Beacon Broadside

Can the Triquis Go Home?

Today's post is from David Bacon, a former union organizer and a fellow at the Oakland Institute. Bacon is the author of Illegal People and the forthcoming The Right to Not Migrate. This post originally appeared at New American Media.

OAXACA, MEXICO -- Just before Christmas, the women and children who'd spent 17 months living on the sidewalk outside the governor's palace in Oaxaca announced they were going home. In the spring of 2010, these refugees abandoned their homes in San Juan Copala, the ceremonial center of the Triqui people. Many houses were burned after they left.

Stringing tarps and ropes across the palacio's outdoor colonnade, they set up their planton, an impromptu community of sleeping and cooking areas across the sidewalk from the zocalo, the plaza at Oaxaca's heart. It looked hauntingly similar to the settlements of the Occupy protesters that spread across the United States last fall, but rather than fighting to remain in their tents, the Triqui families in the planton were fighting for the right not to live there, for the right to go home.

Finally, this December, they announced an agreement with representatives of Gabino Cue, elected governor last July, who promised to protect the families if they returned to San Juan Copala. Still, many question whether they can really go back safely. Even more importantly, they ask what can bring an end to the violence that has claimed the lives of at least 500 people over the last two decades.

This question is not just debated on the sidewalk by the zocalo, or only in Oaxaca. It is asked, albeit in whispers, by migrant farm workers in Baja California and Sinaloa, in northern Mexico, and in Hollister and Greenfield, in California's Salinas Valley. 

Indigenous Triqui children march through the streets of Oaxaca on December 19, 2011, to protest a wave of killihngs in their home community of San Juan Copala.

Mixtecos have been leaving Oaxaca for decades, driven mostly by the endemic poverty of the Mexican countryside, says Gaspar Rivera Salgado, a Mixteco professor at UCLA and past coordinator of the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations. Yet for many years the Triquis, who were equally poor and live in the same region, stayed put. Their migration only began when the violence in their communities made life unbearable.

Once displaced, they began to migrate within the Mixteca region, then within Oaxaca, and then within Mexico. They traveled north, following other Oaxacans to San Quintin in the 1980s, and then in the 1990s, to California. 

Triqui migrants might have escaped the violence, but not the political presence of the groups they were fleeing. Wherever they went, the Movement for the Unification of the Triqui Struggle (MULT) and the Social Welfare Group of the Triqui Region (UBISORT) sent agents, requiring people to pay monetary quotas and participate in mobilizations.

In the 1980s, Triqui activists organized MULT. "It was a grassroots organization to fight the caciques (rural political bosses) over control of land, forests and other natural resources," says Rivera Salgado. "The caciques were so violent that MULT members had to arm themselves. Eventually, those armed men became a paramilitary group. The caciques were overcome, but what began as a grassroots organization became something different. There was no transition to a civil society form of organization."

A Triqui boy carries a sign that says, "We want justice for the widows, the orphans and our injured.

Eventually MULT itself fractured into factions. One faction became UBISORT, which began fighting MULT for political control of Triqui communities. Oaxaca's repressive state government used the conflict to enhance its own control. 

UBISORT was organized with the support of then-governor Jose Murat, and became a political support base for Oaxaca's old governing party, the PRI (Party of the Institutionalized Revolution). MULT organized its own political party, the Popular Unity Party. But behind the parties were the guns.

"A civil war went on between them," Rivera Salgado says. In 2006, Raul Marcial Perez, a leader of UBISORT, was assassinated. Then in October, 2010, Heriberto Pazos, the founder of MULT, was gunned down in the streets of Oaxaca city. 

In the only municipio that remained in Triqui hand, San Martin Itunyoso, Antonio Jacinto López Martínez, a MULT leader, was elected president in 2004, but then couldn't take office because of threats, and fled to the nearby city of Tlaxiaco. Last October, as he was crossing the street there with two members of his family, a gunman shot him in the head. Many others were killed in years of violence and retribution.

