you know,
Speaker 16: you get involved in more and more things. Yeah, and
Speaker 16: that's kind of a that's kind of a late stage
Speaker 16: thing that we're sort of jumping to a bit. But
Speaker 16: I want to go back to the beginnings of how so,
Speaker 16: how do you get a group of people together to
Speaker 16: do a thing? And the answer is you kind of
Speaker 16: already know how to because you you, presumably at some
Speaker 16: point in your life, have like organized a group of
Speaker 16: friends to go do something, right, Like I've gotten a
Speaker 16: group of people together to go accomplish a task.
Speaker 17: Yeah, and it could literally be anything, right like, yeah,
Speaker 17: if you've got some people to go to a bar,
Speaker 17: you have the skills.
Speaker 16: One way I've been thinking about it recently and in
Speaker 16: my project is putting is thinking about it as like
Speaker 16: putting together a heist crew.
Speaker 6: And Okay, I could vouch for this, right.
Speaker 16: The feeling of walking up to eight people and telling
Speaker 16: them individually, I'm putting together a team and I want
Speaker 16: you it is. It feels you can just do it.
Speaker 16: There is nothing stopping you. Nothing in the world can
Speaker 16: stop you from just walking up to your friend and going,
Speaker 16: I'm putting together a team. And it feels exactly as
Speaker 16: good as you think it would from a ice movie.
Speaker 5: It rules.
Speaker 6: It's so fun, amazing.
Speaker 16: Yeah, and and but this gets into also what kinds
Speaker 16: of people you want to do right, because obviously you
Speaker 16: know there's two vectors of this. There's on the one hand,
Speaker 16: you have the aspect of okay, who do you know, right,
Speaker 16: And a lot of organizing is just about, here is
Speaker 16: a problem, and I know someone who has some sort
Speaker 16: of skill or resource that can that can help deal
Speaker 16: with it, and you put people in touch with each other,
Speaker 16: and that's organizing. That's so much organizing is literally just hey,
Speaker 16: like I have like a broken part of my car.
Speaker 16: I know someone who's like a car mechanic, right, and
Speaker 16: you put them in touch and you have successfully organized people,
Speaker 16: and you have built relationships, and you have made all
Speaker 16: of the sort of social web that creates organizing, you've
Speaker 16: made it stronger. Yeah, it also just feels good because
Speaker 16: you know and that that's an auxiliary benefit to all
Speaker 16: of this is that it's a great It's a great
Speaker 16: way to sort of break break the isolation we're all under.
Speaker 17: Yeah, I think the best solution for despair is I'm
Speaker 17: thinking of a quotation here something that the busy bee
Speaker 17: have no time for despair. But the thing that makes
Speaker 17: me feel better about the world is that I have
Speaker 17: seen that people can fix massive problems with very few
Speaker 17: resources by just showing up. And like, I think, organizing
Speaker 17: is what gives me, what allows me to enter this
Speaker 17: period of time that we're entering into with a with
Speaker 17: a great deal more hope than I otherwise would have done.
Speaker 16: Yeah, and do you know what else will help you
Speaker 16: enter your situation?
Speaker 17: Is it the products and services that support this podcast.
Speaker 16: I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, but
Speaker 16: we are not in control of the length of the ads.
Speaker 1: They just do it.
Speaker 6: We're sorry, here's.
Speaker 1: A really long period of ads. I'm so sorry. We
Speaker 1: are back.
Speaker 16: So I want to I want to return to my
Speaker 16: highest creer if. I don't know if you're a D
Speaker 16: and D person, the other way you can think about
Speaker 16: this is you're putting to either like a Dungeons and
Speaker 16: Dragons party or like an RPG party. And the way
Speaker 16: you need to think about this is Okay, so you've
Speaker 16: picked a thing that you want to do.
Speaker 11: Right.
Speaker 16: You see, you've seen something in the world that is
Speaker 16: bad and you figure it. You go, okay, I can
Speaker 16: do this thing to solve it. And maybe and maybe
Speaker 16: that's you know, it's literally something as simple as feeding people.
Speaker 16: Maybe that's you know, I want to start. I want
Speaker 16: to start doing tenants organizing. I want to start because
Speaker 16: my rent is too high, right, people are getting evicted.
Speaker 16: I want to start doing like immigration defense.
Speaker 14: Yeah.
Speaker 16: And from there you make a list and that list
Speaker 16: is you know what you're interested in doing, and you
Speaker 16: try to match what things need to be done with
Speaker 16: people you know who have those skills. Yeah, and this
Speaker 16: is you know this, this is this is where you
Speaker 16: release get into the higst things, right, because everyone has
Speaker 16: their sort of like highst role. Now, obviously, part of
Speaker 16: this that you want is you want to create sort
Speaker 16: of balanced teams, right. You want people who have overlapping strengths,
Speaker 16: so you don't just have only one person who can
Speaker 16: do a thing. And part of the way to successful
Speaker 16: organization works over time. And I mean just how successful
Speaker 16: organizing works is that eventually you are trying to organize
Speaker 16: yourself out of a job, which is to say, you
Speaker 16: want your organization to function such that if you're not
Speaker 16: able to do it, you know, or just you're gone,
Speaker 16: or you cycle onto a next thing, or you know,
Speaker 16: any any number of things that can happen. You want
Speaker 16: the organization to still be able to keep working without you,
Speaker 16: and you want you want you're trying to get people
Speaker 16: to be able to replace you as the person who's
Speaker 16: like organizing the thing, right. Yeah, And at this point
Speaker 16: we can start talking about the kinds of skills that
Speaker 16: people need for organizing, and a lot of people and
Speaker 16: this is unbelievably common when I talk to people, and
Speaker 16: like especially women and especially like a lot of non
Speaker 16: binary people and trans people particularly have this is that
Speaker 16: people don't believe that they have any skills. And then
Speaker 16: you talk to them for five seconds and they're like, well,
Speaker 16: I'm good at carrying heavy objects, right, I'm good with kids,
Speaker 16: which is a huge one. We'll get you in a second, right,
Speaker 16: Or like, I don't know, I have a call. That's
Speaker 16: a huge skill. There are so many different skills that
Speaker 16: are so useful for so many things. I'm just gonna
Speaker 16: go over lots of things that are actually really useful
Speaker 16: to get to get people a sense of like the
Speaker 16: kinds of things that there are. There are massive roles
Speaker 16: for so one of the most important ones, and this
Speaker 16: is something you can you deliberately look for. You know,
Speaker 16: this is this is one of the things you do
Speaker 16: at the beginning of any union organizing campaign. Someone who's
Speaker 16: good at talking to other people and making friends. That
Speaker 16: is a staggeringly useful person because again, most most organizing
Speaker 16: is just talking to people and building relationships. And you know,
Speaker 16: one of the things you do when you're when you're
Speaker 16: doing your sort of they call it power mapping, but
Speaker 16: when when you when you're figuring out how you're going
Speaker 16: to organize a workplace is you find the person who
Speaker 16: everyone likes and talks to and respects, and you talk
Speaker 16: to that person because that person can you know, can
Speaker 16: sort of like organize people down the chain because they
Speaker 16: have they have their relationships already and also they're good
Speaker 16: they'll be good at, you know, talking to new people
Speaker 16: and and spreading your organization that way. And so, like,
Speaker 16: you know, if you're just someone who's social or and
Speaker 16: this is also very useful if you have a friend
Speaker 16: who is very social, because I know a lot of
Speaker 16: us are oporary social. But you probably have a friend
Speaker 16: that you're thinking of right now who is very good
Speaker 16: at conversations that is charming and is good at making friendships.
Speaker 16: That person unbelievably useful, incredibly useful and compelling skill.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 16: There are also things like research people who are good
Speaker 16: at and I think people are much better at research
Speaker 16: than they think to take like a ten a's organizing example. Right,
Speaker 16: one of the common things you have to do is
Speaker 16: find out stuff about a landlord, right, Yeah, and there's
Speaker 16: the higher difficulty version of that, which isn't that hard. Also,
Speaker 16: I want to mention this, but like going to a
Speaker 16: courthouse and finding records about who owns property companies that
Speaker 16: high it's not that hard. It's like you could just
Speaker 16: do it, right, It's not as hard as you think
Speaker 16: it is from someone saying it. But there's also even
Speaker 16: just easier things than that, right, that all of you
Speaker 16: probably already know how to do, which is just looking
Speaker 16: at someone's social media profiles and finding out information about them. Yeah,
Speaker 16: and this is very useful, yeah, for like union campaign bosses.
Speaker 17: If you've ever been a person who uses dating apps,
Speaker 17: especially if you're a woman, Yeah, yeah, then you know
Speaker 17: how to ocin. Actually maybe you don't credit yourself with
Speaker 17: that skill, but one hundred percent that like, you've developed
Speaker 17: that skill to keep yourself safe and you can use
Speaker 17: it for good.
Speaker 16: Do you want to explain what ocenter is?
Speaker 6: And yes? How that how that process works?
Speaker 15: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Sure?
Speaker 17: So open source intelligence is it's an acreum doesn't really
Speaker 17: need to exist. It's gathering information of open sources, things
Speaker 17: that are openly accessible, right as opposed to like humint,
Speaker 17: which is like being a spy, or singint, which is
Speaker 17: capturing signals. Open source information is you're creeping someone's Instagram,
Speaker 17: creeping their Facebook, looking at the weird fucking shit that
Speaker 17: they put on good Reads.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 17: All the data that is out there, largely on the Internet,
Speaker 17: about us. A lot of people put a lot of
Speaker 17: information on the Internet, and it's very easy. And I
Speaker 17: would imagine that if you're under fifty and maybe if
Speaker 17: you're over fifty two, like you just know how to
Speaker 17: do this because it's what you do anyway you want
Speaker 17: to find out about someone, And especially if you are
Speaker 17: a person who goes on dates with people who you
Speaker 17: haven't met before and haven't been introduced to by a
Speaker 17: mutual friend, but you meet on the internet, you probably
Speaker 17: already do this to keep yourself safe.
Speaker 16: Yeah, and this is something that's very useful for I mean,
Speaker 16: there's so many use cases for this, right There's you know,
Speaker 16: there's the very obvious ones where you're dealing with the
Speaker 16: local Nazi and you're trying to organize around like running
Speaker 16: them out. People say from them and you can find
Speaker 16: information about them. But I mean, it's useful for cops
Speaker 16: who are beating people. Is useful for like politicians particularly,
Speaker 16: It can be very useful for it's useful for landlords.
Speaker 16: This happens all the time. It can be very very
Speaker 16: useful for bosses and union campaigns. Unions have like teams
Speaker 16: of researchers usually to like do this kind of stuff.
Speaker 16: But the thing is also and this is something I
Speaker 16: don't think people understand. Those guys, like the people they're
Speaker 16: hiring to be researchers are just you, but they got
Speaker 16: a job being a researcher for a union. Like they
Speaker 16: have the same skills as you. They know how to
Speaker 16: like Google stuff, and they know how to look through
Speaker 16: people's like data profiles and like look through their their
Speaker 16: facebooks and their Instagrams and like A big one, A
Speaker 16: big one that that the rich people especially do not
Speaker 16: think about, is like cash app and venmo oh venop
Speaker 16: because yeah, yeah, because because people's peoples trying, people just
Speaker 16: leave public transactions out there like that. That's how they
Speaker 16: got what's his name, the congressional magates. Can I legally
Speaker 16: call him the congressional pedophile? I guess they call him
Speaker 16: the accused pedophile?
Speaker 17: Yeah, yeah, the man credibly accused of sleeping with an
Speaker 17: underage woman lots of times, you know.
Speaker 16: And one of the ways they found that was that
Speaker 16: and also like paying paying for that right, yes, which
Speaker 16: is which is rape. By the way, I want to
Speaker 16: be very clear about that, like, yeah, having sex with
Speaker 16: someone who is underage is rape.
Speaker 6: It is always rape, you know.
Speaker 16: And the way people found that was that they just
Speaker 16: looked through like his cash app history and they found
Speaker 16: all of these money transfers to people. You know, this
Speaker 16: is all very very simple stuff. That's that's very very
Speaker 16: useful organizing wise, that you already know.
Speaker 1: How to do.
Speaker 15: Yeah.
Speaker 17: Pinterest is another absolute back to people. Yeah, so much
Speaker 17: people on a pinning that they be pinning.
Speaker 16: You know, if if you're hearing some of these things
Speaker 16: and you think that you can figure out how to
Speaker 16: do this. That's also a huge skill. Finding people who
Speaker 16: are willing to learn things and willing to learn new
Speaker 16: skills is a huge benefit to organizers because you know this,
Speaker 16: this gives you, Like, this gives you a flexible person, right,
Speaker 16: it gives it gives you someone you can like flex
Speaker 16: into into any of a bunch of roles that you need.
Speaker 16: And also can you know, pick up skills to learn things.
Speaker 16: Having a car, being able to drive, and I know
Speaker 16: a lot of you don't do this, but if you
Speaker 16: do do this, this is you immediately, even if you
Speaker 16: literally cannot contribute anything else to a project. Being able
Speaker 16: to just drive a bunch of water to a place,
Speaker 16: oh yeah, huge, staggeringly useful.
Speaker 17: The amount of things that people can't access because they
Speaker 17: can't get there, it's vast, especially when I when I
Speaker 17: talk to migrants, right, have recently arrived in the US.
Speaker 17: They don't have a US cell phone, they can't uber.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 17: Oftentimes nowadays you can't even pay for mass transit with cash.
Speaker 17: You have to have a special card and then you
Speaker 17: have to get to the place to get the card. Right.
