UCSC alumna Julia Sweig speaks for a crowd of community members on foreign policy between Latin America and the United States. Since graduating from Porter in 1986, Sweig has become a distinguished scholar and worked at the Council on Foreign Relations. Photo by Prescott Watson.

Julia Sweig was all smiles when Provost Helen Shapiro handed her a Colleges Nine and Ten mug at the end of her speech on Latin America and foreign policy. Sweig, a Porter graduate of 1986, visited campus to address students after having been honored as a UC Santa Cruz Distinguished Alumni of 2011.

After graduating as a Latin American studies student before the major was even in place at UCSC, Sweig became a senior fellow and task force director for the Council on Foreign Relations. She took time off from her post at the major Washington think-tank to share her expertise with the crowd of Latin American and Latino studies (LALS) and politics majors and faculty members crowded into the Namaste Lounge.

While she currently works at the Council on Foreign Relations, Sweig said she found “a different sort of activism” during her time at UCSC.

“When I was a student at UCSC, my focus was on using my scholarship to pursue policy-related activism,” Sweig said to the assembled crowd.

Sweig went on to crunch decades of Latin American history and U.S. foreign policy into her 45-minute speech and ensuing Q&A session.

“This was a period in history when Henry Kissinger said defying the American order was done at Latin America’s peril,” Sweig said, recounting the turbulent period in Latin American history that was the 1980s, characterized as it was by hyperinflation and military dictatorships.

Sweig interrupted her speech on occasion to offer brief personal stories. For example, when in Cuba in the mid-’80s, Sweig shared a hotel with revolutionaries.

“There was a lot of rum flowing. That was Havana in 1984,” said Sweig, to the amusement of those assembled.

On a more solemn note, Sweig described how her involvement with the Council on Foreign Relations helped change the language of U.S. foreign policy.

“Even as recently as 2004, a group of ‘elites,’ using that word to describe their obvious [Latin American] counterparts, was like shining a light on the elephant in the room,” Sweig said, describing how American politicians shied away from using the term to describe Latin American high-powered military and political personnel. “Now in today’s dialogues, we see that word all the time, and I know where they got it from.”

Sweig also spoke of the necessity to recognize the greater prominence of Latin American states in today’s world.

“The greater voice that Latin Americans have now would have been unrecognizable to my professors,” Sweig said. “The fundamental agenda for Latin Americans now is social inclusion. There’s still massive inequality, but there’s more democratic access as well.”

Sweig also took time to answer students’ questions, which ranged from queries on future U.S. foreign policy to how Brazil was going to handle hosting both the Olympics and the World Cup. After firing off answers on how the United States tended to “use Latin America as a proving ground for counterinsurgency tactics,” and that “the ball hasn’t rolled very far forward” with regard to U.S. attitudes towards Cuba, Sweig casually mentioned that she’d be taking her family to the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.

Arielle Greenwald sells CAN’s direct-trade coffee each Wednesday afternoon at the downtown Santa Cruz Farmers Market. Photo by Hilary Khteian.

Fourth-year Merrill student Moises Plascenia is preparing to embark on the adventure of a lifetime.

Plascenia will leave for Jose Maria Morales, Mexico, this June and will study and volunteer with other students there through the Community Agroecology Network (CAN). 

“We’re going to be traveling from Mayan community to Mayan community, collecting stories, collecting farming techniques of the area, basic demographics of the area,” he said.

Plascenia is currently an intern for CAN, a nonprofit organization based in Santa Cruz that supports farmers in Central and South America through direct trade practices. Steve Gliessman, an environmental studies professor at UC Santa Cruz, started the organization in 2001 in response to Latin American farmers’ plummeting wages.

UCSC students interning with CAN help farmers improve their crops, develop more sustainable practices and increase biodiversity. Volunteers and interns both abroad and in the United States work to ensure farmers a living wage. Here in Santa Cruz, volunteers sell their coffee every Wednesday at the farmers market to support the cause.

Photo by Hilary Khetian.

“What we try to do is set up a trade relationship,” said Tom Maimon, a fourth-year CAN intern who will go on the same trip as Plascenia. “[In the conventional market] there’s these middlemen, exporters, importers, grocers, distributors, roasters, retailers, and all those retailers take a cut from the producers.”

CAN farmers can ship their coffee to the United States directly through the mail system, cutting out the middlemen. This puts more money in the farmers’ pockets. 

CAN outreach coordinator Grace Voorheis put it best: “The coffee we sell goes beyond fair trade. It’s a direct market.”

Plascenia, Maimon and their classmates will work with the Mayan Intercultural University of Quintana Roo, Mexico. Together they will conduct surveys, research and create an ethnography of the region.

