A Franciscan Abroad

Posted By Steve on September 2, 2010

I just came across a short but interesting article on Alternet promoting Benjamin Dangl’s forthcoming book Dancing with Dynamite:  Social Movements and States in Latin America. The title is a reference, I think, to the fact that miners here in Bolivia, and possible elsewhere in Latin America, often set off dynamite during protests.  The article itself highlights the changing nature of Latin America and the clash of visions that this has produced; a clash recently exemplified in a series of protests in the city of Potosi.  What is the future of Latin America going to look like?  Is the future going to be based on an economic growth model, even a socialist one, or one that seeks to create a world where people can live well, in harmony with each other and creation?  This question is further complicated by the reality of environmental degradation, pollution, global warming, and related problems.  The economic growth model is heavily dependent on the use of natural resources, resources that are often extracted at a heavy cost to the environment.

The article doesn’t attempt to answer these questions or even address them in any substantive way (presumably Dangl’s book will), but it does echo a theme I have heard over and over again since I have arrived here in Bolivia.  Bolivia, and possibly all of Latin America, is in a new moment and no one really knows what is going to happen or what the future will look like.  What is clear is that the old way of doing things did not work.  The neo-liberal economic model that dominated Latin America for so long is clearly a failure.  It was tried here in Bolivia for almost twenty years and did nothing to improve the state of the country or of its people.  The current administration here in Bolivia is taking a new approach to economics, one that uses government control of natural resources to fund necessary social change.  It is too early to tell if this program will work, but it falls clearly into the economic growth model that Dangl mentions.

Dangl, and others, however, is asking a deeper question.  Not, how do we modify the current system to be more equitable, if that is even possible, but what should the system look like to begin with?  What is the vision that should guide our way of life and what are the principles and virtues that will sustain this system.  The emerging model that Dangl mentions, that of buen vivir (living well in Spanish), seeks a way of living and an economy that is in harmony with the Earth and provides a dignified way of life for all people.  This model is heavily dependent on the traditional respect that Andean cultures and religions have for the Pachamama (Mother Earth).  What is interesting to me as student of Catholic theology, however, is how close this vision is to that of Catholic Social Thought(CST).

CST has always taught that work, and by extension economies, exist to serve the needs of people, not that people exist to work.  In other words, work is meant to provide people with the things they need for a dignified existence, not to make a profit or to increase the wealth of the world (in contrast to a capitalist model).  Profit and the accumulation of wealth are not necessarily bad, provided their accumulation does not deprive people of the ability to live well and with the dignity proper to them as human beings.  Unfortunately, this seems to be the model under which the world currently operates.  The resources, labor, and poverty of the majority of the world supports the wealth and comfort of a minority.  This is an inherently immoral and sinful system.  When one factors in the environmental problems that come with the massive extraction of resources that this system requires it also becomes clear that the current model is also unsustainable over the long-term.

It is a clear principle of CST that no one has a right to more than they need at the expense of other people’s ability to survive with dignity.  We need to build a system that honors this principle, one that will bring us closer to the reality of the Kingdom of God that Jesus so eloquently preached when he walked among us as one of us.  If Dangl is right, and I think he probably is, then this struggle for this kind of vision is going on right now in Latin America, albeit under a different name.  We in the Catholic Church can learn from and aid this struggle as we seek to imagine a new and better world, a world that is yearning to be born from the degradation of our current way of life.

This new way of life will likely require sacrifice on the part of those of us in the developed world, as I suspect that the way of life those of us in the wealthier classes enjoy is unsustainable under another system.  This, however, is a necessary sacrifice for those of us who have committed ourselves to the Body of Christ.  We are all connected inextricably to each other through our shared commitment to Christ and to the rest of the world by our common humanity – a gift from God that bestows its own inherent dignity.  A true life is one that honors the gift of all creation and the dignity of all people.  The people of Latin America are beginning to work out what this means, how can we do less than stand with them?