Speaker 17: The problems you can solve by being able to drive
Speaker 17: someone five miles are enormous, especially in the US where
Speaker 17: everything is designed around everyone owning a motor car at
Speaker 17: all times.
Speaker 5: Yep.
Speaker 16: Yeah, And like transport based skills are also very useful.
Speaker 16: I mean, if you hike a lot, that's a very
Speaker 16: very useful skill. There's a lot of sort of mutual
Speaker 16: aid projects. There's a lot of you know, I mean
Speaker 16: even things like setting up summer camps is the thing
Speaker 16: that like leftist groups do right, and being able to
Speaker 16: hike very good for that. It's good for things like
Speaker 16: wilderness rescue. There's a lot of you know, the jams,
Speaker 16: like the work you do that has to do with
Speaker 16: like going in helping migrants. Like being able to hike
Speaker 16: is staggeringly useful skill.
Speaker 17: Yeah, yeah, it's very like, it's useful, it's important. It's
Speaker 17: okay if that's not something you can physically do or
Speaker 17: you know that that works for the way you like
Speaker 17: to live your life. Like another thing I was thinking
Speaker 17: of which can be mass important and people don't realize
Speaker 17: is if you know how to take off a tail
Speaker 17: light and replace the bulb in it. Yes, Like we're
Speaker 17: entering a time when people with DAKA, people with TPS.
Speaker 17: People who are undocumented, people are on temporary migration statuses
Speaker 17: are going to be definitely afraid of any interaction with
Speaker 17: law enforcement. If you can change the bulb on someone's
Speaker 17: tail light or their turn signal indicators of US in
Speaker 17: the UK, then you can meaningfully protect that person in
Speaker 17: a really important way. And it can literally take ten minutes.
Speaker 16: And this is something that you can scale up depending
Speaker 16: on how much skill you have. Right, there's even just
Speaker 16: very basic auto maintenance stuff is very useful for stuff
Speaker 16: like this. But you know, like if you're a carpenter, right,
Speaker 16: if you're an electrician, you do some kind of trade work, right,
Speaker 16: you do plumbing, right, That is the thing that is
Speaker 16: massively useful to a lot of people. There's a lot
Speaker 16: of other kind of just skills that you have from
Speaker 16: your job that can be very useful. I mean, having
Speaker 16: someone to manage spreadsheet, oh yeah, yeah, is staggeringly useful.
Speaker 16: And another one that I think people don't understand that
Speaker 16: they really have, but like being able to set up
Speaker 16: a meeting and like having a thing that lets you
Speaker 16: be like, okay, here's when everyone is free. Like you
Speaker 16: probably have to do this for your job or just
Speaker 16: for you know, trying to get your friends to go
Speaker 16: even just like be on a call together or like
Speaker 16: go have food or like just do anything. That is
Speaker 16: what literally, genuinely one of the most important skills you
Speaker 16: can possibly have as an organizer is the ability to
Speaker 16: just sort of like go talk to people and be like, hey,
Speaker 16: can you show up to this thing here?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 16: And that is that is so much of just what
Speaker 16: organizing is. Can you be here at this time? And
Speaker 16: then trying to figure out a time.
Speaker 17: Yeah.
Speaker 16: So we're going to close out this sort of skill
Speaker 16: section with some I think just sort of like domestic
Speaker 16: ese skills that I don't think people realize are super useful.
Speaker 16: If you have a button maker, you are instantly the
Speaker 16: same most useful person in any organization.
Speaker 1: I love that.
Speaker 16: Yeah, well, you could obtain a button maker. They're very
Speaker 16: easy to use. But if you have one or you
Speaker 16: know the person who has the button maker, and suddenly
Speaker 16: you can just crank out buttons for every single event
Speaker 16: they rule. Everyone loves them. It helps, It helps me enormously.
Speaker 16: It's awesome.
Speaker 17: That's a badge for those us in the Commonwealth. Also,
Speaker 17: if you have a sewing machine, Yeah, I was about
Speaker 17: to mention that, yeah, yeah, you're a hero.
Speaker 12: Yeah.
Speaker 17: One of my friends recently made me a little patch
Speaker 17: and it's really cool and I like it and putting
Speaker 17: all my stuff. But if you can sew, like, that's
Speaker 17: a skill that I do not have. And it's so
Speaker 17: great when people can fix stuff for someone or you know,
Speaker 17: make stuff fit someone. You know, if you're a person
Speaker 17: who finds it hard to get clothes that you like
Speaker 17: to wear that make you feel good and someone one
Speaker 17: of my friends could do that. And one of my
Speaker 17: friends was making clothes for another friend for like a
Speaker 17: renaissance fair, and like it was the nicest thing I've
Speaker 17: seen someone do for someone else in a very long time.
Speaker 17: It really made her like, yeah, feel like nice and
Speaker 17: cared for. And like you might think that like this
Speaker 17: is just a weird little thing that you like to
Speaker 17: do with your sewing machine, but you can meaningfully really
Speaker 17: make someone feel cared for using that.
Speaker 16: Yeah, And that's a huge part of what organizing is right,
Speaker 16: and and that that goes into one of the things
Speaker 16: that is also an appreciable skill that's very useful, is
Speaker 16: I mean just like being nice to people, being kind
Speaker 16: to people, and having people around who are good at
Speaker 16: like keeping groups together. Yeah, and that's its own distinct
Speaker 16: kind of person is someone who can you know, keep
Speaker 16: all of the people who are involved in a thing
Speaker 16: enjoying being around each other. That's that's that's a kind
Speaker 16: of person who's very valuable. And it's something that you
Speaker 16: can look for, you know. And if that's not you,
Speaker 16: like you can there's something you can you know, find
Speaker 16: in your friends. You can find in the sort of
Speaker 16: the people around you.
Speaker 17: Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 16: There's also something that I think you can tell when
Speaker 16: an organization is collapsing, because this is like the first
Speaker 16: thing with the quality drops drawing and graphic design are
Speaker 16: very very useful because a big part of what you
Speaker 16: do organizing is like you make a flyer and you
Speaker 16: put a flyer on a bunch of telephone poles to
Speaker 16: tell people that there's a thing happening. Yea, and yeah,
Speaker 16: you know, and this is also something you know later
Speaker 16: on you might be making a social media presence, but
Speaker 16: just having good artists and having good graphic design people
Speaker 16: is enormously useful for this kind of stuff. Yeah, And
Speaker 16: along this line, these things like making music and there's
Speaker 16: a bunch of different ways this can go this can
Speaker 16: be an immediate thing where you know, like you have
Speaker 16: people on a picket line, right and everyone's singing songs
Speaker 16: and this is great. We love this also, and this
Speaker 16: is another thing that you can be thinking about in
Speaker 16: terms of what skills you have and what things you
Speaker 16: can create benefit shows. This has been a huge part
Speaker 16: of a lot of how some of the Union stuff
Speaker 16: up here has been getting funded is by just having
Speaker 16: like punk benefit shows. And if that's the thing that
Speaker 16: you can do, well, you know, people in bands, you
Speaker 16: know people who make music, you know people who just
Speaker 16: make stuff who are willing to contribute it to the cause,
Speaker 16: that's great.
Speaker 17: I remember one of we had one night last September
Speaker 17: so cold. We were in the desert and I'm like
Speaker 17: a thousand people, right, and we were at that point
Speaker 17: we were really struggling to feed everyone, even you know,
Speaker 17: because there was so few of us. But my friend
Speaker 17: bought out like their guitar and some bongo drums they had,
Speaker 17: and I think I had my harmonica in my truck,
Speaker 17: and like we were sitting around with these. We had
Speaker 17: some seek guys, had some Weiga folks come from China,
Speaker 17: and then some Kourdish people and they were all displaying
Speaker 17: their different music and it was so nice like that,
Speaker 17: taking people out of a shitty situation for a moment
Speaker 17: with music. Again, like, don't underestimate how important that it.
Speaker 17: Don't feel like if you have that skill, it's not
Speaker 17: a useful one.
Speaker 16: No, And this is something I've been starting to say
Speaker 16: more and more. If you need a three brained way
Speaker 16: to say this to someone who like is is like
Speaker 16: a curmudgety marksist who hates fun. Moral is it terrain
Speaker 16: of struggle that this is. There's a reason why morale
Speaker 16: is one of the most important factors of military campaigns.
Speaker 16: You can't get people to do things if they're too
Speaker 16: depressed to do it. Yeah, And being able to raise
Speaker 16: people's morale, it's it's this massive if you want again,
Speaker 16: want to go into technical language, is a massive force
Speaker 16: multiplayer right, It makes everyone you have enormously more effective,
Speaker 16: the better they feel about themselves and the better they
Speaker 16: feel about the situation they're in. And things like music,
Speaker 16: things like art, I mean things like pulling pranks.
Speaker 6: This thing, yeah, if you were, if.
Speaker 16: You were a good practical jokester, this is a staggeringly
Speaker 16: useful skill. Both like in terms of you know, you
Speaker 16: need to be careful about whether you're you're playing your
Speaker 16: pranks on like other people in the org. But like
Speaker 16: you know, if you know how to just like pull pranks,
Speaker 16: this is a really really useful thing in like union campaigns,
Speaker 16: tenants organizing. There are a lot of people who you
Speaker 16: can prank and it's very funny and it lowers their
Speaker 16: morale and it raises your morale.
Speaker 17: Yeah, and I can bet to you music as are
Speaker 17: like like morale is a terrain of struggle. Like the
Speaker 17: other memory I have last year of playing guitars is
Speaker 17: in Rajava, being inside at night because everyone was getting
Speaker 17: drone struck all the time and it was dangerous to
Speaker 17: be driving around, sitting around with some ZD friends and
Speaker 17: like we spent all night playing the ood, which is
Speaker 17: like a it's like a guitar with a gord on
Speaker 17: the bottom of it. To describe it, like it's a
Speaker 17: string instrument. It's a string instrument, is what it is.
Speaker 17: And like that made everyone so happy. We had such
Speaker 17: a nice evening. Everyone was able to like get through
Speaker 17: it's a relatively difficult thing. Like, you know, it sucks
Speaker 17: that people are being killed and just for driving around
Speaker 17: are existing, and they're bombing all this c really infrastructure,
Speaker 17: and the power keeps going out and all these things, right, like,
Speaker 17: but there's a reason that those people have kept ood
Speaker 17: around after fifteen thirteen years of war, and it's because
Speaker 17: it is important, and so don't overlook that.
Speaker 16: And you know, and resisting fear is in a huge
Speaker 16: aspect of this, right, A lot of the ways that
Speaker 16: people like a lot of the ways that you demobilize people.
Speaker 16: This is, this is why regimes like this spend a
Speaker 16: lot of effort trying to make people afraid. He is
Speaker 16: that it makes it harder for you to act. And
Speaker 16: things that you know, the things that make you less afraid,
Speaker 16: even if they sort of seem silly, are very very important.
Speaker 16: And you know, on sort of this note, one of
Speaker 16: the things that you know, as you've assembled your group
Speaker 16: of people, right, one of the things that that that's
Speaker 16: important to be able to sort of have a grasp
Speaker 16: on is that you can't just do organizing by having
Speaker 16: it only be the capital, the serious thing, the captialty
Speaker 16: organizing thing all the time. Your organization will not hold together.
Speaker 16: There has to be actual like bonds formed between you
Speaker 16: and the people you're organizing. With and the people you're
Speaker 16: trying to help.
Speaker 17: I don't want to call out any organization in particular,
Speaker 17: there is an organization that perceives organizing to exist solely
Speaker 17: in the realm of wearing a high based vest and
Speaker 17: carrying a clipboard and getting people to write their email
Speaker 17: addresses down and then telling them to attend things. And
Speaker 17: like maybe there are several organizations like that.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 17: I've just I've perceived one locally. If you don't have
Speaker 17: those bonds that like those interpersonal relationships, like these things
Speaker 17: won't hang together. Like yeah, So many of my happiest
Speaker 17: organizing memories, like again going down James's memory Lane, I
Speaker 17: guess I have a memory of like Christmas Eve last year,
Speaker 17: twenty twenty three, me and my friends have been out.
Speaker 17: I know some of them listen because some of them
Speaker 17: have come across from different states to help us at
Speaker 17: Christmas Holidays, which is nice. And it was cold, and
Speaker 17: we had been feeding people all day, and then we'd
Speaker 17: heard some people in another location that we'd gone to find,
Speaker 17: and then we got to the end of the day
Speaker 17: and like, rather than just going home, I had a
Speaker 17: bunch of we had some MRIs left the refugee emory
Speaker 17: sort of vegan. Lots of us are vegan, so we
Speaker 17: were like, we're not going to find any other vegan
Speaker 17: food in the middle of nowhere out here, so we'll
Speaker 17: set around eating the little vegan MREs and like just
Speaker 17: talking and like sharing some thoughts and things we experience
Speaker 17: over the last months of doing this, And like, it's
Speaker 17: those moments that make you're organizing groups so much stronger.
Speaker 17: No one's telling anyone to do anything, you know, there's
Speaker 17: genuine bonds and that the love and friendship we build
Speaker 17: up between each other doing things that are very important.
Speaker 17: Don't overlook the value of those because it's extremely valuable.
Speaker 16: And this is something that I think you can understand
Speaker 16: in your own life pretty easily, where Okay, if a
Speaker 16: random person on the street walks up to you and
Speaker 16: tells you to go do something, are you going to
Speaker 16: do it?
Speaker 6: It's like no, why? No?
Speaker 16: Probably not, Like I don't know, Maybe it's something like
Speaker 16: really sort of, hey, there's children in a burning building.
