American Dream | Prologue: Dream a Little Dream

To tell the story of The American Dream is to tell the story of an American’s dream.  And so, unable to synthesize any story but my own, I will use it to illustrate.

I am Caitlin Frazier, 23 years old and a graduate of the University of Oklahoma.  I grew up in an upper-middle class household on the west side of Norman, Oklahoma. I went to amazing schools, and when I was in high school I participated in orchestra, choir and took Advanced Placement classes. My parents supported me through college, and I graduated without a cent of debt. Afterward, I was able to move across the country and participate in a year of service as a community volunteer. I consider myself very lucky. I also have one sibling, an older brother who is currently pursuing a doctorate in mathematics, which he will complete in 2012.

But the present is not where the story begins; it’s where it ends.

Backtrack 55 years.  The date is February 6, 1955.  My father is being born at his grandmother’s house outside of small-town Drumright, Oklahoma.  Doctors are not present, only midwives, trained by tradition and instinct and prayer.  My father already has a brother, two years his senior.  Another will come along in two more years.  A girl will complete the quartet four years after that.

Previously, my grandfather had been in the Navy for four years on a destroyer escort, after which he and my grandmother settled in their native Oklahoma to raise a family. He worked as a letter-carrier, and she was a homemaker who later worked as a school cook.  Like most Oklahomans at the time, they raised a few farm animals and grew their own vegetables.  Money was very tight but love abounded.

My dad graduated from Drumright High School, the head of a class of 47 students.  He was the first in his family to go to college. At the University of Oklahoma, he earned both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in mechanical engineering, putting to work the practical know-how of building things he had been taught by his father.  To afford college, my dad hauled hay during the summers and worked other odd jobs to save money. In 1980, my father married my mother, another recent University of Oklahoma graduate.  They started a family and in 1986, I was born.  Reference the first paragraph for how lucky I have been to have so much provided for me and have opportunities that my father lacked, like international travel and the luxury of being a full-time student without worrying about debt.

Quite simply, our story is The American Dream. My father, whose family struggled with money, was able to pass on opportunities to me, a young woman completely financially stable with the world at my fingertips.  An essential part of the Dream is that parents are able to give their children more than they had.  My great grandfather was a sharecropper in Davis, Oklahoma.  He died early in my grandfather’s life, so not much is remembered about him in the family. But I would imagine that he worked incredibly hard to make ends meet and had very minimal education.  My grandparents graduated high school but did not have the luxury of higher education.  My father (and mother) received both a bachelor’s and master’s.  My brother is working for his doctorate.  It’s a beautiful story, particularly moving to me as I am one of its characters.

The American Dream is one of the essential ideologies of the United States.  It is as American as apple pie, baseball and freedom. But, the Dream is so ubiquitous that its effect on us is very rarely pointed out. We swim in it all the time so we cannot see the water.

In this series, I hope to make you see the water.  The huge effect of the Dream was first pointed out to me three years ago and The American Dream has captured my imagination ever since.  Bookended by an introduction and a conclusion, this series will examine four aspects of the dream:

• What is the Dream and who can achieve it?
• Who is not able to achieve the Dream?
• How does American Dream ideology affect our everyday lives and policies?
• How does The American Dream empower us?  How does it hold us back?

I invite you to dream the Dream with me.  Please leave your own comments about your experience of The American Dream.

How We Live Matters: City Design in the Modern Age, Part 1

-This is part one in a series about city design and the perception of modern-day communities-

It’s a sunny winter day as I maneuver my bicycle from Norman’s Boyd Street to Porter Avenue and finally onto Main Street, rolling toward my favorite coffee shop. The gears click harmoniously with my perpetual leg motions and – for now at least – everything seems at peace in the world. The weather is bliss, I’m riding on two wheels (a favorite pastime) and I’m not in a car. All tenets of the good life.

But why does simply riding a bike to the local coffee shop incite so much contentment? Is it just me, or is there more to the equation? I believe I can offer some answers.

Think about it for a moment. If you could live anywhere, or in any way, what would your life look like?

I am, of course, speaking of how you live in terms of community and city design.

So the question remains: how would you choose to live? Would your dream more resemble American society’s way of life, that is one largely characterized by car commutes and suburban neighborhoods? Or, would your ideal take on a more Manhattan-esque flair, with a fast-paced pedestrian life filling your idyllic dream-scape?

It’s different for everyone, but most of us would probably hit somewhere in the middle of these two paradigms. But, is there an ideal way to live? Or, at least one that is beneficial for the greatest number of people?

Whether we know it or not, we’ve all been subject to the persuasive forces of the Industrial Revolution, and the more recent car-dominated way of life.

The Revolution and pervasiveness of automobiles restructured the aim of city design. As University of Notre Dame Architecture professor Philip Bess writes:

“Today’s common wisdom is different. It views the city as governed by impersonal market forces, and devotes little thought to the good life or to the relation cities might have to the good life.”

In past times, Bess (among others) states, city design had two purposes: moral and aesthetic greatness. Cities strove for beauty while caring for their citizens (i.e., the “good life”, simply defined). These purposes shaped city design and trumped the notions of the individual. Indeed, the dominant interest was the benefit of society as a whole. This is an important distinction to make, as it can differ from a more modern view in which the parts often dictate the whole (e.g., what makes me happy is more important that what’s good for society).

In my own dreams, I would live somewhere in which I could walk or bike everywhere: To work, to church, to school, the grocery store, my friends’ houses. All manner of services and social functions would be easily accessible. Ideally this would put me in meaningful contact with my neighbors. It would allow me to know them deeply and to help them when in need (and vice versa).

Obviously, in 21st century America, this super pedestrianism is not a reality in the grand sense. I drive many if not most places, and my dream for society will likely remain just that, at least in the near future.

But others had a pedestrian dream far before I did. And certainly cities of old were ones populated by people on foot. As Bess writes in his essay Design Matters: The City and the Good Life:

“Systematic philosophical thinking about urbanism antedates Christianity, going back to Aristotle, who wrote some four centuries before Christ that the best life for human beings is lived in community with others, and most particularly in a polis. This “city-state” was typically small in scale, with flexible but definite physical and geographic characteristics. It happened also to approximate the size of subsequent historic towns and urban neighborhoods— and for an obvious reason: it is an area that can be comfortably
walked.”

So you can argue that the modern-day building practices of sprawling metropolises go against historic city designs that once dominated the landscape.

People, Aristotle believed, were meant to live in small, pedestrian communities of diverse patronage comprising multiple generations. It’s a lifestyle that is increasingly absent in modern times. Even if you actively wanted to live such a life, it would be difficult today for many Americans.

In terms of negative effects, I personally think modern neighborhood design is one of the largest enablers of prolonged racial and socio-economic inequality in the modern age. Granted, people can’t truly be forced to desegregate (as history has taught us), but think of your own experiences. If you grew up in the ‘burbs like me, your upbringing was largely homogeneous in terms of ethnicity and relative social class.

I think higher-density neighborhoods comprising multiple economic classes and age generations would do much for society. I realize the difficulties of such an endeavor, but am cognizant of the positive outcomes.

I’m not saying suburban sprawl is inherently evil, but we should be conscious about how it shapes our culture. We should also be mindful about how modern city design encourages the liberal consumption of natural resources and increases utility infrastructure costs (which, in turn costs tax payers more money).

