11 January 23
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Each morning, to combat the Detroit winter, my mother would swathe me in layers of too-big clothing, capping off the baggy outfit with a white T-shirt that read Alkebu-lan Academy in red letters. We’d walk down the hall on scalloped red carpet, saying hello to chatty neighbors lingering in doorways. The elevator was as old and cantankerous as a grandpa who had earned the right to be. We’d ride it down to the lobby, where the guard’s desk sat front and center. Then my mother would take me to the Alkebu-lan Academy nursery, through a set of metal doors heavy enough to sever the tips of a child’s fingers.
That was where, after a hug and a kiss from my mother, I spent my days—in the cinder-block room with its yellow preschool bulletin board. A teacher had pinned up colorful cartoon monsters, like the ones on Sesame Street, and had written each character’s color on its tummy in black marker. In a photo of me there at 14 months, captured by my mother, I am prancing by a windup baby swing, no doubt positioned to give weary nursery workers a scant break.
The nursery was staffed by women like my mother who had committed their time and efforts to the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church in exchange for housing, meals, and other basic needs. For more than three decades, from 1973 into the 2000s, the U-shaped building at 700 Seward Avenue, called the National Training Center and Residence Hall, was a modified kibbutz where hundreds of Black people shared their lives and resources. A dining room on the first floor served meals. The residence hall operated on a communal budget that members could pay into if they worked a traditional job outside the church.
Donations were a major source of funding. Young people we called missionaries went out “reaching,” traveling to cities throughout the South and Midwest year-round, in all weather, to ask for money. The National Training Center, or NTC, was a bustling village back when I lived there in the early ’80s. It must have seemed, to my mother and all the other young people who joined the Black Christian Nationalist movement, that the future shimmered with possibility.
But liberation movements wax and wane. By the late 2000s, the NTC no longer operated as a full-scale commune, though some church members continued living there. In 2019, the building was sold to a developer. The nursery and dining hall and all our old rooms are being turned into luxury apartments; the first hit the market last year. I felt a startling sense of loss when I heard about the sale. It was the symbolic end of a self-sufficient Black nation within a nation.
Knowing that my heritage, and therefore my own children’s, was bound up in those walls, I felt a responsibility to understand what had happened there. I had to go back to the Shrine of the Black Madonna. I had to go home.
The founder of the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church was a straight-talking minister named Reverend Albert B. Cleage Jr. “We would rather eat dirt,” Cleage proclaimed in the late ’60s, “than go through the kind of oppression that we’ve gone through in America for 400 years.”
On July 23, 1967, Detroit police officers raided an illegal after-hours club (called a “blind pig”). Instead of dispersing, patrons and onlookers, fed up with systemic police brutality, fought back. Bottles sailed toward the officers. One crashed into a police-car window. The uprising that began with that broken glass on 12th and Clairmount would last five days, leaving 43 people dead and hundreds injured, and causing $132 million ($1 billion today) in property damage. More uprisings around the country followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. the next year.
Cleage and King had been two of the organizers of the Walk to Freedom in 1963. Both ministers were deeply influenced by the social-gospel movement; they thought the Church had an ethical and theological imperative to meet parishioners’ material needs and to use its power to pursue justice for the oppressed. But Cleage came to see the social gospel, with its belief that man was good and society perfectible, as naive. His Black nationalism divided him from the other organizers. He wanted the walk to be all Black; they thought it should be interracial. He lost that battle, as well as the Michigan gubernatorial race of 1964, in which he ran as a candidate for the Freedom Now Party and won fewer than 5,000 votes.
In a sermon following King’s death, Cleage insisted that despite King’s emphasis on nonviolence and “redemptive suffering,” the people who’d joined King’s marches had learned something different. Protest taught them nationalism: “that black people could come together as a group, that they could find unity in their struggle against oppression, and in their desire for justice.” More and more, Cleage turned his focus away from mainstream politics and toward the new theology he called Black Christian Nationalism.
BCN envisioned salvation as a transformative group experience that involved unlearning the “declaration of Black inferiority.” Slavery, the slave codes, Jim Crow, and centuries of racial terrorism in the United States had reified the belief that Black people were subhuman. The insidious premise that white people were superior had so utterly permeated every aspect of American society, Cleage argued, that even Black people had accepted it. Before his people could throw off their shackles, Cleage believed, they needed to unlearn the inferiority complex that told them they deserved oppression. Black people could not build a Black nation until they believed in their own innate possibility.
To commemorate the new theology, on Easter Sunday 1967, Cleage unveiled before parishioners a stunning 18-foot chancel mural of a Black Madonna and child by the artist Glanton Dowdell. Instead of preaching that a white Jesus had come to save individual souls for the hereafter, he would preach, at his church on Linwood and Hogarth, about a revolutionary Black Messiah whose teachings could save Black people collectively in the here and now. Nothing was more sacred than the liberation of Black people, and Black liberation was in Black hands. Jesus, the revolutionary Black Messiah, was more than a metaphor for Cleage—he was a political necessity. Cleage renamed his church the Shrine of the Black Madonna, and a few years later rechristened it again as the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church. He took a new name himself, as well: Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman, meaning “liberator,” “blessed man,” and “savior of the nation.”
After the tumult of the ’60s, the organization offered young people an outlet for their anger and passion. Soon his 450-seat sanctuary overflowed every Sunday. The movement, he told newcomers, demanded total commitment: “We aren’t organizing to die, but we may have to.”
While the church was expanding, so were its young followers’ families; Agyeman had to think creatively about ways to help both thrive. In 1972, the church made its first purchase, for $3 million, of a communal living space: the seven-story brick Abington Hotel on Seward Avenue, constructed in 1926 by the renowned Detroit architect Albert Kahn. My future home.
The next year, Cleage founded the Black Slate, a political-action committee that helped elect the first Black mayor of Detroit. His church expanded across the country, eventually building 10 outposts by 1977, which housed a bookstore, food pantries, a printing press, and culture centers offering political and theological education. At its peak, in the late ’70s, the church claimed 20,000 active members—an impassioned throng of young people ready to deploy at a moment’s notice. Many lived in the training centers in Detroit (Shrine No. 1, or the Mother Shrine), Atlanta (Shrine No. 9), and Houston (Shrine No. 10), places that bore witness to the communal lives of hundreds of Black families.
Two years after the sale of the NTC, I called each of my parents and asked them to share with me everything they remembered about the early years, and what those years meant. We had never discussed that history before, and I was surprised by how eager they were to pass it down. Over months of conversations, my parents colored in the shape of our lives together. Only as an adult did I come to understand what it meant to be a child of the Shrine.
My parents joined the Black Christian Nationalist movement separately in the mid-’70s. They had both been raised in Detroit. My dad was the only child of a doting, widowed schoolteacher who had migrated from Alabama to eke out a living beyond the reach of Jim Crow. My mom was a free-range kid who used to hop trains in railyards; she grew up with a violent father whose shadow brought terror into the room whenever he was inebriated. She was 15 when she heard about BCN from her older sister and brother, who had already joined.
When my mom followed her siblings, her extended family was baffled. We’re integrationists, they told her. They thought Agyeman was a charlatan and a crook. But my mother didn’t care. “It’s not a church,” she would say. “It’s a movement.” BCN broadened her adolescent perspective on Black history and politics beyond the east side of Detroit while it provided her with a protective, loving environment. “The connectivity, the brotherhood, the family … was something I had never experienced before. It was wonderful,” she told me.
Meanwhile, my father was studying electrical engineering at Western Michigan University, in Kalamazoo. He was always the kind of person who wanted to fix things. By that point, BCN had college cadres all over the state, and my dad felt drawn to the church’s goals. “If you’d like to be involved in a church with the religious mission to be able to change Black people’s lives, this is the place that you could do that,” he told me. After he graduated, he eventually went to work for the church full-time.
My parents met at Shrine No. 10, in Houston, in 1980. My dad was working as a Maccabee guard at the residence hall. He cut a fine figure in his black uniform, with a silver ankh necklace lying on his sternum and an embroidered red BCN patch resting over his heart. His immaculate afro stood just a bit lower than my mother’s. My mother had a bright, easy smile and an impossibly tiny waist in her BCN shirt and jeans. She worked on a rotation of “missionary outreach”—traveling to solicit donations—kitchen service, and new-member recruitment, and later would care for the community’s children.