Speaker 16: We're going to run in and grab them, but like
Speaker 16: the odds are no, you're going to ignore them. But
Speaker 16: if your friend goes and tells you to do the
Speaker 16: same thing, and you know you've been friends with them
Speaker 16: for a long time and you really care about them,
Speaker 16: the odds of you doing it are much much higher.
Speaker 16: And that's that's all organizing is. It's finding ways to
Speaker 16: You have a thing to do, and you go talk
Speaker 16: to people and you ask if they want to help
Speaker 16: you do it. Yeah, And the stronger your relationships are,
Speaker 16: the more lucky that is to happen. And that's why
Speaker 16: it's very important to do things like you know, just
Speaker 16: like having potlucks, like bringing snacks to meetings. Oh yeah,
Speaker 16: and like you know, even if you're doing a potlucks,
Speaker 16: it's good to you know, you do like one capital
Speaker 16: capital T organizing thing, right, you get like a little
Speaker 16: bit of work done, but mostly everyone's just sort of
Speaker 16: relaxing and eating chili or whatever.
Speaker 17: Yeah, if you're a baker, you know you can bay people.
Speaker 17: It's a wonderful thing to shut god.
Speaker 11: Yes.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 16: And just knowing how to cook. I realized I forgot
Speaker 16: to mention this one. Knowing how to cook is a
Speaker 16: staggeringly useful skill and it's useful in literally every literally
Speaker 16: any kind of organizing you can possibly be.
Speaker 6: And it is a thing.
Speaker 16: It is a skill that is useful in like it's
Speaker 16: useful in war zones. It's useful like literally, no matter
Speaker 16: what organization you are in, if you can cook for people,
Speaker 16: oh yeah, and you don't even and you don't have
Speaker 16: to be like a good cook. It's just like you
Speaker 16: can show up with food that you have made. You
Speaker 16: have instantly made this whole thing more successful.
Speaker 17: Yeah, definitely, Like I've had some wonderful meals in water
Speaker 17: and and I've deeply appreciated those people. More broadly though,
Speaker 17: those ties like the way we organize without the state.
Speaker 17: The reason I believe that that is the way we
Speaker 17: should organize and the way we will continue to organize
Speaker 17: in a way that we can make the state irrelevant
Speaker 17: is because we understand each other as people and care
Speaker 17: about each other as people, and then we approach our
Speaker 17: organizing holistically, right with everyone in it, knowing this person
Speaker 17: is good at this, but they're struggling with this right now,
Speaker 17: and I care about them, so I'm not going to
Speaker 17: make them do that right now. That is how we
Speaker 17: can build sustainable communities in a way that state cannot
Speaker 17: and in a way that capitalism cannot. Right, because fucking hurts,
Speaker 17: rent a car doesn't care or know about its employees
Speaker 17: in a way that we who organize with people and
Speaker 17: care and I love one anob do and like that's
Speaker 17: why our organizations will always be stronger than those created
Speaker 17: by capitalism of the state.
Speaker 16: Yeah, unfortunately, speaking of capitalism of the state, we're taking
Speaker 16: our last ad break, would you.
Speaker 17: Yeah, hopefully it's a torndica.
Speaker 6: We are back.
Speaker 16: So I want to wrap things up by doing a
Speaker 16: couple of doing a few things. I want to talk
Speaker 16: about some kind of basic organizing things that you're going
Speaker 16: to have to do that are not very difficult but
Speaker 16: are extremely important. And second, I want to talk a
Speaker 16: bit about how we did the first organizing project that
Speaker 16: I ever was involved in, which was tenants organizing, Because
Speaker 16: it's really not that hard, right, if you just go
Speaker 16: do the thing, it will happen. Yeah, and suddenly it
Speaker 16: ceases to be this like, oh, this domain of expert
Speaker 16: knowledge and there's like, oh, this is a really difficult thing.
Speaker 16: If you just I don't know, you go give food
Speaker 16: to someone and suddenly you've done that and it's happened.
Speaker 16: So there are things that are important to like basic
Speaker 16: organizing stuff, knowing how to book rooms from like churches,
Speaker 16: from libraries, from whatever meeting spaces, and also knowing how
Speaker 16: to book rooms in places that like accommodate disabilities is
Speaker 16: a huge thing because a lot of people book meetings
Speaker 16: in places are a wheelchair accessible and it's a fucking fiasco.
Speaker 16: And you can avoid that very easily, but you have
Speaker 16: to put a little tiny bit of work into it.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 17: Literally, I reached out to a friend to book a
Speaker 17: room last night because I knew they would get at
Speaker 17: that stuff.
Speaker 16: Yeah, you know, there's arranging people's schedules, getting people show
Speaker 16: up for stuff, things you can do to prepare if
Speaker 16: what you're doing is basically all the things we've been describing, right,
Speaker 16: getting together a bunch of people to do a thing
Speaker 16: that is technically forming an organization. Yeah, Now, how formal
Speaker 16: informat you want it to be, or just you know,
Speaker 16: maybe it's just your organizing project or whatever. There's things
Speaker 16: you usually want. You want some kind of email so
Speaker 16: people can contact you in tandem with the email. Something
Speaker 16: that's very helpful that I think younger people tend not
Speaker 16: to think about is getting Google Voice. Yes, when Google
Speaker 16: Voice lets you set up a voicemail account so people
Speaker 16: can call you and leave phone messages. I mean, everyone
Speaker 16: should just do this because this is the way that
Speaker 16: a lot of older people communicate.
Speaker 14: Right.
Speaker 6: They won't send you an email, but they will leave
Speaker 6: you a voice.
Speaker 16: Message, and it's very very useful for this. Childcare is
Speaker 16: something that's important. I did, I mean a lot is
Speaker 16: probably too strong of a word, but like I did
Speaker 16: childcare when I was organizing, and it wound up being
Speaker 16: really helpful because there's a lot of people with kids,
Speaker 16: and so you know, there's a couple of ways that
Speaker 16: this could work. One is that you know, you have
Speaker 16: everyone bring their kids. You have like a little space,
Speaker 16: you bring them like coloring stuff, you bring them toys,
Speaker 16: you bring them games, and you just sort of watch
Speaker 16: everyone for a while. And as an organizing thing, again,
Speaker 16: if you're good with kids, that's very useful, staggeringly useful
Speaker 16: organizing skill.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 16: Another way this stuff happens is, you know, everyone pulls
Speaker 16: together ten bucks and you hire a babysitter, Yeah, for
Speaker 16: a bunch of kids. And that's a very useful organizing
Speaker 16: a thing.
Speaker 17: Yeah, I organize with people who have kids. I remember
Speaker 17: four years ago, fuck me twenty twenty, a long time ago,
Speaker 17: and also yesterday. But like we were organizing to feed
Speaker 17: and house people and we were having a big Thanksgiving dinner,
Speaker 17: and like, some of my friends have very young children
Speaker 17: and they bought them And I think it's actually really
Speaker 17: cool to do that. A like for those kids, it
Speaker 17: is normal that, like we look after people in our community.
Speaker 17: This is what we do and ever since I've been little,
Speaker 17: this is what we did, and like it's also very
Speaker 17: nice for people. Like a lot of my friends also
Speaker 17: brought their children down to the border, especially last year
Speaker 17: when we had because there were children there anyway, right, Yeah,
Speaker 17: some of my friends who bring their children down and
Speaker 17: their kids would play with the other kids, and like
Speaker 17: it doesn't matter that some of the kids are Kurdition
Speaker 17: and some of the kids are from China and some
Speaker 17: of them are from Columbia or whatever. Like they'll get
Speaker 17: along just fine. When they're four or five years old.
Speaker 17: They don't care. They want to kick a ball or
Speaker 17: see a Teddy Bear or something. And I think it's
Speaker 17: really good for your children to you know, you're bringing
Speaker 17: them into a world which is cruel and at times unequal,
Speaker 17: and like your kids seeing that, like we can make
Speaker 17: a difference and we can do this. I think it's
Speaker 17: one of the best educations you can give your children.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and it's something that's good for everyone involved.
Speaker 17: Yeah, exactly, And it's also very I think one of
Speaker 17: the things I see a lot wh people are organizing
Speaker 17: thing with refugees of the end House is like they're
Speaker 17: just people, Like you don't need to be afraid of them,
Speaker 17: Like they don't want to hurt your children. And having
Speaker 17: your children around shows that, like you have grasped they're
Speaker 17: just people, and that you feel safe and your children
Speaker 17: are safe around them. And I think that that's valuable too.
Speaker 17: You're giving both parties some dignity in that moment.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 16: There are some other very basic things that I think
Speaker 16: are very important. If you've never done this before, I'm
Speaker 16: going to talk a little bit about how you run
Speaker 16: a meeting. Yeah, And you would think that this doesn't matter,
Speaker 16: and until you watch a group of one hundred people
Speaker 16: who don't know how to do this attempt to get
Speaker 16: anything done and they it just is a fiasco.
Speaker 6: And this is even true sort of smaller groups.
Speaker 16: Yeah, So I'm going to give you how to run
Speaker 16: a meeting one oh one, Okay, A very common way
Speaker 16: to organize meetings that people use all over the world
Speaker 16: and it's very effective. Is you have two things. You
Speaker 16: have an agenda and you have a stack. And those
Speaker 16: are like the technical terms for them. The agenda, I mean,
Speaker 16: is an agenda, right, you know what an agenda is.
Speaker 16: You put the things that you need to do on it.
Speaker 16: And another thing that's very helpful with these is you
Speaker 16: know you're going to be operating at our time constraints
Speaker 16: because people don't have forty five hours to be in meetings,
Speaker 16: and my god, you don't want to be in a
Speaker 16: meeting for that long. Yeah, you know. Knowing how long
Speaker 16: roughly you want to talk about these things is very
Speaker 16: very useful and making sure that you're of moving the
Speaker 16: conversation through the stuff on the agenda because you have
Speaker 16: more stuff you need to talk about. All of this again,
Speaker 16: like this all sounds very obvious, and again you know
Speaker 16: how to do it, But until you've been in a
Speaker 16: room where people have not realize they need to do this,
Speaker 16: you don't understand how I put.
Speaker 17: On this stuff gets the pain of it not happening.
Speaker 16: God, I have watched rooms full of like sciet these
Speaker 16: are like professional scientists, right, this is an entire room
Speaker 16: of one hundred feet of people with physics PhDs who
Speaker 16: don't know how to run a meeting, and it's a
Speaker 16: shit show. And all of this stuff could have been
Speaker 16: avoided with some very very simple things. Yes, the other thing,
Speaker 16: and this is genuinely a piece of social technology, right,
Speaker 16: it is the stack. It is very simple, right. You
Speaker 16: have one person who is the stack keeper, and whatsone
Speaker 16: wants to talk? You have one person talking at a time,
Speaker 16: and what someone wants to talk, they raise their hand,
Speaker 16: they make some kind of signal to the stack keeper,
Speaker 16: and that person writes their name down, and so you
Speaker 16: now have a list of who gets to talk in
Speaker 16: what order. And so you go down the list and
Speaker 16: people get the say things. And again you know how
Speaker 16: to do this. This is not like a complicated thing.
Speaker 16: But again I have watched people who collectively have like
Speaker 16: more PhDs than like I earn money in a week,
Speaker 16: Like who.
Speaker 6: Know, I can not be able to pick this out.
Speaker 1: You do.
Speaker 16: I believe in you. I believe in you, dear listener,
Speaker 16: that you can do this. Yeah, there's a very common
Speaker 16: Sometimes this is one person and sometimes this is two people.
Speaker 16: A very common way to do it is to have
Speaker 16: a stack taker and then have someone who's the facilitator,
Speaker 16: and the facilitator's job is to call on the people
Speaker 16: and to try to like move the conversation forwards and
Speaker 16: get and make sure make sure everyone's involved. And also
Speaker 16: another important part of this, and this is again something
Speaker 16: you'll know from your stupid work meetings, is you have
Speaker 16: to get people like me to shut up. Your meetings
Speaker 16: can't just be one person giving a speech. You have
Speaker 16: to cut them the fuck off and you have to
Speaker 16: get to the next person.
Speaker 17: Yeah, and doing that courteously is a skill.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 16: Yeah, And finally, on this note, there's a lot of
Speaker 16: if you want to go into the like more technical stuff.
Speaker 16: Part of the things that facilitators use and part of
Speaker 16: you know, the formal name for this is like the
Speaker 16: progressive stack, but it's just a thing that's very useful
Speaker 16: in organizing is you want to make sure everyone in
Speaker 16: a room is engaged and talking and that it's not
Speaker 16: just three people who talk all the time. Yeah, and
Speaker 16: you know, and so the idea of the progressive stack,
Speaker 16: right is you're trying to find the most marginalized people
Speaker 16: in degrees, people who are least likely to speak, and
Speaker 16: you're trying to get them in first. And sometimes this
Speaker 16: is literally just like hey, someone hasn't been talking in
Speaker 16: a meeting this whole time, and you can like ask
Speaker 16: them what they think about something, or asked if they
Speaker 16: have anything to say, and a lot of times they will,
Speaker 16: but they just don't feel confident enough.
Speaker 6: To say it.
Speaker 16: And this is this is a very very important skill
Speaker 16: for a facilitator or just even you could just do
Speaker 16: this in a meeting too, right, Like you can be
Speaker 16: the person who goes like, hey, do you have this
Speaker 16: this person have anything to contribute? And that is an
Speaker 16: enormous thing. Sometimes it can be you know, sometimes it
Speaker 16: can be a little bit awkward, but it's a very
Speaker 16: important thing because you're just losing out on people who
Speaker 16: have really really valuable ideas and contributions and plans. And
Speaker 16: if you just let the same three people give speeches,
Speaker 16: you can't get to the stuff that's actually useful.