The Triquis attempted to create an autonomous town in San Juan Copala, and were expelled by paramilitary gangs.  They carried crosses with the names of people who were killed.

The High Cost of Migration

For Triquies, migration has had a high cost - they've had to fight for survival wherever they went.  "They faced tremendous racism and prejudice," Rivera Salgado charges. "They're always the outsiders, treated like savages."

Over the course of some 25 years, so many have fled the political murders plaguing their homeland that they've formed towns like Nueva Colonia Triqui, or New Triqui Town, in Baja's San Quintin Valley. In that colonia, or in California's Triqui neighborhoods, people ask whether peace is possible, and if it were, would they go home too?

"People left looking for a better future, but they worry about the safety of their families at home," says activist Elvira Santos (whose name has been changed), pointing to the fear that many Triquis share of reprisals for speaking publicly not only against themselves, but also against their families in Oaxaca.  "They'll think twice before going back because the conflicts and the same armed groups are still there."

In north Mexico, migrants found farm labor camps with dirt floors and no electricity. When they wanted homes for children and families, Triquis and other indigenous migrants had to mount land invasions, building houses on Federal land, and then awaiting the police sent to evict them. 

The march called on the governor, Gabino Cue, to guarantee their safety when they try to return to the town and to arrest those responsible for the killings.

In one of the most celebrated cases, Julio Sandoval, a Triqui leader from Yosoyuxi, was imprisoned for two years in the penitentiary in Ensenada for helping families settle in Cañon Buenavista.

When Triqui migrant farm workers arrived in Greenfield, the local police and legal system condemned them for cultural practices like home births or early marriages, or for drinking in public, a normal activity at home. Eventually they reached agreement with the local police chief, who even set up a desk in the police station for a Triqui leader to provide translation. 

Then town residents, who saw the migrants as unwelcome invaders, tried to fire the chief. The Triqui community by then numbered at least 3,000 people. Helped by the United Farm Workers, migrants marched through town to assert their right to live there.

Roots of the Violence

Adelfo Regino Montes, a Mixe indigenous leader and writer for Mexico's leftwing daily, La Jornada, traces the violence in the Triqui region to "political submission, territorial disintegration, economic exploitation, racial discrimination and exclusion in every aspect of daily life." 

Triqui men joined the women and children in the march.

After Mexico won its independence, Triquis controlled three municipios, or counties, where they were the majority. That gave them some degree of political power. After the Mexican Revolution, however, two of the municipios were dissolved, and much of the community's autonomy was lost.

"San Juan Copala itself was no longer a municipio," Santos explains. "Many mestizos [people of mixed indigenous and Spanish ancestry] didn't want Triquis to have power. They introduced alcohol and arms in order to gain control of the land and resources." Those caciques  ruled Triqui towns using repression and violence.

"[Triqui municipios] were dispersed into districts where non-indigenous people are the majority," Regino Montes said in a 2010 Jornada column. "The big majority of Triqui communities have been excluded from any decisions that affect their lives and destinies, undermining their autonomy and freedom to make their own choices. Those decision remained in the hands of the caciques, the state and federal governments, and the party leaders of the PRI."

In the only municipio that remained in Triqui hands, San Martin Itunyoso, Antonio Jacinto López Martínez, a MULT leader, was elected president in 2004, but then couldn't take office because of threats, and fled to the nearby city of Tlaxiaco. Last October, as he was crossing the street there with two members of his family, a gunman shot him in the head.

The women carry a banner that says, "Neither forgive nor forget, punishment to the assassins.   Autonomous town of San Juan Copala."

"The violence is created by a lack of the assertion of the rule of law. But the government has excused its failure to stop it with such racist ideas as 'Triquis are savages and uncivilized,'" Rivera Salgado charges.

Indigenous self-government

Looking for a way out themselves, in 2007 Triqui activists created the autonomous municipio of San Juan Copala, inspired by the experiences of the Zapatistas in nearby Chiapas. "They recreated the system of indigenous self-government," Regino Montes wrote, "the only real possibility for peace in the region."