Ultimately, though, Plascenia said he and his fellow volunteers aim to find “sustainable positions for the communities.” 

“By sustainable, I mean sustainable agriculturally, sustainable economically and sustainable in the cultural fashion,” Plascenia said.

There are several Latin American countries where CAN interns may serve. The organization offers internship programs in Costa Rica and El Salvador, as well as a new program in Nicaragua and two in Mexico, like the one Plascenia and Maimon will be going on.

Maimon, a community studies major, sees the internship program as a chance not only “to go abroad and study in another country, but [also to] have that study be a service study, so that [students] are not just going to another country and then taking what they learned and leaving, but having the learning process be an equal exchange of something.”

“It’s a transformative experience,” Maimon said. “It’s not just like EAP.”

Alayna Fredrick, who is currently interning in Costa Rica, said in an e-mail that time moves much slower there. 

“I’ve only been here for two weeks,” Fredrick said. “But the heat makes it feel like a month.”

Fredrick also notes that a myriad of benefits come out of CAN. 

“[Through the internship] deep relationships are built and learning is shared,” Fredrick said. “Through the direct market system, producers see all the revenues from the sale of their coffee. [Consumers] learn and understand the hardships, inequities and costs of the T-shirt they’re wearing or cappuccino they drink every morning.”

Members of CAN are hopeful about the future, yet realistic about its possibilities.

“Coffee is one of the most traded commodities on the planet,” Voorheis said. “It’s kind of daunting to say that CAN is changing the way conventional markets work, but you know, it’s a start.”

Looking ahead, Plascenia is excited and optimistic, both about his own future and our nation’s relationship with Latin America. 

“With the green movement going on and our economy right now, we’re looking for a better way to go,” he said. 

Plascenia said the conventional trade model is too exploitive.

“I think that CAN offers a different channel, in which we can still get what we want but do it in a way that’s more humane,” Plascenia said. “I really do think that CAN is setting a precedent.”

That was how Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez often referred to former President George W., along with characterizing him as a dictator, a fascist and a cowboy he couldn’t talk to since he felt Bush was a “Texan who walks around shooting from the hip.”

Relations between the Republican Bush and socialist Chavez were like two boys on the schoolyard: taunting each other with name-calling and finding ways to outdo each other.

Chavez incurred Bush’s wrath with boldness and pronouncements of South American autonomy, while Bush-era critics accused the brash president of seizing dictatorial control of the equitorial country.

Many would agree that the real threat posed by Chavez was not necessarily to democracy, but to American oil interests in South America. Chavez, along with Evo Morales of Bolivia, has been leading a resurgence of transnational Latin American solidarity, nationalizing both nations’ oil reserves and adopting a “go it alone” attitude unseen south of the border for decades. 

When Obama took the oath of office, he too ushered in an era of accord, this time with the rest of the world.

Latin America, a pariah under the Bush admistration, is now finding open, though tentative, arms in the United States.

Chavez has changed his attitude toward the United States as well, evident at the Americas Summit last week when the presidents were photographed shaking hands and smiling. As he extended his hand, Chavez told Obama, “I want to be your friend.”

This moment is a symbolic gesture to the beginning of Obama’s foreign policy and the changing attitudes of Latin American nations responding to America. 

Unlike his predecessor, Obama is rekindling relations with countries that Bush refused to cooperate with.

Calling them friends might be a stretch, but Obama has created a more diplomatic atmosphere.

Aside from more cordial relations with Chavez, Obama recently took steps to change America’s relationship with Cuba. Although Cuban President Raul Castro was not invited to the summit of Latin America’s leaders, Obama declared last Monday that he would lift a 50-year ban on restrictions that limited the amount of money Cuban-Americans could send home and the frequency with which they could visit their families in Cuba.

Lifting the entire embargo is not in Obama’s plans, but his move presents a give-and-take situation rather than a frozen one. He says the next step Cuba can take is to free political prisoners, reduce its tax on money sent to Cuba, and grant new freedoms to its citizens as a next step in thawing relations with the United States.

In response, Castro said he’s willing to talk about “everything, everything, everything” with President Obama, including issues regarding “human rights, press freedom [and] political prisoners.”

Obama’s actions represent the broader theme that the United States is open to relationships with countries that don’t necessarily agree with American ideals, quite the opposite of the Bush doctrine. President Obama said that he wants to lead, rather than lecture, about democracy.

We agree that this is a better approach to foreign policy. By creating less hostile relations, or loosening trade embargos, Obama is establishing crucial relationships with the Latin American countries that Bush isolated over the years. 