As one indicator, consider that in 1970, Americans drove an average of 4,000 miles per year per person. Today that average rests at about 8,000 per person per year. A stark reminder of a burgeoning problem.

But the winds of change are upon us, friends. Not necessarily in the form of a city design revolution, but the proof is in the markets: commercial and residential properties are increasingly more valuable if they have pedestrian access to life’s essentials.

There’s a reason why, in college towns, homes are valued more if they’re near the university (as is the case in my own home town of Norman, Okla.). In a simple way, people want to be close to cultural and social hubs.

And with the Green movement spreading its wings in myriad ways, more people are desiring a throwback to our city design roots for environmental reasons. And land developers are listening.

In the end, I believe people want to be close to their neighbors, their friends and their work places. And they want to use their own power — as much as possible — to get there. I realize this paradigm isn’t a possibility for everyone or all situations, but it’s a worthwhile pursuit nevertheless.

I’m pumped because maybe, just maybe, there’s hope for my dream becoming a reality after all.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
My next installment will focus on what’s being done locally (Oklahoma City area) and nationally to change the face of modern neighborhoods and communities. There are a number of organizations, city governments and you, the people, who are actively at work to transform the future and with it our cultural landscape. Please stay tuned for part two!

The Dao of Community Gardening | The Questions to Ask

By Haven Tobias
Xenia Dialogue Fellow

Now, in the autumn, is the right time for your organization or neighborhood to begin planning a community garden. You need to start now, because you will have questions pile on questions, and it may take until late winter to sort them all out. The first question to ask is: Who is your community? By this, I mean both who is going to be doing the work and who is going to be reaping the benefits?

As for doing the work:

• Who will be your responsible party or parties? A garden is a black hole of tasks, from preparing to mulching to weeding plots and everything in between. If one person is willing to take on the responsibility of being administrator/head honcho/boss — OK. But maybe you need a committee, so that there is back-up, a redundancy of responsible parties.

• How you will communicate with your gardeners when there are routine, or perhaps sudden, maintenance needs? Will you use Twitter or Facebook,  e-mail or phone?

As for reaping the benefits:

• In your space, will you have one big garden that is everyone’s, or will participants have their own plots within the larger lot?
• Will you grow whatever it is you grow for “home” consumption or to sell at a farmers’ market?  (Many master gardeners/community gardeners will tell you that, surprisingly — it was to me — enough, people disappear at harvest time.  Is it because in Oklahoma it’s just too hot in August, or is it because people are afraid of the ubiquitous zucchini (make that Ton of Zucchini)

In that light, please permit me an aside in this section on questions to provide an answer. There are organizations, like Food and Shelter for Friends, and there are churches that will welcome your excess produce — yea, even the zucchini! Eat what you can, and share the rest.

To return to the questions, let’s do get the lawyers involved, since almost always lawyers do get involved (In the interests of full disclosure, I am one.):

• Do you have to have premises liability insurance, in case someone wielding a spade or hoe accidentally injuries a fellow gardener? Probably you don’t need to think about workers’ compensation insurance, but also probably it’s a good idea to have a disclaimer form to be signed by volunteers; you know, to the effect: “I don’t have to work six hours today in 90 degree heat, but if I opt to work six hours today in 90 degree heat and get heat stroke, I hold you harmless.”

Now let’s get the lawyers outa here and return to the gardeners:

• What are you — and by you, I mean your community — wanting to grow, roses or tomatoes, morning glories or squash? This is a good discussion to have early on because perhaps you can accommodate both those who want produce for food and those who want to beautify the neighborhood. These can be different motivations and it is best to resolve them up-front.  Then too, there are those who, whether veggies or flowers, want to grow only native plants, and those who want to experiment with the exotic.  It is best to air the differences of people who want orchids and people who want okra as a threshold matter.
• Are you going to grow whatever it is organically?  If so, what alternatives will you use to chemical pesticides and herbicides?
• Where will your garden grow? If you have a park or church or school in mind, have you visited it at different times of the day and the seasons so that you know where the sun/shade patterns are? Have you handled the soil?
• Will your garden be handicap-accessible, with hard path surfaces for wheelchairs or walkers, and raised beds?
• Is there a secure area for tool storage?
• Where will your water source be? Is it clear who is going to pay for it? If you can afford to start from scratch, a drip irrigation system is preferable to a sprinkler system. Among the benefits of a drip irrigation system is that it conserves water by limiting evaporation loss and reduces disease.

So many questions, it’s a wonder anybody ever gets a community garden started!  Perhaps they do because they answer the big question first: Why do we want a community garden?  The answer to that one question may answer many others.

For example, if the answer is:  We would like to provide children with a broad learning experience, where they will apply math and history, as well as biology, in the planting and then learn about nutrition in the harvesting, then you know who your community is. Your community is children, working with the guidance of teachers and parents. You know what your product is.  Your product will be vegetables you can harvest in the spring and in the fall, and you will know to beware of vegetables that are ripe only in mid-summer. You know your garden will be on the school grounds or very close by, and you probably know where your water source is.  So lots of questions are answered when you address the fundamental question: Why do we want a community garden?

I use the above only as an example.  A broad learning experience for children isn’t the only motivation for a community garden. The American Community Gardening Association recognizes that community gardening may provide a catalyst for neighborhood and community development, stimulate social interaction, beautify neighborhoods, produce nutritious food, and create opportunities for recreation, exercise, therapy and education. Each of these purposes requires that the questions be addressed in the context of each unique situation.

Next week: Finding the answers.

Main photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vickimoore/ / CC BY 2.0

Nicaragua Journal | Working for Women

The growing immiserization of governments and economics in the global south … enables and even promotes the migration and trafficking of women as a strategy for survival. The same infrastructure designed to facilitate cross-border flows of capital, information and trade also makes possible a range of unintended cross-border flows, as growing numbers of traffickers, smugglers and even governments now make money off the backs of women. Through their work and remitances, women infuse cash into the economies of deeply indebted countries, and into the pockets of “entrepreneurs” who have seen other opportunities vanish. These survival circuits are often complex, involving multiple locations and sets of actors, which altogether constitute increasingly global chains of traders and “workers.”
– Saskia Sassen, “Global Cities and Survival Circuits” in Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy

By Barbara Schwartz
Editorial Director
The Xenia Institute

All of the topics I’ve talked about in this journal of my Nicaragua experience contain a single thread in common: They all affect women in one way or another.

In Nicaragua, women took part in the revolution as soldiers and supporters of both Sandinistas and Contras; women took their role in the government that worked to rebuild the nation after the civil war, and now are at the center of some of the nation’s political machinations. Women bear the brunt of Nicaragua’s poverty. And the lack of clean, safe water take the hardest toll on women, upon whom traditionally falls the responsibility for obtaining water and safeguarding sanitation for the families.