She was living in the residence hall, so she saw my dad every time she came in. She thought he was handsome, and learned he didn’t smoke or drink. He thought she was soft-spoken and sweet. I was born shortly before their wedding two years later. The children in the church were given African names. They called me Tafakari Tumaini Olubunmi.
One of the most radical aspects of the training centers was their model of child care. Children of full-time missionaries lived separately from their parents in an institution called Mtoto House (“Child’s House” in Swahili). Teams of “house parents” cared for the kids 24 hours a day, five days a week. Houston’s and Atlanta’s residence halls piloted the communal-child-rearing programs in the late ’70s; Detroit opened its Mtoto House in the ’80s.
Agyeman made all of his new followers a promise: If you bring your skills, talent, and energy to the nation full-time, then you will have security from the cradle to the grave. The house mothers would take care of the cradles, and in return, they trusted the nation to care for them as they aged toward the grave.
I was an underweight baby, at three pounds, 11 ounces. My mother stayed home with me when I was an infant, but at some point she knew she might need to return to full-time missionary work, and if she did, I would have to go to the communal nursery. She had recently worked as a house mother, and she told me that she “really, really loved the girls” she cared for there. But when it was time for her own child to enter the Mtoto House system, she realized, “I wasn’t for that.”
She was also growing frustrated with fundraising. Walking around strange cities with large quantities of cash was dangerous. Once, before I was born, she had nearly been robbed before she ran away with a canister of coins. She had heard about car accidents on outreach trips that resulted in the deaths of church members, stories that left the young activists shaken.
It was clear to my mother that the church would always need more and more money; she did not want to be rattling a can for the next five years. She began to wonder what the future held for me. So she told my father that she wanted to move back to Detroit, where she hoped she might have more agency over raising her daughter. My father was determined to stay in Houston. When I was 13 months old, they separated.
That was how I came to share a one-bedroom apartment at the National Training Center in Detroit with my mother in the early months of 1984. During the day, I went to the nursery while she rotated shifts doing kitchen service, new-member outreach, and office work. At night, we ate with everyone in the communal dining hall before heading upstairs for bed. My mother loved the NTC, she told me. “It spoke of the possibility of something big for Black people. Black people in my era were taught, ‘You can’t do nothing.’” The NTC, she said, “was like a monument to Black achievement.”
But the child-care situation turned out to be difficult there too. One day, my mother came to retrieve me from the nursery after work, and I cried when she stood me up to walk. When she asked the nursery workers what had happened, my mom recalls, she got a lot of shrugs. At the hospital, an X-ray showed that I had a fractured leg. And yet no one could tell my mother why. “I was seriously protective and in love with that little baby,” she told me. Her trust was broken.
The incident compounded her growing dissatisfaction with the trajectory of her life; six months after we got to the NTC, we left the church altogether and moved into a house with my aunt and three cousins. “It was very, very painful to come to that decision,” she said, “but you were my family. You were my baby.”
For our new life, my mother gave me a new name. Instead of Tafakari Tumaini, I became Dara Tafakari. My mother thought that Dara would be an easier name for a child growing up outside the Pan African community. But although she had left the Shrine, its teachings did not leave her. “Even after I left, I considered myself a Black nationalist,” she told me. “I still had a Black-nationalist orientation and view of the world.” It would manifest in the way she educated me about Black history and culture, giving me books like Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry to read. She cut out newspaper articles about issues Black people face, and we dissected them, much like her training group had at the Shrine.
I spent summers with my father at Shrine No. 10 in Houston, coming of age with the realization that many people did not know about Agyeman or our communal way of living. As a kid, I didn’t understand why members of the church lived together or why I stayed separate from my father when I went to visit him. Still, during those weeks at the residence hall, where I learned African history, meditated, and lived with my group in Mtoto House, I felt the camaraderie and closeness of communal life. I was loved.
We didn’t know it then, but by the late ’80s the church had already begun the long decline that culminated in the sale of the NTC.
Black Christian Nationalism wasn’t the only liberation movement based in communal living that arose in the past century, and it wasn’t the only one that fizzled. In 1969, the architects Harry Quintana and Charles Jones published a manifesto, “Black Commune in Focus,” declaring that “a people with cultural integrity must be able to control their environment.” That year in North Carolina, a former organizer named Floyd McKissick founded Soul City, which was supposed to be a multiracial utopia that offered a haven especially to Black people. The town developed infrastructure and an industrial plant, but funding dried up in 1979 and the 100 or so residents who remained clung to what would become a ghost town.
Building a nation within a nation required a confluence of vision, capital, and committed workers. Mainstream culture always lurked at the borders to lure members toward a more attractive lifestyle that required less sacrifice. A pan-African community had more cachet when Black-freedom movements worldwide were in the news, but by the late ’80s many of these felt like historical footnotes. It was harder to recruit people to the struggle for liberation if they believed that the civil-rights movement had already accomplished its aims.
Partly as a result of these changes and partly as a result of cultural and religious shifts that affected thousands of other Christian churches, the pews of the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church began emptying out. The youth who powered the Shrine’s halcyon years of expansion advanced into middle age. Their children left the Mtoto Houses, went to college, and didn’t see room for their ideas back home. The church could no longer draw in hundreds of young people willing to travel the country to stand on the streets in all weather raising money.
But the Shrine still had work to do for global Black liberation, and Agyeman had an idea for a new self-sustaining income stream. His vision was the creation of a network of community-owned farms and distribution centers that could eradicate food insecurity across Black America. Shortly before Agyeman died in 2000, the church acquired Beulah Land Farm, in Calhoun Falls, South Carolina, for $10 million. The farm would eventually grow to more than 4,000 acres.
The church, however, wasn’t bringing in as much money as it had in its heyday, and the residence halls in Detroit, Atlanta, and Houston were aging. The NTC building in Detroit “needed lots of attention,” Bishop D. Kimathi Nelson—who has led the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church since Agyeman’s death—told me. Perhaps more important, fewer and fewer people wanted to live communally. Within the next decade, the Mtoto Houses shut down. The church began the process of selling off its residence halls.
The farm struggled too. Church volunteers found they lacked the expertise to profitably cultivate crops on the land. Donations that had amounted to about $25,000 a month plunged to just $5,000 during the Great Recession. Today the farm grows hay to sell for livestock, leases out hunting grounds, harvests trees for lumber, and is looking into solar panels. It makes, Nelson said, a “sustainable profit,” but rarely “the kind of money that is allowing revenue back into the cities to fund operations.” Nonetheless, Beulah Land, which the church calls the largest Black-owned farm in the United States, remains the organization’s spiritual center: a beacon of Black self-determination.
The church still has outposts in Detroit, Atlanta, and Houston, and about 3,450 active members. It focuses on education, political empowerment, cultural centers, and food pantries. Communal living no longer features in the program for Black liberation.
In Houston my father served, and still serves, as the building and maintenance manager for the properties at Shrine No. 10. As a child, I would scamper to keep up as he walked along the sidewalks, his ever-present ring of keys jangling against his hip. He lived there for three decades, until, in 2008, the Houston training center was sold and razed to the ground. He had “a fondness” for the time he lived there, he told me, but he agreed with church leaders that the commune had outgrown its usefulness. Still, he stays busy, keeping the sanctuary, office building, and culture-and-events center running. “I have the longest history of anybody who’s here right now,” he told me. He’s seen buildings demolished, but he’s also “seen things change, rebuilt, built up.” He found a way to fix things after all.
On a sunny Friday in Detroit late in 2021, I walked into the lobby of the Mother Shrine at Linwood and Hogarth. A sense of homecoming gathered me into the bosom of the church where my parents, aunt, and uncles had joined the Black Christian Nationalist movement. A woman working in a room marked Black Theology stacked crates of fruit in preparation for the Saturday food pantry. A calendar on the wall showed February 2020—unchanged since the coronavirus pandemic began.
When Bishop Mbiyu Chui entered the double doors, I recognized him immediately as the lanky music minister who had energetically directed the choir in Houston when I was a child. He has worn many different hats throughout his five decades in the Shrine, serving as a house parent, reading teacher, drama coordinator, and, since 2000, lead pastor in Detroit. He led me into the sanctuary, where we sat down on red-velvet pews facing the Black Madonna and child. I wanted to talk with him about how he saw the church’s legacy, despite the ups and downs of the past two decades.
A bulletin board in the lobby had been decorated with the words Beulah Land and photos of the bucolic landscape. I asked him how the farm was going. “It’s not really a farm, per se,” Bishop Chui told me. “It’s more of a ranch … It was never farmland, even though we called it that.”
