It Could Happen Here Weekly 163
03:07:23 Share

You know you've got to come back in you. When you take the next step, you're going to make it count for your career, for your family, for your life. You can earn a degree you're proud of with Purdue Global. Purdue Global is backed by Purdue University, one of the nation's most respected and innovative public universities.

This is your chance. This is your opportunity. This is your comeback. Purdue Global. Produce online university for working adults. Start your comeback today at purdueglobal.edu.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. This is Michael Phillips, an historian in Texas.

I'm the author of a history of racism in Dallas called White Metropolis, and an upcoming book on the history of eugenics in Texas called The Purifying Knife. And I'm Stephen Monticelli, an investigative reporter and columnist in Texas who covers extremism and far-right movements as well as dark money and other fun things. In 2022, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito authored the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision.

Alito's majority opinion reversed the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade outcome that established a woman's constitutional right to an abortion through the first trimester, permitted states to impose limits to protect the health of the mother in the second trimester, and gave states leeway to ban abortions in the final trimester.

The Roe decision, based on a Texas case, had survived with modification for almost half a century. In Dobbs, however, the Supreme Court denied that women held a constitutional right to an abortion and gave the individual states the power to determine whether such procedures were legal at any point during a pregnancy. In the Dobbs case, Alito seemed to suggest that the concept of abortion rights was a modern aberration.

MSNBC pundit Lawrence O'Donnell zeroed in on one key phrase in Alito's opinion. Samuel Alito says that a right to abortion services is not, quote, deeply rooted in this nation's history. Whatever one might think about Alito as a jurist, he fails as an historian. In fact, for much of American history, abortion was quite accepted.

When men first formed the American Medical Association in the 1840s, they had to wage a campaign against abortion in part to eliminate competition for patients from midwives, who were the primary provider of such services.

The 19th century anti-abortion laws focused on the health and safety of women primarily and not the life of the fetus, as the modern laws tend to do. And the anti-abortion campaign at the time itself had to do not just with limiting women's autonomy, but also with racism and anxiety over immigration. Through it all, Texas became a central battlefront in the culture wars surrounding women's bodily autonomy.

One group of Texans won women the right to an abortion in the Roe case, while another worked almost immediately to reverse Roe and to recriminalize choice.

Meanwhile, a Dallas district attorney, Henry Wade, played an underappreciated and underexplored role in the battle. The often dour Puritans who established the British colony of Massachusetts in the 1620s may have created an oppressive theocracy, but they proved surprisingly indifferent when it came to women's decisions when and if to have children.

Based on British common law, the colonies in New England allowed abortion up to the quickening, which is when women can first feel fetal movement. In that era, it was the first clear sign of impregnation. This moment varies widely for women, but it generally happens during the fourth or fifth month of pregnancy. Women typically endured seven to eight live births, and the experience was often grueling and life-threatening, particularly as they got older.

Seeking relief and physical safety, women frequently terminated their pregnancy in a variety of ways. From Native Americans, white women learned which local herbs were considered abortifacients. White and black women also sought advice from midwives who provided wisdom on how to relieve menstrual cramps, get pregnant, and breastfeed. Midwives provided abortion services as well.

Women attempted to end pregnancy with varying degrees of success by consuming pennyroyal tea or savin juniper or a combination of iron and quinine.

They took hot baths or rode horses bareback in order to cause a miscarriage. Before the 1840s, such actions provoked little or no controversy. Even the Catholic Church adhered to the quickening standard until after the American Civil War. By the 1840s, abortion had become so deeply rooted in American history and culture that abortionists advertised their services, albeit in euphemistic but widely understood terms.

These advertisements were carried in popular newspapers such as the New York Sun and the Boston Daily Times. Abortionists told patients they could provide, quote, French cures for what was referred to as, quote, menstrual blockage. A dramatic shift happened after the 1847 founding of the American Medical Association.

Established by men, the organization began lobbying states to ban abortions in an attempt to discredit midwives, who represented major competition for female patients. Medical journalists began to dismiss midwives and male doctors who provided abortion services as dangerous, ill-informed quacks. AMA members were still unaware that germs existed.

and they didn't clean their hands or equipment when examining wounds or during surgeries, thus causing many of their patients to die of sepsis. So-called regular doctors often use dangerous treatments such as bleeding to treat illnesses.

Yet, in spite of their high body count, AMA members persuaded major press outlets such as the New York Times to sensationally cover cases in which women died during abortions performed by midwives. This created momentum for the enactment by 1880 of laws banning and criminalizing abortion in every single state except Kentucky, where state courts had already rendered such procedures illegal. The drive against abortion wasn't all that it seemed.

Abortion opponents were worried that the wrong women, or in other words, white wealthy women, were choosing to limit how many children they had. The fertility rate for white women fell by almost 55% between 1850 and 1930.

Horatio Storer, the leading anti-abortion crusader at the time, railed against non-infantomania among upper-class white women, a trend that the sociologist Edward A. Ross would call, quote, race suicide. President Theodore Roosevelt later argued that white women had a patriotic duty to bear at least four children.

If biologically fit Anglo-Saxons, quote, have only one child or no child at all, while the Irish, Italians, and Jews have, quote, eight or nine or ten, Theodore Roosevelt warned, it is simply a question of the multiplication table, he wrote. The future of American civilization, Roosevelt believed, depended on reproductive math. White women could not be allowed to become voluntary non-combatants in a racial demographic war.

In the 1880s, Texas was still seen by much of the country as an unsophisticated frontier, but was home to a highly influential doctor with a national following, Ferdinand Eugene Daniel, who became editor of the Texas Medical Journal.

A eugenicist with a national audience, the surgeon had served in the Confederate Army and argued that masturbation and homosexuality were dangerous indications that an individual came from a family line that had not fully evolved or was biologically regressing. Fully evolved individuals, he believed, had less of a sex drive and kept their minds on intellectual pursuits.

Daniel argued that before the Civil War, Americans had endangered their future by bringing Africans into the country as slaves and were compounding the error by allowing what he called, quote, the dregs of Europe, Jews, Greeks, Italians, and others to immigrate to the United States. The only way to save America's biological future, he said, was

was by castrating not just gay men and masturbators who would cause the evolution of white America to swing in reverse, but also to sterilize the sexually promiscuous, the mentally ill, those with disabilities, and the criminal element as well. Daniel could be surprisingly supportive of abortion rights under limited circumstances, however, if it ensured that well-off white women had long and fruitful careers as mothers.

Daniel wrote approvingly of how electric currents might be used to end ectopic pregnancies, cases in which fertilized eggs attach to the fallopian tubes or elsewhere outside the uterus, which can be dangerous and can kill or leave a woman infertile. Both outcomes undesirable for a eugenicist like Daniel, who cared for fit white patients. In an 1887 issue, he published an account of a debate among doctors held by the Medical Society in Terrell, Texas.

The topic was whether saving the life of a mother was the only acceptable reason to allow an abortion.

Some doctors in the debate argued that abortion was morally acceptable for, quote, an intelligent and chaste woman who had gotten pregnant after being deceived by a scoundrel into participating in premarital sex. Because of sexual double standards, several of these Texas doctors argued that such women would no longer be considered a socially acceptable mate by a high-status man and thus should be denied the chance to become an, quote, ornament and useful member of society.

Regardless of Texas's abortion law, a surprising number of doctors in the state performed abortions not only to save women's lives, but to save their reputations and to relieve them of the financial and physical hardships of unwanted pregnancies. In 1899, in Waco, Texas, Mary Wheat discovered she was pregnant and sought an abortion.

The procedure had been illegal in Texas since 1856, a year before the recently formed American Medical Association began a campaign to prohibit abortion in every state. By 1880, the AMA had achieved its goal. In spite of the ubiquitous bans, abortions were frequent, and there were a large number of doctors willing to provide the prohibited medical procedure.

Wheat, called Maddie by friends and family, found such a physician, Dr. S.M. Jenkins. Texas law at the time had not eliminated abortion, but instead had driven the practice underground. Because of this, doctors received little or no training in how to perform such procedures. That proved fatal for Maddie Wheat. Dr. Jenkins performed the abortion in the home of a woman identified by the local press only as Mrs. Smith, and he made a mistake.

She got increasingly and dangerously ill, and then after 10 days of this ordeal, Jenkins rushed Wheat into Waco's city hospital. He claimed she was suffering a severe attack of dysentery. She then died, and an autopsy revealed a bowel perforation, which had been left during the botched abortion. Law enforcement arrested Jenkins on November 1st for the operation, charging him with murder. Jenkins' trial did not go as prosecutors planned.

Jenkins testified that the fetus Wheat was carrying had died and that the abortion was an attempt to save her life. According to a reporter for the Houston Post, Jenkins and his attorney were pleased with how the trial was unfolding. Quote, the defense seemed to be well satisfied with their showing so far and public opinion had changed considerably in favor of the defendant, the newspaper told its readers. But then the trial came to an abrupt and shocking end.

While the court was in session, Hugh Wheat, the brother of the deceased woman, stood, aimed a gun at Dr. Jenkins, and pulled the trigger. A bullet fatally struck the physician, just underneath the ribs. As the assassin fled, Jenkins' brother-in-law, John Halligan, shot back but missed. That a murder trial ended in another homicide is not surprising in a place as violent as 19th century Texas.

But because of the modern image of Texas as reliably and even harshly anti-abortion, it might be startling that the public 125 years ago actually sympathized with a doctor who faced prison after his patient died as a result of an incompetently performed abortion. Abortion politics were far more unpredictable in the American past than Samuel Alito had asserted.

In 1873, anti-vice activist Anthony Comstock of Connecticut successfully lobbied the Congress to pass legislation known as the Comstock Act.

that made distribution to the U.S. mail or common carriers of birth control devices or any information about birth control or how to obtain an abortion a federal crime. Social reformers noted that burying multiple children often shorted women's lives and drove their families into poverty, and they battled for women to gain control over their reproductive choices.

One such reformer was Margaret Sanger of New York, the daughter of a radical Irish father and mother who died at 50 after burying 11 children. Sanger coined the term birth control in 1915 and just before World War I launched a movement that promoted contraception as sexual and political reform aimed to reduce human misery.

She had to flee the country in 1914 because her publication, The Woman Rebel, intentionally defied the Comstock Law and promoted the distribution of information about contraception through the United States Postal Service.

