Drill, Canary, drill!

More than 20.000 people demonstrated in Arrecife, Lanzarote (Canary Islands), on 24 March 2012 against the offshore oil prospections authorised by the Spanish Government. Photography: Kepa Herrero (Lancelot Digital).

Many people visit the Canary Islands but few bother to get to know them. They are usually considered not as a country or region, or as a community with its own history and complexities, but as ‘a product’, something that is there just to be consumed, mainly by others. A recent initiative by the new conservative Spanish government follows this logic. On Friday 16 March 2012 a proposal by Ministry of Industry, Energy and Tourism José Manuel Soria (born himself in Gran Canaria) was approved, authorising a consortium led by Madrid-based Repsol to explore for oil a significant area just 37 miles offshore Lanzarote and Fuerteventura. They expect to find oil in rock formations 3,000 (9,900 feet) to 3,500 meters below the surface. The objective is to reduce dependence on crude imports and raise money to reduce Spain´s budget deficit. But this time the islanders want to have a say on their political, economic and environmental future.

Ever since Norman nobles conquered Lanzarote and Fuerteventura and subdued the aborigine population to the Crown of Castile, the Canary archipelago found itself in a subordinate position within the capitalist world-system. The Canary Islands have been more dependent on the world’s economic cycles than on Spain’s, and external shocks have regularly affected their economy and environment. Most recently, mass tourism and the related real-state boom abruptly transformed the old rural and scarcely populated societies into highly developed service economies, doubling its population and more than tripling its urbanisation in a very short period of time. As a consequence, the islands’ fragile eco-systems have been and continue to be subjected to strong pressure from growth-oriented policies.

The approval of exploration licenses for oil drilling is the last chapter of this story. It followed the suspension of a subsidy program for new installations of renewable-energy projects as part of the package of spending cuts – a highly contested policy shift. With this decision the Spanish government put the Canary Islands in the race for ‘tough oils’, to use Michael T. Klare’s term. It refers to oil that ‘can only be exploited through costly, environmentally hazardous techniques’.

José María Aznar’s government had first granted Repsol the right to explore the area in early 2002. But local governments objected, and in 2004 the Supreme Court ruled that the permits were illegal, as no serious environmental impact study had been undertaken. According to Repsol, hydrocarbons production could reach 100,000 oil barrels per day. Maybe not too much for world markets, but significant for Spain, amounting to about 10% of its daily crude oil imports, according to 2011 government data. ‘Spain’, Soria stated weeks ago, ‘cannot afford the luxury of disregarding possible sources of energy’, especially when Morocco has already allowed oil exploration on their side of the imaginary frontier. This emphasis on the Spanish interests at the expense of the archipelago has strained the relations with the regional government (a coalition between Coalición Canaria and PSOE) and the cabildos or Island Councils of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura. All of them oppose the explorations and drillings and have announced legal actions.

It is not that the Government of the Canary Islands – which in the past has promoted unsustainable infrastructures and massive urbanisation – has suddenly found a passion for the environment. There is certainly an element of political strife between old partners (José Manuel Soria was the regional government’s vice-president when PP governed in coalition with Coalición Canaria), but the truth is that from the local bourgeoisie’s perspective there is little to win with Repsol drillings. It is the Spanish central government that issues the permits, potential tax revenues will be collected by Madrid and it is very unlikely that oil production will create local jobs on a significant scale. The islands would only suffer the risks, potentially detrimental for tourism and fisheries. In a recent visit to the islands Repsol’s CEO Antoni Brufau tried to appease the regional government by promising the creation of thousands of jobs. But very few islanders really believe this. Canary Islands’ rate of unemployment of 31% ranks among the highest in Western Europe despite the significant influx of tourists in the last years (more than 10 million in 2011), but this is due to structural imbalances that oil production -delinked from the rest of the Canaries’ economy- won’t solve.

The regional government’s incapacity to confront Madrid’s fait accompli has angered many nationalists within the co-ruling party and from other political groups. Some local politicians threaten to revise what many call the ‘colonial pact’ -the centennial Canary Island’s pragmatic integration in Spain after the independence of the American colonies. This pact allows for several fiscal and economic peculiarities, namely low-taxation, free trade and in recent years generous transfers to finance infrastructure projects. Although explicit pro-independence movements are a minority in the region, Spanish Repsol´s triumphant entry offers them a powerful argument: as the Canary Islands is not a sovereign state they cannot decide upon the waters surrounding the islands beyond the 12-mile limit, according to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, so waters between the islands are considered international waters. And unlike Portugal with Madera and Azores, the Spanish government has not yet delimited an exclusive economic zone in application of the straight baseline method due to disagreements with Morocco, as well as to the unsolved status of Western Sahara. The sovereignty argument thus puts the emphasis on who decides on the oil drilling and who can benefit the most from the oil revenues.

