Film review: Birds of Passage

Humphrey McQueen,                            14 October 2019

 

‘Savage capitalism’ headlined the Sydney Morning Herald’s review of Birds of Passage, (28 September) the 2018 feature film about the origins of the drug trade out of Colombia.
 

All capitalism is savage. It came into the world dripping dirt and blood from every pore and has never ceased to do so. The devastation wrought by drugs is still being more than matched by the horrors out of the conquest in pursuit of gold, silver, copper, beef, oil, sugar and coffee. (Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America 1973).

 

However, capitalism is barely a bit player in this film. If you know the fuller account, you can join such dots as are presented. Otherwise, the danger is that audiences might leave feeling that the Indian clans brought devastation upon themselves. They were superstitious and greedy. That possible reaction needs to be balanced against the danger of assuming that the locals are never more than passive victims. Given their limited options in harsh social and physical environments, some seek a way out by whatever means are at hand. The film portrays a range of responses but also reveals how a search for an easier life slides into a corruption of their traditional values.

 

The gringos turn up as Peace Corps volunteers who are many times more anxious to get hold of marijuana than to hand out their anti-Communist leaflets. That is pretty likely to have been the case in the late 1960s. The only other Yanquis shown are three pilots to courier thousands of kilograms of pot. They make one brief and fateful appearance. Otherwise, the crops are sold to unnamed and unidentified buyers. Not until the final minutes does anyone mention Medellin.
Birds of Passage deals with one corner of the drug trade before 1980 in the desert in the far north of the country. The drug is marijuana, not cocaine. There is no sign of a civil war, no kidnappings, no death squads and no FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

 

A feature film is not a documentary. They rarely have footnotes. Nor should it be a political tract. Those needs are supplied by Oliver Vilar and Drew Cottle’s Cocaine Death Squads and the War on Terror: U.S. Imperialism and Class Struggle in Colombia (2011). The authors set out two factors essential for getting beneath the news as propaganda and propaganda as ‘all the news that fit to print’. One: the FARC is the current expression of more than 150 years of rural resistance to the landowners. There is, of course, much more than the drug trade driving the struggles of the Colombian people, as there is to the centuries of revolution and resistance across the continent, whether the Tupamaros in Uruguay or the electoral majorities in Bolivia.

 

Villar and Cottle deliver a second rule for penetrating the surface of Colombia’s drug deals: cocaine is just one more commodity, produced and traded according to the laws of capitalist accumulation in its era of monopolising, (Bukharin’s Imperialism and World Economy and Lenin’s Imperialism).

 

For the British, forcing opium on the Chinese was far more than a matter of profit-grabbing by adventurers like Warren Delano, maternal great-grandfather of U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Reasons of state decided the British to wage the Opium Wars from the 1830s in order to get back the Indian silver with which Britain paid for all the tea out of China. The East India Company grew the opium; William Jardine and William Matheson smuggled it into China. Today, the firm they founded is a pillar of Hong Kong business.

 

From the 1940s, the United States Air Force was feeding its pilots methamphetamines to keep them alert. From there, ‘speed’ moved into workplaces to intensify and prolong labour-times for the extraction of surplus-value from barristers and baristas. Nowadays, meths is at work both nourishing the ‘ice’ epidemic and being force fed to children guilty of Attention Deficit Disorder. Many of those kids are victims of how the anti-social media, notably games, are addicting them to instant gratification, as Susan Greenfield shows in Mind Change: How Digital Technology is Leaving Their Mark on Our Brains (2015). More hyper-activity flows from food intolerances, documented by Sue Dengate, Fed Up, 2008).

 

The CIA was in the forefront of researching applications for LSD and in developing the chemical means to terminate with extreme prejudice. (Stephen Kizner’s recent Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.) Anyone who had been reading Alfred W. McCoy, starting from his The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia in 1972, could have predicted how Bush-Noriega-North cooked up Iran-Contra in the 1980s.

 

Like the Right’s War on Drugs, the Left’s focus on how the corporate warfare state both deploys anti-drug campaigns and employs drug overlords overlooks the political economy. Other drugs missing in action are tobacco (now vaping) and alcohol. No less poisonous are the food conglomerates pushing of fat, sugar and salt. Their need to expand sales is the pandemic of obesity. (See my ‘Poisonous Food Industries’,www.surplusvalue.org.au/mcqueen/currentpolitics)
As part of the curative rather than preventative medicine, Big Pharma goes on bribing GPs to over-prescribe antibiotics and more recently opioids. Their other big earner is from hormones to accelerate the growth of chickens, and antibiotics in cattle, both of which enter our bodies and water supply.
(See https://monthlyreview.org/2019/06/01/superbugs-in-the-anthropocene/)

 

Birds of Passage is a wonder to watch, with tonal shifts across desert landscapes to match the changing fortunes. Spherical camera lenses enhance the magical sequences. Birds are central to the mythology; inhabiting dreams, they foretell death and revenge. The actors bring a conviction to a story as compelling as it is grim. To present an indigenous sense of time and its passing, the directors break from the tight, fast pattern of westerns and gangster movies. Instead, a singer shapes the plot into five cantos, or chapters.