Speaker 17: Yeah, definitely, if you've been a teacher or in any
Speaker 17: way what you know, probably have had you have this skill.
Speaker 17: You might not consider it a skill, but even if
Speaker 17: you've been a TA in grad school something like that,
Speaker 17: you probably know how to do this.
Speaker 16: Yeah, so I'm gonna put all of this together briefly,
Speaker 16: and I'm going to run through basically how we started
Speaker 16: the first organizing project I ever day, which was a
Speaker 16: tenants union in Chicago.
Speaker 6: Okay, so this is based on my memory.
Speaker 16: It's been a long time since I did this, but
Speaker 16: my basic memory of what we did was. Okay, So
Speaker 16: one of my friends is an experienced organizer. I was
Speaker 16: like a tiny baby, right this this was my first
Speaker 16: offline organizing project ever.
Speaker 6: Right, I had no idea what was doing.
Speaker 16: I thought I was a guy, which like that, that's
Speaker 16: how much of a fiasco, Like little tidy baby bo
Speaker 16: who doesn't know anything this was, you know. And so
Speaker 16: my friend talked to some people that he knew, and
Speaker 16: he knew that I, you know, I was interested in
Speaker 16: getting involved in tennants organizing.
Speaker 5: And we we like.
Speaker 16: Went to a cafe and we sat down and we
Speaker 16: ate and we just talked about what we wanted to do,
Speaker 16: what our plans were, what things we needed to do
Speaker 16: to get this organization set up. We talked about ideological stuff,
Speaker 16: and that's actually is something that's important too, is part
Speaker 16: of organizing is getting people to think intentionally about their
Speaker 16: actions and think politically about their actions. Yeah, and that's
Speaker 16: something that's very useful. You also have to make sure
Speaker 16: that you're not forming a book club. Like book clubs
Speaker 16: are fine, but you need to make sure you're organizing group.
Speaker 16: If you try to do a thing, has it just
Speaker 16: become a book club. But that's you know that that
Speaker 16: was something that was very useful to us. And you know,
Speaker 16: we started making a plan. And our plan was, okay,
Speaker 16: we made a bunch of flyers and then we went
Speaker 16: out and I did this and I walked around through
Speaker 16: a bunch of streets and put them a light post
Speaker 16: or whatever, and then we put them like we hung
Speaker 16: them up in the buildings of tenants, you know, because
Speaker 16: you can just like walk up the stairs, right and
Speaker 16: you just put them on the walls. And you know,
Speaker 16: we had this flyer, this firehead information. This flyer said, okay,
Speaker 16: we're starting a tenant's union. If you have tenant, if
Speaker 16: you have issues with your landlord, or you want to
Speaker 16: talk about tenants stuff like, come here. At this time,
Speaker 16: we had an email you can send us stuff. We
Speaker 16: had a phone number that you could call. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 16: and so okay, and so parallel to this, we like,
Speaker 16: I forget if it was a church or if it
Speaker 16: was some building, some center or something, we booked a room.
Speaker 16: We were kind of lucky in that we had like
Speaker 16: local press people nice who we sort of knew. And
Speaker 16: this is another useful like if knowing a journalist can
Speaker 16: be a very useful skill, because one way to get
Speaker 16: a project off the ground, if you're trying to get
Speaker 16: to a bunch of people, is by finding a journalist
Speaker 16: who is willing to cover it. Because you know, we're
Speaker 16: we're finding founding like the first tenants union in this place,
Speaker 16: right yeah, and you know, so we had media coverage
Speaker 16: and we got kind of screwed with when this event
Speaker 16: eventually came together because there was like three feet of
Speaker 16: snow that night, but people still came, like people still
Speaker 16: came in the blizzard, Like a lot of people showed
Speaker 16: up for this. What are things that we do? We also, like,
Speaker 16: you know, we just we just started talking to people, right,
Speaker 16: We started talking to tenants about their problems. We just
Speaker 16: you know, we talked to our friends, we talked to
Speaker 16: the people they knew. We ended up talking to someone,
Speaker 16: you know, And this is the thing that just happens
Speaker 16: as it spreads by word of mouth, right, people start
Speaker 16: contacting you. We ran into a really long time tenants
Speaker 16: organizer in the city who had a bunch of incredible
Speaker 16: stories about how our corrupt politicians got jobs by portraying
Speaker 16: the old tenets organizers, right, And like I said, the
Speaker 16: thing is, you know, another thing that happens in projects
Speaker 16: is you'll you'll sometimes you'll just you just pick up
Speaker 16: someone who's you know, has been doing this since like
Speaker 16: the sixties. Yeah, and it rules because they have a
Speaker 16: wealth of experience and they want to they want to
Speaker 16: do stuff. We plotted out what we were going to
Speaker 16: do at our meeting.
Speaker 6: You know, we were going to do some political education.
Speaker 16: We were gonna have a bunch of time for people
Speaker 16: to talk about stuff, and we were gonna, you know,
Speaker 16: get get people to understand what we were doing, how
Speaker 16: they could start organizing. And then we did it, and
Speaker 16: I unfortunately don't remember much of what we talked about
Speaker 16: because I was off in another room taking care of
Speaker 16: a bunch of people's kids, which was very nice, But
Speaker 16: I don't I don't remember what we talked about. But
Speaker 16: like that, you know, but like you all of those things, right,
Speaker 16: all of those steps from the start of you get
Speaker 16: five of your friends to go eat dinner, and you
Speaker 16: talk about what you want to do through Someone makes
Speaker 16: a flyer in like Microsoft or whatever. You make it
Speaker 16: in like PowerPoint, M that's publisher.
Speaker 6: What's what's what's the one? I'm blinking, I haven't used
Speaker 6: it in so long? The one you make greeting cards in.
Speaker 6: I really thought.
Speaker 16: Program and I've forgotten it is you see this to
Speaker 16: make Christmas cards? But like, you know, okay, so we
Speaker 16: made a flyer and then we walked around and put
Speaker 16: the flyers up and we made it. We made an email,
Speaker 16: you know, we got a space together, we figured out
Speaker 16: what we wanted to do, and then we did it.
Speaker 16: And you know, and there's a bunch of organizing from there, right,
Speaker 16: But like we had started a thing, and you can
Speaker 16: do every single one of those steps. And if you
Speaker 16: can't personally do one of those steps, you can think
Speaker 16: of a person who you know, who you can bring
Speaker 16: in to help you do these things. Because organizing you
Speaker 16: already fucking know how to do it. Yeah, you just
Speaker 16: have to go out there.
Speaker 5: And do it.
Speaker 6: Yep.
Speaker 17: You can have faith.
Speaker 16: Yeah, and this has been it could happen here, go organize.
Speaker 10: Hello and welcome to AcrAB and here I'm Andrew Sage,
Speaker 10: I run Andrews on YouTube, and I'm here with.
Speaker 6: The voice of Garrison Davis.
Speaker 10: Hello, Hello, Hello, and today we're going to continue our
Speaker 10: journey through Latin American anarchisms and their histories with a
Speaker 10: sort of a four for one.
Speaker 6: Special exciting, exciting, very exciting.
Speaker 10: We talked about Peru, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Cuba sofa,
Speaker 10: as well as the Mapuche struggle in Chile and Argentina.
Speaker 5: And now was the time to explore what was going.
Speaker 10: On at the top of the South American continent, the
Speaker 10: territory of the former Grand Colombia, and that is the
Speaker 10: territories of Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, and Venezuela. But if this
Speaker 10: is the first time you're hearing about Grand Columbia, let
Speaker 10: me give a quick and a brief historical context. Grand
Speaker 10: Columbia was a short lived political entity that emerged in
Speaker 10: the early nineteenth century during Latin America's struggle for independence
Speaker 10: from Spanish colonial rule. It was formed in eighteen nineteen
Speaker 10: and it encompassed the territories, like I said, of present
Speaker 10: day Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama as well as some
Speaker 10: parts of northern Peru, western Guyana, and northwestern Brazil. The
Speaker 10: republic was envisioned by Simon Bolivar, who are dreamt of
Speaker 10: uniting the former Spanish colonies into.
Speaker 5: A powerful federation.
Speaker 10: They'll be able to resist foreign intervention and secure the independence.
Speaker 10: The Congress of Angostura declared the creation of Grand Columbia,
Speaker 10: with Bolivar as its first president. The public was a
Speaker 10: centralized state with a strong executive branch, so unsurprisingly, tension
Speaker 10: soon arose among the constituent regions due to their differences
Speaker 10: in political vision, economic interests, and regional identities. Centralized governance
Speaker 10: had alienated local elites, and debates over federalism versus centralism
Speaker 10: deepened existing divisions. Plus Bolivard's increasingly autocratic rule I mean
Speaker 10: he literally tried to push for a lifetime presidency obviously
Speaker 10: sparked internal opposition, so Grand Columbia was facing external threats
Speaker 10: from Spanish royalist forces and internal fractures. By eighteen thirty,
Speaker 10: Bolivard had to resign from the presidency, disillusioned by the
Speaker 10: failure of his vision, and the same year Grand Columbia
Speaker 10: dissolved into three separate nations. Venezuela, Ecuador, and the Republic
Speaker 10: of New Grenada, which later on split into Columbia and Panama.
Speaker 10: Unlike the other countries of South America that we've covered,
Speaker 10: these countries had far less large scale anarchist movements, but
Speaker 10: will still take a look at what little impact anarchists
Speaker 10: did make in the past two centuries in these places.
Speaker 10: This whole series, by they wouldn't be possible without the
Speaker 10: scholarship of Anhill Capelletti, whose research I drew upon heavily
Speaker 10: for this historic review. I suggest reading his book Anarchism
Speaker 10: in Latin America for further details. Let's first take a
Speaker 10: look at the history in Ecuador at the turn of
Speaker 10: the twentieth century. Ecuador was ruined from a liberal revolution
Speaker 10: that had just taken place in the country. The country
Speaker 10: was shifting as industrialization creeped in, the bourgeoisie on the rise,
Speaker 10: and feudal landowners were losing their grip on power. A
Speaker 10: new secular cultural wave was also beginning to take shape
Speaker 10: as the clerical authorities began to lose their power. The
Speaker 10: workers naturally needed a voice in this process, and they
Speaker 10: found it first with the rise of the Partiro Liberal Obrero.
Speaker 5: With the Liberal Workers' Party in nineteen oh six.
Speaker 10: Around the same time, on New Year's Eve of nineteen
Speaker 10: oh five, the confederac Delcuador was founded in Guayaquil, a
Speaker 10: city that would become a hub for worker activity. Both
Speaker 10: organizations shared a vision rooted in social reform and work empowerment.
Speaker 10: It was also around this time that the Cuban anarchist
Speaker 10: Miguel Albuquerque made a name from self in Ecuador. Originally,
Speaker 10: he had come seeking assistance with Cuba's independent struggle, but
Speaker 10: eventually found himself playing a key role in Ecuador's labor movement.
Speaker 10: He established the side that the e Host del Trabajo
Speaker 10: or the Society the Sons of Labor, and other anarchist
Speaker 10: groups would also begin forming, contributing to the struggles taking
Speaker 10: place at the time. The first recorded strikes with anarchist
Speaker 10: influence took place in nineteen nineteen, where workers in the
Speaker 10: graphic arts industry organized the demand back conditions. By nineteen
Speaker 10: twenty two, Guyaquil was the epicenter of a massive general strike,
Speaker 10: shaped in part by the anarchist Nicolists, who were obviously.
Speaker 5: Right in the thick of it.
Speaker 10: The strike was driven by dissatisfaction among the workers, particularly
Speaker 10: among the cities, urban laborers and dark workers who were
Speaker 10: facing really poor wages, long hours, and deteriorating living conditions
Speaker 10: talors all this time. The strike culminated in a violent
Speaker 10: crackdown by government forces. Also tales all this time, with
Speaker 10: estimates jet in that hundreds of workers were killed when
Speaker 10: the military suppressed the revolts. Most workers returned to their
Speaker 10: jobs after that, but the trolley workers continued their strike
Speaker 10: until the twenty first of November, when most of their
Speaker 10: demands were.
Speaker 6: Mect How much like crossover was there between like revolutionaries
Speaker 6: or like you know, workers rights people or anarchists in
Speaker 6: Cuba and places like this, because I assume there was
Speaker 6: like a lot more like growing sentiment in Cuba based
Speaker 6: on how that whole situation turned out in the next
Speaker 6: like twenty thirty years, and I feel like there would
Speaker 6: be a decent, like a decent number of cross or
Speaker 6: at least like some travel between some of these other
Speaker 6: like nearby places for.
Speaker 10: Sure, because Cuba has been gained independence much in theater
Speaker 10: than the rest of its last America neighbors, places like
Speaker 10: Mexico and Central America and Granitic Columbia and the rest
Speaker 10: of South America. They all gained the independence, and Cuba
Speaker 10: was still under the Spanish thumb and their remain under
Speaker 10: the Spanish thumb until they ended up having to struggle
Speaker 10: with the Americans as well and eventually to gain their
Speaker 10: one independence. I mean, it's all one one big pond.
Speaker 10: I like to see the Caribbean Sea. So there would
Speaker 10: have been a lot of transfer and communication between these
Speaker 10: independent Latin America and republics and Cuba, which was still
Speaker 10: at the time of colony.
Speaker 5: That was really interesting to see.
Speaker 10: What when you know, these Cuban characters sort of show
Speaker 10: up in the parts and ended I've stirring up some trouble.
Speaker 6: Totally well, and it shows just how like popular the
Speaker 6: nineteen twenties were kind of like everywhere, Like yeah, whether
Speaker 6: looking at like labor movement in the United States or
Speaker 6: like everything that you've been talking about these last few
Speaker 6: episodes about Latin American anarchism. Like always in like the
Speaker 6: nineteen twenties, there was always just like crazy shit going
Speaker 6: down consistently for sure.