When she returned to this country, she was an international celebrity for women's rights and free speech, and she opened a family planning clinic which faced continual police harassment. Lack of access to birth control, Sanger complained, led to abortion, as she has said in a 1957 interview with reporter Mike Wallace on CBS News. Why did you do it? I realize that you had an intellectual conviction that birth control was a boon to mankind, but

but I'm sure that others have that conviction too. And so what I'd like to know is this: What events, what emotions in your life made Margaret Sanger a crusader for birth control? Well, Mr. Wallace, it's hard to say that any one thing has made one do this or that. I think from the very beginning, I came with a large family. My mother died young, 11 children. That made an impression on me as a child. I was a trained nurse, went among the people,

I saw women who asked to have some means whereby they wouldn't have to have another pregnancy too early after the last child, the last abortion, which many of them had. So there's a number of things that are one after the other that really made you feel that you had to do something.

It may surprise many today that the woman who founded the American Birth Control League, which later evolved into Planned Parenthood of America, actually opposed abortion and advocated easing access to birth control as a means of making it vanish. Meanwhile, around the time of Sanger's interview with Mike Wallace, Texas doctors became friendlier to abortion rights. But before we get into that, a quick ad break.

In 1963, the Houston Chronicle surveyed doctors about their views of abortion. About 18,000 abortions took place in Texas every year, the newspaper reported, and that, quote, an increasing number of doctors believed abortion should be legal for reasons beyond saving the life of the mother.

Texas women fought fiercely for the right to control their bodies. In North Texas, the Women's Alliance, the first Unitarian Universalist church in Dallas, launched an education campaign about the need for the state to reform its abortion laws.

Meanwhile, Dr. Hugh Savage of Fort Worth, the president of the State Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, lobbied the Texas Medical Association to draft a statement supporting abortion rights. The state's abortion ban was, he said, in conflict with actual practice of reputable hospitals across the state. Doctors regularly provided abortion care when a woman's life was in danger, and they interpreted that mandate broadly.

In 1969, members of the Texas Medical Association who were surveyed approved liberalization of abortion laws by an overwhelming vote of 4,435 to 536. The Texas legislature even considered loosening abortion restrictions in its 1967 and 1968 sessions, although neither effort was successful in spite of support from conservative state Senator George Parkhouse and a growing number of churches and physicians.

In the end, activists carried the day. Two Texas lawyers, Linda Coffey and Sarah Weddington, took up the cause of Norma McCovey, who had sought an abortion in Dallas. Almost a century earlier, Texas doctors had argued whether to allow an abortion for unmarried upper-class women so they could contribute to the gene pool by bearing children with comparably privileged men. Those Victorian doctors did not have someone like McCovey in mind.

largely neglected by her parents. But Covey had suffered abuse at the hands of men throughout her life and was a frequent drug user. After giving up one child for adoption and having another taken by her mother, in 1969, she was pregnant for a third time while she was living in Dallas.

McCovey tried to end the pregnancy herself with a home remedy of peanuts and castor oil, but she only succeeded in making herself nauseous. She was eventually told about an illegal clinic, but when she got there, Dallas police had already shut down the clinic. Quote, nobody was there, she said later. It was an old dentist's office. Then I saw dry blood everywhere and smelled this awful smell.

She believed that she falsely claimed that she had been gang raped by African-American men. A doctor might be willing to provide her an abortion. She was unsuccessful, but a doctor referred her to an attorney who connected her with a pair of lawyers who were seeking to challenge the Texas anti-abortion law.

These attorneys, Linda Coffey and Sarah Weddington, filed a class action suit against Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade, claiming that the Texas anti-abortion law, which allowed the procedure only to save the patient's life, violated the constitutional right of privacy. Before his name would forever be linked with the history of American abortion law, by the time of Norma McCovey's suit, Henry Wade enjoyed a reputation as one of the most successful district attorneys in the country.

His reputation in Dallas was built on ruthlessness, racism, and the advantages a brutally unfair criminal justice system in Texas gave him. Wade would claim a 90% conviction rate, but in many of those cases, he faced off against poor defendants that were bullied, lied to, and coerced into confessions by Dallas police officers.

In one infamous murder case, Tommy Lee Walker, an African-American man with several alibi witnesses, was threatened with a beating if he didn't sign a confession. He was misled about the consequences of signing an admission of guilt and later died in the electric chair in 1956. Wade reportedly joked, quote, any prosecutor could convict a guilty man, but it takes a real pro to convict an innocent man.

Emanuel Wade provided prosecutors after the civil rights era provided tips for excluding African-Americans and Mexican-Americans from juries. Wade left the district attorney's office in January 1988, and as of 2008, 19 criminal defendants convicted by his team had been exonerated through DNA evidence.

During his time as district attorney, Wade directed police to raid gay bars and vigorously prosecuted violators of the state's sodomy laws that banned oral and anal sex, including a straight couple arrested in Dallas in 1961. While Wade may have racked up wins against badly outmatched targets, before Roe, he bungled his most famous case, a murder covered by Dallas radio reporter Gary Dillon of KLIF-AM. I'm Dillon.

Here he comes, Lee Oswald, the accused assassin. Captain Wilfred's leading the way. Being escorted by police officers and the sheriff.

The shot has rung out. And Lee Oswald falls. Lee Oswald has fallen. A shot has rung out here. A struggle is being in place. A struggle has rung out. And, ladies and gentlemen, Lee Oswald. Lee Oswald has just been shot.

On November 24th, 1963, Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby had murdered Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of John Kennedy, as he was being escorted by police in front of a nationwide TV audience. The case should have been open and shut. Wade's staff won a conviction in March 1964.

But the verdict and death sentence Ruby received was unanimously overturned by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on October 5, 1966, in part because the judge should have granted a change of venue, but also because Wade's team had introduced improperly obtained evidence at the trial. Ruby was awaiting a new trial when he died of pneumonia and cancer in 1967. The Wade team apparently did similarly sloppy work in the Roe v. Wade case.

In abortion cases, Wade's office had generally prosecuted amateur abortion providers who had killed or badly injured their clients, and the Dallas DA's office and the city police had not focused on enforcement of abortion laws on the books. Legal experts would later characterize the Dallas DA's office filings and the Roe case as perfunctory, especially compared to the exhaustive constitutional research done by Weddington and Coffey.

Texas Assistant General Jay Floyd won no allies on the Supreme Court when he opened his argument with comments considered sexist and condescending even by the standards of 1973. When the Supreme Court rendered its verdict, Wade reportedly never bothered to read it. Mr. Chief Justice, please report. It's an old joke, but when a man argues against two beautiful ladies like this, they're going to have the last word.

No one laughed, and a Texas legal team would win a landmark legal victory.

On January 22nd, 1973, news anchor Walter Cronkite made the earth-shaking Roe v. Wade decision, the lead story on the CBS Evening News. Good evening. In a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court today legalized abortions. The majority in cases from Texas and Georgia said that the decision to end a pregnancy during the first three months belongs to the woman and her doctor, not the

the government. Thus, the anti-abortion laws of 46 states were rendered unconstitutional. Stay with us through this ad break to learn more. It took a while for the country, and particularly Texans, to absorb the news about the Roe decision. The Supreme Court ruling was announced on the same day as another big news story that, over the next few days, absorbed attention south of the Red River.

Cronkite was on the air when the press secretary of a former giant of Texas politics called the newsman to tell him a former president had died. Thank you very much, Tom. I'm on the air right at the moment. Can you hold the line just a second?

I'm talking to Tom Johnston, the press secretary for Lyndon Johnson, who has reported that the 36th president of the United States died this afternoon in an ambulance plane on the way to San Antonio, where he was taken after being stricken at his ranch, the LBJ Ranch in Johnson City, Texas. News of the Road decision had to compete not only with coverage of Johnson's death and the planning for his funeral,

but also the recently negotiated American withdrawal from the Vietnam War. No one could have guessed how deeply this one decision would reshape the makeup of the Democratic and Republican parties over the next half century. Americans divided almost evenly soon after the Supreme Court announcement. A Gallup survey indicated that 46% supported a woman's right to choose and 45% opposed granting women access to abortion care in the days following the Roe decision.

Reactions were often surprising. W.A. Criswell, the arch-conservative pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, the largest Southern Baptist congregation in the nation, initially applauded the court. Perhaps the pastor, who had repeatedly warned 13 years earlier that the election of a Catholic, John Kennedy, as president would mark the end of religious liberty, was relieved that the Supreme Court was not controlled by the Vatican.

By the late 1970s, Criswell would emerge as a national leader of the religious right and would help make opposition to abortion gay rights a centerpiece of Republican politics. Shortly after Roe, however, he struck a very different tune. Quote,

I have always felt that it was only after the child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person, Criswell said. And it always therefore seemed to me that's what's best for the mother and the future should be allowed.

Opposition to the legalization of abortion quickly formed and would build to homicidal intensity over the decades. In 1970, three years before the Roe decision, when abortion was still illegal in Texas, Michael Schwartz, a student at the conservative private university of Dallas in the suburb of Irving, staged what might have been the first anti-abortion protest in American history.

He held a sit-in at the Planned Parenthood headquarters not far from downtown Dallas because the organization provided assistance to pregnant women planning on traveling to states where abortion was already legal, not unlike situations that Texans face today. The movement soon came to be dominated by right-wing Republicans, and the occupations of clinics soon became violent. Abortion opponents pouring noxious chemicals into clinic ventilation systems.

Anti-choice extremists set fire to clinics, bombed them, and even murdered doctors and clinic staff providing abortion care. One set of Texans may have won the decisive battle for abortion rights in the past half century, but a different set of Texans would lead the charge to reverse those gains. Strangely enough, the backlash to abortion rights included Norma McCovey.

One day, Flip Benham, a leader of the extremist anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, approached her while she was autographing copies of a book she had authored called I Am Roe. They became friends, and she later claimed that she changed her mind about abortion when she saw photos of fetuses at different stages of pregnancy.

After being baptized in a swimming pool by evangelicals in 1995, an event filmed and widely disseminated in the anti-abortion movement, McCovey became a popular fixture at anti-abortion protests. At first, McCovey embraced evangelical Protestantism, and by 1998, she converted to Catholicism.

But towards the end of her life, while being interviewed for a 2020 documentary called AKA Jane Roe, McCovey confessed that her religious conversion had been a scam and that she had been financially benefiting from her transition into a star of the evangelical anti-abortion circuit. Did they use you as a trophy? Of course. I was the big fish. Do you think they would say that you used them? Well, I think it was a mutual thing.