We talked about fundraising, and he chuckled. He said that missionary work had taken a huge toll on church members, but he understood the value in it. Then the tool outgrew its usefulness. “That wasn’t something we could pass down to another generation,” he told me. Parents in the Shrine wanted to bequeath institutions to their children, rather than the drudgery it took to establish them.
“How hard was it, emotionally, to sell the National Training Center?” I asked.
“Oh my God, it was painstaking,” he said. “Children were born and raised here. It was traumatic. People are still suffering PTSD from that.”
Pain and anger rippled through the community of current and former Shrine members when they heard about the sale. As young people, they had been promised cradle-to-grave security; now that they were old, many felt that the church had reneged. And there was so much to grieve. The walls of the NTC had held their collective hopes for liberation, the midnight cries of their infants, and the chatter of their noonday meals with comrades. They had worked hard. They had taken pleasure in one another’s company and dealt with conflict when it inevitably arose. They had foregone traditionally raising their children for a sacrifice they saw as their life’s work.
Had it been worth it?
Chui believes that the greatest legacy of my parent’s generation is the Shrine’s model for self-determination. It demonstrated the power that unified and organized Black people could wield in their communities. But he does regret the slow leak of institutional knowledge as members of the church have left or died without documenting what they had done.
“The whole thing is supposed to be replicable,” Chui told me. “We haven’t in any way captured what we did so that we can hand it over and say, ‘Here’s the blueprint.’ We should have a blueprint from all the work we’ve done over the last 50 years,” he said, work that had barely scratched “the surface in terms of what’s possible.”
The next day, I went to pay my respects to the former National Training Center on Seward. I hadn’t seen the NTC since I’d toddled around the nursery. The building that remains—once again, it’s called the Abington—offered only a glimpse of its former glory and purpose.
I had called the leasing agent and asked if I could take a tour, explaining that I was writing about the Abington’s history. I wasn’t sure what the response would be, but the agent was cheerfully receptive. While I waited for him in the rainy parking lot, an older gentleman wheeling a bike slipped out of an exit door. “Do you need someone to let you in?” he asked me. “I know everyone in the building. Been living here since the ’70s.” I politely declined and waited for the agent, who arrived shortly afterward—a young white guy in a black puffer coat and slip-ons. He asked me to pardon the mess, and took me upstairs.
The seventh floor, once filled with laughing children in white-and-red Alkebu-lan Academy uniforms, now had more plaster on the floor than on the ceiling after years of roof leaks. About 20 people had still been living there when the building was sold and continue to live in the new complex. Seven are ministers for the church who have resided there for more than 40 years—the contract ensures they can stay as long as they want to.
As I walked through the dust, I thought about how the history of the people who had once lived here was being ripped up like the flooring, overlaid with something new. Another site of remembrance lost—not only for those who built this community but for young Black people everywhere.
The leasing agent showed me some renovated units painted concrete gray. Crown molding and wainscoting framed a big bow window; sunlight poured in. Gleaming marbled tile covered the bathroom floor. A two-bedroom apartment, billed as “modern luxury in a historic setting,” now costs upwards of $1,642 a month. But the construction was only partially completed. Behind a door on the third floor, the future met the past: That same red carpet with the scalloped pattern stretched down the hallway.
The lobby of the first floor still bore remnants of the ornamental ceiling originally installed by Albert Kahn Associates. In the middle of the ceiling, above an antique chandelier, a medallion encircled with flowers was painted the audacious blue of a cloudless sky. My guide led me past draped sheets of construction tarp and asked me to imagine a future café, pet-grooming center, and retail space. Instead, my mind envisioned the past NTC full of women wearing all-white jumpsuits, their afros round as moons. I imagined my aunt teaching African dance, the sweat rolling from her arms to the floor. Through the hanging plastic, I saw a ghost of myself playing next to a baby swing.
I struggled for a long time to explain to my children our complicated history with the Shrine of the Black Madonna. The childhood tensions that pulled me between mother and father, between traditional and communal life, remain with me. Until I became a mother, I don’t think I could’ve understood the magnitude of the sacrifice the commune demanded: that members relinquish the daily intimacies of parenthood to build a better life for their children and grandchildren. My mother considered this too great a price to bear. My father never stopped believing. The truth is that if my mother had stayed, if Mtoto House had endured long enough for me to entrust my own children to it, I would never have been able to let them go either.
But in going home, I have learned that there are many paths to Black liberation. Each morning, when it’s time for my three children to get up for school, I wake them slowly, rubbing circles on their backs. My own eyes may be burning from fatigue, but I keep my tone sweet. It wasn’t until I went back to Detroit and sat down at a metro library to talk with Shelley McIntosh that I connected these mornings with the example my house mother had set in Houston. McIntosh, who also uses the name Monifa Imarogbe, was the director of the Mtoto House in Houston. She trained my house mother, who every day would gently break our slumber with the greeting “Rise and shine!” No harsh lights or discordant sounds. No yelling. McIntosh told me that she had, in fact, written this kindness into the institution’s manual as official procedure, because she believed that it would help each child face the day armed with love.
That love was in me still. McIntosh knew me as a child: She taught me meditation in incense-filled rooms. She’s no longer with the church but still works as an educator. When we first laid eyes on each other again, we hugged and rocked back and forth. She reassured me, “You were born to the nation.”
For my mother, the generation of children who came out of the Shrine is its true legacy. “They have a different mentality about themselves,” she told me. “They have a belief in themselves.” Reverend Cleage’s nation gave us this. It also gave us a model for activism, activism that America still needs. Now in their 60s, my parents recount the events of the ’60s with the same clarity as they do the George Floyd protests. They understand that this is still a country where the police can kneel the breath out of a Black man’s neck.
In 2020, 19 Black families pooled resources to purchase 97 acres in Wilkinson County, Georgia, for a town they call Freedom. They have raised about $115,000 out of a goal of $588,000 on GoFundMe to develop the land—which has expanded to more than 500 acres—into “a thriving safe haven for black families in the midst of racial trauma, a global pandemic, and economic instabilities.” I called Ashley Scott, a co-founder of the initiative, curious whether she’d looked to Beulah Land Farm as a model. It turned out she didn’t know about the farm, though she had visited Atlanta’s Shrine of the Black Madonna and was intrigued to learn more. “I’ll tell anyone that will listen,” she said. “We have a tradition as Black folk here in America of having our own communities.”
Reverend Heber Brown III, the founder of the Black Church Food Security Network, cites Cleage explicitly as an inspiration for his network, which uses Black churches across the country to distribute fresh food grown by Black farmers. In an interview with Bishop Nelson, Brown said he had been “hungry for a blueprint” when he first learned of the Shrine.
Bishop Nelson believes that, in future flashpoints of Black resistance, “people will be looking for something to hold on to.” The Shrine will be there waiting. Liberation cannot be dismantled by wrecking balls or sales contracts. “The promised land is not a place,” Agyeman once wrote, and that is what I’ll tell my children: We can rebuild it anywhere, because we carry it within us.
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Supporters of Brazilian former president Jair Bolsonaro invade the National Congress in Brasília on 8 January. (photo: Sérgio Lima/AFP)
Alexandre Padilha says insurrection by Bolsonaro supporters was well-organized ‘act of terrorism’ aimed at toppling government
Speaking at the presidential palace on Tuesday, the minister of institutional relations, Alexandre Padilha, said he believed Sunday’s far-right assault on the three branches of Brazil’s government was “an act of terrorism” designed to bring down Lula’s week-old government.
And Padilha said the insurrection in support of the former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro might have succeeded had it not been for Lula’s decision to order a federal intervention that put his administration in charge of security in the capital, Brasília.
Ibaneis Rocha, the pro-Bolsonaro governor of the federal district which contains Brazil’s capital, was suspended from his post on Sunday night amid outrage that local security forces had failed to stop thousands of radical Bolsonaristas ransacking the presidential palace, congress and supreme court.
Late on Tuesday, a supreme court judge ordered the arrest of Brasília’s public security chief, Anderson Torres, who was previously Bolsonaro’s justice minister.
Torres was removed from office on Sunday after security forces failed to stop the invasion of the key government buildings. He had previously told local media that he was on holiday in Orlando, Florida, where Bolsonaro is also staying.
“If the government of the federal district had acted as agreed with the minister of defense and the minister of justice, none of what happened on Sunday would have happened,” Padilha said, denouncing what he called “terrorist attacks” on the heart of Brazilian democracy.
