The carnival came to Trinidad twice this year. It held its festive pre-Lenten rite of carnal debauchery a few weeks ago and a post Easter one filled with verbal excess, mostly courtesy of Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega. Danielito, as we not so fondly call him, went on a near hour long tirade providing an overview of the tragic legacy of US imperialism in Latin America. To be honest, I am surprised that he could manage it in only fifty minutes. While all Nicaraguans know who William Walker is, not too many Americans are aware that he attempted to install himself top the perch in Managua in the 1850s.
And while the filibustering of William Walker has been long assigned to history if not folklore, events during my lifetime continue to impair US-Latin American relations. It’s hard to trust when one thinks that Jaime Roldós and Omar Torrijos were murdered in 1981 on the orders of William Casey. And while the Bush Administration distracted by its global wars of necessity in Afghanistan and of choice in Iraq and the Philippines and who knows where else ignored the region except to demand eradication of coca crops, it is also impossible to ignore in the attempted coup against Hugo Chávez that the United States didn’t exactly uphold the inviolability of democratic norms. Tsk, tsk. So forgive us for chiding you because it seems that United States only values Latin democracies when it’s convenient for the United States. But democracy in Latin America is ever more vibrant and likely in the near term if not the longer term to be rather inconvenient for the United States. Danielito, Hugo, Rafa and Evo aren’t going anywhere so get used to them. I personally don’t care for them either but it’s not for me to approve or disapprove the electoral choices of my Latin brethren.
Our friends over at Firedoglake have put out a short post on the waterboarding of Al-Qaeda operative Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003. I have always wanted to meet Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for I have a number of questions to ask him. You see, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed killed one of my closest friends, Daniel Pearl. I don’t remember actually meeting Danny but we became close and fast friends in the Spring of our freshman year at Stanford. We would rush and pledge the same fraternity, share our love of folk music from the world over, muse what it was like to be American and not be American for he and I are sons of immigrants, and talk politics for hours on end. I last saw Danny five months before he was butchered by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Those of us who knew Danny are very protective of Danny and his legacy because Danny Pearl was an exceptional human being. It is hard to talk about Danny and not wax eloquent. It is beyond belief to us that when Al Qaeda killed Danny they killed someone who actually was interested in having their grievances heard. Not that Danny or I sympathized with Islamic terrorism but there are many who think it important to understand its causes so that we might be able to better mitigate its spread.
In thinking about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the fact that he was waterboarded 183 times in the month of March of 2003, I cannot but express how this denigrates everything that Danny stood for. In waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, we have descended to the level of that butcher. We have proved that we are no better than them and I refuse to believe that. The West has a moral obligation to live up to the ideals that Danny Pearl embodied.
In this segment from Real News, Eliane Bernard of the Trade Union Program at Harvard Law School notes that the most significant barrier to unionization is the law.