“Barranco de los Canarios” Beach, Sotavento coast, South Fuerteventura (Canary Islands). Photography: Carlos de Saá

Stronger opposition comes from the local environmental movements. They denounce the important risks at all stages of oil production, endangering islands that have been declared biosphere reserves by Unesco, that is, commons to be shared by humanity and developed on a sustainable way. Seismic prospection can cause high damage to submarine fauna. Opening well perforations produce waste that spills into the sea, negatively affecting submarine habitats of high ecological value, like the marine seagrass meadows. During oil extraction, materials like heavy metals or aromatic hydrocarbons are released; they can affect the food chain and therefore the human being, causing health damage. Accidents frequently happen, either small spills unnoticed by the media, or huge catastrophes like the BP Deepwater disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. A significant amount of oil is already regularly dumped from oil tanker vessels into the Canaries’ uncontrolled waters. From the perspective of a more human and ecologically oriented economy, the negative externalities clearly outweigh the positive ones, and the Canary Islands get mainly the former.

Other concerns relate to the geopolitical instability linked to oil production, especially if there are US oil companies involved. The Canary Islands, which voted against NATO integration in the referendum of 1986, could however be further militarized under Africom. A cable leaked by Wikileaks revealed that in 2008 José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s socialist government already offered to add “Las Palmas to the list of ports where [the US] can take nuclear powered warships”.

Many people in the Canary Islands are now mobilizing on the Internet and in social media, asking for online signatures against the drilling and demonstrating. They demonstrated in the streets in unprecedented numbers on the 24^th March, some days before the 29^th March general strike against labour market reforms. They thus join a global fight against the extraction of fossil fuels at all cost, whether they are in the natural reserves of Alaska, in Canada or Latin America. If prospection finally confirms the existence of hydrocarbons and drilling starts in a few years, it will still take a decade for Repsol to reach plateau production. A long struggle has started, one that may substantially modify the political and social landscape of the archipelago, hopefully for the better. We will need support for such a big challenge.

The debt and the body

Friedrich Nietschze wrote in Genealogy of the morals that in ancient times “the creditor could subject the body of the debtor to all manner of ignominy and torture“. Well, this is what happened in Spain, a dreadful cocktail of debt, forced labour and body torture. Quite symbolic indeed.

Spanish Police Arrest ‘Bar Code Pimps’ Gang

By HAROLD HECKLE Associated Press

MADRID March 24, 2012 (AP)

Spanish police arrested 22 suspected pimps who allegedly used violence to force women into prostitution and tattooed them with bar codes as a sign of ownership, officials said Saturday.

Police are calling the gang the “bar code pimps.” Officers freed one 19-year-old woman who had been beaten, held against her will and tattooed with a bar code and an amount of money — €2,000 ($2,650) — which investigators believe was the debt the gang wished to extort before releasing her.

All those arrested were of Romanian nationality and had forced the women to hand over part of their earnings, the statement said.

The women were tattooed on their wrists if they tried to escape, the statement said. Police also seized guns and ammunition. It was not immediately clear when the raids took place. (to continue, click here)

The power of the financial lobby in the European Union

If there was any doubt about the rationale behind EU economic policies… Below you can watch an interesting report from a German TV on the influence of the financial lobby in the EU institutions (in German; click cc for English subtitles).

The magma

Feeling its way, moving slowly since years or centuries, the magma had been trying to get rid of all the pressure got from above. It tried to find a gap where it could come to the surface.  It could be a crack on the slope of a mountain, or a ridge under the sea. It could also take several paths at the same time. It had no preferences. The only thing it needed was to find a weak flank. When it found the magma gathered speed, with no hesitation. Then the world shaked. Some received it with fear, as they felt the earth move under their feet, while others welcomed it with cheer, like children in a circus show. It doesn’t matter. Its time is not ours. It only wishes one thing: that its mixture of molten rocks and gas becomes one day life. 

Photographies taken in the island of El Hierro in 2009. Author: Samuel

What Utøya tells us

[Originally published in Spanish on the 24/07/2011. Kindly translated into English by Herr Kryptocommunist]

1

In the beginning there was the media. They transmitted and shaped the news of the Oslo attack and the subsequent killing spree on the island of Utøya. Instead of informing us on what was actually known at that moment, journalists spawned wantonly all kinds of speculations on who was responsible for the attacks. When one doesn’t have information, the possibilities are endless, but on this occasion only one was repeated endlessly: “probably” it was Al Qaeda that was responsible for the attack, or an islamist group close to it, in retaliation for the publication of the Mohamed cartoons, or the participation of Norway in the occupation of Afghanistan. Such remarks reflect a political agenda that has been in the making for many years. We no longer need a José María Aznar who calls the editors-in-chief of the newspapers [Note of the translator: Hours after the Madrid bombing in 2004, Mr. Aznar had called the editors of Spanish newspapers to emphasize the government's conviction that ETA was responsible]. The mechanism has been completely interiorized, so that such sentences come out automatically and become routine.