“Perhaps, if we hadn’t had a leader with the popular support and ability to build political bridges that President Lula enjoys … Brazilian history might have been different when it came to the attempted coup, [and] the storming of the supreme court, congress and the presidential palace,” Padilha said.
The minister also praised the unity shown in the wake of the attacks by the leaders of Brazil’s supreme court, lower house and congress, and Brazil’s 27 regional governors, who gathered in the rubble-strewn plaza outside the presidential palace on Monday night in a powerful show of support for Lula’s new administration and Brazilian democracy.
“All of this was halted, it was stopped thanks to the firm response of President Lula,” and the pro-democracy consensus between political leaders of all stripes, added Padilha.
Exactly who orchestrated and bankrolled Sunday’s violence – and what their precise goals were – remains unclear.
But Padilha said he believed the insurrectionists had come to the capital convinced they could close down the Brazilian presidency, congress and supreme court and that a parallel “political command” would be able occupy that space with the help of sympathetic military or other security forces.
“Many of them [imagined their actions] might open the door to some kind of action from security officers or members of the armed forces that would make it impossible for the Brazilian government to operate and impair the role of the supreme court,” he said.
Padilha said the government had intelligence showing that Bolsonarista reinforcements were set to be bussed into the capital on Sunday night from three Brazilian states – São Paulo, Minas Gerais and Goiás – to bolster the coup attempt.
There is no evidence that Jair Bolsonaro was directly involved in any such a plot. The former army captain and president, who is currently in the US, has denied involvement in the mayhem.
But Lula’s minister blamed Bolsonaro’s relentless undermining of Brazil’s democratic institutions for creating the backdrop for the upheaval.
“For four years the ex-president Bolsonaro spread and cultivated an atmosphere of hatred in this country, not just against political parties, the opposition and in particular the leadership of President Lula, but also against Brazil’s supreme court,” he said.
Padilha admitted that Brazil’s security forces had been “contaminated” by Bolsonaro’s antidemocratic ideals.
“We know that numerous institutions have been contaminated by Bolsonarista hatred and the putschist practices of the Brazilian far right,” he said.
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The battles around Bakhmut are among the fiercest of the war. (photo: Reuters)
Russia's defence ministry says its forces are taking part in the battle for Soledar, a town north of Bakhmut in east Ukraine which has been the focus of recent fighting.
Mr Prigozhin will most likely use any victory to bolster the reputation of Wagner as an effective fighting force in the eyes of President Putin.
But the Russian defence ministry appeared to contradict the controversial oligarch's claims.
Spokesman Igor Konashenkov said in the military's daily update that: "Soledar has been blockaded from the north and the south by units of the Russian Airborne Forces.
"The Russian Air Force is carrying out strikes on enemy strongholds. Assault troops are taking part in battles inside the town." There was no mention of Wagner forces.
Ukraine's defence ministry also said on Wednesday that heavy fighting continues, and Wagner forces have had no success in breaking through its defences.
If Soledar falls, it will be a boost to Mr Prigozhin. In a statement released on Tuesday night, he boasted that "no other units took part in the storming of Soledar apart from Wagner". Ukrainian and US officials have said that Wagner units make up a large part of forces fighting in the area.
Analysts have long spoken of tensions between the military and Wagner, and Mr Prigozhin has publicly criticised generals for allegedly being out of touch with the realities of the war in Ukraine.
While it is difficult to know for sure exactly whether infighting is going on in the corridors of power, there are some clues.
Yesterday, news agency Tass reported that Colonel-General Alexander Lapin was appointed as Chief of Staff of the Ground Forces. Russian media quoted sources who claimed that the announcement of Gen Lapin's position - he was one of those slammed by Mr Prigozhin last year - was made as a warning to the oligarch: don't mess with the military.
But many here have been quick to praise Mr Prigozhin and Wagner for their apparent progress in Soledar. Influential media boss Margarita Simonyan gushed about how "polite" he is, signing off with a thanks to Wagner fighters, who she called "my little darlings!"
Likewise, pro-Kremlin military bloggers on Telegram lavished praise on the mercenary group. One blogger thanked them for "the emotions you've given us tonight".
Another said "When Soledar and [Bakhmut] are liberated, it will be a new chapter in Russian military history. The first time that a private military company has shown such results in a highly intensive military conflict".
The strategic significance of Soledar is disputed by military analysts. But if Russian forces do succeed in establishing full control over the town, it will certainly be a symbolic victory for the Kremlin. That is because Moscow's troops have failed to take a single significant town from Ukrainian forces since the summer of 2022.
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Members of the U.S. army training in Adazi, Latvia, March 2022. (photo: Paulius Peleckis/Getty)
At the end of last year, Joe Biden signed a $1.7 trillion budget bill that gives $1.1 trillion to the Pentagon, police, and prisons, including a whopping $860 billion for the military alone. So much for Build Back Better.
One reason is there wasn’t much time to examine the bill’s contents. The legislation is made up of twelve “regular” and two supplemental appropriations bills that fund federal activities for the rest of fiscal year 2023. Democratic and Republican leaders unveiled the bill’s four-thousand-plus pages on December 19 — giving the measure just eleven days to be debated, amended, passed, and signed into law to prevent a government shutdown. It was a legislative fire drill.
Another factor was that criticism of the bill overwhelmingly came from the Right. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was the only lawmaker in the Democratic caucus — in either the House or Senate — to vote against it. There should have been many more.
In a statement following her no vote, Representative Ocasio-Cortez cited the bill’s “dramatic increases in surveillance, border patrol forces, and militarized spending” as the basis for her opposition. Here are a few examples of what she’s talking about.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) receives $8.4 billion, $160 million more than in FY2022. Domestic investigations get a $60 million increase, and enforcement and removal operations a $6 million boost. All told, despite being elected to reverse Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, Joe Biden signed a bill that gives ICE about the same resources to jail immigrants in FY2023 as Trump green lit for FY2021.
For its part, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) will collect $16.7 billion, $1.8 billion above FY2022 levels. Most of that hike — $1.2 billion — will be used to intensify border security operations, and the omnibus bill sponsors hundreds more officers to carry those operations out. Overall, CBP’s FY2023 appropriation supports a force of nearly twenty thousand border patrol agents.
Not to be outdone, the Pentagon will take in a staggering $858.4 billion, or 53 percent of the omnibus bill’s total funding. The rule of thumb used to be that Republicans would demand more military spending and less nonmilitary spending, and Democrats would push for the opposite. However, as Democrats have warmed to ballooning Pentagon budgets, the party has begun pressing merely for funding parity with nonmilitary spending. Yet the omnibus fails to even meet that pathetic standard. It adds $76 billion for the Pentagon and just $68 billion for everything else.
Democratic leaders nonetheless congratulated themselves on the $772.5 billion directed to nonmilitary programs. But “nonmilitary” spending doesn’t mean social spending: according to my inventory of the bill, about $240 billion of that figure is for military- and law enforcement–related activities. This includes funding for Department of Homeland Security components like ICE and CBP; Department of Justice agencies like the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and FBI; State Department’s catalog of military aid programs; and the spiraling Veterans Affairs budget. All told, the omnibus bill contains $1.1 trillion for programs related to the Pentagon, police, and prisons.
By comparison, the combined value of the infrastructure bill and Inflation Reduction Act is $985 billion. So what Biden’s Build Back Better agenda invests over ten years is still over $100 billion less than the amount the US security apparatus spends in one.
In other words, the FY2023 budget delivers the massive government investment Biden promised on the campaign trail — it just didn’t end up being for ordinary workers’ benefit.
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Starbucks workers across the country strike. (photo: Michael Siluk/Getty)
Glacier Northwest v. International Brotherhood of Teamsters should be a straightforward case. But nothing is ever straightforward in this Supreme Court.
Glacier Northwest, the employer behind this case, seeks to upend a more than 60-year-old rule protecting unions from lawsuits when workers exercise their federally protected right to strike.
It’s an audacious ask, and the case could potentially be decided more narrowly. But the two-thirds of the Court that was appointed by Republicans has shown extraordinary hostility toward unions in the past. So we can’t dismiss the risk that the Court hands down a maximalist decision that upends the balance of power between employers and labor unions.
The case hinges on a rule protecting workers’ right to strike, and laying out how companies can claim that this rule does not apply to a particular strike.