I encountered another intersection of women’s lives in Nicaragua and politics about a month after I returned from my eight-day Nicaragua journey. Tthe BBC reported that Amnesty International had started a campaign to protest Nicaragua’s abortion policy, which completely bans all forms of abortion, even in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother. Before the law was changed in 2008,  Nicaraguan law allowed for abortion in these cases; now the total ban prevents medical schools from even teaching the ban to doctors. Amnesty International calls the ban a threat to the human rights and health of Nicaraguan women and girls. According to the report:

At all stages of pregnancy, but particularly during the first three months, spontaneous  abortion (miscarriage) may occur for entirely natural reasons. Publicity surrounding the law has helped fuel fears among women who miscarry that they will be accused of self-induced  abortion. There is particular concern that women and girls who have a miscarriage may find themselves under suspicion of procuring an abortion if they present with symptoms of miscarriage and there is not sufficient medical evidence or expertise available to assess whether the pregnancy ended without external intervention.61 Because of fear of criminal prosecution, some women experiencing complications after miscarriages delay seeking medical treatment. Women who are suffering complications as a result of an unsafe abortion have a strong incentive not to seek medical treatment. Fearful of prosecution, they delay seeking the treatment they need and so put their own lives at risk.

Amnesty International and various news outlets who covered the abortion ban and Amnesty’s campaign, link it to President Daniel Ortega’s relationship with the Roman Catholic Church, which he cultivated in order to win its support in his successful 2006 bid for the presidency. The Sandinista leader had been a supporter of abortion rights in the past, and critics, of both Ortega and the party, have said the FSLN has turned its back on its people in its reach for power. According to a BBC report:

This was “playing politics with the lives of women and girls”, says Patricia Orozco. She fought on the side of the Sandinistas and is today a radio journalist and activist.

I asked her whether she felt there had been a betrayal of the revolution she took part in.

“We see our comrades in the revolution all changed, many of the women in particular.”

Abortion was not one of the topics that I was listening for while I was in Nicaragua, and as a result I don’t know how most of the women I met felt about the law. The closest I got to women’s health was to take snapshots of a beautiful mural outside a women’s clinic in Managua. I also got to deliver a plastic sack full of home pregnancy tests to the small health clinic in Chacraseca, whose single doctor, nurse, pharmacist and support staff are paid for by funds from JustHope supporters.

Primarily, my encounters with women’s issues came through an economic lens. I visited an artist co-op that supported women artists only.  I discussed the basics of a microfinance program that JustHope has begun in the district, and learned about the uses to which the women were putting their $25, $50 or $100 loans. Some were planning to start a pulperia, or a small, corner store or stand; some wanted to buy a pig to increase their farm’s output; others planned to start a bakery, sell makeup, or make and sell jewelry.

Why do microfinance programs primarily go to women? The New York Times’ Nicholas D. Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn recently wrote a book called Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide that, in part, describes why these programs target women. In an excerpt published in August in the New York Times Magazine, they wrote:

One reason involves the dirty little secret of global poverty: some of the most wretched suffering is caused not just by low incomes but also by unwise spending by the poor — especially by men. Surprisingly frequently, we’ve come across a mother mourning a child who has just died of malaria for want of a $5 mosquito bed net; the mother says that the family couldn’t afford a bed net and she means it, but then we find the father at a nearby bar. He goes three evenings a week to the bar, spending $5 each week.

Our interviews and perusal of the data available suggest that the poorest families in the world spend approximately 10 times as much (20 percent of their incomes on average) on a combination of alcohol, prostitution, candy, sugary drinks and lavish feasts as they do on educating their children (2 percent). If poor families spent only as much on educating their children as they do on beer and prostitutes, there would be a breakthrough in the prospects of poor countries. Girls, since they are the ones kept home from school now, would be the biggest beneficiaries. Moreover, one way to reallocate family expenditures in this way is to put more money in the hands of women. A series of studies has found that when women hold assets or gain incomes, family money is more likely to be spent on nutrition, medicine and housing, and consequently children are healthier.

In Ivory Coast, one research project examined the different crops that men and women grow for their private kitties: men grow coffee, cocoa and pineapple, and women grow plantains, bananas, coconuts and vegetables. Some years the “men’s crops” have good harvests and the men are flush with cash, and other years it is the women who prosper. Money is to some extent shared. But even so, the economist Esther Duflo of M.I.T. found that when the men’s crops flourish, the household spends more money on alcohol and tobacco. When the women have a good crop, the households spend more money on food. “When women command greater power, child health and nutrition improves,” Duflo says.

I found Kristoff and WuDunn’s take true, but somewhat unfair; while several men that I met in Nicaragua had that attitude of pleasure-before-responsibility, I also met several who were providing for their families the best they could. I met families where the men were absent either because they had left to live with another woman, or the mother of the family I had met was the other woman. I also found myself in communities and families of general respect and love. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s complicated. What I mean by that, I’m not sure. I think if I take away anything from my all-too-brief time in Nicaragua, I hope it’s that I remember this — it’s complicated — when trying to make a judgment on a situation. Too often when I have to make a judgment about a topic, an issue, a choice, I want to go with the soundbite or the side that most closely aligns with what I think I believe. And too often, reality slaps me upside the head to tell me that my own experiences aren’t always the best site to make a judgment about someone else. There’s a lot of grime on the lens I look at world through that needs to be cleaned off properly so I can see the whole picture.

For example.

On our last day in Chacraseca, our group visited some houses members had helped build the year before. One of the houses had been improved quite a bit: an extra room had been added on, decorative bars, to help protect the television and refrigerator within the house, had been added. Leslie, our group leader, told us that the mother of the household had gone to work as a domestic worker in Costa Rica for a year to pay for the improvements. Great, I said, thinking that it was good the woman had had the opportunity to make some extra money to pay for these luxuries. What initiative!

Leslie replied, “That means she left her children alone for a year. That was the only work she could find to support her family.”

Leslie didn’t have to explain further. I knew what this meant, had spent a semester studying this very issue, and yet I still assumed my own framework when I met it face-to-face. The mother of the family had become part of the global care chain, which an American Prospect article describes as:

A typical global care chain might work something like this: An older daughter from a poor family in a third world country cares for her siblings (the first link in the chain) while her mother works as a nanny caring for the children of a nanny migrating to a first world country (the second link) who, in turn, cares for the child of a family in a rich country (the final link). Each kind of chain expresses an invisible human ecology of care, one care worker depending on another and so on. A global care chain might start in a poor country and end in a rich one, or it might link rural and urban areas within the same poor country. More complex versions start in one poor country and extend to another slightly less poor country and then link to a rich country.

Care chains are one of the products of globalization, often unrecognized by those of us in the industrialized world because we see such work as a choice, rather than an only option that breaks up families and often leaves the woman vulnerable both at home and in her workplace abroad. Although care chains can be beneficial — they can provide economic freedom, which can lead to social and political freedom — they put a literal price on the emotional and psychological well-being of families, and human worth becomes yet another globalize commodity.

So what do I know?

Well, I know that all of the women I met in Nicaragua, all the women I’ve read about since coming back, aren’t victims. They are doing what they can do make the most of the opportunities they have access to, with all the agency and strength that they have access to. But I realize, also, that that there’s a big difference in being a victim and being in a position where you’re easy to victimize. I wonder how much our government, economic or international policies might change — hell, how much of our relationships with one another — might change if we kept that in mind.

Nicaragua Journal | Agüita

Que el agua es de todos, no del mejor postor

Aterciopelados, Agüita

By Barbara Schwartz
Editorial Director
The Xenia Institute

Sitting here right now, writing this blog, I am leisurely sipping from a 32-ounce water cup that I drew from the kitchen faucet. Since that faucet is located in Norman — instead of Oklahoma City, which has some of the best-tasting tap water in North America — this cup of water has a slightly sour taste that isn’t very pleasing to my palate. But it’s pure and it’s free of bacteria, parasites, chemical waste and industrial toxins that can cause life-threatening illnesses like cholera, diarrhea and cancer.