In South America, Clashing Visions of a Better Future — Benjamin Dangl, Alternet

Dancing With Dynamite Website

Category: Bolivia, Catholic Church, Christian Life | View Comments
Tags: andean culture, andean religions, benjamin dangl, Bolivia, catholic social thought, cst, dancing with dynamite, latin america, south america

Posted By Steve on September 2, 2010

As promised, here are the photos, and one video I promised from my trip to the Chapare last weekend.  You can see the first 100 photos here, for the rest, including the majority of the rainforest shots go to my Flickr page (the more photos link in the Flickr box to the left will take you there).  To see the video, click on the first photo in the set and follow the link to the Flickr website.

Category: Bolivia | View Comments
Tags: amazon, Bolivia, chapare, photos, rainforest

Posted By Steve on August 30, 2010

Just a quick note about my photos from this weekend: the internet is down in the friary( I posted my last update from my IPod at school) so I don’t know when I can get the photos up. I will try to do so from my Ipod if I have time. Peace.

Category: General | View Comments
Tags: photos

Posted By Steve on August 29, 2010

I was in the rainforest this weekend. I cannot even begin to describe how beautiful it was or how heavy the humidity was. This weekend I spent two days visiting a region of Bolivia known as the Chapare. The Chapare is interesting both because it is the western edge of the Amazon rainforest, but also because it is the coca capital of the country. Our trip highlighted both aspects of the region.

We arrived late Friday evening at our hotel, located just outside the town of Villa Tunari, after a five hour bus trip from Cochabamba. The Chapare is located north-east of Cochabamba in the NE corner of the Department of Cochabamba (Departments in Bolivia are roughly equivalent to States in the U.S.). Despite the late hour we had a nice, if agonizingly slow to arrive, dinner at the hotel. Afterwards a few of us went for a swim in the hotel pool. We were joined by any number of insects and several frogs. Despite our company the swim was definitely worth it. It is hard to describe how brutal the heat and humidity are in the tropics, especially after the dry heat of Cochabamba. The heat and humidity were oppressive from the moment we arrived and remained so for the duration of our stay. The fact that the hotel had a pool was a saving grace that made the heat a little more bearable.

On Saturday morning we went to the visit the farm of a man named Don Vicente. He was a wonderful man who has been farming in the Chapare region for over forty years. One of his main crops, of course, is coca (the reason for our visit). However, he also raises peppers and palm trees for hearts-of-palm. He was able to tell of his experiences of the difficulties that coca farmers have gone through over the years and the struggle they went through to organize into federations and advocate for a more realistic coca policy in the country. The crowning achievement of this organization was the election of Evo Morales, a former coca farmer and president of the coca growers federation, as President. The loosening of restrictions actually began, however, with the administration just prior to Morales. It was this administration that allowed each farmer to grow what is known as a Cato of coca (roughly 1600 square meters). The field of coca that Don Vicente showed us was such an area. This decision was key in reducing the violence and ongoing conflict that had plagued the Chapare for years, and had culminated in a wave of violence that drove one president out of office.

The Cato policy has done wonders to stabilize the Chapare and almost eliminate much of the violence that a strict no-coca policy had created. There are, of course, still challenges in the area revolving around the production of cocaine. Not all of the coca produced in the Chapare is used for traditional and other legitimate uses. Cocaine remains a part of the economy in the area, something we learned more about in our next stop after Don Vicente’s farm.

To see the other side of the coca issues in the Chapare we next visited the Unidad Movil de Patrullaje Rural (UMOPAR) – a rural police force charged with with finding and destroying cocaine production facilities and interdicting cocaine being shipped out of the area and processing chemicals (known as precursors) being shipped in. UMOPAR is part of the Fuerza Especial de la Lucha contra el Narcotrafico (FELCN) – the national drug police. UMOPAR has a controversial history in Bolivia due to the fact that all of its members are trained at a local school that was originally founded by the DEA and initially staffed by U.S. Army Rangers. After the Rangers it was staffed by Bolivian instructors who for many years all trained at the infamous U.S. Army School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia (now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation or WHISC). As such members of UMOPAR, despite the fact that they are technically police, are trained as army soldiers and by graduates of a school which has produced some of the worst human rights offenders in Latin America. The training school still operates although it no longer exclusively uses SOA graduates. Whether or not this makes a difference is still an open question. The reduction of violence in the region, much of it historically perpetuated by police and the army (including UMOPAR), is probably due to the current policy of limited tolerance of coca production.