You know, I took their money and they put me out in front of the cameras and told me what to say. That's what I'd say. McCovey died in 2017 at her home in Katy, Texas. By that point, anti-abortion politics had become orthodoxy in the Republican Party.

In 2008, the state passed the misleadingly named Woman's Right to Know Act, which mandated that physicians share misinformation about alleged fetal pain during abortion with women who sought the procedure.

In 2013, a state senator, Wendy Davis of Fort Worth, staged a dramatic 13-hour filibuster of Senate Bill 5, legislation that banned abortion after 20 weeks, required clinics to meet the same demanding standards as hospitals and surgical centers, and required doctors performing the procedure to hold admitting privileges at nearby hospitals.

Davis's filibuster stopped the bill from being voted on before midnight June 25th, the mandated end of the legislative session. She killed the legislation for the time being, and the pink tennis shoes she wore became a symbol of abortion rights activism around the world.

However, Rick Perry called a special session of the legislature the next day and Senate Bill 5 passed. Her efforts propelled her into the 2014 gubernatorial race, but she was crushed by Greg Abbott by a 21-point margin.

In recent years, Abbott has led the charge to erase many of the gains women have won in the fight to control their bodies. We will promote policies that limit the growth of government, not the size of your dreams. Under Abbott, Texas has passed some of the most intrusive and extreme anti-abortion laws that tightly regulate women's bodies.

In 2021, Texas passed Senate Bill 8, which banned abortions after the six weeks of pregnancy. It made performing an abortion a first or second degree felony unless the mother's life is in danger or there is risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function.

The vagueness of that latter provision has terrified Texas doctors into not providing care to several women who have shown up in emergency rooms at death's door. Texas physicians have become less willing to perform emergency abortions than they were in the days before the Roe decision, even as far back as the 19th century. In 2023, the Texas Supreme Court denied Kate Cox of Dallas the right to end her pregnancy, even though her fetus suffered from full trisomy 18.

the severe genetic anomaly that guaranteed that the child, if it survived pregnancy, would only live minutes. If the pregnancy continued, Cox may have lost the ability to have children in the future. She fled this state in order to obtain an abortion, but the procedure remained illegal. In 2023, Amanda Zawarski almost died waiting for a life-saving abortion when doctors hesitated to provide care because they feared criminal prosecution.

For years, abortion-right activists had chanted, pro-life, that's a lie, you don't care if women die. In fact, the state legislature and Governor Greg Abbott did nothing as the deaths of pregnant women in Texas soared 56%.

In 2021, Jocely Barnica, a mother of one, was joyful when she realized she was pregnant. She hoped to deliver a sibling for her daughter, but on September 21st, 17 weeks into her pregnancy, she was miscarrying with the fetus pressing against her cervix and about to exit the womb. Barnica's life was in danger, but doctors at HCA Houston Healthcare Northwest told her and her husband that because of Texas' law, they could do nothing until the fetus's heartbeat had stopped.

Fearing criminal charges, doctors refused to medically accelerate the delivery of the dying fetus and let 40 hours pass. Varnika writhed in agony, begged to be allowed to see her daughter, and a fatal bacterial infection ravaged her body. She would die three days later, leaving her young child without a mother. On October 28, 2023...

18-year-old Neva Crane was six months pregnant. She began vomiting, and she became soaked in sweat during a baby shower at her home in Beaumont. She, too, was miscarrying. Her boyfriend drove her to nearby Baptist Hospitals of Southeast Texas, where they waited for five hours in a waiting room before doctors diagnosed her with strep throat and gave her a prescription for antibiotics.

sent home or conditionally worsened. Crane was driven to another hospital in town, Christus Southeast, Texas, St. Elizabeth. Her fever soared to 102 and she was bleeding, but her doctors continued to do nothing but administer antibiotics. Eventually, she was wheeled into a third emergency room. Doctors gave her two ultrasounds to, in their words, confirm fetal demise.

Crane's mother, who had long been opposed to abortion, screamed at the medical staff to help her dying child. Crane suffered for 20 hours before her heart failed. Barneka and Crane's stories were revealed by the investigative news outlet ProPublica just days before the 2024 presidential election. Democratic nominee Kamala Harris made abortion rights a central part of her doomed campaign.

When an anticipated red wave expected to bring a Republican majority in the 2022 congressional elections fizzled, and a number of abortion rights initiatives passed, even in traditional Republican strongholds like Kansas and Ohio, many pundits believed that a Dobbs effect had heralded a permanent political realignment, or at least the upcoming presidential election results. This phenomenon clearly failed to materialize for Harris.

Abortion rights referenda passed in seven states, including Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, and New York in November 2024. But they foundered in Nebraska and South Dakota, as well as Florida, because the support of 57% of voters fell short of the required 60% supermajority. In Texas, Trump, once a pro-choice person but now the proud instigator of the Dobbs decision, carried 56% of the vote.

One of the most prominent Trump supporters, University of Texas Ph.D. Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, might soon be in a position to see his dreams of a national ban on the so-called abortion pill Mifepristone and even the reversal of the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut Supreme Court decision that overturned state laws banning control pills and devices.

When Harris lost, anti-abortion extremists exuberantly celebrated Trump's triumph. Neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, who if right-wing rap artist Kanye West got to go to dinner in 2022 with Trump, saw the Republican victory as an opportunity to reduce women to the status of property. Hey, b****.

We control your bodies. Guess what? Guys win again. OK, men win again. And yes, we control your bodies. Hi, I'm your Republican congressman. Hi, I'm your Republican congressman. It's your body, my choice.

Texas government has become big enough to regulate women's bodies and small enough to fit inside of its citizens' bedrooms. Even though abortion rights have always enjoyed far greater support than Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has suggested,

The right of women to control their own bodies and get the vital medical care they need to prevent bodily harm or their premature deaths seems on the precipice of vanishing. This grim reality is not deeply rooted in America's history or traditions, but unfortunately, it is the current status quo, and Texas has played a major role in bringing us to this place. I'm Stephen Monacelli. I'm Michael Phillips. Thanks for listening. ♪

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus...

Does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really Not Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That?

The opening? Really, no really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, I'm Garrison Davis. I hope you've been enjoying the holiday season. I know I have. Or at least I've been trying to. It's difficult because I keep getting distracted by this funny feeling. Like there's something watching over me up in the sky. Something buzzing around. And at first I thought this might just be Santa's sleigh. But then I realized, no, no, no, no, no. This is actually a drone.

And oh boy, am I not the only one. Drone fever is just sweeping the nation right now with the New Jersey drone panic somehow making headlines based on unconfirmed and very disputable reports. The New Jersey drone thing isn't real. This is mass hysteria. Almost all of these incidents of UFOs, UAPs or mysterious drones are actually just real.

like regular airplanes going to the airport. Airplanes that you can track online via flight radar. These aren't nuclear scanning drones. These aren't secret government military projects. These are either like legal, registered, hobbyist drones in some cases, but really just mostly airplanes. A few weeks ago, there was a really cloudy day over the New Jersey coast, and that day, all of the drone sightings stopped because...

You couldn't see up in the sky. You couldn't see the airplanes. But yeah, the New Jersey drone panic isn't real. The reason why there's blinking lights flying over LaGuardia is that those are airplanes taking off and landing at an airport. This whole panic was boosted by unconfirmed social media reports and local news sites trying to gain clicks. And

And somehow this just broke through into the national mainstream discourse. But fears over invasive drones isn't necessarily unfounded.

Though the ones that you should be worried about aren't UFOs or nuclear scanning drones, but are actually police drones, which are becoming all the more commonplace. More and more cities this year have adopted police drone programs. So for this episode, I'm going to rerun my episode from early in 2024 about police drones.

Now, in the past year, there's also been a great increase in the reporting on police drones, including a fantastic Wired investigation titled The Age of the Drone Police is Here. They analyzed nearly 10,000 individual flight records from July of 2021 to September of 2023, containing more than 22.3 million coordinates.

The investigation showed that poor communities, especially working class and immigrant communities, were disproportionately surveilled, with police drones in Chula Vista flying over neighborhood blocks on the west side more than 10 times longer than blocks on the suburban east side.

And considering Trump's second term, fears over widespread police surveillance are only more relevant, especially in immigrant communities and even in instances where drones like this fly over places like abortion clinics. And these fears are not unfounded. In 2020, the San Diego Union Tribune discovered that the Chula Vista Police Department was sharing its license plate reader data directly with ICE.

Now, it's still unclear how many drones Chula Vista PD currently has, but as of 2022, they had 32 of these high-definition camera-mounted drones. Drones which have now done over 20,000 flights since 2018. All of this will get discussed more in-depth in the episode, but for an update...

Later, I discuss a court case to secure the public's right to access drone footage. And this case is still ongoing. Last spring, the city tried to appeal to the California Supreme Court, who ultimately declined to take up the case, basically reaffirming the lower court's ruling against the police to withhold drone footage. This

This case is, once again, back to trial court to finalize details of how certain footage should be released. So without further ado, here is my episode from the 2024 Consumer Electronics Showcase, Police, Drones, and You. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, I'm Garrison Davis. Now, last week, I spent a few days in Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Showcase.

Most of the time at the convention, I was just walking around the show floor looking at various new types of surveillance equipment, AI products, and various other bullshit that was being peddled to the many, many industry attendees of CES. But I was also able to go to a few panels. Now, panels are really interesting because you get to hear people who are working inside industries talk about stuff that they don't usually really publicly talk about very much.

And on the first day of the convention, I went to a panel about drone technology, which

Half of the panel was about how Walmart is launching new delivery drones in Dallas, Texas. The other half was about police drones. And that's what we're going to be talking about here today. How the police are using drones, why they're using drones, and how you can probably expect to be seeing a lot more drones up in the sky piloted by either an AI or a police officer. So let's get started.

Chula Vista is the southernmost kind of medium-sized city in California, with a population of 278,000 people. Chula Vista has a police force of 289 sworn officers, as well as 120 civilian employees. On top of their nearly 300 officers, they operate a drone fleet, 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, launching high-def camera-mounted drones from four locations throughout their small city.