Speaker 10: Unfortunately, nineteen twenties is also the time of a lot
Speaker 10: of decline for a lot of the anarchist movements because
Speaker 10: nineteen twenties follows you know, the rise of the USSR,
Speaker 10: and a lot of people ended up abandoned in anarchism
Speaker 10: and following that sort of popularity at the time.
Speaker 6: Well, and similarly, once we start getting into like the
Speaker 6: early thirties, I remember in the last few episodes that
Speaker 6: you've done, you see the resurgence of like right wing populism,
Speaker 6: like really hard.
Speaker 5: Yes, we tend to see a lot of resurgences.
Speaker 6: And like all this like revolutionary potential that's been growing
Speaker 6: the past few decades all gets like co opted or
Speaker 6: channeled into like right wing nationalism of right wing populism,
Speaker 6: and like that's a whole whole other pivot that happens,
Speaker 6: not just the more like you know, communism's statust one
Speaker 6: in like the twenties.
Speaker 5: Do see a resurgeons. We do see resurgions in the
Speaker 5: writing populism. Yes, we also see a resurgeons in the
Speaker 5: anarchist politics. You remember, the thirties was also the.
Speaker 10: Time of the Spanish Civil War, sure, and so in
Speaker 10: that time you had the anarchists picking up steam again,
Speaker 10: and you also had following that civil war, a lot
Speaker 10: of the anarchists from Spain spread out into a lot
Speaker 10: of the former colonies in Latin America.
Speaker 6: I think part of that rebirth is just because of
Speaker 6: how tied anarchism and anti fascism is.
Speaker 5: That's true.
Speaker 6: I think inadvertently, the rise of fascism they actually give
Speaker 6: birth to the rise of more anarchists as people get
Speaker 6: involved in anti fascism because of these things are so like,
Speaker 6: you know, sister movements in many ways. I think that
Speaker 6: may be a contributing factor. That's certainly how I kind
Speaker 6: of got into this sort of stuff was through anti fascism,
Speaker 6: and and I suspect that that may have also been
Speaker 6: the case even one hundred years ago.
Speaker 5: For sure.
Speaker 10: For sure, I think every story needs a good villain, unfortunately,
Speaker 10: and the story of anarchism, I mean, the fascists tend
Speaker 10: to make really, really impactful antagonists.
Speaker 5: I think. Indeed, at the same.
Speaker 10: Time we also had an Ecuador to have these strikes
Speaker 10: going on, anarchists doing you know that thing that anarchists
Speaker 10: like to do, which is a study group. Many such cases,
Speaker 10: many such cases, many such cases. But I mean it
Speaker 10: is an important aspect of struggles that's sort of consciousness racing. Yes,
Speaker 10: So these anarchists in particular in Guyaquille, they founded these
Speaker 10: Centro their Studio Socialists, which was a libertarian study group
Speaker 10: in Guayaquille, and then a decade later, in nineteen twenty
Speaker 10: the anarchists also established a Centro Gremial Sindicalista or the
Speaker 10: Synicalist Guild Center, which had a mission to an end
Speaker 10: liberate all the oppressed of the earth by bringing them
Speaker 10: into a libertarian syndicate that will replace the present system
Speaker 10: and opposing all political and religious doctrines as destructive and
Speaker 10: prejudicial to the rights and aspiration of workers endcode. As
Speaker 10: in the rest of the region, their publications played a
Speaker 10: key role in spreading the ideas again early twentieth century,
Speaker 10: late nineteenth century, the anarchists were make in papers. Yeah,
Speaker 10: use papers, newspapers, newspapers.
Speaker 6: I mean it is a bit of a blueprint for
Speaker 6: what anarchism continues to be in many ways, even with
Speaker 6: like the rise of destroyism in the in the past
Speaker 6: new past decade or so, in like popular anarchism, less newspapers,
Speaker 6: more more zines being held together by possibly one or
Speaker 6: fewer stables.
Speaker 10: And I like to think that I also continue that
Speaker 10: tradition and you and I as well by creating this
Speaker 10: kind of totally what do you and visual content?
Speaker 6: I am a zine enjoyer, I have I have any zines,
Speaker 6: but we also have to evolve with the times in
Speaker 6: some ways. Not everyone's going to be reading newspapers, not
Speaker 6: everyone's going to be reading booklets. Unfortunately, as much as
Speaker 6: I encourage people to do so, I do think there
Speaker 6: is value in attacking the information ecosystem that people more
Speaker 6: often use. That includes you know, podcasts, that includes your
Speaker 6: fantastic videos on YouTube, Thank you, thank you, and yeah,
Speaker 6: I agree for sure, for.
Speaker 10: Sure, But they didn't have things like YouTube or the
Speaker 10: Internet at the time. Instead, they had, at least in Ecuador,
Speaker 10: their newspapers like El Proletario and El Cacajuerro and Bandera Roja,
Speaker 10: which were carrying these syndicalist anarchismicalist ideas to the workers
Speaker 10: across Ecuador. They also the first truly anarchist papers that
Speaker 10: hit the country were Encion and Lose. The Axion in
Speaker 10: nineteen twenty two nineteen twenty nine respectfully, but as we
Speaker 10: were anticipating in the nineteen thirties brought some challenges. Marxist
Speaker 10: Lennis thought began to dominate leftist circles and figures like
Speaker 10: Jose Carlos Mariettegi and his general Amauta ended up wielding
Speaker 10: significant influence in the workers struggles, and by the end
Speaker 10: of the decade, anarchist groups found themselves vastly overshadowed as
Speaker 10: Marcus Lenists consolidated power through unified political parties. But despite
Speaker 10: these shifts, anarchistman Acuador was really ever entirely extinguished. It
Speaker 10: actually continues to influence workers organizations like the Ferracio and
Speaker 10: La guayas well into modern times. But now let's make
Speaker 10: our way north to Columbia as a similar story and
Speaker 10: foolds of anarchism taken route in here twentieth century. And
Speaker 10: this is actually a fun factor because both Eli's Recluse
Speaker 10: and Mikhail Bercunan visited Columbia recluses there for research purposes,
Speaker 10: and Bercunen wasn't an anarchist at the time, so they
Speaker 10: didn't directly contribute to the anarchist movement as far as
Speaker 10: we know, in the country.
Speaker 5: By the nineteen tents, anarchist.
Speaker 10: Ideas were definitely spreading, finding a home among students, artists,
Speaker 10: writers and workers. And this wasn't just idle philosophizing. They
Speaker 10: also got to work building workers societies and organizing mass
Speaker 10: actions at the May fifteenth demonstration in nineteen sixteen, which
Speaker 10: of course met with brutal police repression. From there, the
Speaker 10: movement came momentum in nineteen twenty Port Walter because in
Speaker 10: Katahina went on strike, and by the following decade, and
Speaker 10: I guess we're the forefront of workers militancy all across
Speaker 10: the Caribbean coast, which was more connected to global struggles
Speaker 10: in the rest of Columbia and was thus a hotbed
Speaker 10: of organizing and unrest. If you know the geography of Columbia,
Speaker 10: you'd know that there's a lot of jungle and mountainous
Speaker 10: region near the middle of the country. It's that the
Speaker 10: coast where you tend to have more of the activity
Speaker 10: and connection with the neighboring countries in the Caribbean Sea.
Speaker 10: Fun of fact, there's actually a lot of people in
Speaker 10: the English speaking Caribbean aren't aware of the fact that
Speaker 10: there are people in the Spanish speaking Caribbean who consider,
Speaker 10: you know, coastal Colombia and Coastal Venezuela to be part
Speaker 10: of the Caribbean. But as like the sort of niche
Speaker 10: discourse you get an r slash ass Caribbean. The few
Speaker 10: Anarchistablu present in Colombia were part of nearly every major uprising,
Speaker 10: including the Baranquila Strike of nineteen ten, the labor wave
Speaker 10: that swept Cattahina, Barankuilia and Santimurri year nineteen eighteen, the
Speaker 10: first strike against the notoriously bloody United Fruit Company in
Speaker 10: nineteen eighteen, the hero Dot Railroad strike and the Artisans
Speaker 10: and Labor strike in Bogota nineteen nineteen. The oil strikes
Speaker 10: in Baron Kabirmeha during the nineteen twenties, including one against
Speaker 10: the Tropical Oil Company in nineteen twenty seven which cost
Speaker 10: twelve hundred workers their jobs and painted the targets on
Speaker 10: the backs of the organizers because how dare you mess
Speaker 10: with oil? And then finally there was the famous Santa
Speaker 10: Maria Banana strike of nineteen twenty eight, where workers demanded
Speaker 10: fair wages and better treatment, and the government responded at
Speaker 10: the behest of the United Fruit Company by claiming hundreds
Speaker 10: of lives after the massacre. The anarchist movement in Columbia
Speaker 10: was heavily repressed, and because of how small it was,
Speaker 10: it didn't quite pick back up. As historian Max that
Speaker 10: Lao noted, publications like Organization in Santa Marta and Via
Speaker 10: Libre and Baranquilla disappeared at the late nineteen twenties. This
Speaker 10: crackdown on anarchists, coupled with the rise in Floyd of
Speaker 10: Bolshevik led unions, shifted the landscape, and by the nineteen
Speaker 10: thirties anarchist organizing was all but silenced in Columbia. But
Speaker 10: it's a part of Columbia that we're missing. She At
Speaker 10: one point Panama was considered part of the country, so
Speaker 10: there must been stuff happening on that little sliver of land, right,
Speaker 10: He'd be surprised if we rewind to the mid nineteenth century.
Speaker 10: Between eighteen fifteen eighteen fifty five, Panama saw the construction
Speaker 10: of a trans Isthmus railroad, and this massive project was
Speaker 10: followed by two phases of canal construction, the first by
Speaker 10: the French between eighteen eighteen and eighteen ninety five and
Speaker 10: the second by the US from nineteen oh forty nineteen fourteen.
Speaker 10: These projects brought tens of thousands of workers from Europe,
Speaker 10: Asia and Caribbean, effectually turned in Panama into a melting
Speaker 10: part of laborers who bought their skills, their culture and
Speaker 10: their ideas. Beijian workers, for example, that is people from Barberos.
Speaker 10: If I recall correctly, there was a time in Barbeos's
Speaker 10: history where there was some massive It was like a
Speaker 10: full quarter of the country's income was just coming from
Speaker 10: remittances from people who had had family members sending their
Speaker 10: money from the canal project back home. And it's not
Speaker 10: just the Cribbean there was impacted, obviously, as workers from
Speaker 10: Europe and Asia also part of this project. And it's
Speaker 10: the workers from Europe and particularly Spain that brought many
Speaker 10: of the ideas of class consciousness and anarchist cynicalism that
Speaker 10: had been bruin in that region of the world. And
Speaker 10: such ideas were of course solely needed in the horrific
Speaker 10: working conditions of death and disease that marked the Panama
Speaker 10: Canal construction project. Workers organized some successful strikes in both
Speaker 10: the French phase and the American phase of construction, both
Speaker 10: before and after Panama gain its independence from Colombia nineteen
Speaker 10: oh three. But it was just before the transition to
Speaker 10: American control over canal construction that Panama officially banned anarchists
Speaker 10: from entering the country for the anarchists that were left well.
Speaker 10: When the Americans took over the Canal, Governor of the
Speaker 10: Canal So in general, George W. Davis actively suppressed the
Speaker 10: anarchist workers that remained. In nineteen oh seven or whatever,
Speaker 10: despite that repression, two thousand Spanish workers went on strike
Speaker 10: for better wages. In nineteen twenty four, a prominently anarchist
Speaker 10: cynicalist group founded the Sindicato Heneral Destrabbaha Daughters, which was
Speaker 10: Panama's first central workers union. They grew to thousands of
Speaker 10: members and brought together a mix of ideologies anarchists and
Speaker 10: Marxists alike, even those who would later found the Communist
Speaker 10: Party and the Socialist Party of Panama in nineteen thirty.
Speaker 10: But on such a small sliver of land were so
Speaker 10: many people mixed in there, there was bound to be
Speaker 10: a vibrant mix of ideas. And not all of the
Speaker 10: anarchists in Panama were of the syndicalist flair. Believe it
Speaker 10: or not, they were actually workers within Panama who aligned
Speaker 10: themselves with Max Stuner's philosophy. They had egoists and anarchist
Speaker 10: egoism interesting in Panama. Yeah, exactly. This blew my mind
Speaker 10: as well. And they don't expect to see them in
Speaker 10: such contexts.
Speaker 6: Were they reading Sterner in Panama?
Speaker 5: I'm not sure if they were readings Toner, I'm assuming so.
Speaker 10: Because otherwise how would they have come to identify with
Speaker 10: his philosophy. But they did launch a paper called Eluniko
Speaker 10: in nineteen eleven.
Speaker 6: That's what I was wondering is if instead of like
Speaker 6: widely distributings actual books, like, was there like some like
Speaker 6: Sterner influence like newspaper that people were running. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 6: because like that makes.
Speaker 10: Sense exactly exactly, some assuming some of the people either
Speaker 10: would have read Still abroad or they brought Still the Inn.
Speaker 10: And they were obviously inspired by it, and they were
Speaker 10: skeptical of this sort of mass movement sy Nicholas those
Speaker 10: popular at the time.
Speaker 6: Sure many people are.
Speaker 10: They were questioning its effectiveness as a strategy for anarchy.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And so they were.
Speaker 10: Focused primarily on organizing sort of smaller affiancy groups yep.