2

One does not need to back-up information with facts: suffice “expert opinion” in the ideological construction of the enemy. Once again the so-called experts played a fundamental role in fabricating news that afterwards turned out to be completely wrong. In Spain, it is impossible to have an attack or event attributed to islamists that  does not  immediately lead to the publication of an El País article by Fernando Reinares, “Senior Researcher on terrorism at the Real Instituto Elcano, and Professor at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos”. And indeed, after the massacres in Oslo and Utøya, El País digital immediately published an article of his that linked “the terrorist threat to Norway” with “the processes of jihadist radicalization that can be observed in some segments of the muslim community in Norway“. Although the column concluded with the admission that “this is a hypothesis on what happened in Norway yesterday, but not the only possible one“, in the text Reinares focussed exclusively on the Al Qaeda option.  That is why it is no longer possible to consult the text: the author requested El País to redraw it from the digital edition, and it was published only in some regional editions of the paper. For the moment, at least, Google still has a cached version.

Screenshot of Fernando Reinares’s article, published online in El País on the 23/07/2011

A few days later, Fernando Reinares admitted, in the ‘Letters to the editor’ section, that the article had been written in a rush and that it had been published after the bomb blast in Oslo, but before the massacre on the island become known, and before it was known how the Oslo explosion had taken place. It was all Reinares needed to prepare a cocktail with the words “radicalization”, “global jihad”, and “muslim communities”. If there only had been a bomb in Oslo, and if Anders Behring Breivik wouldn’t have been seen indiscriminately shooting young labour activists gathered in Utøya, the article would not have been redrawn – such are the ethical and professional standards used in “terrorism studies”.  The latter serve two fundamental functions: first, they legitimize the policing of what are essentially political issues; and secondly, they create networks that link certain research centres, the governments that fund them, the analysts that work for both of them, and the media that amplify their voices.

3

After the confirmation that the attacks were the work of a white individual with Norwegian nationality and far right leanings, the press oscillated between considering it the action of a disturbed isolated individual (especially in the US), and a dissimulated unease at qualifying it as a terrorist act (especially in Europe). Making a virtue of necessity, the same message had to be repeated but in a different form. The El País editorial does so with eloquence:

the events would have confirmed [...] that the prevention of terrorist attacks cannot and should not be focussed on jihadism alone. There are social pathologies, probably with a more imprecise religious component, but fired up by racist fever, loneliness and frustration, that make their appearance even in the most advanced societies.  Part of these pathologies can be observed in the social networks, because of the latter’s narcissist qualities. Once again we see that latent threats were not taken seriously, or that the means for controlling them were not available

While condemning the events, the editorial this time does not mention the Christian religion of Anders Behring Breivik, his fascist ideas, the fact that his “racist fever” was inspired by no less than John Stuart Mill, his admiration for neoconservative experts like Daniel Pipes or for the Israeli government, his inspiration in politicians like Geert Wilders, or his links with far-right European parties. The vague reference to “social pathologies” on the other hand allow to warn for the dangers of radicalization, while insisting that the internet and the society at large should be controlled, in pre-emptive fashion. Many commentaries talk about the “ingenuity” and the “innocence” of the Norwegian authorities, incapable of foreseeing what in general is impossible to predict.

4

If the literature on “global jihad” allows to stigmatize entire communities in Europe, “extremism” and “radicalization” and its variants permit to recreate at will many other enemy figures and the adequate dispositifs for controlling them. But if we look at the Europol 2010 list of “failed, foiled and completed attacks”, categorized by member state and ideological affiliation, we see the following:

The first thing to call our attention is how few “terrorist acts” are actually linked to islamism, a finding also confirmed in previous years. Second, the large majority can be attributed to a single organization, ETA, which explains why France and Spain figure so prominently in the graph. And all of this despite the fact that in 2010 the only incident worth mentioning was the shooting on March 16 in which a French gendarme was killed.  Most cases in reality are so-called “aborted actions” by the police, or events that have more to do with the badly named “milieu” rather than armed organization per se. Thirdly, after ETA (and attacks carried out by Northern Irish and Republican groups) most attacks are those attributed to “far-left” organizations in the south of Europa, and especially Greece. Finally, not a single completed action is attributed to the far right, nor are there supposed to be failed or foiled plots. Perhaps the fascists, neo-nazi’s and ultra’s limited themselves in 2010 to writing in forums, blogs, and general trolling on the net? Of course not.