I'm going to quote from an article from the MIT Technology Review, which did a deep dive onto Chula Vista's police drones back in February of 2023. Quote,

Chula Vista uses these drones to extend the power of its workforce in a number of ways. For example, if only one officer is available when two calls come in, one for an armed suspect and another for shoplifting, an officer will respond to the first one. But now, CVPD's public information officer, Sergeant Anthony Molina, says that dispatchers can send a drone to surreptitiously trail the suspected shoplifter. Unquote.

And this really gets at the heart of how these drones are going to get used. They exist to funnel more people into the criminal justice system. Instead of having to choose between two calls, one of which actually could relate to saving someone's life, the other just a petty crime, now the police can easily follow someone doing a petty crime while responding to other calls and eventually catch up. It's a way to just expand the amount of people that can be arrested and thrown into jail.

Nowadays, drones are pretty common tools for police. Over 1,500 departments currently use drones, usually for special occasions, though, like search and rescue, crime scene documentation, protest surveillance, and sometimes tracking suspects. But at the moment, only about a dozen police departments regularly dispatch drones in response to 911 calls.

The first of which was Chula Vista PD, who launched their, quote, drone as first responder program back in 2018. With the goal of having an unmanned aerial system or drone be proactively deployed before an officer is on scene.

Now we'll hear from Chief Roxanna Kennedy of the Chula Vista Police Department talking on the drone technology panel at CES. We are seven miles from the Mexico border, and we are the second largest city in San Diego County. So we have about 290 officers, and we serve a community of about 300,000. But because of the close proximity to the border, we have a lot of people that travel back and forth.

We have a drone program that I'm awfully proud of. We are responding proactively to calls for service in our community. And so we have drones stationed from four different locations throughout our city. We have pilots in command that are on the rooftop.

And then we have a operations center where we have sworn officers that are part 107 pilots that fly the drones. So we are responding now to calls for service on average, an officer on scene, a drone pilot on scene that's sharing information with our officers, live streaming that information.

on our cell phones or in our computers, they're receiving information about the call within 90 seconds on average. And so what it's doing for us in Chula Vista and for our community is we are providing information rapidly, real-time information to officers so that they can make better decisions so that everyone goes home safely. We say the community's safer, the officers are safer, and the subjects that we encounter are safer. So we're awfully proud of what we're doing.

The way police are able to deploy drones used to be a lot more limited.

The use of drones is regulated by the FFA, the Federal Aviation Administration. In most cases, the FFA requires that both hobbyists and police departments only fly drones within the operator's own line of sight. But starting back in 2019, agencies and vendors could start applying for a Beyond Visual Line of Sight, or BEVLOS waiver, from the FFA to fly drones remotely, allowing for much longer flights in restricted airspace.

Chula Vista PD was the first department to get a BEVLOS waiver. The MIT Tech Review estimated last year that roughly 225 more departments now have one as well. Another thing that I always talk about, because I think it's critical, is the concept of why we're using drones.

what the benefit is to the community with the use of our guns. And I truly believe that when my officers can pick up their cell phone before they even respond to the call and they can look and see the scene,

what's happening, where the individual is, if the person's pacing in the middle of the park, there are no children around, and there's nobody that's within the reach of this individual harming, you might not have to rush into that scene so quickly. Officers can deescalate, make better decisions, and I mean, this is just a game changer for law enforcement. And right now, we were the first agency to be involved in the Integrated Pilot Program with the FAA.

We're very proud of that, that they trusted us enough for us to be the organization that brought forward all these these ideas that are now being utilized in law enforcement. Now, I've watched a lot of videos of police talking about why they're using drones, of drone training companies talking about why police drones are so important.

In one video on their website, this guy from Skyfire Consulting was talking about how police may not have had to kill Tamir Rice if they simply had a drone watching beforehand so they could see that it was a toy gun. Which is a ridiculous thing to say because in the 911 call that jump-started this entire police interaction, it was expressed that the caller thought the gun was probably a toy. And...

This notion that is simply if police have more ability to surveil, they'll be able to respond safer and apply less deadly force, I think is a pretty suspect premise.

Now, the effectiveness of drone technology in law enforcement is challenging to verify and quantify. The MIT Tech Review cannot find any third-party studies showing that drones reduce crime, even after interviewing CVPD officers as well as drone vendors and researchers. Quote, nor could anyone provide statistics on how many additional arrests or convictions came from using drone technology.

I was able to find some data on CVPD's website talking about how many drone-initiated interactions resulted in arrests, but quantifying additional arrests seems to be a little challenging. Now, if you look at Chula Vista PD's own drone response stats, the vast majority of deployments, I estimate around 70%, are for what the Director of Investigations for the Privacy Rights Group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, refers to as, quote, cross-border.

crimes of poverty, unquote, which he believes will be the target of most drone policing as opposed to violent crime.

Nearly 30% of Chula Vista's drone deployments are for what's categorized as disturbances. Almost 15% are for psychological evaluations. 10% are for, quote, check the area and information. Over 7% are for welfare checks. 6.5% is for, quote, unknown problem. And over 6% is for suspicious person. And another 6% for traffic accidents.

Now, some drone deployments do result in patrol units not having to be dispatched, but CVPD also says that drones have existed in thousands of arrests. And I'm really not sure if having a drone following someone around is the best thing for a 5150 psych evaluation. The presence of a police officer doesn't always make those situations better either, but...

I don't see having a drone be a really calming presence if you think someone needs mental help.

Funding a whole fleet of heavy-duty surveillance drones and paying dedicated operators costs money. Now, it's unclear to me how many drones Chula Vista PD currently has, and on their website, they list 10 different drone models currently being in their fleet, most of them really expensive DJI drones like the DJI Matrix, the DJI Inspire, the DJI Phantom, the DJI Maverick, as well as drones from a few other random companies.

But nevertheless, Chief Kennedy is very grateful for their local police foundation for heading up the funding for their DFR drone first responder program. Let's hear from her. I don't know if anyone in here is in law enforcement, but many agencies use drones.

And there are all different types of drones that are available. I call them reactive drones, or ones that are like the tactical drones that you can use to go in on a hostage situation or a missing person to check in the canyon areas, or interior drones. We have drones that go underneath beds, go inside attics, all types of different drones. And many organizations

have drones like that. But a DFR drone is very unique and different because these drones are flying, as you can imagine, 18,000 missions. It puts a lot of wear and tear on them.

But that is one of the biggest challenges beyond the fact of funding. So we don't have huge budgets that are allotted for drone programs. And so we had to be very, very creative in our police department. And we were very blessed to have a police foundation that has taken on the responsibility to help us

really start our drone program and continue it going forward. So funding is always going to be a challenge and dependent upon the drone that you use, there are some drones that you can't get any, you can't use for asset seizure funding nor can you get grants for because

Sometimes when it comes to foreign made drums, there are many challenges as well. So you have to think of that. And then we deal with legislation right now. That's the new challenge that we all have. We had to fight some

I'm, like I said, agnostic. I want to use what's the best drone out there and protect the information. And we do that with encrypted software programs that are on private servers. But you'll see that there's a lot of discussion about drones and what drones we should be using right now.

We'll get back to the chief's offhanded mention of legal battles in a bit here, but Chula Vista's budgetary situation may not be as dire as the chief makes it out to be.

On top of their current $55 million operating budget, back in 2020, the La Prensa newspaper revealed that departments in San Diego County had secretly been getting hundreds of millions of dollars in high-tech police equipment, including armored vehicles, facial recognition, and phone-breaking software.

license plate readers, drones, riot gear, among other miscellaneous technology, as a part of a DHS grant program due to their close proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border. Chula Vista was one such department, and as of 2020, so four years ago, they had already received over $1 million in grant funds from this DHS program titled the, quote, "'Urban Area Security Initiative.'"

Considering Chief Kennedy's budgetary concerns, drones actually have a lot of upsides financially, as they are often a lot cheaper than alternative surveillance methods, as well as being relatively easy to deploy remotely, either with a joystick or just by clicking a point on a map from a comfy office building.

Issues around this ease of use was pointed out by Dave Moss, the director of investigations for the privacy rights group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who was quoted in the MIT article saying, quote, Up until the last, like, five to ten years, there was this unspoken check and balance on law enforcement power, money.

You cannot have a police officer standing on every corner of every street. You can't have a helicopter flying 24-7 because the fuel and insurance is really expensive. But with all these new technologies, we don't have that check and balance anymore. That's just going to result in more people being pulled through the criminal justice system, unquote.

officers constantly are on the air now. Is UAS 1 available? Is UAS 1 available? Because it's giving them more information. Think about the fact that you can look at your cell phone. I can be anywhere in the world and I can look at, it lets me know whenever there's a drone flight and I can watch, I can have visual awareness, aerial overlay of what's happening in my community no matter where I am.

Advancements in technology are leading to further normalization of police surveillance. Ten years ago, would people react to news of a 24-hour police drone program the same way they would now? What was once the threat of Big Brother has since become a very sought-after and fetishized nanny state.

In the V for Veneta graphic novel, anarchist writer Alan Moore imagined a fascist Britain characterized by surveillance cameras around every corner. And now cities around the country are setting up their own street-mounted cameras linked to private security cameras and ring doorbell cameras to create a network of live coverage around a whole city, which is instantly accessible to police.

The more widespread consumer adoption of new technologies like small camera-mounted drones and doorbell cameras, the more acceptable it seems for police to add such technology to their arsenal of surveillance tools. It almost becomes expected.

Chula Vista PD has routinely declined to answer why their drones are always recording both to and from the scene. And the department has put in a lot of effort into managing the backlash against their expanding drone program. And I'll tell you one thing, even some of the activists, they were very concerned about drones in the sense of privacy. What are you doing with these drones as you're responding? You're trying to gather data and information to spy on us, right? And we have...

I have to go to a lot of detail in explaining that. As our drone lifts off, it is immediately, it is recording because that's the information gatherer for us. As that drone responds, the camera is already going almost three miles down the road to where the scene is and giving us vital information as the officers are responding. But one of the criticism was, well, on the way back, it

Is your drone just going in my backyard? What if we're smoking marijuana in our backyard? And I say, if you're in California, it doesn't really matter, but whatever. We'll let that one go, right? But we said, okay, we get your concern. And so what we did was we worked with the software company that we work with, and they created an automatic so that as a drone returns, it automatically tilts to the horizon,

So we're not recording anything. If another call came out, we can immediately go back in and map it for us and share that information later on. But the goal is to listen to your community as well. Chief Kennedy's claim here is difficult to back up because CVPD have refused to show the public any of the drone footage they routinely collect.