Speaker 5: And one of those groups.
Speaker 10: Ended up launching that paper, Elunico, to spread the ideas
Speaker 10: and obviously called itself an individualist publication.
Speaker 6: That's so funny, that's so emblematic of where we still
Speaker 6: are with it. Oh that's good, that's good.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 10: I also think that this kind of diversity of thoughts
Speaker 10: and strategy is really really beautiful, and I'm glad to
Speaker 10: see it in almost unconventional and surprise enough contexts. It's
Speaker 10: why I consider myself an anarchist without adjectives, you know,
Speaker 10: I really absolutely yeah. I think we benefit greatly from
Speaker 10: conversation between these traditions and between these strategies, and so
Speaker 10: seeing that there were more than one form of anarchism
Speaker 10: in such a small context, it's really quite inspiring.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I am with you there.
Speaker 10: By the way, for those listeners who may not be
Speaker 10: familiar with the anarchist egoist tradition, I know that we're
Speaker 10: ego and egoism.
Speaker 6: Might conjure up some psychoanalytical Freudian.
Speaker 10: Yeah, it might bring some some some sort of feelings
Speaker 10: about capitalistic individualism or like extreme selfishness and that kind
Speaker 10: of thing, kind of like screw everybody except me. But
Speaker 10: it's actually a much deeper philosophical bent to anarchist egoist
Speaker 10: that I think everybody should give a chance. I actually
Speaker 10: recently read what is considered the first manifesto of anarchism,
Speaker 10: and it was written by this French anarchist named Anseel
Speaker 10: and Bella Garige, and he was actually an individualist anarchist,
Speaker 10: and you're actually in reading that end up seeing a
Speaker 10: lot of the influences that would later sort of develop
Speaker 10: further into anarchist individualism from the very beginning. You know,
Speaker 10: I highly recommend reading it. It's called Anarchy a Journal
Speaker 10: of Order. It's available on the Anarchist Library. It's a
Speaker 10: surprisingly contemporary piece in my opinion, and it was translated
Speaker 10: by Sean Wilbow's another anarchist scholar who I'm really inspired
Speaker 10: by lately, and it really gets into some of the
Speaker 10: ideas that I think we've forgotten in terms of what
Speaker 10: it takes to achieve the complete liberation of all people.
Speaker 6: So that's Anarchy a Journal of Order.
Speaker 10: Yeah, Anarchy a Journal of Order. He ended up not
Speaker 10: published in more than two issues due to low readership.
Speaker 10: But that's what happens, I think when any such cases,
Speaker 10: many such cases, many such cases.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I will pull that up on the anarchas Library and
Speaker 6: give that a read myself.
Speaker 10: Yeah, it happens when you're ahead of the times in
Speaker 10: a sense, and he actually ends up becoming at least
Speaker 10: partially relevant to the next episode I'm going to do
Speaker 10: on the Latin America Anarchism series, because he ends up
Speaker 10: making his way to Latin America at one point in
Speaker 10: his life.
Speaker 5: In fact, he dies in Latin America, but we will
Speaker 5: get to that in time.
Speaker 10: Finally returned to Venezuela as the late nineteenth century refugees
Speaker 10: from the Field Paris Commune arrived in Caracas, bringing with
Speaker 10: them the radical spirit of the International working Men's Association.
Speaker 10: From a few of these immigrants, small anarchist cells emerged,
Speaker 10: but they were stifled by the brutal dictatorship of Juan
Speaker 10: Vincente Gomez from eighteen ninety nine to nineteen thirty five.
Speaker 5: So few in number.
Speaker 10: The anarchist immigrant efforts to form mutual societies, organized strikes,
Speaker 10: and spread propaganda gained them a notoriety that put a
Speaker 10: massive bullseye on them. For Gomez's persecution, he had a
Speaker 10: midster oppression. A few sparks of anarchism did survive in
Speaker 10: the cultural fabric. Writers like Migueli Guardo Parlo portrayed anarchists
Speaker 10: as spiritual revolutionaries, lacking them to saints sounds familiar, does
Speaker 10: sound very familiar, Yes, if you know, back in the
Speaker 10: days of Saint andrew'sm There you Go. But his novel
Speaker 10: Toto and Pueblo described anarchists as apostles of justice, which
Speaker 10: is really fire title, I must say, as they carried
Speaker 10: the flame of liberty into the streets.
Speaker 5: But it wasn't all pros.
Speaker 10: The early twentieth century also saw a spike in industrial strikes.
Speaker 10: In nineteen eighteen, for example, a pivotal strike involving transit
Speaker 10: workers included at least one known Italian anarchist named Vincenzo Kusati.
Speaker 10: Although defeated, the strike left a mark in the country's consciousness.
Speaker 10: Inspired by such as Strive for Freedom. Workers united through
Speaker 10: various mutual aid societies which they were disguised as religious skills,
Speaker 10: the anarchist influence quietly spread among bakers, bricklayers, and oil workers. Truly,
Speaker 10: it was the oil boom of the nineteen twenties that
Speaker 10: reshieed Venice Whelan society, and of course continues to affect
Speaker 10: it today. While anarchistiniclist maintained underground networks in the grown
Speaker 10: oil sector, state and corporate power proved to be too
Speaker 10: much By the mid twentieth century, after the fall of
Speaker 10: Gomez's regime, the rise of political parties like Acxio Democratica
Speaker 10: cooperted many of the workers who might have otherwise embraced
Speaker 10: anarchist syndicalism and anarchist ideals became increasingly marginalized, eclipsed by
Speaker 10: party politics and state repression between nineteen thirty six to
Speaker 10: nineteen forty five. In fact, anarchist repression also gained a
Speaker 10: constitutional footing in the four of the Lara Law, which
Speaker 10: band strikes, associations meeting through a permission from the state,
Speaker 10: political propaganda, and basically all the usual datatorial stuff. After
Speaker 10: the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Franco more
Speaker 10: Spanish anarchist immigrants came to Venezuela.
Speaker 5: You see, I said they would be relevant.
Speaker 10: Yes, yes, but they didn't end up impacting Venezuela so
Speaker 10: much As immigrants, they ended up creating a mostly self
Speaker 10: contained scene, apparently through the founding of the Federacion Obrerariqunal
Speaker 10: Venezuelana in nineteen fifty eight, which was affiliated to the
Speaker 10: International Workers Association, But as I said, did make much
Speaker 10: of a splash in the port of Venezuelan population, they
Speaker 10: mostly affected other Spanish immigrants, so anarchist n neover developed
Speaker 10: into an explicitly mass movement in Venezuela, but elements of
Speaker 10: it did persist, and the unield in pursuit of freedom
Speaker 10: were still felt even in the harshest of conditions. So
Speaker 10: looking today at the countries that composed the former Grand Columbia,
Speaker 10: I would argue that the spark of anarchism still hasn't died.
Speaker 10: On Ecuador, uprisings continue to challenge extractive economies and demand
Speaker 10: autonomous control over renditionous territories, and some anarchist collectives are
Speaker 10: active in solidarity, providing logistical support during protests and pushing
Speaker 10: horizontal forms of organizing in the broader social struggle. After
Speaker 10: the twenty twenty one national strike in Columbia, some anarchist
Speaker 10: practices have begun to infuse movements against police brutality, privatization,
Speaker 10: and austerity measures. Mutual aid networks have all same emerged
Speaker 10: inspired by anarchist practice to support the community's hit hardest
Speaker 10: by economic crises. In Panama, anarchism exists on the fringes,
Speaker 10: but it has the potential to provide inspiration to those
Speaker 10: who are actively confronting the liberal policies, advocating for workers'
Speaker 10: rights and engaging in anti corporate actions. Finally, in Venezuela,
Speaker 10: economic collapse and authoritarianism of created space for anarchist ideals
Speaker 10: to spread through grassroots initiatives, mutual aid and self organized
Speaker 10: community groups have stepped in where the state has failed.
Speaker 10: Across these countries, an ideas still have potency. And really
Speaker 10: my hope is at these places continue to explore the
Speaker 10: creativity and solidarity that are necessary for liberation, that they
Speaker 10: continue to struggle and they go further still. You know,
Speaker 10: Viva I labored that or power to all the people. Peace,
Speaker 10: Hello and welcome, take it up. And here I'm Andrew Sage.
Speaker 10: I'm also Androwism on YouTube.
Speaker 6: And I'm here once again with Garrison Davis. Happy to
Speaker 6: be here, happy.
Speaker 10: To have here, and we're going to continue our journey
Speaker 10: through Latin American anarchisms and their histories. We've already discussed Peru, Chile,
Speaker 10: Argentina and Brazil, Paraguay, Cuba, Douapuce Struggle, Ecuador, Columbia, Panama,
Speaker 10: and Venezuela. And so there are just a few territories
Speaker 10: left that are considered Latin America, So just before we
Speaker 10: get to Mexico and Uruguay and possibly even Quebec, I
Speaker 10: wanted to round up all the anarchist histories in the
Speaker 10: smaller states.
Speaker 6: You're not wrong, but it still is funny, yeah, Quebec.
Speaker 10: I mean, honestly, you could say the same for like Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique.
Speaker 6: Yeah yeah, I mean there's even a lot of anarchists
Speaker 6: in Montreal today as a as a booming anarchist movement,
Speaker 6: But it still is a little funny.
Speaker 14: Right, Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 10: I actually wanted to include explorations of Haiti and in Guadelupe,
Speaker 10: Martinique in this episode, since it's you know, fairly small
Speaker 10: anarchist movements there. But I mean, I suppose I could
Speaker 10: just summarize it one time, which is that Martinique had
Speaker 10: a section of the International at one point in eighteen
Speaker 10: ninety five. There was also a branch of the International
Speaker 10: in eighteen sixty six on the island of Guadeloup, and
Speaker 10: it's very difficult to establish whether there were any anarchist
Speaker 10: groups in Heiti. Ever, from my research there there was
Speaker 10: an appearance of socialism more broadly as part of the
Speaker 10: struggle against domination and taking place in the country. But
Speaker 10: the dictato ships of Haiti have made those kinds of
Speaker 10: movements very difficult to spring out and thrive.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I can see that.
Speaker 10: But today we're going to be focusing on the anarchist
Speaker 10: histories and the rest of the smaller states of Central
Speaker 10: America and the Caribbean. So we'll be covering the sparks
Speaker 10: of anarchism in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvor, Guatemala,
Speaker 10: Dimerican Republic, and Puerto Rico. And as with previous episode,
Speaker 10: zosis is all possible thanks to health, capitaleties. Exhaustive work
Speaker 10: titled Anarchism in Latin America, Bleming said, the scene first
Speaker 10: and foremost across the lush rainforests and turquoise seas of
Speaker 10: Central America. Historically, there were several indigenous peoples that have
Speaker 10: called at home, and that home was violated in the
Speaker 10: early sixteenth century as Spanish conquistadors carved bloody paths through
Speaker 10: the region, replacing the ones fiber and pre colonial societies
Speaker 10: with the feuder like arrangements of the incomeendo system, which
Speaker 10: forced indigenous peoples into labor under Spanish landowners. The colonial
Speaker 10: eras of the rise of vast plantations for cash crops
Speaker 10: like cocoa, indigo, and later coffee Inhrition a small elite,
Speaker 10: while indigenous and after descendant populations endured brutal oppression over
Speaker 10: the centuries. Fast forward to the early nineteenth century, and
Speaker 10: the wave of independence sweeping across Latin America reached Central America.
Speaker 10: In eighteen twenty one, the region officially threw off Spanish rule,
Speaker 10: and in eighteen twenty three, Central America gained its independence
Speaker 10: from the Mexican Empire. For a fleet in moment from
Speaker 10: eighteen twenty three to eighteen thirty nine, Central America united
Speaker 10: as the Federal Republic of Central America, modeled after the
Speaker 10: US Constitution, and encompass in modern day Guatemala, Honduras, Salvador, Nicaragua,
Speaker 10: and Costa Rica. Whe By eighteen thirty eight, the cracks
Speaker 10: in the federation would become in too large to ignore.
Speaker 10: I mean, for most of its existence, the capital of
Speaker 10: the country alternated between Guatemala City and San Southador, so
Speaker 10: they couldn't even decide on that. Liberals and conservatives were
Speaker 10: also split on the economy, centralization versus decentralization, and the
Speaker 10: role of the Catholic Church, and Guatemala was kind of
Speaker 10: resented by the other states because it had such disproportionate influence.
Speaker 10: So political infighting and regional rivalries eventually caused the Union
Speaker 10: to splinter. Each state went its own way. But the
Speaker 10: collapse of the federation wasn't the end of the story,
Speaker 10: as seas of resistance would sprout across the former territory
Speaker 10: of the Republic. And among those seeds with the anarchists.
Speaker 10: Let's start from Costa Rica and head north. In nearly
Speaker 10: nineteen hundreds, in Costa Rica, you had libertarian newspapers popping
Speaker 10: up all over the place as usual.
Speaker 6: And when you say libertarian, you don't necessarily.
Speaker 10: I mean anarchists. Yes, yeah, I refuse let them appropriate
Speaker 10: that to it. Yes, so you had names like Eleora
Speaker 10: social Eldra Bajo, and Ralucha, which were aquin the struggles
Speaker 10: of local workers and the cross continental knowledge of international discourses.
Speaker 10: But even before these publications, would you believe there was
Speaker 10: enough anarchist danger to stay up the establishment?
Speaker 6: A very little anarchist danger is enough anarchy danger history
Speaker 6: of the establishment.
Speaker 10: No, But to tell you how unsettled the establishment was.
Speaker 10: So you know, we're recording this a couple of weeks
Speaker 10: before Christmas.
