Erin Rosa to Report from Bolivia for Narco News

Great choice. Congratulations, Erin! Your CJR piece should be read by everyone in the biz.

The travel clinic shots were not fun, but I knew it would be well worth it! I won't let y'all down. I promise.

project and adventure. Al - this is wonderful news!Thanks for letting us know.

Erin, great story at Columbia Journalism Review.  I was particularly interested in your comments about building relationships with prison guards who had commented on your earlier stories.  It reminds me of an article I read about a year ago.  I'd credit the source but I just can't remember. Anyway the gist of the essay was that our Founding Fathers thought of institutional governmental checks and balances being comprised of the executive, legislative and judicial branches but during the crisis of the Bush/Cheney years the Congress and the courts (with many judges picked from the right wing Federalist Society) failed.  The authors' thesis was that an unforseen check limiting the damage of Bush/Cheney was that the ball had been partially picked up by the career bureaucrats, (veteran CIA officers, 2nd generation FBI agents, retired military & the like), ordinary people who were leaking documents.  Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker Magazine has said many sources have told him to call them back after January 20th.

Along that line Wikileaks started somewhere in the East late 2006 or 2007.   http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Wikileaks

Their motto is "Courage is contagious".

In February 2008 a California judge issued an order shutting down the entire site because someone had leaked a list of individuals and corporations doing offshore banking at Bank Julius Baer & the bank had sued.  The resulting brouhaha was a PR disaster for the bank and the judge rescinded his order 2 weeks later.

Adding a little bit more to the effort.  Watching the blue tide creep up toward Seattle has become sort of addictive this month.

It's occurred to me that Obama's fund raising did more than start freeing democracy from oligarchical control.  It's also turning left wing donations into engagement. For 20 years I've given now and then to varous liberal causes with little more than a vague hope that I might help turn things around but all I would get in return with the next fund raising appeal was a list of how dreary everything still was. I believe MoveOn.org was my first experience of financial giving combined with the possibility of participation at the local level as well as seeing some concrete results.  However, 2007 was a real change in how I viewed my donation patterns and feelings starting with the first Field site of sending Al to the conventions.

Erin, I look forward to your reporting from Bolivia.

My visit there in 2004 as part of the Narco News Authentic School of Journalism put my mind in rhythm with what my heart knows to be the truth about the human struggle. Experiencing it firsthand, in a land where the stars in the sky look south to north, is among the fondness memories of my life.

When I'm down on my luck, I often think of those 10 days that shook my world in the land where the mountains touch the clouds above the rain forest.

And I begin to have faith that the hope I touched in Bolivia, in the face of some grim realities, might actually be starting to take hold here, where the stars look north to south.

I expect you're reporting will help all of us see a way to the future.

I wrote this [excerpt below] shortly after I got back. It still rings true in my world, for what it's worth.

After some 10 days in Cochabamba, I had finally started to get used to the thin mountain air in the Andes. More importantly, I had spent days breathing in another culture, one that is experiencing democracy in a more vital way than I have seen play out in the canned elections we experience in the United States.

In Bolivia, it seems to me, the stakes of the game are very real, very much in front of the people. In my short time in this country in the heart of South America, I heard about the struggle to change the country from the bottom up. Although divided at times over strategy, labor and farmers are unified in their quest to return control of the nation's natural resources to the people in an effort to foster job creation, enhance living conditions and ensure a brighter future for Bolivia.

... It seems everyone outside of Bolivia has a solution for the country's woes. Eradicate coca and plant pineapples, continue the private exploitation of the nation's natural resources, militarize the nation's roadways and jungles. Why should we think these formulas would work here when the people, through their own democratic institutions, are saying otherwise? The millions of dollars flowing into Bolivia from the United States to prop up unpopular programs for the benefit of the status quo should not be sold to us as being in the interest of the Bolivian people.

If we really believe in democracy, in a land where the power flows from the people, not the economic interests of a few, then we have to allow that process to work. Call it nationalization, call it socialism, call it a revolution, but don't call it an enemy of the people.

In the case of Bolivia, the people - through a growing social movement rooted in the labor of the people - are asking for nothing more from what I can see. They want to control the destiny of their own country and believe the seeds of that destiny - the natural resources that their native land has been blessed with - must be in the hands of the people.

With that control, countries like Bolivia and Venezuela and all the rising nations of the Americas can begin to provide for the common welfare, to rebuild their economies and begin the process of dismantling the internationally funded military machine that threatens the very essence of real democracy.