But if we take the chief at her word here anyway, she admits that the drone goes back to recording at street level as soon as there's another 911 call, as they record everything on the way to a scene. And the way she phrases this whole tilt feature is quite misleading, because the camera never actually stops recording. She just claims that it tilts slightly upwards in between 911 calls.

but it's still capturing footage up to three miles away the entire time it's in the air. Police in Chula Vista have flown over 18,000 missions with their drones. That's a lot of footage.

When talking about the privacy concerns had by some residents of Chula Vista, Chief Kennedy really emphasized how much her and the department really care about listening to community feedback and how data transparency is so important to CVPD. Community engagement is essential, especially in law enforcement.

Because there are so many challenges when it comes to misinformation that's out there. And whenever you're a part of what's deemed as a government, everyone thinks that you have some ulterior motive when you're involved with any type of technology. And so we have worked really hard to build very strong relationships with every aspect of our community.

So it was about in 2015 when we started talking about the concept and the possibility of drones and I laughed and chanted and said George Jetson because that's my story that I used to and I love it because I made fun of my guys when they said that we want to fly drones. I said, oh come on now, what are we going to be George Jetson flying around with cars? And then I saw today they talked about a flying car. So it happens. It happens, all right? And so

With the community, we started having these conversations. We created a working group. We started doing community forums. We started asking the community about what would you think if we were able to do something like this?

We even went to some of the organizations that may not always be so supportive of these types of groups. We worked with the ACLU and asked for their input on our policy. So before we ever flew a drone, we call it the crawl, walk, run phase. We're still at the very end of crawl. We're not into walk yet.

And we've been doing it again also for five years. So you have to make certain that you're transparent. And we provided all types of information that are available if you go to children. All right.

put in is to visit Police Drones and it'll come up with us. And you can look at all the things that we do, all the information that we share, the flight maps that we share. I mean, it's just super important to have those community forums. Every year we do a community forum twice a year where we ask for input from our community.

Later on in the panel, Chief Kennedy said that CVPD is quote-unquote extremely transparent about their flight data and quote-unquote have nothing to hide relating to their use of surveillance drones. Which is a curious claim considering the fact that CVPD has historically kept all drone footage hidden from the public and has fought in court to do so.

Despite the chief's emphasis on the police's commitment to transparency and the importance of listening to community feedback, even going as far as to consult the ACLU when developing their drone program.

For years now, the Chula Vista Police Department has denied all FOIA and public records requests for any drone footage. In response, Arturo Castanarez, a Chula Vista resident and owner of the local bilingual newspaper La Prensa, filed a lawsuit against the city. CVPD argued that all drone footage should be categorically exempt from the public records requests on the basis that the footage could be used for a future investigation.

Just last December, only a few weeks before CES, the California 4th District Court of Appeals ruled that this blanket exemption is invalid and that not all drone first responder footage could be classified as part of a pending or ongoing criminal investigation, pointing to examples such as 911 calls about a roaming mountain lion or a stranded motorist. And police were not happy about this ruling. I'll talk about their reaction at the end of the episode.

But controlling the narrative about the drone first responder program has been of the utmost importance to Chula Vista police, as the chief herself expressed at the panel. And we're real good about telling our story. If you don't tell your own story in law enforcement, other people will tell it for you and it might not be the right story.

So we've gotten really good at sharing on our social media and through, you know, YouTube channels and everything, success stories of what we're doing. That is quite the claim there. To paraphrase the Electronic Frontier Foundation,

Without public access to their drone footage, it makes it very difficult to assess how much privacy you have in Chula Vista, and whether police are even following their own rules about when and whether they record sensitive places, like people's homes, backyards, or public protests.

And that's why this recent ruling and the legal precedent it sets is a huge win for actual transparency and marks the first step towards the public finally getting a look at how these drones are being used in Chula Vista.

With drone first responder programs spreading to police departments across the country, modeled after the one in Chula Vista, combined with the increasing presence of stationary street-level cameras, the ability for police to be watching everywhere without the need for on-the-ground officers creates what the EFF refers to as, quote, a fundamental change in strategy, with police responding to a much, much larger number of situations with drones.

resulting in pervasive, if not persistent, surveillance of communities, unquote.

Speaking of persistent surveillance, near the end of the panel, the chief announced that Chula Vista PD is planning to expand their 10-hour-a-day drone first responder program to a constant 24-hour-a-day drone surveillance program. More than doubling the department's capacity to have eyes in the sky would mean a lot more work hours for drone operators, as well as a large increase in the amount of video files being stored indefinitely.

But Chief Kennedy claimed that they're looking into offsetting costs by replacing some of the drone piloting team with AI-assisted piloting and autonomous devices. You've clearly been a leader with drones as first responder technology. Looking forward, what does the future hold for the department? I assume you're spending a lot of time telling others about the program in addition to using drones. But beyond that, what does it look like?

Well, my hope is that we'll be moving towards 24-hour operations. Right now, we're from sunrise to sunset. We go until close to 10 o'clock at night, which goes a little bit beyond that. And then one of the challenges, and I know you're only getting like a little piece of the information about exactly how we're doing this, but

From the four different locations that we fly, on each of the rooftops we have what's called a pilot in command. And that pilot in command is contracted through a company and they just have visual awareness of the sky and they work in coordination with our drone pilot that's inside our operations center. But that's a huge expense for us to pay.

I believe for each site right now with the operations that we have, we're paying about $100,000 per year. So that's $400,000 for four locations beyond all the other costs associated. So it can get expensive. My hope is that-- and we keep hearing about it. We've seen some of the testing, and we've been testing it as well in our area, or what's called Drone in the Box. Or there are some of the systems that are out there right now that

organizations are using that are autonomous. And so we're getting there, but we're not quite there because it's very different when you're dealing with flying over people and you're flying into areas where the drone was to drop out of the sky and harm people in our community. That could create tremendous challenges for us. So we're very, as I mentioned, the crawl phase. So to explain how these AI autonomous drones would work, it's essentially this

box about the size of a truck bed that can either be mounted in like a police pickup truck or be stored on various rooftops around the city. And someone just needs to point at a place on a map and the drone will fly and pilot itself around obstacles and basically circle around an area to do surveillance. And you can call it back when you're done.

This would require a whole bunch of drones to just be launching and being piloted by themselves. You wouldn't have to train random police officers to become FAA licensed pilots. And you could just have the whole thing in the box, like it's called a drone in the box. And these are only going to become more common and cheaper.

Imagine having 10 of these throughout a city, launching from like 10 different rooftops, being able to fly around by themselves, constantly going around communities, constantly going to GPS coordinates linked to 911 calls, creating a whole wealth of footage instantly available to police live streamed from the air.

Matt Sloan, the founder of Skyfire Consulting, a company here in Atlanta that trains law enforcement agencies on the use of drones and DFR programs, thinks that we'll start seeing autonomous deployment of police drones within the next year or two as police budgets increase and become allocated for unmanned aerial systems. He referred to the state of drone use by police as, quote, rapidly escalating.

Chula Vista likes to market itself as a pioneer of the smart city movement, which consequently makes them able to receive a whole bunch of grant funding. Now, the idea of the smart city is built around having a massive amount of data to automate certain city services. So for this idea to work, there needs to be a way to collect that data. And these drones are a major part of that.

The website for the city of Chula Vista also lists projects like electronic transportation, adaptive traffic signals, an app for non-emergency city services, as well as, quote, crime mapping and police dispatch modernization, unquote, as also being smart city initiatives.

We have what's called Live 911, and that allows my officers to hear incoming 911 calls before dispatch even puts it into the system. They can hear what's going on there, and that is tremendously invaluable to them. We have so many different layers of technology that have really showcased the value.

Live 911 is a new piece of software that allows patrol officers to listen to live stream to 911 calls directly and pinpoints the location of the caller via GPS.

Now, I don't even have time to get into the many reasons that this could be a bad idea. But simply put, police do not need to respond to every call that goes into 911, let alone be giving random cops this ability to self-dispatch on their own. It just seems like that could have many, many consequences. But anyway, back to drones. According to a 2020 article in the newspaper La Prensa, it says,

Cities in San Diego County, like Chula Vista, have received equipment such as tethered drones used for stationary surveillance, pole cameras, license plate readers, and cell phone cracking technology used to circumvent passwords from the Urban Area Security Initiative DHS grant program. A lot of these technologies have use in the smart city idyllic plan for data collection to automate city services.

After the drone panel was over and I was walking around the show floor at CES, I couldn't help but notice all of the smart cameras and AI image recognition systems being advertised for law enforcement applications. Software that can almost instantaneously scan through a wealth of footage and track people's movements, run facial recognition, and identify every article of clothing.

versions of this type of software are already in use by many police departments, and they will only get better, cheaper, and more common. In effect, what this does is remove a lot of the detective legwork. Instead of having to manually map someone's movements and track down what niche Etsy shirt someone's wearing, these AI systems can now do this all automatically.

To quote the MIT Tech Review article on CVPD's DFR drone program, quote, "...as the technology continues to spread, privacy and civil liberty groups are raising the question of what happens when drones are combined with license plate readers, networks of fixed cameras, and new real-time command centers that digest and sort through video evidence."

This digital dragnet could dramatically expand surveillance capabilities and lead to even more police interactions with demographics that have historically suffered from over-policing, unquote.

Pedro Rios, a human rights advocate with the American Friends Service Committee and a member of Chula Vista's Community Tech Council, was quoted in the MIT article saying, quote, people in the community have no awareness of what images are captured, how the footage is retained and who has access. It's a big red flag for a city that says it's at the forefront of the smart city movement, unquote. These drones, they're revolutionizing technology.

The world, I mean people who are not taking drones seriously right now will be left behind. We have flown 18,150 missions. You can go on our webpage, you can see the flight data, we're extremely transparent. We share all that with our community. We have nothing to hide. We are in the business of saving lives and I believe drones are one of the best de-escalation tools.

If they truly have nothing to hide and are extremely transparent about the use of their camera-mounted drones, I wonder why they've spent years in court fighting to keep every second of drone footage from being seen by the public. Luckily, after Chief Kennedy talked for like 30 minutes about how much they care about community engagement and how transparent they are with their flight data...

I was able to ask the chief how their commitment to transparency relates to the recent lawsuit she just lost over hiding drone footage. And I also threw in a question about drones at protests. Let's take a listen.