At the UMOPAR base we visited, to call it a police station just wouldn’t fit, we were given a short presentation by a lieutenant, whose name I forget, who talked a about the work the UMOPAR does and the challenges they face. The major challenge for stopping cocaine production is that in Bolivia such production is usually done by small family clans. These clans utilize mobile production factories that can be easily moved from place to place or even abandoned when necessary. Also, because they are small and there are so many of them, shutting down one has no real effect on overall cocaine production. There is always another clan ready to pick up the slack.

After the presentation the lieutenant showed a small museum that UMOPAR maintains about their work and on drug processing. They had a reproduction of the mobile processing plants mentioned above. These plants utilize what is known as the Columbian method. They start by grinding the coca leaves into a fine flour utilizing what is basically a jury-rigged leaf shredder. This flour is then mixed with various precursors chemical, including gasoline, to create a cocaine paste, known as a base. This part of the process is fairly simple and can be done with only minimal training. This paste is then sent to “chemists” with more advanced training to be refined into pure cocaine which is then smuggled out of the country to either Brazil or Columbia. The next set of displays showed a variety of objects that people use to hide cocaine. They included things like televisions that had been hollowed out and filled with cocaine and hollow pieces of furniture, and so on. I got the impression that pretty much anything that could be hollowed out can and has been used to hide drugs at some point. There were also several sets of pictures of people who had been caught trying to smuggle cocaine on their bodies showing where they had hidden the drugs. One picture was of an x-ray showing a woman who had at least twenty small balloons of cocaine in her stomach and intestines. A few racks of seized weapons and some pictures of the precursor chemicals rounded out the display. This is the only part of the trip I don’t have pictures of because they are forbidden on the UMOPAR base.

After UMOPAR we returned to the hotel for lunch. We were supposed to visit a monkey preserve in the afternoon, but it turned out to be closed over an ongoing dispute with local town that wanted to build a road through it. We ended up at a small nature preserve with a variety of different plants and a couple of alligators. You can see it in the pictures. The rest of the day was pretty relaxed. We headed back to the hotel and hung around in the pool until it was time for dinner and that was pretty much it.

On Sunday morning we visited Parque National Carrasco, where we went hiking for about two hours. The park itself is part of the Amazon rainforest, the western edge of which is on the eastern side of Bolivia. This was the fantastically beautiful part of the trip, something that is difficult to put into words. I did take a lot of pictures that I will post separately. The highlight of the hike was two caves. The first cave was home to bats and we were able to walk inside and see the bats hanging on the ceiling. It was very cool (both literally and figuratively). The other cave was home to a nocturnal species of bird found only in this part of Bolivia, whose name escapes me at the moment. Similar to bats they spend the day perched on cave walls and hunt for food after the sun goes down. They also make a sound unlike anything I have ever heard and could not possible describe. Unfortunately, I have no pictures of the birds as the cave walls were too high for the small flash on my camera to penetrate. The rest of the hike was wonderful as well and we got to see a number of interesting plants that grow in the area. We had an excellent guide named Don Pablo to show us around. The only challenging part of the hike was the extreme humidity (remember we were in a rainforest) and we were all soaked with sweat be the end of the hike.

We left of home after the park and the trip was uneventful, if long. We stopped for a very late lunch/dinner at a trout farm and then continued on to Cochabamba. We arrived back at school around 9:30pm. That’s all for now, look for pictures in my next post. Peace and all good.