"They were looking for a political alternative," adds Rivera Salgado, "and they used the political process.  They weren't armed. And they won in a clean election."

Those activists had roots in another splinter from MULT, called MULT Independiente, or MULT-I. UBISORT and MULT united against them, and eventually laid siege to the town, which went on for months. A number of residents were killed. 

A Triqui girl carries a sign that says, "Long live the autonomy of the native people of the planet earth."

On April 27, 2010, a caravan of Mexican and European human rights activists set out for San Juan Copala.  They were stopped at a roadblock, and gunmen began shooting. Beatriz Alberta Cariño Trujillo, a Mexican human rights activist, and a Finnish supporter Tyri Antero Jaakkola, were murdered. The others fled into the hills.

Human rights lawyer Gabriela Jimenez Rodriguez said she was captured by hooded men who told her they were from UBISORT and MULT. "They told us than no one could pass here, that it was their territory."  Finally she and others were released. Police recovered the two bodies, but never tried to enter the town.

On August 22, three more people were killed and two wounded, as they drove to nearby Santa Cruz Tilapia, where residents were also trying to establish an autonomous municipio. One was the town leader, Antonio Ramirez Lopez, 78 years old. 

Then in September, 500 paramilitaries surrounded San Juan Copala and told supporters of the autonomous municipio they had 24 hours to leave. "That wasn't just a threat," Reyna Martinez, one of the town's leaders, told La Jornada. "They did the same thing in San Miguel Copala, where they killed twelve of our colleagues in the city hall. Neither state nor Federal authorities dare even to come into San Juan Copala.

Women and children walked past the street vendors selling toys in the city's main plaza, with the star and masked figure on their banner showing their connection to the Zapatista movement.

No need for protective measures?

Oaxaca's governor at the time, Ulisses Ruiz, notorious for his violent suppression of the teachers' strike of 2006, said there were no gunmen, deaths or disappearances in the Triqui region, and no need for protective measures for residents. By that time, families who'd fled were already living in the planton outside his office, and some had gone to Mexico City to set up a similar planton there. "They got us to leave," said another leader, Marcos Albino Ortiz, "but that doesn't mean we've given up."

Last July, however, Gabino Cue, who Ruiz defeated in the election of 2004, beat the PRI candidate for governor. UBISORT campaigned for the PRI. MULT's PUP ran its own candidate, viewed largely as an attempt to draw votes from Cue. After the election, Cue put Region Montes in charge of the state Secretariat of Indigenous Affairs. Rufino Dominguez, former coordinator for the Frente Indigena de Organizaciones Binacionales, was appointed director of the Oaxacan Institute for Attention to Migrants.

The women in the planton didn't stop demonstrating against the government, however, and the violence continued. In August three MULTI members were killed in Agua Fria. Their bodies were brought to the planton for a public funeral. In October, Reyna Martinez was arrested with two dozen others for occupying a piece of land near the airport, in an act of civil disobedience. They demanded that the new state government provide protection to allow their return to San Juan Copala, pay for the destruction of peoples' homes there, and arrest those responsible for the killings. And in December women and children in bright red huipils marched through Oaxaca city, demanding the government accept the conditions.

In response to the pressure, Rufino Juarez, a UBISORT leader, was arrested in May for killing MULTI activist Celestino Hernandez Cruz a year earlier. Cue's administration then issued arrest orders for a number of others, but so far none have been detained, with one exception. Authorities did arrest a MULTI founder and retired teacher, Miguel Angel Velasco, accusing him of arranging the disappearance of two young women from MULT in 2007.

The planton in front of the governor's palace on the main square in Oaxaca.

Nevertheless, Marcos Albino Ortiz, says that the state government "has fulfilled about half of what it agreed to. We're going back to San Juan Copala, and we're talking with the communities there to ensure they support our decision. Our objective is to pacify the region." He predicts that the state and federal police will provide an escort, along with representatives of the Interamerican Commission for Human Rights, which has issued orders of protection for many of the activists. Some 135 families have received some restitution for their burned homes, he says.

