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July 28, 2005
What is Utopia for, anyway?
Back from Ecuador, I have a certain frustration at so many things left unwritten and unsaid in these dispatches...but these notes were far from my primary purpose there, so what's said is said. I would've liked to tell more about the political situation there in Absurdistan, especially as several of the people I spent time with were involved in chasing out the President last April. I would've liked to tell what I know about a huge new US military base being built in the Amazon, to further enforce Plan Colombia and further dominate. I would've liked to describe the commercials I heard on the radio advertising the benefits of the upcoming Free Trade Agreement: "Ecuador is not an island -- Competition is growth, growth is development, development is progress." I would've liked to transcribe interviews I conducted with Adolfo Maldonado and Alexandra Almeira of Accion Ecologica, with Dr. Miguel Sebastian who has studied and continues to study the rates of cancer in the Amazon, with Camilo Santi of the Kichwa village of Sarayacu who are resisting petroleum development at all costs, and with Edgar Isch, the former Minister of the Environment who quit because of the recent government's neoliberal policies and corrupt practices. I wish I could describe what I heard of the Haourani people -- the least developed and most fiercely independent of Ecuador's indigenous groups -- who, the week before I arrived had planted themselves in front of the Environmental Ministry with spears and blowguns and declared war on any oil company that invades their territory. And I would have liked to offer more complete passages about how the People's Health Assembly works, how decisions are made, who is involved, and so forth.
But no time for all that. For those of you in the Bay Area, a few weeks from now you can expect to hear about a few reportbacks by myself and my colleagues at Hesperian Foundation, and our friends from the International Indian Treaty Council and the People's Grocery. Beyond that, I'll leave off with a quote from Eduardo Galeano, regarding all of this:
"Utopia is like the horizon. You walk two steps, and it retreats two steps. You walk ten steps and it retreats ten steps.
So, then what is utopia for? For that -- to make you keep walking."
Hasta la proxima.....
Posted by at July 28, 2005 04:36 PM