Category: Bolivia | View Comments
Tags: amazon, chapare, coca, cocaine, drugs, hiking, rainforest, travel abroad, umopar

Posted By Steve on August 26, 2010

I just read a great homily by Bishop Thomas Gumbleton on last Sunday’s readings. He makes a great connection between the readings and the current fervor over the so-called “Ground Zero” Mosque. His point is that Jesus did not come to preach personal salvation but to preach the redemption of the entire world. As such, we have a responsibility to work to make that world, one that Isaiah describes in the first reading as well, as much of reality here and now as possible. What we must not do is let hatred and vengeance take root in our hearts.

I could not have said it better myself. You can find the entire homily here: http://ncronline.org/blogs/peace-pulpit/jesus-didnt-preach-just-personal-salvation .

Category: Catholic Church, Christian Life, U.S. Life and Society | View Comments
Tags: christianity, ground zero, islam, Jesus, reign of God, salvation, social justice, thomas gumbleton

Posted By Steve on August 24, 2010

I have added to new links to the lists on the side.

The first is a link to the Andean Information Network’s Blog, mentioned in my last post.

The second is to Znet’s Bolivian information page.

Both sites are in English.

Category: Bolivia | View Comments
Tags: andean information network, Bolivia, znet

Posted By Steve on August 24, 2010

Once again friends, apologies for the lateness of this post, I know is has been a long time.  The internet connection in the friary here has been very bad for the last week and I have had trouble getting online at all.  I dislike taking my computer to school for safety reasons and the computers there are so slow as to be almost impossible to work with at times, especially on the internet.  Anyways, there is so much to tell and update you all on that I think I will begin with the most recent and work backwards.

This evening at mass there was the cutest baby boy sitting in front of me with his parents and people who were probably his aunt and uncle.  He looked to have been somewhere between 1 and 2 years old and spent the majority of mass in his father’s arms with a look of curious wonder that children sometimes have.  He seemed especially fascinated by his father’s five o’clock shadow.  Watching him explore the world in front of him with such wonder I tried to remember the last time I looked at the world with such wonder.  I couldn’t do it.  I have seen many fascinating and beautiful things in the past couple of years, many of them in the last month and a half here in Bolivia, but I cannot remember the last time I looked at the world the wonder I saw in that boy’s eyes this evening.  There is an innocence lost when we leave our childhoods behind.  It is perhaps a necessary loss, one we need to survive in a complicated world, but it is a loss nonetheless.  It is a complicated world we live in and this is a fact that we should never be happy with.

Speaking further of the complicated nature of the world I went to a presentation earlier today on the U.S.’s war on drugs and its effects on Bolivia over the years.  The presentation was given by an U.S. woman who has worked here for many years named Kathy Kledebur.  She runs a group called the Andean Information Network based here in Bolivia that specializes in providing commentary and analysis on U.S. drug policy and related topics here in Bolivia.

The gist of her presentation was that U.S. drug policy here in Bolivia has been uniformly misguided and harmful.  Listening to the facts she presented it was hard to come to any other conclusion.  The U.S. has a long history of imposing its drug policy here in Bolivia usually to the detriment of Bolivian citizens and national sovereignty.  To give one example from the presentation:  She described some early U.S. attempts at eradicating coca crops in the Chapare, the major coca growing region here in Bolivia.  The policy went something like this.  The U.S. offered to coca farmers (known as cocalero’s) development aid to buy and plant alternative crops.  The problem was that in order to even apply for the aid the farmer had to completely destroy all of his coca crops first.  Keep in mind here that this was his or her only source of income, the only way they had to feed their families.  Another problem was that the crops the U.S. offered (like pineapples and oranges) as replacements took several years to mature enough to produce income (2yrs for pineapples and 8 for oranges).  As our presenter put it Bolivian farmers were a little selfish in that they wanted to feed their families every day and not two to eight years in the future.