Can Triquis go home?

To ensure peace in San Juan Copala, however, some police presence there is unavoidable, at least in the short run, Rivera Salgado believes. "The litmus test is whether the government will create the conditions in which people can go home," he says. "You can't change overnight a situation that's existed for 30 years. In the short term they have to disarm the armed people. This can create political space. But military occupation is not a long-term solution. People need to become a force for change themselves."

Following the ambush of the caravan, Regino Montes asserted, "The solution must be the recognition and respect, in law and in action, for the process of Triqui autonomy." Now he is a responsible official in a government that has the power to implement that recommendation.

Peace in Oaxaca may encourage Triqui migrants to return, but going home won't be easy. No one can afford to go back to Oaxaca, just to take a look. 

A child sleeps in a planton set up by the Triquis in Mexico City's zocalo, or main square.

Triqui migration hit the U.S. after the amnesty of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, so most people have no legal immigration status.  They can cross the border into Mexico, but coming back to the U.S. is a much bigger problem. It's expensive -- $2500 for a coyote for the crossing is two months wages for a farm worker. Plus, it's more dangerous every year, as people get pushed by increased enforcement into the most remote sections of the border to cross. 

Going back home is a permanent decision, not a temporary visit. Nor has the fear of violence there diminished. In the last few years, five Triqui families even won political asylum, helped by San Francisco's Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights. Nevertheless, "most migrants get much harsher treatment now," according to Rivera Salgado. "The current enforcement policy is based on excluding them, through violence and jail at the border, and isolation and fear in their community. The idea is to make life so hard for them in the U.S. they'll have to leave.  But where are they supposed to go?"

"I think a lot of people would go home if they could," Santos believes. "Our land is very productive, and as farm workers here we've seen new crops that we could grow in Oaxaca. But we need jobs and schools there, and especially security. Right now, we don't know if we can even hope for that. Some of us have lost hope. Our governments have made these promises before. It would be good if it were true this time, but we have to see if their actions match their words.""

"And where is home?" asks Rivera Salgado. "Lots of Triquis have grown up in San Quintin or Greenfield by now. Yet the first generation still yearns for connection to San Juan Copala. It is part of their identity and sense of belonging.  Everybody needs that."

Nancy Rubin Stuart: Happy July 4th to our Forgotten Founding Mothers!

We celebrate Independence Day this weekend, and Nancy Rubin Stuart, author of The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation, honors the often overlooked women of the American Revolution.

Traditionally, we celebrate our nation's birthday on July 4th with parades, fireworks and tributes to the Founding Fathers. Rarely do we recall the women who supported our patriots, those forgotten Founding Mothers who watched their men march off to fight for American independence, leaving them to struggle to support children, homes and farms.

Silence surrounds the lives of those nurturers. While we recall the names of "celebrity women" of that era-- Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams; Mercy Otis Warren, author of anti-British propaganda plays and historian of the American Revolution; Betsy Ross, who stitched the American flag; Deborah Sampson, disguised as a soldier who fought against the British, and Margaret Corbin, who loaded cannons on the battlefield-- we know relatively little about their personal sacrifices and those of their peers.

Before the Revolution, Abigail Adams and her historian friend, Mercy Otis Warren, shunned tea and proudly wore homespun garments in lieu of British finery. Living miles apart south of Boston with their children, the two friends spun dozens of skeins of wool which they collectively donated to the poor. So, too, did countless other women who gathered in private homes for spinning parties or participated in public spinning contests. To stir patriotic sentiment even hotter, patriotic newspapers offered suggestions about North American substitutes for imported teas, among them sassafras, raspberry and mint.

While patriotism required sacrifice, American women still needed certain manufactured goods and fabrics for their households. Since Abigail's husband, John, and Mercy's son, Winslow, lived in Europe during the last years of the Revolution, those matrons sent for certain household goods and fabrics which they sold or traded to friends and neighbors.