In reality, violent actions by the far right are usually classified as “vandalism” or “racist attacks“, hardly ever as “terrorism”. This has important consequences: the same actions by “separatists” or “radical leftists” are punished much more severely as those perpetrated by those belonging to the “far right”. Moreover, the latter are the object of far less zealous police scrutiny, sometimes even sharing common objectives, environments and forums.

5

Politically, Norway does not escape the conservative and racist wave that is engulfing the rest of Europe, just like other Scandinavian countries too.  The neoliberal and anti-immigrant Progress Party to which Breivik belonged is already the second political formation of the country, with 22,9% of the votes in the last elections. But in Norway, with the lowest unemployment numbers if Europe (3,4%), the new nativist and anti-immigrant discourse even permeates the governing Labour Party. The coalition it is in wants to make immigration laws stricter, based on arguments that are more cultural than economic. At the same time it adopts and promotes an individualism that is markedly hostile towards the Welfare State. In this synthesis education, culture, common values and religion become selection criteria and ways to (re)segment the labour market. At the same time, the “war of each against all” – against the barbarians, but also those that have allowed the “invasion” to take place – converts the multitudes into a mob of predators devouring each other.

There are no police-oriented solutions against the Anders Beehring Breiviks of Europe, or those that might end up doing similar things like him. It is immensely hypocritical to be horrified by the criminal and racist consequences while those very same “popular” or “progressive” governments impose labour conditions that can only be characterized as semi-servitude, deny civil rights to certain “immigrants” and consolidate anti-terrorist legislation incompatible with fundamental liberties. The far right knows this all too well, and is quick to exploit said hypocrisy. Faced by the genocidal option, the only alternative is political, creating an overwhelming and empowering democratic movement, as the one that we have seen in Madrid lately.

Google Maps forgets South Sudan

After years of civil war, a new nation is born today: South Sudan. Maps will have to be redesigned. The Guardian already did it. Not Google, though.

This is a capture taken on 9 July at 11:19 GMT. Sudan still appears as a unified country. It is not that at Google Inc. they didn’t know what was going on there. On 8th July this was posted on the official Google Africa blog:

In anticipation of this significant development, the World Bank, UNOSAT, RCMRD, Satellite Sentinel Project and Google organized a South Sudan Community Mapping event in Nairobi on June 30. This was the second in a series of mapping events intended to encourage local people to create accurate and detailed maps of South Sudan, to help them navigate their path to independence. There were over 100 attendees in the room, mostly Sudanese — university students, humanitarian workers, journalists, developers, donors, citizens — coming from Nairobi and its surroundings, but also as far as Juba, the capital of South Sudan.

In fact, Google’s Africa policy manager Ory Okolloh, who helped create Ushahidi, is very fond of interactive social mapping. But it seems that Africa is not yet on the top of Google’s agenda. This time Google did not create a doodle to celebrate the event and did not update Google Maps. And that despite heavy US involvement in the process leading to South Sudan’s independence. Those trying to find their way in that region by using Google Maps on their mobile phones will still be in Sudan.

Update (11 June 2011): PC Mag asked Google about this. This was their answer:

We are following the situation in South Sudan and are working with data providers to ensure that we depict the area accurately,” the Google spokeswoman added. “However, we aren’t able to specify when the update to these borders will be made, as the changes are often dependent on a variety of factors such as provider data availability and our system update schedule.”

Greece, occupied territory

[originally published in Spanish]

Greek commando on the deck of the US boat ‘Audacity of Hope’, on the 1st of July 2011. Photography: Institute for Middle East.

They wanted to sail, bound for Gaza, to show their solidarity and to deliver humanitarian aid, but they ended up blocked in another occupied and besieged territory, where the price of rebellion is also beign paid back with interests by its population: Greece. “The flotilla organizers did not take into account that Greece of July 2011 is not the Greece of May 2010” a top Israeli official, who worked in the past few months to prevent the Gaza flotilla mission from taking place, told to Haaretz. He is right. The Greek State, having put himself at the forefront of the plundering of its own country, lost what little legitimacy remained and now its police behaves in the same brutal way as the IDF in villages like Nabi Saleh, throwing tear gasses and stun grenades to unarmed citizens. They no longer target just the inmigrants or the usual suspects of Exarchia. Under the financial siege, the intifada is part of the Greek daily life, as it is of the Palestinian’s since years. And the roadmap designed by the so-called troika is as deceitful as the Quartet’s. The European governments encouraged the Israeli bombing of Gaza, they were understanding with the attack to the first freedom flotilla and they continued strengthening bonds with the State of Israel, learning from its policies. The reason is obvious: they all share the same fear of democracy. In Israel a ‘real democracy’ adopts the form of a demographic threat and in Europe that of the disruption of the representative system. Becoming-Israel or becoming-Syntagma, that seems to be the question.