And for that, we give him a hand.

Oaxaca City’s spirit is written on its walls.

Its cultural reality is painted, sprayed, and plastered on almost every vertical surface the city has to offer. Written messages scream phrases like “Democracia para Oaxaca!” and “Presos politicos, no! Politicos presos, si! [Political prisoners, no! Imprisoned politicians, yes!]” And about 10 feet from a caricature of Oaxaca’s governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz being lynched is a looming government-painted warning — a message to anyone and everyone that those who paint and stick posters on this wall will be denounced.

During the span of the past few years, the state of Oaxaca has seen social movements and large-scale cultural resistance. Throughout the city and countryside, many people from different social sectors united, marched and protested in order to denounce policies reflecting governmental corruption and Mexico’s growing dependency on the United States.

“The dependency is so great on the U.S., you could say Mexico is living an economic, political and even military occupation from the U.S.,” said Miguel Angel Vasquez de la Rosa, co-founder of Services for an Alternative Education (EDUCA).

VISITORS CAN SEE this powerful message as they drive on a Oaxacan highway. The message translates, “Political prisoners no! Imprison politicians yes!” Photo by Toan P. Do.

Some History

Since World War II, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has loaned money to countries, including Mexico, for development projects. When debt spiraled out of control, the IMF became central in implementing Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) meant to cushion fiscal woes.

However, SAPs usually implement programs and policies that include privatization, deregulation and lifting trade barriers, all of which become problematic for countries involved.

The people of Oaxacan communities were hit hard on January 1, 1994 when the United States, Canada and Mexico entered into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a treaty that was designed to foster trade between the three countries.

In the decade following the implementation of NAFTA, America watched its corn industry soar while certain business juggernauts like Wal-Mart exploded to epic proportions. Conversely, citizens of Oaxaca, Mexico’s second-poorest state, suffered deepened poverty rates, cuts to social programs, and the destruction of one of its main sources of income: corn.

Corn flooding into Mexico from the United States was aggravated by the Mexican government’s withdrawal of subsidies and monetary assistance to small corn farmers, catalytically producing a spike in the rate of migration from the area.

Those most affected by these policies were and still are the indigenous communities. Of the 3.4 million population of Oaxaca, about one-third to one-half are members of 16 indigenous groups, according to Witness For Peace (WFP), a political organization that advocates nonviolence in Latin America.

“For the last 25 years, we can see that the politics and policies of the IMF have been adapted here in Mexico,” Vasquez de la Rosa of EDUCA said. “There has been kind of a double effect here. One is the decrease of public spending on food, health, education — and then the increase in the matter of economic sense. You can see that not only has poverty increased, but inequality has increased by a tremendous amount.”

Photo by Toan P. Do.

Artistic Revolution

All over the city political messages are scrawled with black, red, and white spray paint, silently yelling and challenging the higher authorities.

Randomly dispersed throughout, blocks of white, grey, and other neutral-toned paint solemnly cover up these challenges, suppressing the voice of resistance.

Privatization policies hit the education sector hard, leaving those in rural areas — who are mostly indigenous — especially underfunded.

The Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (APPO) movement was born when a teacher’s union protested in the zocalo, or town square, of Oaxaca City on the morning of June 14, 2006.

While the teachers peacefully demanded funds for school supplies, infrastructural repairs, and higher wages, government forces quickly moved in and attacked the unarmed protesters — igniting a movement of social resistance.

Millions of southern Mexico’s most marginalized people marched the streets, led by APPO, in protest of the far-reaching effects of policies like NAFTA that were taking over every aspect of daily life. During this time, APPO sought to unite people from various social sectors, and called upon artists to form a collective expression of the voice of the people. This came in the form of the Assembly of Revolutionary Artists of Oaxaca (ASARO).

“In 2006, during the movement, during the confrontation, there was this discontent in the population that was not being expressed in the media or the mainstream news,” said Julio*, co-founder of ASARO. “We chose to have our art fill that void. The media wasn’t expressing the cultural reality of Oaxaca.”

In its early days, ASARO often created artistic works that represented direct responses to government suppression witnessed during the APPO movement in 2006.

Today, the uprising is but a mere whisper in the wind, yet remnants of its effects are still scarred on the walls of the country like shrapnel left on a battlefield.

“We really came out of that moment to organize artists in that movement,” said Mario*, another co-founder of ASARO. “During the beginning our work was really around what was happening with the movement in Oaxaca. So during the first few months, we were creating work to respond to the repression, or to respond to the people that had been killed or disappeared.”