Many women and their children, however, no longer lived in old neighborhoods. Among those who fled from Boston during the British occupation was Abigail and Mercy's friend, Betsy Adams, wife of Samuel Adams, who hid in a humble cottage far from the city.

No less unnerving was the April 1775 flight of their friends, Hannah and Professor John Winthrop of Harvard College, as British soldiers stormed through Cambridge. After securing lodging in a "safe house," Hannah wrote about harrowing scenes of bloodshed in nearby fields and nights spent with weeping women and children crowded into a temporary shelter. Later, the Winthrops were transported in a rough wagon to rustic Andover. There, John Winthrop, 61, fell desperately ill from one of the epidemics then raging across Massachusetts emanating from the unsanitary conditions of the British soldiers in Boston. Months later, after Hannah finally called upon the Warrens to help her get him to Watertown, John recovered, but never fully regained his health.

That same April of 1775, Hannah's kindly sister and brother-in-law of Charlestown dressed wounds and provided food for British soldiers fleeing from Lexington and Concord. In June 1775 that couple was stunned to watch their home go up in flames when the British burnt Charlestown. As the Revolution moved to New York and the South, still other women wrote letters or left diary accounts of British and Hessian soldiers who broke into their homes, plundered their valuables, raped them and set their homes on fire.

Even those who escaped such a fate were plagued by loneliness. By the summer of 1775, Mercy's long absence from her husband, James Warren, the first Quartermaster General of the Continental Army and president of the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts, finally impelled her to leave her young sons with servants in Plymouth and ride thirty-five miles over rough roads to Revolutionary headquarters in Watertown. Shocked by James's harried and overwrought condition, Mercy made five solo trips that summer and fall to Watertown to serve as his private secretary and to write reports to their friend John Adams in Philadelphia.

In Braintree, meanwhile, Abigail not only skimped and schemed to maintain her home, children and family finances, but became an astute manager of the Adams's farm. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of other Revolutionary-era women, whose husbands left home either to fight or serve in Congress, were similarly compelled to assume their husband's former responsibilities.

Among them was Mary Bartlett, wife of a New Hampshire Congressman, who initially balked at running her husband's farm but later became so adept at it that she regarded it as "our farm." A still more famous and lonely "war widow" was Deborah Read, wife of statesmen Ben Franklin, who spent most of the Revolution abroad in his diplomatic duties, leaving her to live and die alone in Philadelphia.

While Abigail's plea to "remember the ladies" fell on deaf ears during the Revolution, her vision has gradually, if grudgingly, become a reality. Nearly ninety years ago women achieved suffrage. Today, more than half of America's college students are women. Now too, in the midst of the Great Recession, women comprise nearly half of the work force.

Nevertheless, women, especially single mothers with children, remain our most impoverished citizens— a condition strikingly similar to that suffered by women of the American Revolution.

As we sing "Happy Birthday America" today, let us remember that women quietly baked the nation's cake. They did so with rationed flour and bartered candles, whose light has burned brighter and stronger through the centuries than have muskets, firearms and bombs.

Troubling New Military Strategy in Afghanistan

Today's post is from Garry Leech, the author of Beyond Bogotá: Diary of a Drug War Journalist in Colombia and Crude Interventions: The United States, Oil and the New World Disorder. Leech is an independent journalist and editor of Colombia Journal.

With the NATO-led coalition in Afghanistan struggling on the battlefield against a resilient insurgency and opium poppy cultivation on the rise, Navy admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently suggested that the United States should import the counterinsurgency and counternarcotics model currently being employed in Colombia to Afghanistan. "I think many of us from all over the world can learn from what has happened with respect to the very successful developments of Plan Colombia," Mullen stated, adding that the counterinsurgency approach used in Colombia would be applicable to Afghanistan.

Not surprisingly, Mullen and others who advocate transferring the Plan Colombia model to Afghanistan point to improved security in Colombia's major population centers and a dramatic reduction in murders and kidnappings in recent years. While a significant percentage of the Colombian population has indeed benefitted from these successes, Mullen and others conveniently ignore the humanitarian crisis that has resulted from this establishment of "security" and Plan Colombia's complete failure as a counternarcotics initiative.