Most of the world isn’t this fortunate.

According to Good Magazine:

• One-sixth of the world’s population does not have access to clean water;
• Every minute, four people across the world die from a water-related disease;
• Diarrhea caused by water-borne diseases kills 4,100 people per day; 90 percent of those deaths occur in children under the age of 5.

I spent my time in Nicaragua with one eye on the work that I was doing and the other on my ever-present plastic water bottle, which served not only was a source for drinking water, but also for teeth-brushing and some hand-washing. Any water that didn’t come from that water bottle, or the 5-gallon vessels of purified water we bought at the corner stores, I had to look at with suspicion and avoid, lest I end up with any number of water-borne ailments.

Again, most of the world is not this fortunate, to be able to shell out $1 a liter for a day’s drink. Neither are most of the people in rural Nicaragua.

The irony, of course, is that parts of Nicaragua are very wet and water-covered, at least during the rainy season. According to Public Citizen, water covers about 10 percent of Nicaragua’s surface, and the water table has been easily reachable through hand-dug wells. However, over the past 20 years, environmental degradation, pollution and a rising population that’s taxed the available water has threatened the country’s ability to provide clean water to its people. Only about half the country is able to access clean water; in rural areas, only a quarter of the country as clean water. Only about a third of the country has sewage coverage. In addition, what water is available that is available is being scooped up by multinational firms, backed by  International Monetary Fund policies, that are privatizing water access.

Clean water access is one of the the main projects that JustHope is working on together with Chacraseca. The community has been working on getting clean water to all its 8,000 residents for about nine years. Thanks to a $250,000 grant from the Austrian government and fundraising efforts by JustHope partners, Chacraseca was able to buy pipeline, professionally drill two wells and build clean water tanks in order to provide water to all but 200 families in the sector. Community members — women, men and children together — took part in the work, from digging trenches for the pipelines to building and installing the tanks. JustHope is currently raising the last few thousands of dollars to bring water to the rest of the community.

For those who have had taps installed at their homes, getting clean water is as easy as turning a knob. The final tests on the last wells took place while I was in Chacraseca. The water in those wells, purified through chlorine, were finally deemed safe to drink. I took a sip from a plastic bottle that had been filled at the well; it was sour and left a terrible taste in my mouth, but it was drinkable, and it was safe.

For those who don’t have faucets at their home, clean water is neither safe nor easily accessed. At the home our group was helping to build, in the remotest part of Chacraseca, the family still got its water the old-fashioned way: via a single well that served the entire neighborhood, drawn 20-gallon bucket by 20-gallon bucket. It takes a team of oxen, hitched to the pulley system, to pull the water up from the water table more than 200 meters below the earth. One man led the oxen down a long trail so he could haul the bucket up to the surface; another man tipped the water-filled bucket into a cistern, where the women of the neighborhood could then draw water for their homes’ use. The mother of the family whose house we were helping build showed us how she transports the water, in 2-gallon buckets atop her head. I gave the chore a try; I could barely lift half a bucket, and the weight of it left a painful bruise on the top of my head that I felt for days. This water, of course, wasn’t drinkable without purifying it first, and the family, which included two small children under the age of four, had no way of purifying it.

Access to clean water is only part of Nicaragua’s water problem. The other is water privatization, in which for-profit companies take over a nation’s water supply, create infrastructure for water delivery, but charge a high price for what was previously free. The good part: clean water; the bad: water only goes to those who can now afford it. Water privatization for many developing countries is often a condition of a International Monetary Fund development loans. According to Jennifer Schwab, director of Sustainability for Sierra Club Green Home:

The shrinking supply of clean drinking water worldwide is on a collision course with its relentlessly growing population. And in a number of developing world countries such as Bolivia, Honduras, Nicaragua, Angola, and others, private for-profit corporations are taking over the water supply and charging high prices for this previously free commodity. In many cases, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank are behind this strategy.

The world’s three leading for-profit water firms — Vivendi, Suez and Thames — would counter that they are installing an infrastructure to support a supply of clean fresh water that otherwise would not be built by the governments of these under-financed nations. They also provide jobs and inject significant sums into otherwise struggling local economies.

So who is right? Nobody can charge citizens for the air we breathe. Should water be for sale or is it a basic human right? Is it possible for sustainable social policies and multinational, public companies to coexist? I think the answer is no. If Vivendi, Suez or Thames invest the capital to install the clean drinking water infrastructure and their business model is to sell drinking water, how can they be required to give it away to local citizens? This is the quandary we face especially in the developing world. Company CEOs and Board Members will argue they have a responsibility to their shareholders to maximize profits, while local governments have a responsibility to their citizens. These poor countries, most often targeted for privatized water systems, need infrastructure and money to provide clean drinking water. Private companies feel that by providing these essentials, they have the right to charge for water consumption, regardless of the consumer’s socioeconomic status.

The IMF has pushed for water privatization in several parts of Nicaragua, including the capital Managua, Jinotega and León, which is three miles away from Chacraseca, and the cost of water increased water prices by 30 percent in Managua. The public policy nonprofit Public Citizen lays out the the IMF and World Bank’s structural adjustment programs for Nicaragua that include plans for water privatization and an increase in residential water prices here. The report states:

The government of Nicaragua has been responding slowly to IMF and Inter-American Development Bank pressures to increase cost recovery and privatize water services. There are a variety of domestic political obstacles, from the role of water utilities in the political patronage system to popular resistance to increased water fees, that have slowed the externally imposed water sector “reform” program. Gaining popular political acceptance of the water privatization agenda will not be simple. There is tremendous resistance and social opposition to increased tariffs for water and social anxiety about relinquishing control of major portions of the country’s water system to foreign multinational corporations. Water, like food, air, or land, is basic to human survival. The basic injustice of water fees that are unaffordable to the majority poor population is very clear to most Nicaraguans.

To be honest, before I went to Nicaragua, I never thought about how much water I use each day, and how that access to all that water might be a justice issue. According to Good Magazine, the average North American resident uses more than 100 gallons a day; the average person in a developing country uses about 1.3 gallons a day, a little less than a single flush of a low-flow toilet in the U.S. Curtailing my water use might be better for the environment, lower my own bills, and even help ensure the supply for those in my immediate area. But are my water concerns related to those in Nicaragua?

Public Citizen points out that eventually, all water problems will be local:

In the U.S. we have taken for granted access to basic water and sanitation services. However, policies promoting privatization and increased cost recovery are creeping into the wealthy countries as well. Recent tax cuts and the U.S. “War on Terrorism” will make in unlikely that water and sanitation infrastructure will receive the public subsidies sufficient to maintain operations and hold the line on consumer water fees. According to the U.S. Water Infrastructure Network (WIN), an additional $23 billion a year is needed in the U.S. to meet environmental and public health mandates, and to replace the aging infrastructure. Relying just on utility rate increases will cause consumer bills to double or triple, according to WIN.

As a result, cash-strapped municipal, country and regional water system managers will likely have to face hard choices, including the temptation to sell or contract operations to private multinational water corporations. In addition, new rules proposed by the World Trade Organization (WTO) services agreement may help private investors access government subsidies and ease the entry of foreign private water companies into the U.S. market. The policies of water privatization and increased cost recovery may soon begin to hit home in the U.S.