This is what I saw in Bolivia, in this nation in the mountains, in this place somewhere in America, in an ancient land whose people have the same dreams and hopes for their future as do any people in this world. All they want, I believe, is that Bolivia be allowed to be a Bolivia for all of its people.

Congratulations Erin. I will look forward to reading your first-hand, field reports.

Al - not able to contribute right now. Here's why.

I'm back at work, full-time after taking most of the past two years or more off for election work. But, found my business, like many right now, except maybe AIG, etc., is in a cash crisis. Decreased business has not helped. People are not spending, fer sure. Our business celebrated our 20th anniversary yesterday and we are survivors. Needless to say, I am devoting all my time (and money) to get my business in shape for the inpending economic 'reset'.

Erin - have a great time reporting from Bolivia.

Happy New Year Fieldhands.

i would like to know if any bolivians besides government workers and the press have read the document being voted on since it arrived in their mailboxes. none of the people i know in cocha most likely to read it, ie, college grads interested in politics, have read the entire thing. and what about all the contradictory amendments? looking forward to ms rosa's reportage in these areas, as well as her take on president morales recent admission that some of the coca crop is diverted for illegal uses and growers have bigger plots than allowed.

@Nancy Chester

Heh. Fortunately for me, federal correctional officers were some of the best sources under the Bush administration. I had a lot of fun covering political issues, but by far my favorite was corrections. In Colorado, they have strong union organization. Even under a “right-to-work” environment, more than 90 percent of officers make the choice to pay dues and the majority of them are Republicans. To put it bluntly, they're down for the union like the Pipefitters are. They despise Bush for ruining their bargaining and arbitration rights and making things generally dangerous in the prisons with massive budget cuts, and even better, they absolutely loath private prisons for taking away their jobs. I could go on and on about this of course, but I will say that every time the prisons bureau tried to shut someone up I would get even more information about what was going down.

@Bill Conroy

Thanks for the excerpt. It just reaffirms my thinking that I would be kicking myself if I didn't take this opportunity.

@Deb

Don't worry about money. Things are disastrous in Denver right now (150+ homeless people died on our streets this year alone.) But bring me some of your green chill if you're ever downtown please!

Best wishes to Erin.

I'll just say that which has been obvious throughout the ages.  Authentic journalism is not 'objective', and it is congruent with the true democratic impulse and human liberation.

You don't have to be 'against' the more priviledged, willfully ignorant sectors--because human liberation benefits everyone.  A nobel few of those in the priviledged sectors are our allies.

All the propagandistic buzz words--'communism', 'socialism', etc.--are intended to keep our eyes off the ball.  Democracy always has been the most radical concept.  Against this we have oligarchy and tryanny.  When olgarchy becomes dominant, we have mass immiseration, wage slavery, the collapse of ecological health, crime and ignorance.

Your mission as an authentic journalist is not too huge--but nothing less than human survival on a healthy, habitable planet is at stake.

If I were beginning my working life and was interested in journalism,  I would go the route of authetic journalism that Al and his associates have helped create.  Congratulations.  You have chosen the more winding, difficult path.  However, this path is always the more rewarding and enlightening.

If you and others fail, then we are all screwed.

But, oh, I don't want to add to your anxiety.  No doubt you will develop friendships that will last a life time, and if you have an abiding curiosity about the world (which you do if you have engaged with Al and his organization) you enjoy your time on assignment.

I've been working my way through the constitution for the past couple of weeks, but I'm afraid I'm not exactly sure what you mean when you say "contradictory amendments." I did read the AP article about President Morales's admission that some individuals are violating the government-mandated 1,600 square meters of coca plots for medicine/food, but I'm really not seeing the big news here. Obviously some people aren't going to follow the law, just like in the United States. And Mr. Morales's transparency about it shows to me that the government really is interested in quelling cocaine production in the country.

Frankly, I wish the AP--which circulated the news widely--would focus on a real story. Namely, that Colombia is still the world's largest cocaine producer, despite billions from Washington D.C. to curtail the flow of the drug.

Our donations are well spent! Thank you Erin!

I was hoping to read more about Bolivia in these pages, ever since Bill Conroy did his excellent coverage a few years back.

The time is now especially ripe for Narco News' style of independent and authetic reporting from Bolivia.

I wish you the best of luck Erin, and look forward to reading your reporting.

Saludos desde Irlanda!