Yeah, a question for the chief. So I know you talked about the importance of listening to the community and community engagement. And I'm not sure this is the case for your department, but other departments who've kind of followed suit, for your example, have been using drones to like surveil First Amendment activity stuff. And I know you recently lost a court case regarding the availability of drone footage. So I'm curious about kind of what...

what the rationale for that footage is and how that plays into this idea of trying to be transparent with the community for how these drones are being used.

Now, this is either a straight up lie or a huge cope and a gross mischaracterization. But more on that in a sec.

I think it's really important, as I mentioned, there are ethics involved and the ethical responsibility that you have as a law enforcement agency is super important. So how you utilize your drones and how you do outreach with your community is fundamentally important. And so we don't use our drones for... If there was...

A protest, we would not use our drones. If there was, if it turned into a riot, 100%. So if people were out there and they have the ability to speak freely, to share their concerns, and if it's in opposition, our goal is to make sure that we keep it safe for all parties involved on either side. So my hope is that other people look at it the same way that we do,

and hopefully I've been able to answer it as much as I, believe me, I'm dying to give you more, but I can't, okay? - Thank you for those questions. Folks, we're out of time. Maybe there could be questions after the session.

So yeah, there were no more questions after mine. I kind of shut down that possibility. Anyway, okay. So first of all, the line between a protest and a riot is meaningless. Police can declare a riot for any reason they see fit, including people being in a road marching. I've seen this happen dozens of times, nearly hundreds of times, actually. So just moving on from that immediately, let's go back to the court case.

The city of Chula Vista did lose the argument that they were trying to make. They did lose the case. The 4th District Court of Appeals ruled that claiming exemption from the Public Records Act was unlawful and sent the case back to trial court to hammer out the details of how much footage is subject to public disclosure and figure out a process for standardizing the release of the footage.

Now, the same day I attended this panel in Las Vegas, January 9th, the city of Chula Vista requested an appeal to the California Supreme Court to prevent the release of their aerial video footage. There is a 60-day waiting period where the high court will decide whether or not to take the case. And if they decline, finally, it will go back to trial court to decide on the process of how selected drone footage shall be made publicly available.

The police are now currently claiming that making DFR footage adhere to the Public Records Act would violate the privacy of Chula Vista residents captured in the videos, which perhaps demonstrates that the aerial videos should have never been captured in the first place.

I'm going to read a press release from the city's communication manager. Quote, unquote.

So the city is both trying to argue that having to manually review each requested file to determine if the video in question is related to a pending investigation, as well as redacting personal information captured on camera, would be way too costly and time-consuming. City officials claim that reviewing and redacting videos from one month to obscure faces, license plates, and backyards would take a full-time employee around 230 days.

I'm going to read a little bit more from the city's recent statement. Quote, unquote.

Somehow, the city is missing the point that this is the very reason the drone footage is being requested to learn the actual nature of this highly influential drone first responder program that's being adopted across the country.

If the existence of this footage is such a massive privacy violation, that implies that the recording of said footage itself implicitly violates people's privacy. And the harder police fight to hide their sweeping collection of aerial footage, all the more suspicious this entire program seems. So that is what I have to say about Chula Vista's drugstore.

drone first responder program. In about a month and a half, the Supreme Court of California will make their decision on whether or not they're going to hear this case. If they decline, then the precedent will be set statewide against this exemption of the Public Records Act

by hiding drone footage. So that will be really cool. And then hopefully within the next year, we'll finally be able to see what some of this footage actually looks like, how good their cameras are, how much they can zoom in, all of the details of how much of the city they're capturing, all this kind of stuff, how often the drones are in the air, all of those types of things that will be easier to highlight once we can actually take a look at the footage. And I assume that...

going through and releasing requested files from one month will probably end up not taking 230 days. But I do know how the police love to love to stretch out these public records requests for as long as they can. As the request that this lawsuit stems from dates all the way back to April of 2021. So hopefully, hopefully more than three years later, we'll finally get a look.

Special thanks to LaPrensa for starting this lawsuit and doing all of the hard work to actually force the police to be transparent. And if you want to read more, I'd recommend checking out their website, LaPrensa.org, as well as the MIT Tech Review piece, which provided some really, really useful information to fill in the gaps between my own research. So yeah, thank you for listening to It Could Happen Here. It certainly could happen here in terms of seeing more of these little fuckers flying around in the air.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, is

Does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's...

It could happen here. The podcast that's happening right now.

This is maybe the foremost of the Putting Things Back Together episodes. I'm your host, Mia Wong. With me is James Stout. A guy who likes to put things together. Yeah, and you know, on the subject of putting things together, over the last, I don't even know, three, four weeks, the question I have been asked the most by everyone is, how do I start organizing? And...

You know, the problem with how to ask for organizing is that it's not a question that has clean or simple answers. Now, the most common answer you get is just join an org. And the problem is that most of the people who you are hearing this from are already in an org and want you to join their org. Yeah. Also, the problem is a lot of the orgs that are currently dominating leftist spaces in the United States are trash. Yeah. And...

bad for people. Bad for people in them, bad for people who are not in them. Yeah. Here's a little test you can do. Is your org currently sad that Bashar al-Assad is no longer governing Syria? Because if that's the case, leave. Yep. And that's a lot of orgs. That's a lot of orgs. Yeah, that takes most of them, right? Now, we'll come back to orgs in a bit, but what I'll say about orgs is that, okay,

Okay, if you know an organization in your area that you like and you think does good work, and most importantly, spends their time actually doing work instead of either infighting or talking about doing work, join them, it'll be good. But the important thing about organizations, and this is something we'll come back to later, the important thing about organizations is they have a lot of people. Yeah.

And the thing that makes organizing work is people. It's not organizations. It's not even necessarily ideological labels. It's there being a bunch of people who you can use and who want to do things. Yeah. But something I realized that the more I had these conversations, right? You know, I'm having it with friends. I'm having them with strangers. I'm having them with other organizers. And the more I had these conversations, the more I realized something sort of startling is.

You, the person listening to this, almost certainly already knows how to organize, but you don't know that that's called organizing? Yeah, that's a very good point. I have encountered some of the most stunning, I mean, organizing that, like, I can't discuss the specifics of, but like some of the best organizing I've ever encountered, I have ran into in the last three weeks from people who don't think that they're organizers and started talking to me about their stuff. And I was like, what? Like, people

People are winning victories that the hardcore committed organizers haven't been able to do in like 30 years. Yeah. And it's just by random people who don't think they know how to do anything. Yeah. Can I tell a little organizing story? Do we have time? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, go for it. So I remember in like 2018, I am on a trip with a friend. We're coming back and we see the arrival of the migrant caravan. One of the migrant caravans, the one that everyone decided to have a fucking cow about right before the 2018 midterms.

And at that time, they were corralling the people of the migrant caravan in a baseball stadium in Tijuana. And like it was raining every day. So the baseball stadium ends up looking like the Battle of the Somme after like a couple of days. Right. You know, kids in needy mud and shit. And I didn't particularly know what to do. But evidently, there were people there who were hungry and thirsty. And so I get three of my friends at this time. I was still making coffee.

about half my money riding bicycles and the other half writing. So my friends and I are supposed to do a long bike ride. All of us are people who make a living riding bikes, right? We're not like expert organizers. And I was like, hey guys, this is fucked. What should we do? We called a friend who has a company who makes waffles and

We obtained as many waffles as we could physically carry across the border. At that time, we weren't able to get in. We found a way to get in. We began distributing the waffles. After that, we put something online. People sent us money and we continued feeding people for months.

None of us, I think, had a particular plan or a schedule. Yeah, it was a bit chaotic at times. But A, we were able to do that with a lot of other people. Clearly, it wasn't just us, right? But we were able to process tens of thousands of dollars and feed thousands of people there.

B, everyone there, and I've seen this countless times, especially working and organizing with refugees for the most part, people are so good at organizing each other and themselves. When we got there with bottles of water and food, there were a thousand people there who have not had some time to drink for days, let alone more than a thousand, I think, let alone something hot to eat, right?

Everybody made sure that the children and the sick people got what they needed first. Organizing is something that is very inherent in us as people. It just, we don't call it that. Yeah, and that's part of what I want to try to, the myth I want to try to puncture with this, because I think, particularly in the US, but this is true in a lot of places, there's this way in which the organizer, sort of TM, capital T, capital O, the organizer gets held up as this

Sort of, I guess, even a particularly masculinist thing, which is it's this this guy with specialized knowledge. Yeah. And that's just not true. This brings us something that I think is actually really important, which is what what even is organizing. Right. And the answer is that most organizing is you get it. You get a group of people together. You get them to show up to something and then you do something. Right. And the thing about this. Right.

That's something all of you know how to do. If you can organize a dinner party, if you can get eight people to show up to a place to eat dinner, you can do this. It is largely the same skill sets. And all of the skill sets that make people good organizers are skill sets that you have to develop to work a job. One of the things that comes up a lot in this, which is

less discussed and also kind of annoying, but you have to manage it, is that organizing is about people. And sometimes you have to do things like you have to manage people's egos. But I don't know, almost all of you work jobs or have worked jobs. You have had to deal with your boss being on one. You have the skills to do this. You know how to do the interpersonal work.

relationship stuff. It's just that you don't think about that as organizing, even though that's just what it is. Yeah, that's the core of it, is getting people to do stuff. You do it every day.

Yeah. And the way you do this is by building relationships with people. Right. And this isn't necessarily friendships, although that works. And like one of the easiest ways to start organizing is by getting all of your friends together because you're already friends. You have preexisting relationships and being like, OK, motherfuckers, we got to go. We got to go do something.

And actually, I love that the first thing that you brought up was an admittedly sort of medium-ish scale lift version of this. But one of the very easiest things that you can do is you can just get food of some kind. You can either buy it or you can make it yourself. And you and a group of like eight people, not even eight people, you can do it with lower. I know people who've done this just solo, is that you can just go give food to people. Yeah, literally, it was this morning.