Happy Thanksgiving

Our relations to each other, our prayers whispered across generations to our relatives, are what bind our cultures together.—Winona LaDuke, American Indian activist

All of this ugliness and emptiness can be washed away by connecting. We can heal each other through nurturing and sitting in that circle with our relatives and just to hear the word "relative" and know it means you.—Sandra White Hawk, American Indian activist

To share one's food is to demonstrate one's humanity. —Leslie Marmon Silko, American Indian writer

These quotes are included in "Language Is a Place of Struggle": Great Quotes by People of Color, edited by Tram Nguyen.

McCain and Obama on Colombian Free Trade: Business as Usual

Today's post is from Garry Leech, author of Beyond Bogota: Diary of a Drug War Journalist in Colombia. Leech is an independent journalist and editor of Colombia Journal. For the past eight years his work has primarily focused on the US war on drugs and Colombia's civil conflict. He is the author of several books including Crude Interventions: The United States, Oil and the New World (Dis)Order (Zed Books, 2006) and Killing Peace: Colombia's Conflict and the Failure of US Intervention (Inota, 2002). He also teaches international politics at Cape Breton University in Nova Scotia, Canada.

In the final presidential debate, the South American country of Colombia briefly became a central theme in the U.S. election campaign, not so much because of its infamous history of drug trafficking and civil conflict, but because of international economic policies. In November of 2006, the Bush administration signed a free trade agreement with the Colombian government. However, its ratification in Congress has been stalled because many Democrats oppose the pact on human rights grounds. During the debate, Republican candidate John McCain decided to take the offensive against his opponent Barack Obama by attacking the Democratic candidate's opposition to the U.S.-Colombia free trade agreement. The arguments presented by each candidate are telling with regard to the degree of difference between the two of them on international economic issues.

In the debate, McCain repeatedly made Colombia a topic of discussion. In fact, as Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker put it, McCain appeared to have a "strange preoccupation" with the South American country. In actuality, McCain was preoccupied with suggesting that Obama's opposition to the U.S.-Colombia free trade agreement exemplified the Democratic senator's protectionist tendencies and that such an economic approach would be bad for Americans. "I just recited to you the benefits of concluding that agreement, a billion dollars of American dollars that could have gone to creating jobs and businesses in the United States, opening up those markets," McCain argued.

Obama responded by suggesting that the United States should ensure such agreements contain adequate human rights and environmental protections, particularly in the case of Colombia where more unionists are killed each year than in the rest of the world. "We have to stand for human rights and we have to make sure that violence isn't being perpetrated against workers who are just trying to organize for their rights," Obama declared, suggesting that human rights trump U.S. trade interests.

Not surprisingly, McCain's position on free trade agreements is consistent with that of President George W. Bush, who again urged Congress to ratify the U.S-Colombia pact the day after the debate. McCain, like the Bush administration and many other Republicans, advocates the expansion of the neoliberal, or "free market," global economic order that has been established over the past quarter century. But is Obama's position markedly different?

Colombia Hostage Rescue Cause for Joy and Sadness

Garry Leech is an independent journalist and editor of Colombia Journal. In August of 2006, he was briefly held captive by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), an experience that frames the narrative of his forthcoming book, Beyond Bogota: Diary of a Drug War Journalist in Colombia. After last week's rescue of fifteen hostages, including former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, from FARC custody, Beacon Broadside invited Leech to share his perspective with our readers. 

The news that the Colombian military had successfully rescued 15 hostages held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) spread quickly around the world. The story was deemed newsworthy by most mainstream media outlets because the leftist guerrilla group's four most high-profile hostages—former presidential candidate and Colombian-French citizen Ingrid Betancourt, and three U.S. military contractors—were among those liberated. The liberation of the hostages has conveniently shifted media focus away from yet another political scandal in which the administration of Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe finds itself mired.

