Bastion City

Ecuador: so much to say, no one really to say it to. It's a good place. It's my home place. People here know that, by now, even though I don't look like someone who'd have a home place here. Over there, in the north, it's easy to look like you belong but it never feels like it.

First photos from my trip home.

The name of this place is "Bastion Popular," literally a safe haven for the people. From Doug Saunders' book Arrival City, a look at slums worldwide and their role in urbanizing rural populations and serving as a vehicle out of poverty:

"The arrival city is often barely urban, in form or culture, but it should not be mistaken for a rural place. Urbanites tend to see the arrival city as a simple reproduction, within the city, of the structures and folkways of the village. “Look, on one side villages, on the other side buildings,” the Indian-American writer Suketu Mehta hears his young son observe on first seeing the arrival-city enclaves nestled against apartment towers in Bandra, in northern Mumbai. The father reacts approvingly: “He has identified the slums for what they are: villages in the city.” But this view misinterprets the urban ambitions of the arrival city, its fast-changing nature and its role in redefining the nature of urban life. 

"The culture of the arrival city is neither rural nor urban, though it incorporates elements of both—often in grotesquely distorted form—in its anxious effort to find a common source of security among its ambitious and highly insecure residents. It is a fallacy that people move in a straight line from backward, conservative rural customs to sophisticated, secular urban customs. The period in between, with its insecurities, its need for tight bonds and supportive institutions, its threats to the coherence of the family and the person, is often the time when new, hybrid, protective cultures are developed."

I'm reading that book during my evenings, after days spent walking the streets that used to be dirt and mud but have all been paved since my last trip here. The house that used to have a welding shop in it's front yard now has a big fence with barbed wire pointing out, protecting the middle-class car parked in the drive and the surely middle-class TV and sound system inside. The family that owns that house used to take me to their country home once a year when I was a kid. I'd eat rooster and sleep on wood slats and pick mandarin oranges off the trees and walk through mud that was thigh deep for an eight year old.

I've always thought of Bastion Popular as one of the back-ends of global capitalism, a forgotten people working slave jobs in the factories that spit out clothes and plastics for the people on the sunny side of life. The North. The Saunders book is a bit more hopeful, and gives me a new way to look at my home, at least until I actually get past the first few chapters and find problems with his argument.

At least in Bastion, I know too many people who aren't in transition from poverty to middle class stability.They are forced to be stuck: by ties to family members with addictions or health problems or bad business sense. But change is certainly in the air, with the radical left-wing president pushing through reforms at every level, shaking up everything society had taken for granted: mandatory military service, expensive higher education, out of reach health services. When I talk to kids I used to teach when they were in school, I hear that since they've joined the workforce, their  work day has improved, from 12 hours down to 8. Though some bosses still break the new laws because they still can.

But the government is gaining strength: "revolutionary inspectors" go out and ask employees at all sorts of companies whether their boss has signed them up for the government social security program (that costs the employee, and the employer, but gives the worker access to health and social services). If the employee says "No," the boss faces jail time. It's a criminal offense, punishable by five years in jail. Even housewives hiring maids, frequently rural girls looking for an in to the city at any cost, have to sign them up for social security. And their wages have gone up: you can't get a girl for $100 a month anymore.

The bosses do not like the president. It's hard to gauge whether the people genuinely love him, or have just been affected by the constant TV commercials and  billboards and print products acclaiming his measures. It's all really interesting. I just got here. I'm learning as fast as I can about everything I've missed. (you can't really trust the newspapers: their readers and owners also consist of bosses).

But I'm glad to be home.

Sentences about the end of exile

My body fills out its own space again. All systems are a go: the senses peak; the circulation spikes; the water flows. I can feel the health of my composition coming back with every warm hour that passes.

To be back in a house where my name is still scrawled in pencil on a pillar next to the front door.

To walk a neighbourhood where every step could lead to being spirited away by an enthusiastic thirteen-year-old, and then treated to lunch and three hours of socialization.

To greet with sweaty hugs and kisses. I must've given and received fifty cheek kisses already (there's this cool move where you can do both at once).