Jesús is among a small population of children who remain in San Juan Sosola, Oaxaca. Photo by Toan P. Do.

Forced Migration or Natural Phenomenon?

Although it is only two hours from the politically aggravated streets of Oaxaca City, the community of San Juan Sosola could not feel farther away.

One of many agricultural communities scattered throughout the Oaxacan countryside, the land of San Juan Sosola is dry and unforgiving, the sun relentless during the day. It’s quiet in this small town, despite the hustle and bustle of packed streets and smog-filled air. Hills roll as far as the eye can see with scattered towns visible in the distance, golden in the sun.

San Juan Sosola is eerily empty; the presence of adults between the ages of 25 and 40 has become scarce. In the time span of the past few generations, these agricultural laborers, mainly of indigenous descent, have seen many traditions lost as their children migrate from the unfertile land.

This little countryside community is a perfect example of the wide disparity between urban and country life.

“We see, especially in the indigenous communities of Oaxaca, an important aspect of community and how community is built,” said Father Fernando Cruz Montes of the Center for the Orientation of Migrants (COMI).

COMI is a small migrant sanctuary in Oaxaca City that provides a safe space and much-needed shelter during the trek to the United States that often finds migrants exploited and abused.

“Migration patterns have begun to break these social structures,” Montes said. “And so what happens now? We see these communities are just left with elderly people. There are barely any children or young people and there are houses that are abandoned. There are ghost towns in these areas. I am personally from a town in the Mixteca region, where when I was growing up there were a lot of children, but now there are only five left.”

The roots of migration in Oaxaca — and Mexico — date back to the early 1900s. However, since the passage of NAFTA in 1994, Oaxaca has seen approximately 400,000 migrants choose “a journey of death,” as Montes calls the path of migration to the United States.

Most farmers in Oaxaca are small subsistence farmers. Once NAFTA opened the floodgates for American corn to saturate the Mexican market, these farmers went out of business. Their small-scale production could not compete with U.S. agribusiness.

“In terms of corn, one of the reasons why Mexican farmers can’t compete is the subsidy disparity,” said Randy Hinthorn, co-founder of COMI. “In 1994 Mexican farmers received 30 percent of their yearly income from the Mexican government in various forms of subsidies and credits.”

However, Hinthorn said that from 1995 to 2001 it decreased to 13 percent as a result of NAFTA wiping out programs like National Company of Popular Subsistence (CONASUPO). Prior to NAFTA, CONASUPO bought corn, stored it, subsidized the price and distributed the corn to 2 million poor families each year.

Faced with no options except to leave their homes and their lands, young adults from all over the countryside migrate to different cities in Mexico or to the United States. In the process of this forced migration, families are left behind.

Dona Garcia-Velasco lives in San Juan Sosola. Like many other mothers and grandmothers in the community, she has children who have migrated to the United States.

“I want to give a greeting to my children that are out there in Los Angeles. Remember us, because it’s been years since I’ve seen you,” she pleaded as she began to cry. “Please take care of yourselves.”

The Revolutionary artists call themselves ASARO for short, and create art that represents the cultural reality of Oaxaca. Photo by Toan P. Do.

Don’t Forget About Us

Back in the city of Oaxaca, the APPO movement has faded, leaving the graffiti tags behind as a reminder of the government suppression that took place. However, the spirit of Oaxacan resistance remains among many teachers and organizations alike.

The Coalition of Teachers and Indigenous Promoters of Oaxaca (CMPIO) is an organization made up of 1,070 indigenous teachers, who provide indigenous youth with an alternative education that puts value on maintaining the various aspects of indigenous culture.

“The irony in such a huge country that is very diverse, both linguistically and culturally, is that the same programs are given to all children without really recognizing these differences,” said Fernando Soberanes, teacher and co-founder of CMPIO. “So facing this problem, we’ve tried to respond by bringing programs and activities that more accurately address the needs of these communities.”

On the other side of town is EDUCA.

“It was in the midst of everything happening in 1994 that a group of us, a group of activists with connections with the progressive aspects of the church, decided to set up this organization,” co-founder Vasquez de la Rosa said.

EDUCA was founded on the principle idea that in order to push forward social and political transformation in Mexico, the marginalized communities would need to be educated and organized.

Vasquez de la Rosa said that one of EDUCA’s main purposes is to inform indigenous adults about their rights, making sure they are equipped and know how to demand them effectively.

Father Montes of COMI echoed the same sentiment.

“Our governments have a lot of work to do,” Montes said. “They need to pay attention to the situation and create laws that will support migrants and recognize that these migrants have rights as well.”

Photo by Toan P. Do.