Speaker 6: Right, yes, this is going to come out I think
Speaker 6: right after New Year's Okay.
Speaker 10: And I don't know if you've gone to change for
Speaker 10: Christmas before. If that's the thing that you've done, I have,
Speaker 10: I okay, I have as well. And imagine eighteen ninety two, go,
Speaker 10: it's Christmas time, you going to church, You sit down
Speaker 10: to get your little you know, he's supposed to keep
Speaker 10: the sermon short and sweet, let people get home to
Speaker 10: do what they have to do. Right, But in eighteen
Speaker 10: ninety two, Bishop Field decided to use his Christmas sermon
Speaker 10: to one against anarchists.
Speaker 6: That that's pretty funny.
Speaker 10: Like imagine you're just trying to go home at each
Speaker 10: a Christmas lunch and you have to listen to this
Speaker 10: guy preach against like these are radical anarchists to come
Speaker 10: into mess of the country.
Speaker 6: They're giving out food, they're healing the sick there.
Speaker 10: I mean to be fair, the anarchists at the time
Speaker 10: were generally a threat to the to the clerical establishment.
Speaker 6: Sure, of course, as was our Lord and Savior Jesus
Speaker 6: age Christ Jesus and his affinity group of twelve traveling
Speaker 6: around the countryside stirring up all kinds of trouble, indeed
Speaker 6: indeed seeding revolt against the Roman Empire. We gotta stop them.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I mean, rush, That's the whole kind of rooms
Speaker 10: I could have get into, right there, sure is. Yeah,
Speaker 10: I mean, I mean seriously, Christianity went from being a
Speaker 10: response to the Roman Empire to be in the Roman Empire,
Speaker 10: and that is like one of the biggest down creates
Speaker 10: of the millennia. Yeah.
Speaker 6: No, it's a super successful recuperation. And that's why I
Speaker 6: do find as much as it has some problems, liberation theology,
Speaker 6: especially the version in the South, to be kind of compelling.
Speaker 6: I wouldn't consider myself a Christian necessarily, but as of
Speaker 6: like a religious sect goes, I am interested in in
Speaker 6: what liberation theology kind of does and how it tries
Speaker 6: to reradicalize forms of Christianity for sure.
Speaker 5: For sure I have some concerns about it another strands
Speaker 5: of Christianicism, same as somebody who grows Yeah.
Speaker 6: Same.
Speaker 10: But of course this is not the place to digress
Speaker 10: about that toffic as we do have quite a few
Speaker 10: countries to cover.
Speaker 5: So the cost three Ecan anarchists were not just.
Speaker 10: Being called out by the bishops, bishops, you know, they
Speaker 10: were also struggling, you know, print eight hour workday, such
Speaker 10: as with the Baker strike in nineteen oh five, and
Speaker 10: they would also demonstrate against the assassination of anarchists educator
Speaker 10: Francisco Ferrere. They were also found the Center Day Studio
Speaker 10: Associatist Criminal, which was a collective of intellectuals and workers
Speaker 10: who focused on study and expanded upon anarchism. At nineteen eleven,
Speaker 10: they would launched the journal Renovacion, which lasted an impressive
Speaker 10: seventy plus issues. They helped organize Costa Rica's first May
Speaker 10: Day celebration in nineteen thirteen and he resilate. As in
Speaker 10: the nineteen twenties, groups explicitly formed for libertarian action, but
Speaker 10: unfortunately the anarchist influence wouldn't be as impactful in the
Speaker 10: country heading into the mid twenty youth century, as the
Speaker 10: country faced two dictatorships. However, the defeat of the latter
Speaker 10: in nineteen forty nine actually ushered in the most peaceful
Speaker 10: and stable political situation in all of Latin America. I
Speaker 10: suppose that might be because the democratic government that followed
Speaker 10: didn't transgress US interests. They do have a US military
Speaker 10: base in the country after all. But let me not
Speaker 10: expeculate too much.
Speaker 6: Look who doesn't have a US military base these days?
Speaker 5: Come on, cut them some sack.
Speaker 6: That's right, that's right, Andrew. I thought you were pro internationalism,
Speaker 6: but here we go.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, look at this.
Speaker 10: Look at this, this this parochio backwards regressive. You're telling
Speaker 10: me you don't want boots on the ground in your country.
Speaker 6: Globe emoji in bio version of internationalism.
Speaker 5: So moving on north to Nicaragua.
Speaker 10: The spark of labor organization began to flicker in the
Speaker 10: early nineteen hundreds, but there's little evidence of any anarchists
Speaker 10: specific influence. In nineteen eighteen, the Federalsti Nicaraguenes, or the
Speaker 10: fo N, emerged and pulled together various mutual societies from
Speaker 10: across the country, from shoemakers to bakers to tailors, from
Speaker 10: Leon to Managua. But this federation wasn't anarchists and character
Speaker 10: both conservative and liberal elites actually tried to use these
Speaker 10: workers groups with their own ends within the fo When
Speaker 10: the group of Socialista ended up emerging as a rebel
Speaker 10: force to challenge these elites and their influence in the workers' movements,
Speaker 10: but even that rebel group was a reformist in nature.
Speaker 10: Now it is possible that libertarians from Spain and Mexico
Speaker 10: played roles in the Steve Drow strikes of nineteen nineteen
Speaker 10: in Corindo, which was Nicragu's major port city, but a
Speaker 10: caste for Shure for my research, we do know that
Speaker 10: at least one influential person was perhaps inspired by anarchism,
Speaker 10: and that was Augusto Sandino, the leader of the Sandinista
Speaker 10: rebellion against the US occupation of Nicagua. Sandino worked alongside
Speaker 10: anarchists during his time in exile in Mexico. Unit's revolution
Speaker 10: and the red and black of the Sandinistas actually came
Speaker 10: from that anarchist influence. By the nineteen thirties, after the
Speaker 10: US withdrawal, the labor movement had to navigate the Soumotza
Speaker 10: family dictatorship, which was marked by the severe oppression of
Speaker 10: anything that even smelled red. Even in the face of
Speaker 10: state violence, unions and workers' groups continued to organize, laying
Speaker 10: the groundwork for future resistance, including the eventual Sandinista revolution
Speaker 10: that overthrew the Somozas. In the late seventies, some social
Speaker 10: progress was then possible in the country, but it was
Speaker 10: still marred by corruption and authoritarianism, made worse by the
Speaker 10: reelection of Daniel or Day in two thousand and six.
Speaker 10: He still holds the presidency in Nicaragua to this d
Speaker 10: managing to steave off this swell of protest against him
Speaker 10: between twenty eighteen and twenty twenty, of which anarchists, however
Speaker 10: small number did indeed take part. If weteen to Hounduras. Now,
Speaker 10: there's not too much to say about anarchists so again,
Speaker 10: but Honduras did have a vibrant label movement. In eighteen ninety,
Speaker 10: La Democracia, one of the country's first mutual laid societies,
Speaker 10: emerged with a cooperative spirit that laid the foundation for
Speaker 10: was to come. By the early twentieth century, the workers
Speaker 10: move when in Honduras had begun to heat up even more,
Speaker 10: particularly among miners and banana plantation laborers, two groups that
Speaker 10: were central to the country's economy. In March nineteen o nine,
Speaker 10: miners struck against brutal conditions and poverty wages. The response Garson,
Speaker 10: maybe you can guess bad things, violent, brutal repression and
Speaker 10: ding ding ding ding thing.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that is that is you know what I was assuming,
Speaker 6: but I didn't want to, you know, make a fool
Speaker 6: out of myself.
Speaker 10: Nineteen sixteen banana plantation workers at the Quim Food Company.
Speaker 6: What was their response, Oh, violence, murder.
Speaker 10: I assume Dinging, ding Ding four hundred strikers were four
Speaker 10: hundred strikers were arrested and imprisoned in the infamous Castillo
Speaker 10: de Moor. I didn't see any epvidence of mass deaths
Speaker 10: in this particular case.
Speaker 6: Which is honestly progressive considering the time. I don't know.
Speaker 10: Mass incarceration not really that much better. I mean, they
Speaker 10: literally got in prisoned in this castle, dungeon jail. Not
Speaker 10: something I would want to be rats, nibblermetric tools and
Speaker 10: stuff like that.
Speaker 12: You know, no, no.
Speaker 9: So.
Speaker 10: Following these early twentieth century strikes, workers gradually began to
Speaker 10: build some momentum when they fight for rights, particularly during
Speaker 10: the nineteen fifty four General Strike against the US banana companies.
Speaker 10: This strike led to significant gains, including the legal right
Speaker 10: to organize and the emergence of a more he afide
Speaker 10: labor movement. Now will anarchists involve these movements as possible,
Speaker 10: as movements do bear much of the language and hallmarks
Speaker 10: of the anarchist cynicalis thought at the time, but identify
Speaker 10: specific names as difficult, and there doesn't seem to be
Speaker 10: any evidence of specifically anarchist groups.
Speaker 5: In the early labor history of the country.
Speaker 10: As in other parts of Central America, it appears that
Speaker 10: Marxists had a bit more influence in their struggles. In
Speaker 10: response to the workers gains, the US backed military coups
Speaker 10: of roles to counter that progress. The nineteen sixty three
Speaker 10: coup against President Harmone vieda Morales usher in decades of
Speaker 10: military rule which stifled labor movements and pleasant movements, often violently.
Speaker 10: During the nineteen seventies, the Campesino or peasant land struggles
Speaker 10: intensified as the people demanded.
Speaker 5: Redistribution and reforms.
Speaker 10: They did get some reform under General Essualdo Lopez Ariano,
Speaker 10: but these reforms were limited and met with the usual repression.
Speaker 10: In transition into a young government in nineteen eighties, Honduras
Speaker 10: remained under heavy US influence, serving as a base for
Speaker 10: anti communist activities in Central America. Then new liberal policies
Speaker 10: in nineteen nineties eroded many of the hard won social
Speaker 10: and labor rights, as privatization and austerity measures deepened the
Speaker 10: inequality in the country. Two thousand and nine coup against
Speaker 10: President Manuel's u Liar marked another turning point in modern
Speaker 10: hundred resistance. Silia's progressive policies, including raised in the minimum
Speaker 10: wage and considering a Greeran reform. Imagine you're considered progressive,
Speaker 10: even considering a careering reform. But for that thought crime
Speaker 10: of considering a Greeran reform, he was alienated by the
Speaker 10: business elite and the US aligned military and thus could
Speaker 10: and this triggered, of course, a wave of militarization and
Speaker 10: repression and protests. We met with violence and human rights
Speaker 10: abuses usual in the years fallen. The coup movements like
Speaker 10: Clatters Extensia unified a broad coalition of workers, indigenous crewsanist
Speaker 10: students who were all demanding systemic change. But the essues
Speaker 10: persist Andruas continues to face crises of poverty, violence and migration,
Speaker 10: but grassroots organizing continues. The ground there is indeed fertile
Speaker 10: for an anarchist resurgence, And then we come to the Salvador. Anarchists,
Speaker 10: both local and international, played a key role in shape
Speaker 10: in the early labor movement Spanish, Mexico and Panamanian anarchisynicalists
Speaker 10: work with them ideas of collector resistance and workers autonomy.
Speaker 10: One of the earliest milestones in the country was the
Speaker 10: Union Oprera Savalorina, founded in nineteen twenty two, which united
Speaker 10: workers under the principles of mutual aid and direct action.
Speaker 10: Nineteen twenty four, the Ferracrion de Ravadoresta Salvador or FRTs
Speaker 10: emerged and was initially steeped at anarchistinicalist ideas before shifting
Speaker 10: towards Marxism in the late nineteen twenties. In the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 10: the anarchist Centro sind Cal Libretario was founded and operated
Speaker 10: in Sansa the Door. Unfortunately, for pretty much everybody in
Speaker 10: the outside of door, nineteen thirty two happened the devastating
Speaker 10: La Mantaza of nineteen thirty two. To be specific, this
Speaker 10: was a massacre that was orchestrated by the dictatorship of
Speaker 10: General Oh. I shouldn't have told you, I should have
Speaker 10: asked you what you think to La matanza means un
Speaker 10: if you've be brushed up in your Spanish.
Speaker 6: Unfortunately, no, my Spanish is actually quite famously bad. I
Speaker 6: really should work on it.
Speaker 10: I'm sure you envy and my stumbling through all these
Speaker 10: Spanish names throughout this series.
Speaker 6: See that's usually me. I'm just happy to have it
Speaker 6: be someone else, so James doesn't laugh at me for
Speaker 6: reading too many books but not practicing saying things out
Speaker 6: loud as a kid.
Speaker 10: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I feel you. I mean for me,
Speaker 10: I think one of the difficulties I have been don
Speaker 10: in Spanish all my life. Yeah, the difficulty is when
Speaker 10: you're speaking at a momentum in one language, at least
Speaker 10: in my experience, it's really difficult to switch the patterns
Speaker 10: of pronunciation to the other language. You know, the way
Speaker 10: that Spanish like reads vowels is different from how English
Speaker 10: reads vowels, so it's hard to like quickly switch in
Speaker 10: and switch out.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's that there has always been. My struggle is
Speaker 6: reading their vowels like my vowels, and it produces some
Speaker 6: sometimes quite quite comical pronunciation, which is really really my bad.
Speaker 5: I can imagine, but yeah.