See, my blood is worked into the paint on these walls. It's there in the form of  the little murdered mosquitoes and the splattered contents of their bellies.

The children I used to teach are now adolescents, and the adolescents I used to lead in youth groups are now teenage parents. Time passes. Lives are condensed. Many die young, but those left behind love younger, too, to make up for the losses.

To have a dollar in your pocket and eat for two days. Not because life is that cheap, but because poverty makes for generosity. And you're surrounded. By both.

Crime School

The current realization of President Correa (largely brought to his attention by the "sicario" (assassin-for-hire) murder of the Director of the Penitentiary last month):

There can be no just society without an effective Justice system.

The Guayaquil Penitentiary (Penitenciaria del Litoral) was built to accommodate 1,500-1,900 prisoners. Currently, 5,900 are trapped within its walls, sleeping on cement floors a foot away from each other, if they allow themselves to sleep at all in an environment where tension is suffused with fear and distrust.

The prison budget assigns each prisoner 75 cents a day for food. This is enough for one meal, prepared with the cheapest expired ingredients, every single inch of a chicken (whether it is edible or not), dirty water and the ever-present rice. Thus, the families of the prisoners are largely responsible for supplementing this diet, and they must make daily trips to bring plastic tubs full of food to their loved ones. Only those with families who care, who can afford this expense, and live in the city, enjoy this privilege. Others must rely on their ingenuity to bribe, steal or swindle someone for a bit of nourishment.

75% of the prisoners in the women's branch are for non-violent crimes (drug trafficking, mainly). This majority is true in the men's prison as well. Many of these people were merely mules, carrying packages from one person to the next for a price. The drug business doesn't care if they get caught, as they are completely expendable, hired help. They sit and wait for a chance to explain this to a judge.

Of the 16,000 penitentiary prisoners Ecuador keeps, 11,000 are awaiting trial.

What sort of rehabilitative environment exists in the Pen? Gangs. Crime and violence education (because if you didn't know how to before, you have to learn to defend yourself in this charged environment). The first thing that happens to you when you walk into the common area is you are attacked and all your clothes are stolen. Someone throws you some old shorts 7 sizes too big. You have to barter to find a piece of rope to tie them up with. You have entered a society where acquisition is so vital, and you have entered it with absolutely nothing. Of course crime breeds in this environment: it is a microcosm of the outside world.

President Correa is going to declare a state of emergency for the Justice system. This will allow him to seize funds that are frozen in other sectors and put them towards the prison system.

They need psychologists (there are none). They need rehabilitation education (there is none). They need fair trials. They need food and beds. They need to repatriate the thousands of foreign prisoners, so they they can be dealt with justly in their countries of origin. They need to completely replace the staff and guards: corruption has seeped through that organization too completely by now. They need to create records for each prisoner: no such system exists. They need to eliminate the double standard: "First category" prisoners in shirts and ties who pay monthly installments and are blessed with a 5 star prison experience.

Another huge task for you, Mr. President.

His popularity with the people is huge. His popularity with the press is dwindling, as he recently accused them of incarnating human misery. In his speech at the Penitentiary, he said

"I am here, not with the rich, not with the owners of the means of communication. What freedom of speech have you had, you who have never had a voice?"

Developments in Ecuador

The issue of the suspension of the 57 congressmen and women has gone to the courts. Judges are now in the news, weighing in on one side or the other. A Supreme court magistrate thinks that the congress-members should be allowed back in to sessions, while the Supreme Court considers the case. One judge, Wilson Mendoza, made statements about a suspended congress member who threatened violence if the suspensions were not revoked. The party this man belongs to has distanced itself from these remarks, and the judge has not pressed any formal charges. Mendoza is a provincial judge in Manabí who ruled to pass the case on to the higher Tribunal. He was invited to a meal with this congressman, who showed up accompanied by a former cop (a cop who lost his job for being involved in the coup d'état of Lucio Gutierrez, in January 2000) and said things like "I hope you don't regret your decision". Ah, and Barcelona lost 4-1 to Olmedo, for those more interested in the fútbol news. At least sports are less ambiguous: we know for sure Barcelona losing is a good thing.