 

There is much to praise. Nonetheless, we should not allow the excitements from watching Birds of Passage to overlook that the directors are a long way from knowing how to integrate more of the forces in play, whether in Miami, Mexico or Manhattan. The U.S. warfare state and the drug cartels, illicit or sanctioned, are not even birds of passage.

 

Bibliography
Poisonous Food Industries’,www.surplusvalue.org.au/mcqueen/currentpolitics)

 

Oliver Villar and Drew Cottle Cocaine Death Squads and the War on Terror: U.S. Imperialism and Class Struggle in Colombia (2011).  https://monthlyreview.org/product/cocaine_death_squads_and_the_war_on_terror/  

 

Charlie Chaplin Modern Times features a sequence where the Tramp snorts cocaine. 

 

Ian Angus Superbugs in the Anthropocene: A Profit-Driven Plague https://monthlyreview.org/2019/06/01/superbugs-in-the-anthropocene/ Ian Angus edits the website Climate and Capitalism and is the author, most recently, of A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism (Monthly Review Press, 2017).

 

Stephen Kizner Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.

 

Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia in 1972,

 

Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America 1973

 

Susan Greenfield Mind Change: How Digital Technology is Leaving Their Mark on Our Brains (2015).

 

Sue Dengate, Fed Up, 2008). https://www.fedup.com.au/

South America: New developments create headaches for US imperialism

Nick G.                        13 October 2019

With events escalating in Syria/Rojava following the Turkish fascist regime’s invasion of Kurdish liberated areas, attention should also be kept on events in South America.

After five years of negotiations between the Colombian FARC rebels and that country’s government, a peace deal was announced in 2016 to end the 50-year old civil war. We said at the time:

“It is entirely understandable that the Colombian masses, weary of a conflict in which a quarter of a million people have died, and with no immediate prospects of a victory for the guerrilla forces, would welcome an end to civil war. 

“However, they should harbour no illusions about the possibility of achieving peacefully what they could not achieve through armed struggle….

“It is absolutely the case that just as there is a time to pick up the gun, so there is a time to put it down. 

“It is also regrettably the case that only one side will be laying down its weapons under the agreement.”  (see “The Civil War in Colombia ends”, )

Now, three years after the signing of the peace agreement, a section of the FARC is rearming.   Early in the morning on August 28, the former head negotiator for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC), Iván Márquez, announced via a YouTube video the official rearmament of a faction of FARC in what appears to be the eastern plains on the Colombian border with Venezuela and Brazil. New groups have spread rapidly across the nation as ex-combatants feel betrayed by the government’s failure to live up to its promises to enact land reforms and as para-military squads continue to murder hundreds of progressives.

The other main guerrilla group still active in Colombia, the National Liberation Army (ELN) could enter into an alliance with the newly re-armed wing of the FARC in several regions of the country where they remain active.

Although the majority of FARC still support a parliamentary approach to changing the power structure in Colombia, the new developments create major problems for US imperialism and its lackeys in South America.

US imperialism has determined that the Colombian government and army should be its cat’s paw in creating trouble for Venezuela along their shared border, with the backing of other reactionary governments allied with or under US control in the region.

A recent (September 2019) report of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Venezuela (Marxist-Leninist) – the PCMLV – refers to the activation of the Inter-American Reciprocal Assistance Treaty (TIAR) by the US and ten South American governments, saying:

“It is not the first time that the bourgeoisie uses the stimulus of the war between oppressed countries as an excuse to curb the actions of a rebel people who are advancing in a democratic process, trying to create the conditions for direct aggression. In this case, this old policy is intended to apply to the people of Venezuela who have been resisting and fighting against imperialist aggression…. (through an) increase of tension on the border with Colombia as steps prior to military action.”

“Possibly the capitalists who run the United States Department of State are not in a position to generate direct military aggression against Venezuela with their own troops because their economic situation is not the best: it has an ongoing trade war, problems on all continents and a rising armed confrontation in the Middle East.

“The US government, to avoid getting directly involved in a new war adventure, uses its puppets and aims to incite right-wing nationalism, religious fanaticism, as well as fascism and other tendencies of deep reactionary roots to provoke fights between the same peoples….”

Noting that class contradictions still exist in Venezuela, the PCMLV said that along the border regions “The class struggle continues to be present there, and it is clearly expressed when the peasants and the working class serve as a base for the guerrillas and the social and anti-Yankee policies of the Bolivarian government. On the other hand, landowners and the bourgeoisie support paramilitarism and the fascist government of Colombia.”