So I'm tired. Yesterday morning, I have some of my house neighbors, right? And it was cold. And so I went out and gave them some hot breakfast or hot coffee. It's super easy to do. If you are struggling socially, wherever you are, maybe you're finding it hard to make friends. I know that's the thing that people often struggle with, especially if you've moved to a new place or post pandemic, or you're still concerned with large gatherings or any of those things. Like if you start doing that, you will find other people who want to do it too. Like so many of my friends I organize with are people who,

Like when we had the end of Title 42 and people were in between the fences there, a lot of the people who I organize with now or who I help people with now, I didn't know. I just showed up with a giant solar generator that I happen to have and some stuff that we had a whip around a cool zone for. And like people who care about the same things as you are generally cool. And it's a good way to make friends. And then you can go on from there. Yeah. And there's a second compounding thing here too, which is that

You know, feeding people, it's a way to build relationships with people. And also, it's a really good way for people to get to know you in general and know that you are someone who will help them with things. Yeah. And from there, and this is a very common example. I mean, this is I literally had this conversation with with one of my friends who's like an old school Food Not Bombs organizer. Food Not Bombs is a very, very it's a cool organization. You can just like found a Food Not Bombs chapter online.

They have like a couple of principles or you can just do your own thing. And I'm pretty sure it's still like the largest anarchist project in the world. Yeah. Because all it takes is you and like three other people and you just go feed people. But the thing is, from doing that, right, if there's other things that you're concerned about, people will bring you their problems and you can help them doing it. And this is a very good way to get into other kinds of organizing because suddenly once you start building these relationships, everything sort of cycles and cycles and you know, you get involved in more and more things.

Yeah. And that's kind of a late stage thing that we're sort of jumping to a bit. But I want to go back to the beginnings of how, so how do you get a group of people together to do a thing?

And the answer is you kind of already know how to because you presumably at some point in your life have organized a group of friends to go do something, right? You've got a group of people together to go accomplish a task. Yeah, it could literally be anything, right? Yeah. If you've got some people to go to a bar...

you have the skills. One way I've been thinking about it recently in my project is thinking about it as like putting together a heist crew. Okay, I could vouch for this, right?

The feeling of walking up to eight people and telling them individually, I'm putting together a team and I want you. It feels you can just do it. There is nothing stopping you. There is no nothing in the world can stop you from just walking up to your friend and going, I'm putting together a team.

And it feels exactly as good as you think it would for a heist movie. It rules. It's so fun. Amazing. Yeah. But this gets into also what kinds of people you want to do, right? Because obviously, you know, there's two vectors of this. There's

On the one hand, you have the aspect of, okay, who do you know, right? And a lot of organizing is just about, here is a problem, and I know someone who has some sort of skill or resource that can help deal with it. And you put people in touch with each other, and that's organizing. That's...

So much organizing is literally just, hey, like I have like a broken part of my car. I know someone who's like a car mechanic, right? And you put them in touch and you have successfully organized people and you have built relationships and you have made all of the sort of social web that creates organizing. You've made it stronger. Yeah. It also just feels good because, you know, and that's an auxiliary benefit to all of this is that it's a great way to sort of break the isolation we're all under.

Yeah, I think the best solution for despair is... I'm thinking of a quotation here, something, the busy bee has no time for despair. But the thing that makes me feel better about the world is that I have seen that people can fix massive problems with very few resources by just showing up. And I think...

Organizing is what gives me, what allows me to enter this period of time that we're entering into with a great deal more hope than I otherwise would have done. Yeah, and do you know what else will help you enter a situation with more hope? Is it the products and services that support this podcast? I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, but we are not in control of the length of the ads. They just do it. We're sorry. Here's a really long period of ads. I'm so sorry.

We are... So I want to return to my heist career. I don't know, if you're a D&D person, the other way you can think about this is you're putting together like a Dungeons & Dragons party or like an RPG party. And the way you need to think about this is, okay, so you've picked a thing that you want to do, right? You've seen something in the world that is bad and you figure, you go, okay, I can do this thing to solve it. And maybe that's, you know, it's literally something as simple as feeding people. Maybe that's...

You know, I want to start I want to start doing tenants organizing. I want to start because my rent is too high. Right. People are getting evicted. I want to start doing like immigration defense. Yeah. And from there, you make a list. And that list is, you know, what you're interested in doing. And you try to match what things need to be done with people, you know, who have those skills. Yeah.

And this is, you know, this is where you really shouldn't get into the heist things, right? Because everyone has their sort of like heist role. Now, obviously, part of this that you want is you want to create sort of balanced teams, right? You want people who have overlapping strengths. So you don't just have only one person who can do a thing. And part of the way to successful organization works over time. And I mean, just how successful organizing works is that eventually you are trying to organize yourself out of a job, right?

which is to say you want your organization to function such that if you're not able to do it, you know, or just you're gone or you cycle on to a next thing or, you know, any number of things that can happen, you want the organization to still be able to keep working without you and you're trying to get people to be able to replace you as the person who's like organizing the thing, right? Yeah. And at this point, we can start talking about the kinds of skills that people need for organizing and a lot of people, and this is,

unbelievably common when I talk to people and like especially women and especially like a lot of non-binary people and trans people particularly have this is that

People don't believe that they have any skills. And then you talk to them for five seconds and they're like, well, I'm good at carrying heavy objects, right? I'm good with kids, which is a huge one. We'll get to in a second, right? Or like, I don't know. I have a car. That's a huge skill. There are so many different skills that are so useful for so many things. I'm just going to go over lots of things that are actually really useful to get people a sense of like the kinds of things that there are massive roles for.

So one of the most important ones, and this is something you deliberately look for, you know, this is one of the things you do at the beginning of any union organizing campaign. Someone who's good at talking to other people and making friends, that is a staggeringly useful person. Yeah.

how you're going to organize a workplace is you find the person who everyone likes and talks to and respects and you talk to that person because that person can sort of like organize people down the chain because they have their relationships already and also they'll be good at talking to new people and spreading the organization that way. And so like...

you know, if you're just someone who's social or, and this is also very useful, if you have a friend who is very social, because I know a lot of us are not very social, but you probably have a friend that you're thinking of right now who is very good at conversations and is charming and is good at making friendships. That person, unbelievably useful, incredibly useful and compelling skill.

Yeah. There are also things like research, people who are good at, and I think people are much better at research than they think. To take like a tenants organizing example, right? One of the common things you have to do is find out stuff about a landlord, right? Yeah. And there's the higher difficulty version of that, which isn't that hard. Also, I want to, I want to mention this, but like going to a courthouse and finding records about who owns property companies. No,

Not that hard. It's not that hard. It's like you could just do it, right? It's not as hard as you think it is from someone saying it. But there's also even just easier things than that, right? That all of you probably already know how to do, which is just looking at someone's social media profiles and finding out information about them. Yeah. And this is very useful, yeah, for like union campaigns, you know, bosses. If you've ever been a person who uses dating apps, especially if you're a woman, then you know how to OSINT actually.

actually, maybe you don't credit yourself with that skill. But 100% that like you've developed that skill to keep yourself safe and you can use it for good. Do you want to explain what OSINT is and how that process works? Yeah, sure. So open source intelligence is an acronym that doesn't really need to exist. It's gathering information from open sources, things that are openly accessible, right? As opposed to like HUMINT, which is like being a spy or SIGINT, which is capturing signals. Open

Open source information is you're creeping someone's Instagram, creeping their Facebook, looking at the weird fucking shit that they put on Goodreads, right? All the data that is out there largely on the internet about us. A lot of people put a lot of information on the internet and it's very easy. And I would imagine if you're under 50 and maybe if you're over 52, you just know how to do this because it's what you do anyway when you want to find out about someone. And especially if you...

are a person who goes on dates with people who you haven't met before and haven't been introduced to by a mutual friend, but you meet on the internet, you probably already do this to keep yourself safe. Yeah, and this is something that's very useful for, I mean, there's so many use cases for this, right? There's, you know, there's the very obvious ones where you're dealing with a local Nazi and you're trying to organize around like running them out, keeping people safe from them and you can find information about them. But,

But, I mean, it's useful for cops who are beating people. It's useful for politicians, particularly. It can be very useful for landlords. This happens all the time. It can be very, very useful for bosses in union campaigns. Unions have, like, teams of researchers, usually, to, like, do this kind of stuff. But the thing is,

Also, and this is something I don't think people understand. Those guys, the people they're hiring to be researchers are just you. But they got a job being a researcher for a union. They have the same skills as you. They know how to Google stuff. And they know how to look through people's dating profiles. And look through their Facebooks and their Instagrams. A big one, a big one that rich people especially do not think about is Cash App and Venmo. Oh, Venmo is gold. Particularly Cash App. Because...

Yeah, yeah, because people just leave public transactions out there. That's how they got, what's his name, the congressional... McGate. Can I legally call him the congressional pedophile? I guess I'd call him the accused pedophile. Yeah, yeah. The man credibly accused of sleeping with an underage woman. Lots

Lots of times, you know, and one of the ways they found that was that and also like paying paying for that. Right. Yes. Which is which is rape, by the way. I want to be very clear about that. Like, yeah, having sex with someone who is underage is rape. It is always right. Yeah. You know, and the way people found that was that they just looked through like his cash app history and they found all of these money transfers to people. You know, this is all very, very simple stuff. That's that's very, very useful organizing wise that you already know how to do.

Yeah. Pinterest is another absolute bang for people's faces.

is a huge benefit to organizers because, you know, this gives you, like, this gives you a flexible person, right? It gives you someone you can, like, flex into any of a bunch of roles that you need and also can, you know, pick up skills to learn things. Having a car and being able to drive, and I know a lot of you don't do this, but if you do do this, this is, you immediately, even if you literally cannot contribute anything else to a project, you're

being able to just drive a bunch of water to a place. Oh, yeah. Huge. Staggeringly useful. The amount of things that people can't access because they can't get there is vast. Especially when I...

When I talk to migrants who have recently arrived in the US, they don't have a US cell phone. They can't Uber. Oftentimes, nowadays, you can't even pay for mass transit with cash. You have to have a special card. And then you have to get to the place to get the card, right? The problems you can solve by being able to drive someone five miles are enormous, especially in the US where everything is designed around everyone owning a motor car at all times. Yep.