The Teamsters, the union in this case, allegedly timed a 2017 strike so that it would begin after some of Glacier Northwest’s mixing trucks were already filled with concrete, forcing the company’s non-union employees to race to dispose of this material before it hardened in the trucks. But the company was able to remove this wet concrete from the trucks before they were damaged, and there are a wealth of cases establishing that workers may strike even if doing so will cause some of their employer’s product to spoil.
In one case, for example, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) — a kind of quasi-court that hears disputes between unions and employers — sided with milk truck drivers who struck, even though their strike risked spoiling the milk before it was delivered to customers. Another case, handed down by a federal appeals court, reached a similar conclusion regarding striking cheese workers.
That said, there are also some cases establishing that workers may not walk off the job at a time that could result in truly egregious damage to their employer’s business. In one such case, for example, a federal appeals court ruled that foundry workers who work with molten lead could not abruptly walk off the job and leave the lead in a state where it could melt the employer’s facilities or injure other workers.
In any event, the Supreme Court’s decision in San Diego Trades Council v. Garmon (1959) lays out the process that employers must use if they believe their workers timed a strike so recklessly that the union should be held liable. In nearly all cases, the employer must first obtain a ruling from the NLRB establishing that their workers’ strike was not protected by federal law. Only then may they file a lawsuit against the union.
The employer in Glacier Northwest, however, wants the Supreme Court to water down Garmon considerably, potentially enough to render that decision toothless.
If that happens, it would be a tremendous blow to workers. One important reason the Garmon process exists is that it shields unions from lawsuits that could drain their finances and discourage workers from exercising their right to strike — after all, that right means very little if well-moneyed employers can bombard unions with lawsuits the union cannot afford to litigate.
Why the Garmon process exists
To understand the Glacier Northwest case, it’s helpful to first understand two foundational principles of US labor law.
The first is that the right to strike is protected by federal law. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) provides that workers have a right to engage in “concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection.” A separate section of the NLRA states that the “right to strike” shall be “preserved.”
The second principle is that federal law trumps state law when the two conflict. This principle is stated in the Constitution itself, which provides that “Laws of the United States ... shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”
Taken together, these first two principles establish that any state law that infringes on the federal right to strike must yield to the NLRA. That typically includes state tort laws that permit employers to sue unions that organize strikes, even if that strike does some economic damage to the company. After all, placing economic pressure on an employer to extract pro-worker concessions from that employer is the entire point of a strike.
As a practical matter, however, the exact scope of the right to strike (along with many other rights protected by the NLRA) is ill-defined. As noted above, federal law does typically protect strikes that cause some of an employer’s product to be spoiled or otherwise destroyed. But it does require striking workers to take some reasonable steps to protect their employers’ property in extreme cases, such as the case involving molten lead.
Many decades ago, this uncertainty created a difficult problem for federal courts. Frequently, workers and employers would allege that some state law trampled on their rights under the NLRA, and it wasn’t immediately clear whether they were correct — to the Supreme Court’s consternation.
In Garmon, the Court announced a process that would enable the judiciary and federal labor officials to sort out these cases. Under Garmon, when either a labor union or an employer engages an activity that is “arguably” protected by the NLRA, then the case must first be heard by the National Labor Relations Board.
As Justice Felix Frankfurter explained in Garmon, the NLRB is a “centralized administrative agency, armed with its own procedures, and equipped with its specialized knowledge and cumulative experience.” Because this board specializes in disputes arising under federal labor law, Frankfurter reasoned, it was better equipped than a federal or state judge to sort through difficult questions about which strikes (and other labor actions) are protected by the NLRA.
If the board determines that a union’s or employer’s action is protected by the NLRA, then, under Garmon, “the matter is at an end, and the States are ousted of all jurisdiction.” Conversely, if the board determines that the NRLA has nothing to say about a labor dispute, then state courts may hear that dispute and potentially order one party to the dispute to compensate the other for violations of state law.
Under Garmon, there should be little doubt that Glacier Northwest must be heard first by the NLRB before the employer’s suit against its truck drivers’ union can go forward. Although there is some legal uncertainty about just how much risk of property damage striking workers can impose on their employer before that strike loses its federal legal protections, Garmon doesn’t require the union to show that its actions were protected by the NLRA. It only requires it to show that its actions were “arguably” protected, and that’s a very low bar.
Moreover, as the union points out in its brief to the Supreme Court, the NLRB’s general counsel — an official who acts similarly to a prosecutor when companies or unions are accused of violating federal labor law — has already issued formal complaint against Glacier Northwest, claiming that it violated the NLRA when it took action against some of the striking workers. So one of the nation’s top labor officials has already concluded that the union’s actions were protected by the NLRA. That, alone, should be enough to establish that the unions actions were, at least, “arguably” protected by federal law.
Nevertheless, the company proposes several modifications to Garmon that would allow it to bypass the NLRB. Its primary argument is that a union may not intentionally time a strike in order to cause damage to a company’s property, but it also claims that Garmon relied on an “idiosyncratic approach” — suggesting that maybe the decision should be abandoned or strictly limited.
There’s no guarantee that this Supreme Court will honor Garmon
The Garmon decision was primarily rooted in the Supreme Court’s belief that someone has to sort through labor disputes to determine which ones cannot be heard by state courts, and that the NLRB, as the federal agency with the most expertise in labor management disputes, is better suited than anyone else to perform this task.
But it’s also a very beneficial decision for labor unions, because it limits employers’ power to harass unions with lawsuits in state court. As the text of the NLRA itself acknowledges, there is often tremendous “inequality of bargaining power” between workers and employers. Absent Garmon, many unions would be reluctant to strike, because doing so could lead to financially disastrous litigation.
But there are reasons to doubt that this Court, with its supermajority of Republican appointees, will follow the labor-friendly rule laid out in Garmon. The first is this Court’s record of hostility to unions.
In Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid (2021), for example, the Court voted on party lines to strike down a nearly half-century-old California regulation that allowed union organizers to briefly enter agricultural worksites in order to speak to farmworkers. The Constitution permits the government to require businesses to allow unwanted persons on their property — think of laws requiring restaurants to admit health inspectors, or requiring factories or mines to admit safety inspectors — but Cedar Point invented a new rule that excludes union organizers.
Similarly, in Janus v. AFSCME (2018), the Court voted along party lines to cut off an important source of funding for public sector unions. Under Abood v. Detroit Board of Education (1977), these unions were allowed to charge “agency fees” to non-members in order to reimburse the union for services it provides to these non-members, such as bargaining on their behalf to secure pay raises. Janus overruled Abood, effectively forcing unions to provide these services to non-members for free.
The other reason unions should worry about how this Court will decide Glacier Northwest is the Court’s current Republican majority is very hostile to arguments that it should defer to other institutions, like the NLRB, which have specialized expertise that the justices do not possess.
Until very recently, one of the fundaments of federal administrative law — the body of law governing federal agencies and their power to issue binding regulations when authorized to do so by Congress — was that courts should typically stay away from questions about how these agencies should regulate.
Thus, in Mistretta v. United States (1989), the Supreme Court held that federal judges should normally defer to Congress’s decision to delegate regulatory powers to a federal agency, rather than questioning the amount of power Congress gave to that agency. And, in Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council (1984), the Court also held that judges should ordinarily defer to agencies when there is doubt about whether a federal law authorizes that agency to regulate.
As Chevron explained, “judges are not experts” in the matters regulated by agencies, so they should be reluctant to second-guess decisions made by officials who know vastly more than they do.
But this sort of humility is absent in the Court’s current majority. Indeed, the Court’s GOP supermajority has largely replaced cases like Mistretta and Chevron with a judicially created doctrine known as “major questions,” which effectively permits the justices to veto any regulation they do not like on the grounds that it is too ambitious.
There are many other examples of this Court abandoning or likely planning to abandon longstanding principles of judicial humility in favor of new legal rules that centralize power within the Supreme Court, but there’s no need to belabor this point. This shift toward judicial supremacy matters for unions because, again, Garmon was rooted in the proposition that a federal agency with subject-matter expertise on labor management disputes should get the first crack at resolving those disputes. And the current Court has shown very little sympathy for past decisions arguing that the justices should be mindful of the views of expert institutions.
And that means that this Court could open labor unions up to lawsuits that they haven’t had to worry about for more than 60 years.