Apparently it occurred to no one in the U.S. government that asking people to starve their families for two to eight years might not be the best way to convince them to give a up a lucrative crop that can be harvested up to four times a year.

U.S. anti-drug policy also has and does ignore the strong cultural importance of coca in Andean culture.   Coca is a sacred plant among Andean native religions and has many legitimate uses here that have nothing to do with cocaine.  Coming from the U.S. it is easy to get the impression that coca is only used to make cocaine, a belief that is reflected in U.S. drug policy.  In reality, coca has dozens of uses and can be found in many products here in Bolivia that will not get you high.  Coca’s most basic use is that when the leaf is chewed it acts as a stimulant that suppresses hunger, combats altitude sickness, and provides stamina; all with no side effects.  You can also buy it here in Bolivian in tea form (mate de coca) which is used as a home remedy for altitude sickness and stomach ailments.  Many people also drink the tea as a morning pick-me-up similar to coffee.

Kledebur also talked about the U.S. tendency to manipulate, and at times simply invent, facts and numbers about the drug trade to suit its purposes.  There are no reliable numbers on how much of the coca produced here is used for legitimate products and how much for cocaine.  There is evidence that after the Morales government expelled the DEA in 2008 that the U.S. changed its estimates of the amount of drugs produced here in Bolivia to make it look like they had gone up after Morales took office.  This involved blatantly changing previously published numbers.  The only scientific study of legitimate use is currently ongoing and is being funded by the European Union.  The idea is to measure the amount of coca used for legal products and then use this as  a basis for determining how much coca the government should allow people to grow.  Note the use of logic and reason in this proposal, something that seems completely absent from U.S. policy on the subject.

I could go on ranting for several pages on the evils of American foreign policy, but I think that enough for now.  Suffice to say that this presentation has further strengthened my belief that the U.S. drug policy is solely designed to make politicians look good to voters who have no real idea what the world outside their own little bubble is like.  This is the only explanation for the U.S.’s tendency to continue spending time and money on policies that do not work and fail to take into account the realities of the countries where they are put into practice.  As Kledebur pointed out, after over twenty years of the so-called “war on drugs”   the quantity and quality of cocaine in the U.S. is about where it was when the “war” started.  We have literally spent billions of dollars, or more, on a policy that has produced untold suffering and death and no benefits whatsoever.  Somebody needs to explain to me the world in which this makes sense because I don’t live in that world.

By way of conclusion this presentation was background for a trip I will be taking this weekend to the Chapare where I can hopefully learn more about the changes in Bolivian drug policy since the election of Evo Morales, a former cocalero and current president of the Coca Grower’s union here in Bolivia.

Category: Bolivia | View Comments
Tags: andean culture, andean information network, andean religions, Bolivia, chapare, coca, coca tea, cocaine, cocalero, drugs, evo morales, mate de coca, u.s. drug policy, war on drugs

Posted By Steve on August 19, 2010

Sorry for the lack of posting. I was ill last week and have been catching up this week. I should have a substantive post later today or tomorrow. Until then here is a short poem I wrote earlier this week.

Mountains in the distance,
Palm trees in the street,
Beauty all around me,
Suffering in the midst;
It seems a world gone strange,
But perhaps it’s always been.

The poor you will always have with you,
He said,
The God made flesh:
A sad lament
Or
A challenge to us all?

I cannot believe the former,
So the latter it must be.
A reminder of our call to live the Kingdom
In humble simplicity.

Category: Bolivia | View Comments
Tags: poetry

Posted By Steve on August 7, 2010

As promised my photos from the celebration of the feast of the Virgen de Copacobana.