To rebuff Colombian provocations, the Maduro government in Venezuela has declared an “orange alert” along its border with Colombia, sent 3000 FANB (National Bolivarian Armed Forces of Venezuela) troops and mobilized local militias.

The PCMLV has predicted that with the build-up of revolutionary forces in other parts of South America, any “conflagration will spread to a wider area than the territory of Venezuela.

It has issued the following call:

 

“From the PCMLV we call the democratic, revolutionary forces, and especially the Marxist-Leninists to express without any doubt their solidarity with the people of Venezuela who are resisting and fighting against imperialist aggression, who in the midst of a complex situation are building the foundations for revolutionary struggle, who assume imperialism as the main enemy in all its expressions, and are accumulating forces for a harder struggle every day.”

 

Colombia: "They are killing us”

Call to support Sydney rally on August 3

 

Colombians and supporters in Australia

It is with great sadness, indignation and powerlessness that we receive each day the terrible news regarding the ongoing assassination of our social leaders while the government remains silent.

 

The numbers of deaths are increasing by 2019 reaching over 600 social and political leaders killed. We have grave concerns for the human rights situation in Colombia and grave concerns about the future of the peace accords and the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP).

 

We are also troubled by the reestablishment and empowerment of paramilitary groups that have taken arms against our leaders, many of them guarantors of the process of land restitution, human rights protectors in their communities, and leaders of the "Colombia Humana" and FARC, guerrilla movement that recently have signed the peace agreement with the Colombian Government. 

 

We, Colombians and supporters living in Australia, want to make an urgent call to the national and international community, to governments, to social, political and solidarity organisations in Latin America, Australia and the world, and to individuals interested in developments regarding Colombia’s peace process and the imminent violation of human rights in Colombia.

 

We want to invite you to a public rally for Human rights in Colombia.  We want to show to the community in Sydney, Australia and the world about the critical situation of our social and political leaders where more than 600 leaders have been killed in the last 4 years.

 

The public event will be held on August 3rd at 3:30 pm.
Place:  Overseas Passengers Terminal, Circular Quay,

112 George St, The Rocks NSW 2000

The Civil War in Colombia ends

(Contributed)

“…the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes” (Karl Marx, The Civil War in France).

The 50-year old civil war in Colombia is effectively finished.

After four years of negotiations in Havana, a ceasefire and agreement (The General Agreement for the Termination of the Conflict and the Construction of a Stable and Lasting Peace) was signed between the government of Juan Manuel Santos and the leaders of the FARC-EP guerrilla forces.

It is entirely understandable that the Colombian masses, weary of a conflict in which a quarter of a million people have died, and with no immediate prospects of a victory for the guerrilla forces, would welcome an end to civil war.  

However, they should harbour no illusions about the possibility of achieving peacefully what they could not achieve through armed struggle.

The agreement with the government covers agrarian development, political participation, decommissioning of weapons and dismantling of paramilitary groups, victims’ rights, illicit drugs and implementation measures.

These six areas of the agreement provide for very limited gains for the poor and landless, the workers and revolutionary intellectuals who have supported FARC-EP.

The attitude of the landlords and capitalists was made clear in the October 2 plebiscite which narrowly rejected the agreement.  Only 37% of registered voters took part.  The highest concentration of votes was in the big cities like Bogota and Medellin.  Here the bourgeoisie displayed their vile hatred of the poor by urging rejection of the agreement and a continuation of state violence against the guerrillas.

Ensconced behind their guarded and gated communities, behind their razor wire-topped and electric fencing, the Colombian bourgeoisie wanted to continue with a war of extermination, convinced that with US support they could finally crush the FARC-EP.  

The right-wing, religious and reactionary ruling class ran a campaign to scare itself into believing that the agreement was some sort of Chavez-style plot to make Colombia into a second Venezuela, a country in which their class brothers and sisters have loudly bemoaned restrictions on their greed and ill-gotten wealth.

The Colombian ruling class has a fairy tale in which only the FARC-EP created victims in the civil war, as a consequence of which its leaders should be tried as war criminals and executed.

FARC-EP support for the rights of LGBTI Colombians sent ruling class reactionaries to Church on Sundays to pray that such un-Christian abominations never be legalised in their deeply Catholic country.

It is this class that has shaped and owned and controlled the centralised state power of Colombia, with its death squads and paramilitary murderers thrown on top of what Marx described in relation to the French state as “its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature – organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of labour”.

It is this class that rejects reconciliation and compromise and is determined to continue to use the state as “a public force organized for social enslavement” (Marx, The Civil War in France).

FARC-EP leaders say they will continue to fight for a socialist future within this already existing Colombian state.

They and Santos have vowed to adhere to the agreement despite the No vote in the plebiscite.

It is absolutely the case that just as there is a time to pick up the gun, so there is a time to put it down.  

It is also regrettably the case that only one side will be laying down its weapons under the agreement.