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Demonstrators clash with security forces during a protest demanding early elections and the release of jailed former president Pedro Castillo near the Juliaca airport, in Juliaca, Peru, on Monday. (photo: Hugo Courotto/Reuters)
We go to Peru for an update after Peruvian authorities declared an overnight curfew in parts of southern Peru as mass protests continue following the ouster and arrest of leftist former President Pedro Castillo. At least 17 people were killed Monday after security forces opened fire at anti-government protesters in the city of Juliaca, and over 40 people have been killed across Peru over the last month, with human rights groups accusing the authorities of using indiscriminate force against protesters. The country’s crisis started in early December when then-President Castillo attempted to dissolve Congress and rule by decree, resulting in his arrest and replacement by his vice president. We are joined from Desaguadero, Peru, near the Bolivian border, by Ollie Vargas, a journalist with Kawsachun News, who says protesters are demanding new elections, the resignation of Castillo’s successor Dina Boluarte and the formation of a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution. A major contributor to the current crisis is “the extreme weakness of the political system in Peru” in which many politicians lack any real connection to their constituents, adds Peruvian sociologist Eduardo González Cueva.
JULIA ESPINOZA: [translated] We are demanding our rights. That rotten coup Congress let them get away with the genocidal Dina Boluarte. They do not represent us. They kill our brothers and sisters.
AMY GOODMAN: Protesters have set up massive roadblocks in southern Peru, calling for the resignation of the interim president, who had been vice president, Dina Boluarte. This is a protester speaking near the Peruvian-Bolivian border.
ANTONIO CHOQUE: [translated] Right-wingers have ousted the government of our president, Pedro Castillo. The Peruvian Congress ousted him. The Peruvian people don’t support Congress. We don’t support newly appointed President Dina Boluarte, and we want her immediate resignation, the closure of Congress and a new constitution.
AMY GOODMAN: On Tuesday, Peru’s Prime Minister Alberto Otárola defended the use of force against protesters, accusing them of trying to take over an airport in Juliaca. Otárola also announced a curfew in the southern Puno region.
PRIME MINISTER ALBERTO OTÁROLA: [translated] Compulsory social immobilization in Puno for three days, from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m., to safeguard the life, integrity and freedom of all the citizens of Puno.
AMY GOODMAN: Peru has been in a state of crisis since December 7th, when the right-wing Peruvian Congress voted to remove President Castillo after he moved to temporarily dissolve the Peruvian Congress ahead of an impeachment vote. Castillo is a left-leaning former teacher and union leader from rural Peru who was president for less than a year and a half before his ouster. In 2021, he defeated Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of Peru’s former dictator Alberto Fujimori. Protesters accuse the Peruvian Congress of unfairly targeting Castillo ever since he defeated Fujimori.
There are two guests with us right now. Eduardo González Cueva is a Peruvian sociologist and human rights expert, joining us from here in New York City. And in Peru, we’re joined by the Bolivian-based journalist Ollie Vargas. He’s a co-founder of Kawsachun News. He’s joining us from Desaguadero, Peru, near the Bolivian border.
We welcome you both back to Democracy Now! Ollie Vargas, let’s begin with you. Can you tell us what’s happening there right now? And give us the broader context of why this is all taking place.
OLLIE VARGAS: Thank you, Amy.
And, yeah, I’m here in Desaguadero, Peru, which is in the Puno region in southern Peru, very close to the Bolivian border. And, well, I arrived here yesterday, and my intention was to go to Juliaca, where the massacre took place on Monday. However, that is pretty much impossible because there are so many roadblocks, essentially barricades, erected by protesters all along all of the roads in this region. It is not possible to really move about at all in any way. And, yeah, at every point, there is huge numbers of protesters who have erected barricades, whether through metal sheets, sort of giant rocks, and have essentially paralyzed the southern part of the country. There’s also similar barricades erected in some Amazonian cities, like Pucallpa and Ucayali, and also near the coast, for example, Ica.
And, yeah, the sense I got from speaking to people yesterday is that people are getting ready for the long haul. People are ready to take part in what is a general strike in these areas for the long haul. I don’t know how much you can see behind me, but there is actually — everything is boarded up. Nothing is open. Everyone is taking part in this general strike.
And the demands of people are the resignation of the president, the immediate elections — because the regime had said that they want to have elections in 2024. They’ve said, no, they have to be now. People want a constituent assembly to draw up a new constitution. And these demands are essentially completely unacceptable to the government. And these demands are, essentially, completely unacceptable to the government.
And the government, I think, have backed themselves into a corner, especially with the massacre we saw on Monday, but also the deaths before that. There’s a total of 46 deaths since the government took power. They’ve only been in power about 40 days. So, the level of human rights abuses they’ve committed means that they cannot necessarily, you know, have a negotiated way out of power, because they will face prosecution, they will face possible jail time. And so, really, their only options would be to either — if they were to resign, to leave the country or to — I think, which is more likely, to dig their heels in and increase the repression.
And in this southern region, they imposed a curfew last night. That wasn’t observed here in Desaguadero. There’s actually really no state presence at the moment. Government workers have been withdrawn from these regions by the central state, so there’s actually no way of enforcing that. There’s no police at all. They have withdrawn from these areas, as well. So, it’s an incredibly tense situation, and protesters give no sign of backing down from their demands, which are essentially the fall of the government.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Ollie, I wanted to ask you if you could talk about what’s being portrayed as a divide between the countryside and the cities of Peru. To what degree are the protesters largely from the Indigenous populations of Peru? And how does race and how Castillo had been perceived previously by the elite in Peru involved in what’s happening here?
OLLIE VARGAS: Absolutely, that divide is — the political divide is also a class and racial divide at the moment. And all of the protests and the general strike is concentrated in southern Peru. And southern Peru is overwhelmingly Indigenous. This particular area here near the Bolivian border is predominantly Aymara. That’s people’s first language. But there’s also — the strike is very strong in places like Cusco, where people are predominantly Quechua Indigenous. And so, this is the epicenter of the movement, which is a predominantly Indigenous region.
And people don’t feel represented in any way whatsoever by the central state in Lima, and primarily because of the racism that comes out of the capital city. We’ve seen with this past few weeks with the protests, the government ministers and also the media based in the capital city have talked in an incredibly discriminatory way about people here, calling them the “Indians,” the “savages,” the “terrorists,” the “ignorants.” And there’s even some people — certainly not a majority, but some people even say that “We don’t feel very Peruvian, because we’re told constantly that we’re not equal citizens, that we’re not Peruvians like the people in the capital city. So, if we’re not recognized as Peruvians, why should we remain part of Peru?” And a lot of people don’t feel any identification or attachment with those in the capital city.
And, you know, just on an anecdotal level, I used to live in Lima a few years ago. And the way the people, a lot of people, especially middle-class people, in Lima would talk about Indigenous Andean Peruvians was in a way that didn’t recognize them as fellow citizens. They would talk about the “invaders” or the “immigrants,” talking about people — you know, calling people immigrants within their own country. So, this is the context, really, behind this.
And people here felt that Pedro Castillo was the first president, really, in Peruvian history that is like them, that represents them, that knows their issues and their struggles. And they didn’t even let him finish one term. Within a year and a half, he was ousted by the Congress, in which the majority are right-wing parties, a majority of people are not reflective of the country, are not Indigenous, as well as the police and the military. I think those three institutions really were who ousted Pedro Castillo.
And now there’s a new government in power that no one voted for. And people feel, “Well, what was the point of us having a say, if that say is not being respected by the people in Lima, if the government is just decided by people by backroom deals in the capital city? So, there’s a huge amount of resentment about that, about the racial discrimination that comes from the capital city.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s turn to hear from some of the protesters who were injured Monday when the Peruvian security forces opened fire on the anti-government protesters in the city of Juliaca, killing at least 17 people.
INJURED PROTESTER: [translated] I was holding my camera when a police officer asked me to kneel while pointing a gun at me. Then I heard a shot, and I felt my foot blocked. Then I felt a cramp. I took four steps, and I fell on the ground because I couldn’t walk.
UNIDENTIFIED: [translated] He was walking around because his friend lives nearby. They went for a walk. And as far as we know, a bullet hit him.
JOURNALIST: [translated] Where did it hit?
UNIDENTIFIED: [translated] In the abdomen. All the intestines are injured.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Eduardo González Cueva, a Peruvian sociologist and human rights expert, I’d like to bring you into the conversation. Could you talk about your perspective of what’s going on here, and also talk about the reality that the current interim president, Dina Boluarte, was an ally of Pedro Castillo before he was ousted from office?
