tziteras

Leyla Noriega has been active for more than 20 years, campaigning and reporting on injustices against indigenous people and the natural environment across the northern regions of Chile. The newly independent state had conquered the area around 1880 to access mines and natural resources that had previously been under the rule of Peru and Bolivia, and before then, by Incas and Aymaras who called the area Qullasuyu. One day the mining companies which Leyla had seen tear towns apart before in the area arrived at her mother and grandparents' town of Belén, at around 133 km from the city of Arica and at an altitude of 2800m and it was a very different feeling.  Mining laws in Chile were created specifically to easily sell land and water to private companies, during the Pinochet dictatorship, so that any private company that finds an element in the mountain can claim it for their own, and exploratory machinery can be installed up to a total of 39 machines without requiring any specific p...

When getting into indigenous cultures one of the main fear is this underlying idea that they are going to be soon revealed to be backward or somehow savage, and you won't figure it out until you are tied up being slowly roasted with no white tarzan there to save you. Same goes for Aymara culture, often criticised by feminists who for example see the Chacha Warmi concept as reducing the genders to just male and female, and it's then used as the foundation of an idealised perfect community life made of people who bring out opposing complementary aspects and roles which work together to build a society.  Sexist and patriarchal attitudes are evident in indigenous circles, but also present in the countries that now exist across where andean cultures evolved before the conquest. This is perpetuated by the strong syncretic belief in Christianity and by national laws that generally favour men over women or LGBT rights .  But it's important to decolonise the binary gender which wa...

...Consideraciones en búsqueda de un punto de contacto y coordinación entre la gente del pueblo Aymara y entre pueblos originarios... El Ayllu Virtual Desde las protestas de George Floyd he podido experimentar un acercamiento a mis raíces Aymara, quizá dada la ola de información que se ha visto llegar desde toda la gente está divulgando la información que ahora se hace más presente entre las protestas de BLM, la destrucción de monumentos coloniales y su legado ya es algo que concierne el mundo occidental. También con mi familia extensa de la parte de mi padre y abuela Aymara, culpa de la cuarentena hemos comenzado a reunirnos y poder compartir cuentos, canciones, saludos, chistes y un poco de todo, y al crecer el conocimiento de la plataforma zoom, hemos podido presentar de manera más ordenada lo que sabemos de la cultura Aymara. Al pasar los meses, las conversaciones se han ido convirtiendo muchas veces en una especie de clase intensiva de historia y cultura propiamente Aymara de nues...

 A quick collection of links about Aymara hip hop, which was mainly active during the life of Abraham Bohorquez who is considered one of the founders of this type of music. During the time of Evo Morales´s government it then seemed to fade a bit as maybe it´s major impetus was the time leading up to the massive mobilisations which brought Evo´s party MAS to power, but there are various writings about it. http://upsidedownworld.org/archives/bolivia/rapping-in-aymara-bolivian-hip-hop-as-an-instrument-of-struggle/ https://rebelion.org/el-rap-en-aymara-el-hip-hop-boliviano-como-instrumento-de-la-lucha/ Known as Wayna Rap or Nacion Rap, it does manage to fuse a lot of sounds I love but Abraham´s girlfriend Nina Uma does mention it was certainly not a feminist movement for the most part, and it was not linked via a big industry so it could spread to other countries or continents, so remained limited to the El Alto area. Fortunately there are also female artists like Uma herself and...

The question that's led me to write this has been how do we adapt long term, specifically here in Scotland, where I live now, to coronavirus and the idea that pandemics are here to stay if we stay this industrialised and globalised. How does a society look if it's to be resilient long term, sensible and ecologically regenerative? We do know a few things about this novel coronavirus that we seem to be slowly figuring out as it evolves and spreads, and I have almost a picture of how it might look in my head. Here is the closest I can get so far to it, on a regional scale at least: In the picture, each block is a community of several households and work spaces, and each green space is where they grow crops, or graze animals. So why this system? Around the time when it was obvious a lockdown was coming, I read a community organisation manual that mentioned how graph theory applies to limiting the spread of something like Covid-19. It advocates getting together with your clos...

Who would have known that all the old men, the old women, all their knowledge and experiences, all the people with asthma and diabetes, all the poor people and the indigenous people and disabled, the doctors, nurses and the ill would suffer and die so much from one moment to the next? But by the time all the waves, all the quarantines and thousands dying every day, we had changed our society. We had been forced to reorganise, if we wanted to enjoy a life even a little bit like the life we had before the pandemic. We wanted to go out, we wanted to have some comfort, but we wanted to have food, to be able to offer some hope to our children, we needed a basis on which to build our lives. But we dealt with it, back in the 20s. We rebuilt into a new society, and the names of those who suffered and died, of the doctors and activists, whistleblowers and rent strikers are now the names of our streets. I am standing outside a replica of an urbanisation, a block of flats in hexagonal sha...

After a bunch of mutual networks formed over the weekend of the 14th of March in Glasgow and as I can see from the internet, are still forming around the world, I started to look into the tech side of the response to coronavirus. A lot of things happening, with Tech companies giving away free access to their content, data bundles and services, during the crisis, On the other hand the governments plan and in some cases already carried out intrusive policies that violate many established privacy rights. Many people have also lost their jobs and the capacity to renew their data packages, so have gone offline, just at a time when online forms and services become a far more attractive format than going in person to somewhere that with the lockdown is probably now closed. So many things can be solved: a neighbour can open their wifi network for others, a group of techies can help build a local wifi network that might cover all of Glasgow and beyond, coronavirus makers on telegram have alre...