So paying attention to the impact of water privatization in developing countries like Nicaragua is a smart thing for those of us in the U.S. to do, to watch for when these policies might begin affecting us. But there’s more to it than that. As a person who cares deeply about justice and who tries to participate in the creation of a just and sustainable world, the issue of water access has to be understood as something more than either profit or how they might affect me individually. Access to clean, safe water has to be seen as a human right, because water, like air, is something we must have in order to live. Jennifer Schwab calls for the world to take a middle path in managing water access and costs, finding a way to provide clean affordable water to every person while still providing the companies that create the infrastructure a reasonable profit. Perhaps that is the answer; how that might be implemented, however, is anyone’s guess. And whatever happens, it must happen justly.

Right now, all I know is I stand with the quote in the epigraph of this post: May water belong to everyone, and not the highest bidder.

Watch …

For the past few years to mark World Water Day, GOOD Magazine has created these videos about water inequality and the need for safe, clean drinking water worldwide.

Nicaragua Journal | ‘Dirty Water of Imperialism’

The degree to which Nicaragua in the 1990s was obliged to yield its economic sovereignty to the international lending and donor community was brought home to met he day after the 1996 general election by an observer group, of which I was a member, with an individual heading one of those institutions in Nicaragua. When asked what he thought of the results of that election, he responded that either outcome would have been the same to him, since neither Aléman nor Ortega would have had many options concerning how to run the economy. After elaborating on that point, he then confided that his institution had an economic plan for Nicaragua and that he had arranged President-elect Aléman to come to his — the international bureaucrat’s — office to see it.

Thomas W. Walker, Nicaragua: Living in the Shadow of the Eagle

By Barbara Schwartz
Editorial Director
The Xenia Institute

Leave the United States and order a Coke, and you’ll probably find that it has a different taste. I drank one Coca-Cola during my eight days in Nicaragua, at a small restaurant (actually, it was a table set up on the front porch of a woman’s home in a Managua neighborhood), and enjoyed the taste of Coke made not with high fructose corn syrup but cane sugar.

I’m not much of a soda drinker; under normal circumstances I drink water. But in a place where most of the water is not readily drinkable, when you realize that the 20-oz. bottle of water you bought at the corner store has to last until your next trip to the store, which is three miles away and you’ll have to walk to get there, and it’s got to serve for everything — from quenching your thirst to brushing your teeth — you hunt around for other options. I ended up drinking a lot of Toña, one of two beers made in Nicaragua.

The pulperias — the small locally run corner stores — were stocked with both Coke and Pepsi, but I didn’t have the heart to drink one anyway. If you walk into a cantina and order one of these drinks, I was told, you don’t order them by name; you ask for some “dirty water of imperialism,” a reference to the political and economic hegemony the U.S. holds over the Western hemisphere and a good portion of the world.

In Nicaragua, the economic divide between the U.S. and the two-thirds world is palpable. Nicaragua is a country of stark economic division, with one of the highest degrees of income disparity in the world. It is the second-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere (after Haiti, according to the BBC), with the majority of its people living on less than $1 a day. In rural areas, electric service is spotty; if there’s running water, it’s not necessarily potable. The house we helped build, in the most rural sector of Chacraseca, was built with concrete blocks and included a concrete floor, but when you consider that the family had been living in a tiny shelter cobbled together out of salvaged tin tied to branches taken from the forest, that tiny concrete house seems almost palatial.

Our small group of builders reached that site every day after about a half-mile hike up a dirty path; the road, if you could call it that, was too bad — filled with deep ruts and sharp volcanic stones — for our van to make it all the way. Carts pulled by donkeys or oxen, however, didn’t have too much trouble.

A phrase I heard quite a bit during and after my experience in Nicaragua, especially by people who have made the journey themselves, is, “We may have material wealth, but they are rich in community.” But this division isn’t a natural one that keeps the U.S. on one side and Nicaragua on the other; it didn’t just shake out that way through a Guns, Germs and Steel history. Among other things, it’s national external debt, and it’s global economics.

Nicaragua’s external debt currently stands at about $6 million, reduced in the last few years from about $6 billions dollars after the nation entered the World Bank’s Highly Indebted Poor Countries program that canceled 80% of Nicaragua’s debt. This works out to about $1,000 for every person in Nicaragua. That original debt, though exacerbated by the civil war and environmental disasters like hurricanes and volcanic eruptions and from Nicaragua’s inability to pay the interest on those loans, came from bond payments, bank bankruptcies and structural adjustment programs imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Witness for Peace says Nicaragua spends about 25% of its annual budget on paying its external debt. Health care and education get 14% and 11%, respectively. So the money that could go to into social programs that might help end the cycle of poverty instead go into debt repayment,

There is plenty of argument about whether global economic programs such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are helpful or harmful to the economies of countries in the two-thirds world. Structural adjustment programs, for example, provide money for needed national projects such as road and dam projects, but they come with conditions such as deregulation of prices and currency, the privatization of state industries and the elimination of trade barriers. Essentially, the country is required to take part in the neoliberal market system that rewards lending institutions and wealthier governments that lend the money, at the expense of the nation’s poor.

Vincent A. Gallagher, in his book The True Cost of Low Prices: The Violence of Globalization, details the downward economic spirals that indebted countries experience under these programs. For example:

The social impact of IMF-sponsored devaluation is usually brutal and immediate. Overnight the prices of food, drugs, fuel, public services and many other products increase sometimes 30 to 50 percent. In poor countries high school students, taxi drivers and people with no formal education come to realize that prices rise after the visits by IMF representatives are reported in the newspapers. Many people in the United States have no idea how the system works. Poor people know all about it because of the way it impacts their lives. The prices of everything go up. …

Increases in the cost of transportation can be devastating. For example workers living in a poor area may take three buses to get to work. With devaluation, transportation costs can go up five cents for each bus fare. So the cost to get to the job and back can go up thirty cents a day or more. If the workers were already living on less than a dollar a day, as over 1 billion people do, the devaluation can push them over the edge. It may now be better for them to go to the local garbage dump to collect paper, bottles, metal and plastic to sell for recycling. They may be able to find food at the dump.

During my brief visit to Nicaragua this summer, the exchange rate was 20 cordobas for each U.S. dollar. The $50 U.S. that I exchanged in Managua lasted the entire eight days, dribbling out of my pocket usually less than a dollar at a time. A souvenir magnet I would have paid $5 for in the U.S. cost me a quarter (which I paid with a U.S. coin; all my cordobas were in 50s and 100s, and the vendor couldn’t make change). And the Coke, the “dirty water of the imperialism”? About 18 cordobas, or a little less than a buck. As was the bottled (and clean, safe-to-drink) water, as was the beer.

So think about this: If you’re making about $2 a day, are you going to be able to fork over nearly 50% of that for a clean drink? Or will you take your chances with the contaminated well that may end up giving you cancer, diarrhea or a host of other health problems?