Speaker 10: The La Matanza of nineteen thirty two was a massacre
Speaker 10: orchestrated by the dictatorship of General Maximiliano Frandez Martinez that
Speaker 10: aimed to crush the peasant prison that was sparked by
Speaker 10: systemic poverty and land dispossession. Tens of thousands were slaughtered,
Speaker 10: many of them indigenous people, and the anarchist and labor
Speaker 10: movements in the country suffered immense losses as activists were
Speaker 10: either killed or forced underground. This marked the beginning of
Speaker 10: decades of military rule designed to protect the interests of
Speaker 10: the land owned in oligarchy, the fourteen families that practically
Speaker 10: owned everything in El Salvor. But despite this repression, radical
Speaker 10: organizations have persisted. The mid to lay twentieth century saw
Speaker 10: the rise of armed revolutionary groups, culminating in the Salvadorda
Speaker 10: In Civil War from nineteen eighty eight to nineteen ninety two.
Speaker 10: The war pitted the primarily Marxi Leninists and socialist factions
Speaker 10: against the US backed Selvadorra and military dictaisership. The Marxists
Speaker 10: transitioned into a political party after the nineteen ninety two
Speaker 10: peace accords, which ended the war but left many systemic
Speaker 10: inequalities unresolved. In the twenty fifth century, labour struggles have
Speaker 10: continued amid new liberal economic reforms and international financial pressures,
Speaker 10: while the left wing Fmelon won the presidents in two
Speaker 10: thosey nine and held power on until twenty nineteen. Its
Speaker 10: tenure was criticized for failing to sufficiently addressed issues plague
Speaker 10: in the country. Recent years under President I have seen
Speaker 10: the construction of a proper mass casseral police state. What
Speaker 10: we're going to struggle against, privatization and our sterity measures.
Speaker 10: By the way, the rise of Achille is just really
Speaker 10: fascinating to me, particularly from a trendardy and context, because
Speaker 10: we have a pre surveyor murder rate situation going on.
Speaker 10: Our murder rate has been rising steadily in the past
Speaker 10: two decades and there's just been in general, lot of
Speaker 10: crime is serious lately, and the response a lot I've
Speaker 10: seen a lot of Trindadians have toward the rise of
Speaker 10: a Chill and a Salvador. It's literally like, we do
Speaker 10: that too, We need to do that too, Like we
Speaker 10: need to you know, institute like a mass custual state
Speaker 10: as well. And I feel like I'm fighting a wave.
Speaker 10: I'm like talking to a war like really, it's really
Speaker 10: difficult for me, I think, to challenge that because I
Speaker 10: know some people's frustrations, but to me, my mind is
Speaker 10: just boggled at it. You know, like you really think
Speaker 10: we'll be complaining about r ouption all the time, right,
Speaker 10: Like it's very openly nepatistic and corrupt in this place,
Speaker 10: people who are like either political party that is presented
Speaker 10: to us as the options, and yet people are so
Speaker 10: think about the crime situation that they're willing to put
Speaker 10: that much power in the hands of the government to
Speaker 10: make that judgment. That's the things we know that they're
Speaker 10: innocent people in for killers prisons. You know, we know
Speaker 10: that journalists haven't locked of for criticizing the government. We
Speaker 10: know that all people are locked up without charges, without rights,
Speaker 10: without anything. And what's crazy to me is that like
Speaker 10: people are like cheering it on until it's them, until
Speaker 10: you happen to be unlucky enough to have a tattoo.
Speaker 6: I mean, yeah, as long as it's someone else, then
Speaker 6: it's not them.
Speaker 10: Yeah, exactly, It's like it's fine as long as somebody else.
Speaker 10: But like, let's say you have a tattoo or I mean,
Speaker 10: the thing is the police. I'm sure it's the case
Speaker 10: in VA as well, because the police are themselves a
Speaker 10: gang anywhere in the world, but the police insure not
Speaker 10: literally connected in some cases with gangs. In fact, there's
Speaker 10: some gang members who end up like joining the police
Speaker 10: force later on in their lives, and so to just
Speaker 10: give that kind of powerity that you know, let's say
Speaker 10: you criticize an officer, you say something that they were like,
Speaker 10: and then before you know it, you're the one behind
Speaker 10: boss as well. I understand the frustration, I don't understand
Speaker 10: the response, and it remains to be seeing how Biguli's
Speaker 10: policies continue to play out in the country. I feel
Speaker 10: like it's a disaster reason to happen, and so in
Speaker 10: many ways it is already a disaster.
Speaker 5: But you know, there are people.
Speaker 10: Point to oh, look, I'll see if things have got
Speaker 10: no But I don't know how long that will last,
Speaker 10: especially when the families that are responsible for so much
Speaker 10: of the disparity in the country are still in their
Speaker 10: position of power.
Speaker 5: But I digress.
Speaker 10: The spirit of mutually direct action and anti thoughtun resistance
Speaker 10: still as a potential to persist in the country of
Speaker 10: El Salbaro. At last, we've reached Guatemala. In nineteen twenty sixth,
Speaker 10: the publication Orientascian Cindical started circulating in Guatemala calling for
Speaker 10: the kind of direct grassroots union action that went around
Speaker 10: or even opposed fiscal parties as obstacles to liberation. Meanwhile,
Speaker 10: the Marxists in the country had a different vision. They
Speaker 10: pushed for the formation of the Federacion Juianaloberradia Guatemala and
Speaker 10: with that the launch of Fangaradia Proletaria, a communist led
Speaker 10: people that aim to rally the working class behind Marxist ideas.
Speaker 10: At the same time, Spanish and Peruvian workers alongside Guatemala
Speaker 10: and students and workers came together to form the Committee
Speaker 10: Peroxio and Cindical, which was the space where anarchistyndicalism truly
Speaker 10: found its voice in Guatemala. Gres you can probably guess
Speaker 10: the powers that be weren't going to let this kind
Speaker 10: of artical action stand. In nineteen thirty a military Dutay
Speaker 10: ships swept into the country, ending the Committee, effectively silence
Speaker 10: and anarchystynicalism in Quatemala and set in the stage for
Speaker 10: years of political oppression as the state worked tirelessly to
Speaker 10: suppress any form of workers self organization, often with the
Speaker 10: back end of the one and only yous say us
Speaker 10: say us say. The mid twentieth century marked a period
Speaker 10: of extreme violence against workers movements, passive movements, and leftists movements,
Speaker 10: especially after the nineteen fifty four CIA backed coup. Despite
Speaker 10: these setbacks, workers and political movements really never stopped fighting.
Speaker 10: In the nineteen sixties and seventies, Kriller movements gainablementum inspired
Speaker 10: by Marxist and anti imperialist ideologies, and although these movements
Speaker 10: were frequently crushed with state violence in the Fourth massacres
Speaker 10: and disappearances, they persisted until the end of the Civil
Speaker 10: War nineteen ninety six. Still social inequality and economic exploitation persisted.
Speaker 10: They moved on, especially in this sweatshop industry, have continued
Speaker 10: to fight for workers' rights. Guatemalo today is still fighting
Speaker 10: to breathe free. Its people are still fighting against the
Speaker 10: continued dominance of new liberal economic policies, fighting against crop
Speaker 10: political elites, and most importantly, fighting for autonomy French, indigenous
Speaker 10: and working peoples. And that it's time to hit the
Speaker 10: islands on Our first stop is the Dominican Republic. To
Speaker 10: the efforts of Spanish immigrant workers, the ideas of mutual
Speaker 10: aid and syndicalism found very fertile ground, particularly in the
Speaker 10: mid eighteen eighties, where we see the emergence of the
Speaker 10: first mutualist associations, such as La Alianza Chipayania in eighteen
Speaker 10: eighty four and Society dad at tsinale Ecost de Pueblo
Speaker 10: in eighteen ninety. The riverald Workers Strike in eighteen ninety six,
Speaker 10: struck in protest against their conditions but working on the
Speaker 10: Puerto Plata Santiago line, among the first direct actions in
Speaker 10: the American Republic outside of its historical.
Speaker 5: Maroonages and slaver of votes.
Speaker 10: In eighteen ninety seven, the first labor union was formed,
Speaker 10: the Union de Panaderos the son to Domingo. Not long after,
Speaker 10: strikes erupted across the country. Bakers, cobblers, brick layers all
Speaker 10: marched in protest, often the heart of Cologne Park, fighting
Speaker 10: for better working conditions and respect from their employers. Fast
Speaker 10: forward a bit, and in nineteen twenty we saw the
Speaker 10: first Premier Congress to de Ravajadores Dominicanos convene in Santramingo,
Speaker 10: where the Confederacion dominican and del Trabajo was born. The
Speaker 10: demands were basic but crucial, things like the eight hour workday,
Speaker 10: the right to strike, a salary schedule, and profit sharing.
Speaker 10: But it wasn't just about improving their daily lives. They
Speaker 10: also sought to fight foreign intervention. Specifically, they called to
Speaker 10: the end to the North American occupation, which had had
Speaker 10: a heavy presence in the region for decades. The nineteen
Speaker 10: twenties also the rise of another powerful union, the Federacion
Speaker 10: Locale de Travajo de Santra Remingo, which was founded by
Speaker 10: thirty one different unions. Despite the strength of these movements,
Speaker 10: the Dominican Republic remained under the heavy influence of foreign
Speaker 10: powers and corrupt local elites. In nineteen forty six, the
Speaker 10: Dominican Republics so a major strike in the sugar plantations
Speaker 10: of La Romana and San Pedro de Macoris, and this
Speaker 10: time the influence of Spanish anarchists who had fled the
Speaker 10: Spanish Civil War was undeniable. Today, the anarchist presence in
Speaker 10: the American Republic is not pronounced, but the conditions are
Speaker 10: as with the others ripe for such a transformation. Finally,
Speaker 10: let's jump across to Puerto Rico for a final historical review.
Speaker 10: Puerto Rico, as we know, was a Spanish colony until
Speaker 10: eighteen ninety eight, but after that it fell under the
Speaker 10: control of the United States. Anarchism in Puerto Rico didn't
Speaker 10: have quite the same impact as it did in there
Speaker 10: By Cuba, let us men, it wasn't there pushing back
Speaker 10: against the powers of b Anarchist militans, particularly from Spain,
Speaker 10: made their way to Puerto Rico in the eighteen eighties,
Speaker 10: bringing with them the fire of direct action and commitment
Speaker 10: to the idea that workers should control their own lives.
Speaker 10: In the liberal period between eighteen sixty eight and eighteen
Speaker 10: seventy three, the first artist and based organizations started popping up.
Speaker 10: These were mutual aid societies and cooperatives. They weren't exactly
Speaker 10: radical orientation, a far cry from the anarchist of prizings
Speaker 10: happening elsewhere in that America, but there were spaces where
Speaker 10: workers could find solidarity and support. In eighteen ninety four,
Speaker 10: things began to change. A monetary crisis hit, followed by
Speaker 10: a devaluation that ten prices kyrocketing, and the population decided
Speaker 10: to push back. This triggered a wave of strikes and
Speaker 10: mass protests, and that's where we start to see the
Speaker 10: direct influence of anarchists. Were not for sure that Spanish anarchists,
Speaker 10: who had settled in Puerto Rico were active in these
Speaker 10: early struggles, push in fremancipation and denounced in exploitation. In
Speaker 10: eighteen ninety eight, when Puerto Rico was already under US control,
Speaker 10: anarchists and socialists came together to form the Federacrialricnale the Rostravadories,
Speaker 10: a group clearly inspired with the Spanish Federascriol and Richiernalespanola.
Speaker 10: Their program was a simple yet radical one, abolished the
Speaker 10: exploitation of workers and build a society without borders or masters.
Speaker 10: But as with all movements, there were contradictions and splits.
Speaker 10: In eighteen ninety nine, a major rift occurred within the Federation,
Speaker 10: and it became clear that some of its leaders were
Speaker 10: more willing than others to accept the support of political parties,
Speaker 10: something the anarchists traditionally rejected. This caused those that were
Speaker 10: true to syndicalist autonomy to form the Federastrian Libre, a
Speaker 10: group that split from that original federation and stuck to
Speaker 10: the principles of the First International. Yet, just a few
Speaker 10: years later, in nineteen oh one, this same group ended
Speaker 10: up affiliated with the conservative American Federation of Labor, which
Speaker 10: is a very strange Bedfellow considering their earlier anarchists commitments.
Speaker 10: But the anarchists didn't feed away just after these splits.
Speaker 10: They didn't achieve the dawn and position in Puerto Rico's
Speaker 10: worker movement, but they kept pushing forward anyway. And one
Speaker 10: of the ways they did this was through the press,
Speaker 10: as they spread ideas, shared literature.
Speaker 5: And build networks.
Speaker 10: Baz Sumana, a publication based on Kagwas, was one such example.
Speaker 10: The anergi anarchists in Perto Rico was translated into action,
Speaker 10: especially in the labor front where they were there and
Speaker 10: part of strikes and eons and ongoing battles. So as
Speaker 10: we look to Puerto Rico today, whether with the fight
Speaker 10: for sovereignty, for labor rights, against cunalism, or whatever else,
Speaker 10: we can remember the potential of anarchism on the island.
Speaker 10: There are Puerto Ricans and history who understood that freedom
Speaker 10: wasn't solely about political independence, but about deliberation of all
Speaker 10: people from all forms of exploitation. So I just take
Speaker 10: a step back and look at the broader picture of
Speaker 10: labor and anarchist struggle across the region. Do the anarchist
Speaker 10: movements were not as vibrant as elsewhere, whether indeed dormant
Speaker 10: or dead in many cases, we still see a very
Speaker 10: powerful thread of resistance and a very flutile ground for
Speaker 10: anarchist development, which our comrades in these places can hopefully
Speaker 10: flourish within.
Speaker 5: That's all for me today. You can find me a
Speaker 5: YouTube at Androism and patroon that seem true. This is
Speaker 5: It could Happen Here? All power to all the people. Peace.
Speaker 2: Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat death of the universe.
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