Category: Bolivia, Catholic Church | View Comments
Tags: angostura, catholic celebrations, copacobana, franciscans, marian feasts, religious festivals, virgen of copacobana

Posted By Steve on August 7, 2010

Hello everybody, sorry it has been so long since I have updated this site. I find myself getting busier and busier every week, but this seems like a good thing so I can’t complain. Yesterday marked the end of one month of classes, although we didn’t have classes. Yesterday was Bolivian Independence Day and we had the day off from school. The celebrations here in Cochabamba were about what you would expect. There were several parades, starting Thursday night and finishing yesterday afternoon, and lots of flag-waving going on. The parades themselves were about what you’d find in America – a mix of school marching bands, civic officials, military units, and various other honored persona’s. Unfortunately, I only have a couple of pictures as I forgot to carry my camera with me for most of the celebrations.

Also yesterday, I had the unique experience of joining my fellow Bolivian student friars in a soccer tournament in the morning and early afternoon. The master of students here, Tomas Kornacki, described it to me as an opportunity to help defend the honor of the Seraphic Order. Unfortunately, the honor of the Seraphic Order ended the day a little tarnished as we lost both of our games and were eliminated from the tournament. I only played part of each game and didn’t do too badly considering I was playing with and against people who have been playing soccer since they could walk. The other teams were mainly other religious formation students and a few lay men to round out the teams from orders that did not have enough students to field full teams (ours included). Losses aside it was an interesting and enjoyable experience that I was happy to be part of. Other than that yesterday was a quiet day. After returning from the tournament I napped a little, walked around the city to see some of the parades and had a little ice cream before returning home for mass.

The evening was similarly quiet. There were only four of us at dinner and so Claver – the other friary here learning Spanish if you didn’t remember – and I both had to talk a little more than we usually do. I ended up doing most of the talking as Claver’s Spanish is still a little rudimentary, but I was able to learn a lot about David, the other student friar at the meal. The rest of the house was in the Angostura celebrating the vigil of the feast of the Virgen of Copacobana (see the next paragraph).

Today was a much fuller day as we celebrated the feast of the Virgen of Copacobana here at San Francisco. The Virgen of Copacobana is the patron of Bolivia and the particular patron of transportation workers and police officers. We started the day with mass at 8am in the Church. Mass was followed by a procession through the streets of Cochabamba with an image of the Virgen carried by a group of uniformed policemen. We were also accompanied by a police marching band and an escort of traffic cops. The procession itself was a sight to see: some people setting off fireworks while others threw flower petals, incense, and perfume at the Virgen. It was a cacophony of sights and sounds that one friar described as akin to a Zefferilli production (if you don’t know who that is click here to check out his Wikipedia page – if you are a Franciscan who doesn’t know who he is, shame on you). At the end of the procession we all boarded buses, cars, and taxis to ride out to the Church of the Virgen of Copacobana in the Angostura – the Angostura is an artificial lake outside of Cochabamba that serves as the city’s water source. The Church itself is on a hill overlooking the lake. Once at the Church we celebrated another mass in honor of the Virgen. After mass I hung around outside the Church while a second mass got under way talking with some of friars and some teenage dancers that showed up to dance for the celebration. There will be masses going on there all weekend honoring the Virgen and celebrations and dancing.

After the second mass I went out to lunch with another friar, the Church sacristan, and a Dominican friar who was helping out at the masses. We ended up at a small roadside restaurant where we had a choice of some kind of white fish – I forget the name – and Trout. Both dishes came with French Fry’s, rice, and a salad of lettuce and tomatoes. All in all a wonderful lunch that cost less than $15 US.

That is pretty much all of the interesting stuff that happened this week. I am happy to report that my Spanish is getting noticeably better, at least to me. I am finding it takes less effort to follow a conversation and to respond correctly (although it still takes some) and yesterday I was able to follow the entire mass, including the homily without problems. I didn’t understand every word, but the meaning of everything was clear throughout. I still have a long way to go towards fluency, but it definitely feels like an attainable goal. I will try to post more frequently this week and look for my photos from today in a separate post. h

Peace and All Good.

Category: Bolivia | View Comments
Tags: bolivian independence day, cochabamba, copacobana, domincans, franciscans, futbol, marian feast, soccer, virgen mary, virgen of copacobana