I’m not an economist; I can barely balance my own checkbook, and when I was in Nicaragua I never could get the hang of the exchange rate. My heart would jump at seeing the menu price for ice cream at 60 cordobas. I had the same experience in Nogales, México, on a BorderLinks experience, trying to plan a dinner for eight on a maquiladora salary and realizing that a gallon of milk would probably deplete most of what I had. Everyone talks about how cheap it is to go to Latin America; our houses are filled with stuff manufactured by factories or food grown in Latin America that we love because they’re so cheap and help us meet our personal budgets with ease. But that’s only because the dollar goes horrifically further than cordoba, the peso, the sole. But if everything you buy is based on the dollar, and all you get is 20 cordobas a day, how will you feed your family? For the first time in my life, I felt too wealthy. I was able to spend my cordobas like water and came home with just a few coins in my pocket because I wanted to make sure it stayed in the country and benefited someone there. But I didn’t feel blessed, I felt like something was terribly wrong with the world, and I was on the wrong side of that divide.

I can’t discount that the development programs by the IMF and World Bank have provided helped Nicaragua by providing some improvement of infrastructure and creation of new markets, new imports and investment. There is much more to this story that I have recounted and attempted to critique here, and I know that I will probably always lack the background to really understand the intricacies of global economics. So I have to fall back on my experience, and I know what I saw. And I can’t see how a system that takes away funds from health care and education and infrastructure, a system that’s geared toward bringing revenue to the investors at the expense of the people in the country being invested in, is one that I can give my blessing.

It’s colonialism in an economic form, imperialism through investment. And I really have to ask myself if I want to be on the side of the empire. It’s reframed my view of Coke and Pepsi and a number of things I take for granted. It’s not necessarily the products, but what they stand for — the hegemony of the neoliberal market and the toll it takes on two-thirds of the world.

Nicaragua Journal: Ghosts of the Revolution

People in the United States often say that “real” social change must begin with the individual. What one sees in Nicaragua is a dialectic between individual change and changed social and economic conditions. The individual spirit is nurtured by the community, which gives opportunity and hope to the individual, and which itself depends upon the individuals who sustain it. A collective spirit emerges. The inherited poverty of the past and the hard times of the present are enlightened. Individuals share the spirit to build and create, to go beyond the given society. This spirit of struggle and hope is the heart of the revolution.
– John Brentlinger, The Best of What We Are: Reflections on the Nicaraguan Revolution

By Barbara Schwartz
Editorial Director
The Xenia Institute

My visit to Nicaragua took place a little more than a month before the nation’s planned 30th anniversary celebrations of the 1979 revolution that brought the ouster of dictator Anastasio Somoza and the opposition Sandinistas (Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional, or FSLN, and named after early 20th-century guerilla revolutionary and national hero Augusto César Sandino,) into power. There were signs of the celebration everywhere, if you looked for it. The most obvious, of course, were the cotton candy-colored posters and billboards that decorated the right-of-ways of the highways and the walls of buildings in León.

Pink, by the way, is the new color of the Sandinistas, replacing the party’s  traditional colors of red and black, and leading some critics of President Daniel Ortega to question is commitment to the ideals of the revolution. They say he’s turned he’s become a bourgeois, free-market supporter that’s hungry for personal political power. Other defend him, saying that he’s still on the side of the people. I heard arguments on both sides while I was in Nicaragua. And this is what I’ve learned about the revolution and the civil war, and wished I’d known before going.

After the Sandinistas overthrew Somoza on July 19, 1979 (after armed struggles that killed more than 30,000 people), the FSLN, which named Ortega as president, or “first among equals,”  began a series of reforms meant to undo the harm caused by the Somoza family’s decades-long dictatorship. These reforms included literacy programs, free health care clinics, and education and land reforms that took land that had been “confiscated” by the Somoza regime and returned it to the campesinos (farmers) with an eye toward creating collective or cooperative farms. According to a recent article by Al Jazeera about the anniversary of the revolution:

The Sandinistas installed a so-called government of national reconstruction encompassing moderates from the business community, intellectuals and both conservative and Marxists politicians.

It was a revolutionary experiment without precedent in Central America.

The new government promised political pluralism and a mixed economy, which included initiatives such as a widely-praised literacy campaign that reduced the illiteracy rate from 60 per cent to just 13 per cent.

Not everyone favored Ortega’s style of government. A BBC article about the revolution says that the Sandinistas began to lose support because people found Ortega’s style of government “authoritarian and proto-communist.” These reforms, as well as Nicaragua’s ties to communist Cuba, led the U.S. government to believe that the Sandinistas were creating a base for the spread of communism throughout Latin America. In the early 1980s, the U.S. government under President Reagan began funding covert and overt CIA operations to fund a counter-revolutionary group, or Contras, with the goal of undermining the Sandinista government, and implemented economic sanctions against the country . The Sandinista government responded defensively, implementing censorship and other authoritarian measures, and turned to the Soviet Union to buy arms for its army. The result: 12 years of bitter civil conflicts that divided the country, killed more than 50,000 people (out of a then-population of 2 million) and devastated Nicaragua’s infrastructure and economy. Ortega and the Sandinistas were voted out of office in the 1990s, and a non-Sandinista government led the country for 16 years. However, Ortega was re-elected president in 2007 with less than 35 percent of the vote. According to an article by Global Post, Ortega — like a few other Latin American presidents — hopes to change Nicaragua’s laws to allow him to run for president again in 2012, and perhaps an unlimited amount of terms after that.

That’s the textbook history — maybe even the Wikipedia history — full of facts to act as little signposts for interpretation. Whether the revolution was good or bad for Nicaragua politically or economically isn’t really the question (it’s always good when a dictator is ousted, no question); whether its results and ideals were able to last might be a better one. Critics say that Ortega’s presidency suffers from corruption, too, with government jobs and public works projects going to friends of Ortega’s wing of the party, and all government workers being pressured to join the Sandinista party. But Ortega still has his supporters:

Eden Pastora, a former Sandinista hero of the revolution who later fought against the government as a Contra leader, agreed the government is doing many good things, and he does not agree with those who call Ortega a “dictator.”

“Where is the dictatorship if there are no political prisoners? Where is the dictatorship if there is no one being tortured? Without any people killed? Without any exiles? Without anyone being beaten? Tell me, where is the dictatorship without a single media outlet closed, not a single radio station, television station, newspaper or magazine?” he said.

Nicaragua still remains the second-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Unemployment is high, hovering at 80 percent, and most people in the country live on less than $1 U.S. a day. It’s not uncommon to see families picking through the garbage dumps to scrounge food or other items for survival. For all the revolution’s promises, has it been able to deliver?

Like any country, Nicaragua’s politics and its economy are not self-contained. We visited Ortega’s home, a guarded compound located across from a park in a middle-class neighborhood in Managua (Ortega’s home, incidentally, also serves as the seat of government; his attempt, I was told, to stay in touch with the people). Our group leader went inside the guard shack and asked whether  we might be able to take pictures of the home or talk with someone about Ortega’s policies. She returned and joked, “He said Daniel says we have a picture if we can get the IMF to forgive Nicaragua’s $6 million loan.” With such global pressures to keep in mind, I’m sure that my opinion, as an outsider from a country that’s responsible for putting most of that pressure onto Nicaragua, doesn’t outweigh those of the Nicaraguans who are quite literally living with the ghosts of the revolution in their homes and communities.

On our first full day in Nicaragua, my group visited a marimba school in a small neighborhood in Managua. The marimba is a national instrument of Nicaragua, and the backbone of the campesino music that provided a soundtrack to its history. The school provides instruction for children in the neighborhood and those around it, providing scholarships where they can, so that this piece of Nicaraguan culture doesn’t die away.