EDUARDO GONZÁLEZ CUEVA: Juan, thank you for having me and for your question.
The first thing that we need to understand is that the political system in Peru is extremely fragile. The political parties simply have very little representation, and they are mostly electoral vehicles for quite opportunist actors. The formula that led Castillo to government at the beginning didn’t even appear in the polls, and it catapulted to the top because of the image of Castillo. Boluarte was a person that nobody really knew. She was just in the presidential formula decided by the party bosses. And so, to say that Boluarte was an ally meant simply that she was in the formula, but there was no connection between the, let’s say, some kind of party discipline or party identity. Castillo himself was invited by the party boss to be the candidate, in the initial calculation that with his image they would get a few parliamentarians.
So, that is the context, the extreme weakness of the political system in Peru, the fact that this political system really does not represent the electors at all, and therefore that we are reduced to a very degraded form of representation. This is symbolic representation, whether the person who is in power feels like me, rather than a representation of interests, a representation in the political arena. So, this is the source of the problem.
AMY GOODMAN: On Monday, Peru’s prime minister announced Dina Boluarte’s government had banned former Bolivian President Evo Morales from entering Peruvian territory. This is what he said.
PRIME MINISTER ALBERTO OTÁROLA: [translated] The superintendency has decided to ban former Bolivian President Evo Morales from entering the country, and that of various of his Bolivian supporters, for directly violating this law, Article 48, which establishes that those people who threaten or disrupt internal order do not enter Peru. … We are closely watching not only the attitude of Mr. Morales, but also of those who work with him in southern Peru, who, as all of you have been able to see in the last few months or days, have been very active in fueling the crisis.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Peru’s current prime minister. Ollie Vargas, you’re right there on the border between Peru and Bolivia. Can you talk about the significance not only of banning Evo Morales, but what this means for what’s happening in Bolivia, as well, and for all of Latin America? And where is Castillo right now? He’s jailed where? Near you?
OLLIE VARGAS: Yeah, well, Pedro Castillo is in police custody in Lima, in the capital city. He’s being held there without charge. He was given 18 months of preventive detention.
But, yeah, in terms of Evo Morales, I mean, this is really about the government looking for a scapegoat and looking for a way to explain away social protest. I think it’s something that a lot of governments around the world will do in the face of, you know, a population that is on the streets, saying, “Oh, this is foreign actors. There’s some secretive puppet master pulling the strings. This isn’t genuine social protest.” And so, they’ve chosen Evo Morales.
And the reason they’ve chosen Evo Morales is because in southern Peru there is a great deal of admiration for him. And, I mean, just yesterday, I was speaking to one of their protesters. He said, “We want a president like Evo Morales.” And the first reason he gave was actually around the nationalization of natural resources. He said, “In Peru, for a canister of natural gas,” which people use for cooking and heating their homes, etc., “we pay 10 times more than in Bolivia for the same thing. Why? Because in Bolivia, natural gas is nationalized, and the distribution is done by the state at fair prices, whereas in Peru, it’s all privatized. Foreign companies sell it back to the Peruvian people at sky-high inflated prices. And, you know, we look at what’s going on in Bolivia with great admiration.” And a lot of people in southern Peru, because we’re close to the border, you know, some people come to Bolivia for work, to sell goods, etc., at different markets. And so they can see the kind of economic growth that Bolivia has had during the period of Evo Morales, and now with President Luis Arce. And so, there is — yeah, there certainly is that level, that sort of image of Bolivia, and the Peruvian government is very aware of that, so they’re trying to use that to blame Evo Morales for social protest.
But people were actually very, very offended by that, because it means that they’re delegitimizing the reason that people are coming onto the streets. Of course, it has nothing to do with Evo Morales; this has to do with Peruvian domestic politics and the way that Peruvians are unhappy at the national government. And to say that they are being used by some behind-the-scenes puppet master is to say that they don’t have legitimate reasons to come out onto the streets. And so, that has actually angered people more. That has put the protesters even more entrenched in their positions, more determined to sort of stay in for the long haul. And so, I think while this discourse would play to the government’s middle-class supporters in the capital city and, you know, the ideas they have about Bolivian Indigenous people, in terms of actually resolving the situation, it’s actually made it a lot worse and made the situation a lot more tense.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I’d like to ask Eduardo González Cueva — Peru — the modern history of Peru has been marked by profound class and racial struggles — of course, decades ago, the guerrilla war of the Sendero Luminoso and then the Fujimori dictatorship. Could you talk about the demands of the protesters now for a constituent assembly and new constitution? What is the problem with the existing Constitution in Peru?
EDUARDO GONZÁLEZ CUEVA: Well, we have a problem that is very similar to other countries that experienced a transition to democracy. Think of Chile. Chile and Peru, we’re very similar in the sense that when we both achieved a transition to democracy, we kept the constitution that had been written by the dictatorship. And that created, of course, a number of political imbalances that had to be corrected at some point.
In Chile, you saw how that ended. There was a demand for a constituent assembly. Regrettably, they were unable to pass a new constitution.
In Peru, when Fujimori escaped the country in the year 2000, there was a movement towards an integral transition. That is why we had a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, trials on human rights abuses, reparations to victims. But at the same time, the constitution of Fujimori was kept untouched. And not only that, in link with that constitution, the economic model that was installed by Fujimori, the neoliberal model, was untouched, which meant that, of course, Lima benefited from the resources that were extracted from the provinces. Lima benefited greatly because of the commodities boom that took place in the first two decades of this century, while the theory was that progress would trickle down to the provinces or to the middle and lower classes.
So, that is the original sin of Peruvian democracy, that there was a transition in 2000, 2001, towards the ideals of democracy after the personalistic rule of Fujimori, but we kept the rules of the game that were designed by Fujimori and for Fujimori.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what do you see as a possible solution to the current crisis? Do you fear a direct — a return to dictatorship with the military backing that approach?
EDUARDO GONZÁLEZ CUEVA: Well, right now I am extremely pessimistic, and I don’t see many ways forward. I agree very much with what has been said in this program, that the willingness of the population that is protesting is to hold on for the long haul. They are prepared, I think, to demonstrate as much as they can. And, of course, the government is also pretty much in a trench and is demonstrating that it’s decided to exercise maximum force against the demonstrators.
So, basically, what we are going to see in the next few months, I believe, is a simmering crisis with these kinds of spasms of violence, depending on operations that the police launches against demonstrators. And we will have to see whether the protests actually move from the current area where they are, which is basically the south, the areas that voted for Castillo, the areas that have a high rural and Indigenous population, to Lima, to the capital.
I think that the government in Peru has this very cynical calculation that if the killings happen outside of Lima, if the killings happen in Indigenous areas, they are not going to worry Lima, and they are going to allow the government to function. That is, of course, not just profoundly immoral, it’s ahistoric, and it’s also economically suicidal, because Peru lives from mining, that happens to be located mostly in the southern territories.
So, that is what is going on. I think that we are going to see this simmering crisis, spasms of violence. And we will see whether the protests can actually have a foothold on Lima.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Eduardo González Cueva, we want to thank you so much for being with us, Peruvian sociologist and human rights expert, and Ollie Vargas, reporter with Kawsachun News, joining us from the Bolivian-Peruvian border in southern Peru.
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Construction workers repair water infrastructure in Baltimore. (photo: Michelle Cho)
The federal government has “waited too long” to invest in water infrastructure, EPA chief Michael Regan told NBC News in an interview.
“You’re helping your kids with homework, cooking, trying to get ready for bed,” Johnson said.
“It’s frustrating because we’ve got to keep up with this every single day.”
As federal investment in water infrastructure has dwindled over the years, the infrastructure in America’s cities for drinking, waste and stormwater has deteriorated. That was made evident last September in Baltimore, when tests revealed the presence of E. coli in the drinking water in three sites in West Baltimore, a predominantly Black and low-income area. City officials determined the contamination was caused by a cascade of infrastructure failures.
The federal government has “waited too long” to invest in water infrastructure, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan told NBC News in an interview. “Unfortunately, there are certain populations in this country, Black and brown communities, tribal communities, low-income communities, that are seeing the worst aspects of this disinvestment.”
Last year, the EPA granted Maryland $144 million to finance water infrastructure projects across the state as part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which set aside more than $50 billion to improve drinking, waste and stormwater infrastructure across the country. The EPA also announced that Baltimore, a city that is more than 60 percent Black, would receive more than $390 million to finance water infrastructure projects.