My granddad helped set up the telegraph line that once ran across Chile, from Santiago to the south. When he was up a pole in the middle of the 1940s forests of the south, did he ever look at the green landscape to the next place, the next pole ahead, and imagine what would happen when all of Chile was connected? My grandparents, aunts and uncles ran the post office in La Pintana where my mother, one of the younger siblings would wander. They did regular post office work and received telegrams for the people in the vicinity, which was part of their income after he bought his 1 Acre of farmland there. The 12 kids would play around with the telegraph between messages on their shifts, chatting in morse to other operators across Chile. When we finally returned from exile and spent a first Chilean winter at that farm, they had pigs and had once had horses and cows, but still had geese, ducks, chickens and all sorts of other animals, a small enclosed herb garden that said fowl couldn...

El deber Me sacaste mi tierra de debajo de mis pies. Los andes se fueron volando y quedé al otro lado del mundo. Y mientras no estaba, viste esas tierras y las saqueaste, eran tuyas para destruir, porque no nos dábamos cuenta. Estado fascista de Pinochet, que vendió esa tierra. Las valles se hicieron viñas, mineras gigantes crecieron.. Pedimos que no se compraran las cebollas. Que íbamos a hacer? Mataron por tantos años, de todas las maneras más crueles. En la carretera mataste un niño, de 13 años, panadero En la población de Camilo aún se llevan a la gente. Aún atropellan y crean leyes para pegar mejor. Para reirse de los derechos con escopetas. La tierra sacude, se mueve, se levanta con la gente.. Tu modelo se rompió Tu modelo del gran capital El modelo de tu gente ya se rompió de repente Tu modelo se rompió Tu tiendita se saqueó donde pagan poco y cobran mucho precariedad consumista. Patriarcado que rige el capital, destruido por las encapuchadas. El pu...

With Trump giving the OK for turkey to invade Rojava, the autonomous area of northern syria, I felt the need that people read about Murray Bookchin, Abdullah Ocalan and Janet Biehl and about the experience of the Rojava revolution and just how inspiring it is. It's as if these sexist autocrats found themselves incapable or unwilling to stop IS, and instead got this ecofeminist autonomous force to just keep going, because they were already the most effective fighters against them. So now that the threat has been cleared, and the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria  is at peace, with all those amazing people who actually resisted ISIS and won, the US is withdrawing it's presence and support so that Turkey can invade and ethnically cleanse them. I thought about how it might go, knowing that Turkey is at risk of further recession as is Europe, and how powerless war can be, especially when it is never mentioned that the people who Trump and Erdogan are occupying an...

Electric disobedience is a radical lifestyle where you attempt to use the least possible amount of commercial petrol or fossil fuel based electricity normally purchased from large companies, and which is frequently the source of many environmental or cultural/societal issues for the workers and local people in these places. Endesa/Enel for example are to blame for a lot of extractive projects that directly affect the lives of local communities in Araucanía that enjoy a natural commons that gives them fresh water and fertile crops. There are countless examples of ecological and societal disaster at the hands of large producers in extractive industries. Not only do these activities affect the lives of these people, but also those of the users of that electricity in the northern hemisphere, who as passive consumers can't escape an oligarchy of companies that may be the only providers in any westernised enough city, and that in the end depends on the existence of alienated over-cons...

There are various reasons for a community to develop a shared sousveillance system: It provides a legal witness for any crime, brings media attention (via the agreed and anoymised sharing of the captured information), deters anti social behaviour even amongst neighbours, and together with other activities to work on community cohesion such as assemblies or neighbourhood events, can lead to a positively reinforcing environment towards a socially and environmentally positive use of the tool. This in turn empowers the local community and pushes official surveillance or policing reasoning to require it's own justification or to work alongside neighbours on a more equal ground. Depending on the area a group may choose to ally with local law enforcement or only do so when a group determines that a crime has been committed. So shall we make one? I'll be taking down and working on ideas for how it could work on this post. Some initial features: 1) A "camera view" showin...

I wonder what image of respect the national guard wanted to bring to Catalan people when they rode in from all across Spain to punish and repress this province with fantasies of emancipation. We saw Nazis from across spain, posting on social media in their home towns and waving their flag and singing that one song they all know from some kind of tourist ad for Spain. ( Did the Catalan right wing argue with the Spanish right wing and they just couldn't co-habit any longer the space where you divide up all the riches? ) Those police came dressed in their black gear, allowed by the state to beat people of all kinds - including if in old age or children, or to use that kind of violence that you dish out when you think people just aren't worthy of any respect. I wonder if the national police have debates as to whether people in the repressed provinces are actually human or not. From around 9am this morning, national police descended on the unarmed civilian population attemptin...

Es el siglo 21. En el barrio Raval de Barcelona se mezcla la crisis económica, la gentrificación, la drogadicción , el aislamiento social , el mobbing y los planes doctrina shock de los fondos inmobiliarios y gran capital. Todas estas cosas son una tormenta perfecta contra los vecinos del Raval. Los vecinos de toda la vida que ayudaron a reconstruir el barrio, algunos migrando de todas partes de España en el post guerra, y los vecinos mas recientes, que llegaron como migrantes, turistas o estudiantes y quisieron quedarse a hacer sus vidas en estas calles. A post shared by Roig22 (@picalquers.roig) on Jul 4, 2017 at 4:44am PDT En todo el barrio se siente el aire pesada y húmeda de la resignación, del miedo, del haber dejado de esperar que mejore, ya no pudiendo ni creer lo que vemos cuando vamos ya con miedo por las calles, o mirando nuestras cartas con nuevas boletas y subidas de alquiler. Todo el barrio???? No!! Una aldea poblada por irreducibles ravaleñ@s sigue luchando ...