We were treated to a performance by a group of teens who were studying at the school; at one point, a young girl left her spot behind the marimba and began to dance to the music of a traditional Nicaraguan ballad that had been sung during the revolution and the civil conflicts afterward. Our group leader began to weep. A committed social justice worker who has been traveling to Nicaragua several times a year since 1986, she was moved by how much Nicaragua has changed since the first time she had heard that song and now. “Back then,” she said, “that little girl would have been carrying a rifle and ready to go off and fight. Now she’s dancing to music.”

We didn’t have to go far to see what might have happened to that little girl 20 or 30 years ago. Attached to the marimba school, which is a still-functioning liberation theology-style base community, is the Garden of the 13 Martyrs, a small cemetery that cradles the remains of 13 members of the neighborhood who died during the civil war. Two of them were young women, barely out of their teens before dying in the conflict. We found their pictures in a room in the school that displays the photos of the 89 youths from the neighborhood who died in the conflict, some of them bystanders who were caught by a bullet or a bomb. A sign hanging over the cemetery proclaims in black-and-red Sandinista letters: “Nuestro Pueblo Es El Dueño de Su Historia, Arquitecto de Su Liberacîon (Our People are the Owners of Their History, the Architects of Their Freedom).” Our host at the school, one of the teachers, told us that the garden represents their understanding that Jesus’ resurrection is found within the people: Those they lost during the conflict and the freedom they fought for are not lost, but is still to be found among the people that keep their memory alive and take up the work that is left to be done. And in addition to the garden, to the school, there’s also a clinic that provides free health care to the neighborhood, and a youth center that provides tutoring and a place for neighborhood youths to go in the afternoons. The government may not be able to continue in the spirit of the revolution, but it lives  on in the people.

Did the revolution make a difference? I still don’t think that’s the question. Did it have significance, did it mean something? No doubt that it means something to those who lived through it, suffered through it and are building a world out of the wreck the revolution and the U.S.-backed war left behind. The question that I found myself left with is what difference this event has made for me, and what responsibilities I bear as both a U.S. citizen and a person of faith who is committed to creating a socially just world. These are questions I’m still working out, haunted as I am by all the ghosts of the Nicaraguan revolution.

Watch …

Al-Jazeera has a four-part report on Nicaragua’s history, including the revolution and its legacy. You can access all four parts below:

Nicaragua Journal | Prologue: Sandino’s Hat

“I was struck by the fact that it was Sandino’s hat, and not his face, that had become the most potent icon in Nicaragua. A hatless Sandino would not be instantly recognizable; but that hat no longer needed his presence beneath it to be evocative. In many instances, FSLN graffiti were followed by a schematic drawing of the celebrated headgear, a drawing that looked exactly like an infinity-sign with a conical volcano rising out of it. Infinity and eruptions: the illegitimate boy from Niquinohomo was now a cluster of metaphors. Or, to put it another way, Sandino had become his hat.”

– Salman Rushdie, The Jaguar Smile

I went to Nicaragua in June of this year knowing little more about Nicaragua than what I could remember from my childhood in the 1980s, when news about the Nicaraguan civil war and the U.S.-funded Contra army was featured on the nightly news. I remembered the words Sandinistas and Contras, and recalled that I was never certain which side were the “good” guys, but even then I had a feeling that the media or the president wasn’t being completely honest with me. I knew that liberation theologian Ernesto Cardenal still lived and worked in Nicaragua, I knew that I had too many pieces of cheap clothing in my closet that bore the label “Made in Nicaragua.” This scanty knowledge became the foundation for nearly everything that I learned — and am continuing to learn — about Nicaragua, globalization, and what kind of world I and other justice-seeking people want to have a hand in building.

I took the journey with members of a church from California that worked to build both an elementary school program and a small, cinderblock house for a family in one of Chacraseca’s most rural sectors. While we resembled the dozens of other church groups, whose members sported identical T-shirts spouting their Christian commitments, who had come to Nicaragua that week while on a mission trips, JustHope is not a mission group. Rather, it looks to build relationships based on respect, mutuality and justice between the Nicaraguan and U.S. communities, with learning taking place between both groups. This turned out to be more of a challenge, I think, for us gringos because for us it requires a new way of looking at the world that challenges our comfort with global economics and development, and our U.S. identity as an undisputed world leader. The marks of previous relationships Nicaragua has had with the U.S. is written all over the country, too often in blood or martyrs, the sweat of exploited workers, and tears of grief and anger. Our visit took place just a month before the 30th anniversary of the revolution, and barely a week  before a coup ousted the president of Honduras, Nicaragua’s neighbor to the north, which reminded us that the politics in Latin America, while relatively stable now, still exist on the edge. In the wake of the coup, I nervously watched the news from Latin America and warily eyed President Obama’s reaction, wondering whether the U.S. was involved (it wasn’t), and what effect the coup might have on the entire region (not much so far).

They say that world travel broadens your horizons and changes you. I really hope so, and I hope that change wasn’t just found in my character, the typical reaction in the wake of mission trips. Sure, I probably built some character — living rough for a few days, if you’re lucky, will do that. But more than anything I want that my perspective be changed. It wasn’t just that I slept outside and ate rice and beans (gallo pinto, which is the national dish and quite good, actually) three times a day, but that I have to ask why it was such a big change, and what role am I playing in making the differences between here and there so great? And then, I hope, I work on those answers.

But first, I had to encounter the questions. I asked and received. In Nicaragua, I learned about its history of revolution and freedom, the shaky economics that keep Nicaragua dependent on the crumbs the U.S. and multinational corporations stingily leave behind, and the struggle for clean water and full human rights as Nicaragua works to become an equal partner with the U.S. on the world stage. And finally, I pondered the politics of mission and the message of justice that faith communities profess in a world of inequality. And as I looked around for answers, I kept encountering the ghosts of Sandino, and, of course, his hat.

Grasping at Democracy | Conclusion

In this series, C.J. Hobson has examined the Western  understanding of democracy and the different ways obervers might know it when they see it. Democracy, Hobson said, wears different faces, and that by changing the way democracy is understood, its emergence might be seen in unexpected places. After examining the complex evolution of the United States’ democratic system and introducing two theories of democracy applicable to the systems found in other nations, Hobson took a look at how Turkey, Ethiopia Russia and Chile have struggled to grasp, implement and maintain their own versions of democracy.

By C. J. Hobson,
Ph.D candidate
University of Oklahoma

“The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.”
–– Robert Maynard Hutchins

While seemingly very dark, the above quote hits to the core of the primary theme intended in this article series on democracy and democratization: participation.  Participation is also thoroughly guaranteed in the longue durée through real and meaningful contestation to use terms created by Robert Dahl and outlined in this series’ first article. I would argue that these two forces of democracy and democratization become mutually fulfilling. Where this process starts and ends seems to remain as elusive as the semi-scientific puzzle regarding the chicken and the egg.

Perhaps this starting point is less important being that it might indicate each state and people are on their own paths. Just this very week, the world has been made witness to a fitful exercise in mass participation and questions about genuine contestation in the recent elections for the president of Iran.  If these case studies are to prove anything, it will confirm that the Iranian path is as unique and varied as is everyone else’s. Perhaps I will return to you with future comments about this case study as events develop and evolve, but most assuredly we are watching a democratic exercise in Iran — one way or another.