Regan, who has spent the past year visiting communities struggling with water infrastructure crises — including in Alabama, Mississippi and West Virginia — acknowledged that the need is much greater.
“The resources that we have from the bill are just a shot in the arm,” he said, adding that the nation needs billions more in public and private investment to fully modernize vulnerable water systems.
“No community should ever experience what Flint [Michigan] experienced,” he said. “No community should ever experience what Jackson, Mississippi, is experiencing right now. We do have to have a proactive strategy to prevent cities from getting to that point.”
‘You have to continue to invest’
One of the most important techniques for treating drinking water was developed in Baltimore.
In the early 1900s, when waterborne diseases like typhoid regularly sickened Americans, Johns Hopkins graduate and engineer Abel Wolman co-developed a way to determine the most accurate amount of chlorine needed to treat drinking water. It was a huge advance for public health: As water treatment systems in Baltimore and elsewhere adopted the formula, such diseases dropped precipitously. Engineers also had the forethought to build separate waste and drinking water infrastructure in Baltimore.
“The city has always prided itself on good drinking water, because of the way it was originally designed,” said Natalie Exum, an environmental health scientist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “But you can’t rest on those laurels forever. You have to continue to invest.”
Though Baltimore’s drinking water is considered safe as it leaves its treatment plants, that water is being flushed through a system in disarray. The average age of Baltimore’s water mains is about 75 years. Weather events routinely overwhelm the system, causing sinkholes that can lead to water main breaks and sewer backups in homes.
Such backups happen often after periods of heavy rainfall when storm and groundwater floods into the city’s aging network of pipes, said Alice Volpitta, a water-quality scientist and Baltimore Harbor waterkeeper with Blue Water Baltimore, an environmental nonprofit group. A 2018 study found that these backups are more likely to occur in neighborhoods with a higher proportion of Black residents.
Wastewater infrastructure failures have also landed the city in trouble with state and federal regulators. In 2002 Baltimore entered into a consent decree with the EPA, the U.S. Department of Justice and Maryland’s Department of the Environment, requiring the city to repair its public sewer infrastructure. Last year, the state also took over operations at one of the city’s wastewater treatment plants, after inspectors found that partially treated sewage had been discharged into local waterways, far beyond permitted limits. Blue Water Baltimore filed a federal lawsuit against Baltimore in late 2021 over the issue.
Modernizing its water infrastructure is one of the city’s most pressing needs, Volpitta said.
“If we don’t have working pipe systems under our feet, we don’t have a functioning city,” she said.
“Those infrastructure failures are happening in places where there has been a historic lack of investment,” she added. “So where we see sinkholes or water main breaks, those are areas where we haven’t put the dollars in the ground.”
Last September, as residents in Jackson, Mississippi — another majority Black city — were reeling from the collapse of their city’s drinking water system, Baltimore’s own water woes were thrust into the headlines. Two separate sinkholes, caused by the collapse of a stormwater tunnel and a leaking water main, led chlorination levels in the water system to drop. Tests then revealed the presence of E. coli in three drinking water sampling sites in West Baltimore.
The crisis was short-lived — the city issued a boil water advisory that lasted less than a week — but many residents felt panicked.
In a City Council meeting later that month, Jason Mitchell, director of Baltimore’s Department of Public Works, the city’s water utility, said that some of the water lines and valves that were compromised were installed as far back as 1898.
“It was a result of aging infrastructure,” he said. “Something that this city and all cities that are aged are dealing with.”
Matthew Garbark, who oversees the city’s infrastructure projects, said that the threat of a similar public health crisis happening again is “one of the worries of all utilities.”
Just two months later, the collapse of another stormwater tunnel, built in the 1880s, caused a sinkhole to form near a water treatment plant — potentially compromising a city water main.
Those kinds of emergencies can keep utilities from making proactive upgrades, Garbark said.
“It’s a tremendous challenge,” Garbark said. “We can predict, we can think, we can hope that we are planning for maintenance, preventative maintenance, capital improvements in areas that need it. But water main breaks can happen anywhere.”
Every year the EPA distributes federal funding for waste and drinking water infrastructure through state “revolving funds” that issue low-interest and forgivable loans as well as grants. That funding has been critical for Baltimore: Over the past 20 years, the city has received nearly $2 billion through Maryland’s revolving funds and through the Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act program, a federal credit program administered by the EPA.
But the $50 billion that the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law set aside for water infrastructure improvements represents the single largest investment in water the federal government has ever made. The dollars will be used to lay new infrastructure, replace lead service lines and clean up emerging contaminants in water, such as PFAS, among other projects. The EPA has specifically directed states to prioritize projects in historically disenfranchised communities.
In Baltimore the funds will be used to upgrade major components of the city’s water distribution and wastewater treatment facilities.
Continued federal investment, Garbark said, is “the only way that we can really get this stuff modernized and fixed.”
“We need a lot more than that to get us really to be the best maintained system that we need,” he added.
‘All across the country’
Even those billions are a drop in the bucket.
The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) ranks the nation’s water infrastructure at a C minus, according to its most recent report. There is a water main break every two minutes and an estimated 6 billion gallons of treated water is lost each day in the U.S., according to the group.
Water infrastructure is inherently expensive to build and maintain, said Upmanu Lall, a civil engineer and director of Columbia University’s Water Center. By the EPA’s own estimates, the nation’s drinking and wastewater infrastructure will require more than $744 billion over the next 20 years, just to meet existing health and environmental standards.
The nation’s water infrastructure woes are due in no small part to the fact that the federal government’s share of capital investment in water infrastructure has sharply declined over the past five decades, he said.
The federal government’s share of capital spending in the water sector fell from 63% in 1977 to about 9% of total capital spending by 2017, according to the ASCE. That’s laid most of the responsibility to raise funds on state and local governments and left water utility managers to cope with aging water systems by deferring upgrades for as long as possible and funding upgrades on the backs of ratepayers.
“It’s not a surprise when you look across the country, it’s smaller communities that are in trouble,” Lall said. “And the other areas that are in trouble are the somewhat larger cities that have been depopulating.”
During the past year, the EPA’s Regan visited Lowndes County, Alabama, where residents without septic systems are forced to straight-pipe waste from their homes into nearby waterways or backyards. He also visited McDowell County, West Virginia, where some residents have to collect their drinking water from roadside springs. Both West Virginia and Alabama received millions in funding through the infrastructure law.
“These are unacceptable conditions that we’re seeing all across the country,” Regan said.
“These are the communities that are most at-risk from a health standpoint,” he added. “These are communities also that have suffered from a lack of investment and indifference. And so we want to put those who need these resources the most at the front of the line.”
‘Maybe we shouldn’t drink it’
Continuing infrastructure problems and headline-dominating water crises, from Flint to Jackson to Baltimore, have created a trust gap in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color across the country, Exum said.
“I think we’re now entering that dangerous place where people are asking, ‘Can we trust the water system? Maybe we shouldn’t drink it,’” she said.
In Baltimore, as across the nation, costs for infrastructure upgrades and repairs are passed on to consumers. In doing so, Baltimore’s water rates have risen more rapidly than the national average. One 2018 study found that typical residential bills in Baltimore increased by 127 percent from 2010 to 2018, and estimated bills would be triple the 2010 average by 2022. Last year, the city launched a program to help residents pay water bills.
“Whenever we’re responding to an emergency, that is more expensive,” Garbark said. “That takes away from our revenue and our money that we have to use for our capital projects. Every dollar we spend has to be raised from our ratepayers.”
For residents who have experienced sewer backups, discolored water and other issues, those high bills are hard to square.
Whether the problem is in her building or in the city’s pipes, the water coming out of the tap at Stacy Beahm’s home in South Baltimore is often brown and sandy. The water in her toilet stains the bowl yellow. Every month, she spends about $150 a month on bottled water and lugs home heavy jugs for herself and her children. That's on top of her water bill, which averages about $200 a month.
Sometimes, she said, she has to choose between paying her bill and buying food.
“I’ve still got to pay a water bill for water that’s going down the drain,” she said.
“Would you trust tan and brownish water? I don’t and I’m scared to death to give it to my kids. I’m pretty sure nobody wants to drink dirty water.”
It’s that trust that Regan said the federal government has to help restore.
“As we are rebuilding water infrastructure, we’re also rebuilding trust with communities,” Regan said. “I can understand the trepidation that people have all across this country because water systems have been failing our communities. It’s time for government to step up, and that’s what we’re doing.”
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