In recent years, there have been many international efforts to negotiate a prisoner exchange between the FARC and the Colombian government. Envoys from the French government have repeatedly sought the release of Betancourt. The past eight months has seen Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez achieve the unilateral release of six hostages held by the FARC. The latter case is particularly interesting because the leftist Chávez's success was beginning to prove embarrassing to Colombia's right-wing president. Consequently, Uribe declared that Chávez was no longer authorized to negotiate with the FARC and within weeks successfully shifted the focus away from the plight of the hostages when he killed the FARC's second-in-command, Raúl Reyes, in a cross border air strike into Ecuador that caused an international incident but sent his approval ratings skyward.

A Global Perspective on Mother’s Day

In honor of Mother's Day, Beacon Broadside will feature a handful of posts on the holiday. Today, Sarah LeVine shares her experiences of mother's days around the world. LeVine grew up in England; she was educated at Oxford, the University of Chicago, and Harvard, where she received her Ph.D. and is now an associate in the department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies. Her most recent book, with David Gellner, is Rebuilding Buddhism, and a collection of stories, The Saint of Kathmandu and Other Tales of the Sacred in Distant Lands, is forthcoming from Beacon Press. 

When I came to the US from England in the 1960s, I suffered a good deal from culture shock. In the first place, in contrast with my British undergraduate classmates who rarely mentioned their parents, my Freud-indoctrinated American graduate school classmates, despite being older and, one might have assumed, already well out of the nest, were obsessed with theirs, especially with their mothers. Trading tales of psychological abuse was a favorite pastime. But for all this tension and ambivalence, they still celebrated Mother's Day. In England at that time we had Mothering Sunday on the fourth Sunday of Lent, an Anglican Church festival that was generally ignored. The four per cent of the population who went to church on that particular late winter Sunday thanked God for the care and attention they'd received from their mothers, who were only marginally involved in this thanksgiving. In contrast, Mother's Day in America was a federally-sanctified celebration, a deification of the internalized torturer/seductress, which even in the sixties was poised to out-strip the commercial excesses of Christmas.

I was astounded by the commotion. But then I married an American and had American children who, soon after they could toddle, were deifying me on the second Sunday in May. Almost before I knew it I was receiving cards (handmade in daycare center) and being pressed to stay in bed long after the hour when I was usually out jogging so that, with their father's help, my children could bring my breakfast on a tray.

Rather to my surprise I began to look forward to the Mother's Day commotion.

Bloody Foundation for U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement

Garry Leech is editor of Colombia Journal, author of Crude Interventions and Killing Peace, and coauthor of The People Behind Colombian Coal. A lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Cape Breton University, Leech lives in Nova Scotia. His account of being held captive by guerrillas, Beyond Bogotá, Diary of a Drug War Journalist in Colombia, will be published by Beacon Press this fall.

There has been an ongoing debate in Washington about a potential free trade agreement with Colombia. The failure to implement a hemisphere-wide agreement—the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)—led President George W. Bush to push for a bilateral pact with his ideologically-aligned ally in Colombia, President Alvaro Uribe. The Bush administration signed a free trade pact with Colombia in November 2006, but congressional Democrats have stalled its ratification due to ongoing human rights abuses in Colombia, particularly against unionists.

The Bush administration repeatedly points to a recent reduction in the number of Colombian labor leaders killed as justification for the free trade agreement. In October 2007, U.S. State Department spokesperson, R. Nicholas Burns, declared, "Homicides of trade unionists have shown a steep decline…. Rather than condemning as insufficient the considerable progress already made by the Colombian people, we should help them consolidate that progress through expanded trade."

In the past 20 years, more than 3,000 Colombian unionists have been assassinated. In 2007, Colombia remained the most dangerous country in the world for unionists with thirty-nine labor leaders killed; a number significantly lower than the 197 assassinated in 2001—the year before President Uribe assumed office. Consequently, the Bush administration is clearly correct when it points out that there has been a marked decrease in the number of unionists killed under the Uribe administration.