More to the point, through the course of these articles I have introduced you to only four case studies among the almost 200 independent and internationally recognized states on the globe. It is my hope that the very nature of democracy with its undulations, ebbs and flows and, most importantly, with its highly particularistic nature that has been evidenced in these case studies. However, while it is unarguable that the experiences of Turkey, Russia, Ethiopia and Chile are vastly different in many ways, what can be displayed is the inherent struggle for a constantly improving system of government that strives for more democratic ideals. There are times where each extreme of the human condition –– glory and misery –– have been found in democratic exercise.  This gamble does not excuse each of us however. Critical to each of these two ends is the state. To quote the academic Christopher Pierson in his recent text Beyond the Welfare State:

No one who reflects for a moment on the history of the twentieth century can write of the benevolent power of the state.

While this point hints at the horrors of Stalin, Hilter, Pol Pot and Mao, it is undeniable that we are people who must organize in order to survive. To do this, we must in some way formulate a state, and it is only through the most authentically and organically organized version of this state that we will witness governments that walk with the blessings of their own citizens –– the mandate of their own people. It is this most genuine mandate that each nation should normatively seek.

While the process of democracy and democratization is undeniably messy and at times deeply painful, few of us can offer options to people aside from this process that are palatable. This process not only brings about the respect of their own citizens, but additionally brings a state into a family of global democracies, loosely based on mutually recognizable notions of human rights, dignity and justice. As global notions of these rights become increasingly uniform, it is my genuine hope to see an increase in global pressures towards democratization, while maintaining the vital space for states to explore this process under their own direction.

The opening quote of this segment indicates that it is incumbent upon each of us as members of a society to continue to engage and press for the evolutions of our democratic identities through this messiness. It should be evident from these articles that these identities are indeed, fluid and alive. The exercise, evolution and growth of these identities take place on a massive scale, but through individual action. Each increase in individual participation moves all of our respective societies towards meaningful contestations and perceived human goals of peace, access to rights and a brighter future for those of us to come.

Grasping at Democracy | Chile: Democratic Restoration

In this series, C.J. Hobson examines our understanding of democracy and the different ways we might know it when we see it. Democracy, Hobson points out, wears different faces, and that by changing the way we consider democracy, we might spot its emergence in unexpected places. After examining the complex evolution of the United States’ democratic system and introducing two theories of democracy applicable to the systems found in other nations, Hobson took a look at how Turkey, Ethiopia and Russia’s have struggled toward democracy — and perhaps in Russia’s case, toward nondemocracy.

By C. J. Hobson,
Ph.D candidate
University of Oklahoma

“Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its’ heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.”
–– Agnes Repplier

Few democratic journeys of modern states can duplicate the experiences of the citizens of the Republic of Chile. Many might stereotype the history of most governments in South America as a long litany of dictatorships, military juntas and civil unrest. As with most stereotypes there are pieces of truth to them, but they are always far from universally applicable.

One of the countries in South America that both exemplifies and dispels this stereotype is Chile. Having represented one of the strongest democratic traditions in Latin America, Chile spun into the darkness of totalitarianism for almost two decades before emerging again as a beacon of democracy along with so many other nations in the early 1990s in this “third wave” of democratization. Having resurfaced from the oppression of dictatorship, how does a nation then sew back together their society enough to have a functioning democracy? How can you have enough people engage in government participation in such a divided society for a government to have legitimacy?  It is this journey that we will explore in this case study.

Born out of the imperial designs of Spain, Chile — like the rest of the rest of Central and South America — found its freedom as a result of both domestic freedom movements as well as the tossing-out of the Spanish monarchy by Napoleon in the early 19th century. With the military might of Spain long passed and what little Spanish forces existed being occupied by European affairs, South American independence was comparatively easily gained. This is not to detract from the various freedom fighters that existed in several areas of South America during this period, the most well-known of which is the famous Simon Bolivar. Bolivar is still emblematic for many of South American political identity and is often claimed by both the left and the right. Chile’s lesser known version of Bolivar is the military and statesman Bernardo O’Higgins who advocated for many years for Chilean home rule. It was from this system that Chile found its’ independence and set about their path in forming a “more perfect union.”

Early independence for Chile came at the dawn of the 19th century and for the next 100 years was a relatively calm exercise in increasingly democratic identity as was seen in the United States during this period. The governments swung from more progressive to more conservative regimes, but rested more or less in the hands of semi-democratic citizens of Chile. In 1925 a new presidential era was founded with reformers such as Arturo Alessandri Palma being elected. It was this system that functioned as a meaningful democracy until the fateful year of 1973.

In 1970 the academic and physician Salvador Allende was elected president of the government. Allende was many things to the citizens of Chile — one of these was a self-identified Marxist — the first democratically elected Marxist head of state in the western hemisphere. Given that this election was held in an era of global consciousness centered on the Cold War, the election of Allende was hailed by many and scored by others. His government was to last until 1973 when a military-led coup resulted in the complete overthrow of this decades long tradition of democracy. It is claimed by many that Allende, who died in the attack on the presidential palace during the coup, was found dead while clutching a copy of the Chilean constitution. It is additionally claimed that the Nixon government and the CIA, along with other elements within the United States, was intricately involved in this overthrow. Beyond the scope of this article, I strongly suggest that interested readers continue research on this case, as it provides great insight into just one of many reasons why U.S./Latin American relations remain tense.

The resulting regime was led by General Augusto Pinochet and was known for oppression and right-wing purges over the next 16 years. One particularly painful story is the tale of the folk singer and guitarist, Victor Jara. Jara was a much-loved figure in Chilean society, whose music was very much associated with the left and Allende’s government. In the early days of the military coup, Jara along with thousands of other citizens of Chile perceived to be threats to the military government were taken by agents of Pinochet to the city of Santiago’s soccer stadium. There many of them were publicly tortured and executed in the very place build to celebrate sports. Jara himself had his very talented fingers broken one by one so that he could never play again. He raised his voice in song and was murdered. It was only after the downfall of global communism in the latter part of the 1980’s that the Pinochet regime stepped down and democratic elections were allowed to resume.

I tell you this painful story of Chilean democracy to offer some observations as well as beg several questions. My first observation is that even through the nearly 150 years of growing democracy, the fragility of democracy is all too abundant in this story. My question remains, how does a society who has endured such a painful loss of democratic identity and then witnessed one segment of society endure such oppression and the hands of another group of their own people ever re-cooperate?  How are you able to develop a society where all participate, where polyarchy can ever exist again?

It is for the reason that I will shortly address that I have saved Chile for the final case study. The great surprise of Chile is that they were able to rapidly re-establish a democratic government and surpass many of the dark days of the 1970’s and ‘80’s.  The process by which a society can do this is amazing and most assuredly very unique, but examples such as Spain, South Africa and Germany also come to mind, dealings with many of the post-conflict traumas and tragedies found in the Chilean case study. This leaves this case study with the bright light of hope to shine on the many war-torn and nondemocratic societies across the globe.

The exercise of democracy is never conducted in one finite moment; it is a culmination of a thousand and one tiny moments — at times with long pauses in-between. Chile’s exercise in democracy was interrupted by the Pinochet regime, but was much more easily resurrected than thought possible. Chile today stands as a regional leader in human rights and liberal democratic reform. It is the very presidential seat once held by both Allende and Pinochet that welcomed the first democratically elected woman in Chilean history, whose own father — a general in the Chilean army — was brutally tortured by the Pinochet regime.

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