Yeah, and like transport-based skills are also very useful. I mean, if you hike a lot, that's a very, very useful skill. There's a lot of sort of mutual aid projects. There's a lot of, you know, I mean, even things like setting up summer camps is a thing that like leftist groups do, right? And being able to hike, very good for that. It's good for things like wilderness rescue. There's a lot of, you know, James, like the work you do that has to do with like going and helping migrants, like being able to hike is...

staggeringly useful skill. Yeah. Yeah. It's very, like, it's useful. It's important. It's okay if that's not something you can physically do or, you know, that works for the way you like to live your life. Like, another thing I was thinking of, which can be massively important and people don't realize is,

If you know how to take off a tail light and replace the bulb in it, we're entering a time when people with DACA, people with TPS, people who are undocumented, people on temporary migration statuses are going to be deathly afraid of any interaction with law enforcement. If you can change the bulb on someone's tail light or their turn signal indicator, for those of us in the UK, then you can meaningfully protect that person in a really important way. And it

It can literally take 10 minutes. And this is something that, you know, can scale up depending on how much skill you have, right? There's even just very basic auto maintenance stuff is very useful for stuff like this. But, you know, like if you're a carpenter, right? If you're an electrician, you do some kind of trade work, right? You do plumbing, right? That is the thing that is massively useful.

to a lot of people. There's a lot of other kind of just skills that you have from your job that can be very useful. I mean, having someone to manage a spreadsheet. Oh, yeah. Yeah, is staggeringly useful. And another one that I think people don't understand that they really have, but like being able to set up a meeting, right?

And like having a thing that lets you be like, okay, here's when everyone is free. Like you probably have to do this for your job or just for, you know, trying to get your friends to go even just like be on a call together or like go have food or like just do anything. Yeah.

That is literally genuinely one of the most important skills you can possibly have as an organizer is the ability to just sort of like go talk to people and be like, hey, can you show up to this thing here? Yeah. And that is that is so much of just what organizing is. Can you be here at this time and then trying to figure out a time?

Yeah. So we're going to close out this sort of skills section with some, I think, just sort of like domestic-y skills that I don't think people realize are super useful. If you have a button maker, you are instantly the single most useful person in any organization. I love that, yeah. Well, you can obtain a button maker. They're very easy to use, but...

If you have one or you know the person who has the button maker and suddenly you can just crank out buttons for every single event, they rule. Everyone loves them. It helps enormously. It's awesome. That's a badge for those of us in the Commonwealth. Also, if you have a sewing machine. Yeah, I was about to mention that. You're a hero. One of my friends recently made me a little patch.

and it's really cool and I like it and I'm putting it on my stuff. But, uh, if you can, so like, that's a skill that I do not have. And it's so great when people can, uh, like fix stuff for someone or, you know, make stuff fit someone. You know, if you're a person who finds it hard to get clothes that you like to wear to make you feel good and someone, one of my friends could do that. And, uh, one of my friends was making, uh,

clothes for another friend for like a Renaissance fair and like it was the nicest thing I've seen someone do for someone else in a very long time. It really made her like feel like nice and cared for and like you might think that like this is just a weird little thing that you like to do with your sewing machine but you can meaningfully really make someone feel cared for using that. Yeah and that's a huge part of what organizing is right?

And that goes into one of the things that is also an appreciable skill that's very useful is...

I mean, just like being nice to people, being kind to people and having people around who are good at like keeping groups together. Yeah. That's its own distinct kind of person is someone who can, you know, keep all of the people who are involved in a thing, enjoying being around each other. That's that's that's a kind of person who's very valuable. And it's something that you can look for, you know, and if that's not you, like you can that's something you can, you know, find in your friends, you can find in the sort of the people around you.

Yeah, definitely. There's also something that I think you can tell when an organization is collapsing because this is like the first thing where the quality drops. Drawing and graphic design are very, very useful because a big part of what you do organizing is like you make a flyer and you put a flyer on a bunch of telephone poles to tell people that there's a thing happening. Yeah. And

And yeah, you know, and this is also something, you know, later on you might be making a social media presence, but just having good artists and having good graphic design people is enormously useful for this kind of stuff. Yeah.

And along this line, there's things like making music and there's a bunch of different ways this can go. This can be an immediate thing where, you know, like you have people on a picket line, right? And everyone's singing songs and this is great. We love this. Also, and this is another thing that you can be thinking about in terms of what skills you have and what things you can create. Benefit shows. Oh, yeah. This has been a huge part of a lot of how some of the union stuff up here has been getting funded is by just having like punk benefit shows and

And if that's the thing that you can do, or you know people in bands, you know people who make music, you know people who just make stuff who are willing to contribute it to the cause, that's great. I remember one of, we had one night last September, it was so cold. We were in the desert and there were like a thousand people, right? And we were, at that point, we were really struggling to feed everyone even, you know, because there was so few of us. But my friend bought out like their guitar and some bongo drums they had. And I think I had my harmonica in my truck.

And we were sitting around with these, we had some Sikh guys, had some Uyghur folks come from China, and some Kurdish people, and they were all just playing their different music. And it was so nice. Taking people out of a shitty situation for a moment with music, again, don't underestimate how important that is. Don't feel like if you have that skill, it's not a useful one.

No, and this is something I've been starting to say more and more. If you need a theory-brained way to say this to someone who is a curmudgeon-y Marxist who hates fun, morale is a terrain of struggle. There's a reason why morale is one of the most important factors of military campaigns. You can't get people to do things if they're too depressed to do it. And being able to raise people's morale, it's this massive...

If you want to get one to go into technical language, it's a massive force multiplier, right? It makes everyone you have enormously more effective, the better they feel about themselves and the better they feel about the situation they're in. And things like music, things like art, I mean, things like pulling pranks. This is a, if you were, if you were a good practical jokester, this is a staggeringly useful skill, both like in terms of, you know, you need to be careful about whether you're playing your pranks on like other people in the org, but like,

You know, if you know how to just pull pranks, this is a really, really useful thing in union campaigns, in tenants organizing. There are a lot of people who you can prank, and it's very funny, and it lowers their morale, and it raises your morale. Yeah, and going back to your music as a morale, it's a terrain of struggle. The other memory I have last year of playing guitars is in Rojava.

being inside at night because everyone was getting drone struck all the time and it was dangerous to be driving around sitting around with some uh zd friends and like we spent all night playing the oud which is like a uh well it's like a guitar with a gourd on the bottom i don't know how to describe it like it's a stringed instrument it's a stringed instrument is what it is and uh like that made everyone so happy we had such a nice evening everyone was able to like

get through this relatively difficult thing. Like, you know, it sucks that people are being killed and just for driving around or existing and they're bombing all the civilian infrastructure and the power keeps going out and all these things, right? Like, but there's a reason that those people have kept Ood around after 15, 13 years of war. And it's because it is important. And so don't overlook that. And, you know, and resisting fear is another huge aspect of this, right? A lot of the ways that people

like a lot of the ways that you demobilize people, this is why regimes like this spend a lot of effort trying to make people afraid, is that it makes it harder for you to act. And things that, you know, the things that make you less afraid, even if they sort of seem silly, are very, very important. And, you know, on sort of this note, one of the things that, you know, as you've assembled your group of people, right, one of the things that's important to be able to sort of

have a grasp on is that you can't just do organizing by having it only be the capital, the serious thing, the capital T organizing thing all the time. Your organization will not hold together. There has to be actual like

formed between you and the people you're organizing with and the people you're trying to help? I don't want to call out any organization in particular. There is an organization that perceives organizing to exist solely in the realm of wearing a high-vis vest and carrying a clipboard and getting people to write their email addresses down and then telling them to attend things. And like,

Maybe there are several organizations like that. I don't know. I've just, I've perceived one locally. If you don't have those bonds that, that like those interpersonal relationships, like,

These things won't hang together. So many of my happiest organizing memories, like again, going down James's memory lane, I guess, I have a memory of Christmas Eve last year, 2023. Me and my friends have been out. I know some of them listen because some of them have come across from different states to help us over their Christmas holidays, which is nice. And it was cold outside.

And we had been feeding people all day. And then we'd heard some people in another location that we'd gone to find. And then we got to the end of the day and like, rather than just going home, I had a bunch of, we had some MREs left, the refugee MREs that are vegan. Lots of us are vegan. So we were like, oh, we're not going to find any other vegan food in the middle of nowhere out here. So we all sat around eating our little vegan MREs and like just talking and like sharing some thoughts and things we'd experienced over the last months of doing this. And like,

It's those moments that make your organizing group so much stronger. No one's telling anyone to do anything, you know, like those genuine bonds and the love and friendship we build up between each other doing things that are very important.

Don't overlook the value of those because it's extremely valuable. And this is something that I think you can understand in your own life pretty easily where, okay, if a random person on the street walks up to you and tells you to go do something, are you going to do it? And it's like, no, why? No, probably not. Like, I don't know, maybe it's something like really sort of

hey, there's children in a burning building. We're going to run in and grab them. But like the odds are, no, you're going to ignore them. But if your friend goes and tells you to do the same thing and, you know, you've been friends with them for a long time and you really care about them, the odds of you doing it are much, much higher. And that's...

That's all organizing is. It's finding ways to, you have a thing to do and you go talk to people and you ask if they want to help you do it. And the stronger your relationships are, the more likely that is to happen. And that's why it's very important to do things like

you know, just like having potlucks, like bringing snacks to meetings. Oh yeah. And, and like, you know, even if you're doing a potluck, it's, it's good to, you know, you do like one capital O capital T organizing thing, right? You get like a little bit of work done, but mostly everyone's just sort of relaxing and eating chili or whatever. Yeah. If you're a baker, you know, you can bake people. That's a wonderful thing to share. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah. And just knowing how to cook. I realized I forgot to mention this one. Knowing how to cook is a staggeringly useful skill. It's useful in literally every, literally any kind of organizing you can possibly be in. It is a thing. It is a skill that is useful in like, it's useful in war zones. It's useful. Like literally no matter what organization you are in, if you can cook for people. Oh yeah. And you don't even, and you don't have to be like a good cook. It's just like, you can show up with food that you have made and,

You have instantly made this whole thing more successful. Yeah, definitely. I've had some wonderful meals in Warzone and deeply appreciated those people. More broadly, though, those ties, the way we organize without the state, the reason I believe that that is the way we should organize and the way we will continue to organize and the way that we can make the state irrelevant is...

because we understand each other as people and care about each other as people. And then we approach our organizing holistically, right? With everyone in it, knowing this person is good at this, but they're struggling with this right now. And I care about them. So I'm not going to make them do that right now. That is how we can build sustainable communities in a way that state cannot. And in a way that capitalism cannot, right? Because, uh,

fucking Hertz rent-a-car doesn't care or know about its employees in a way that we, who organize with people and care and love one another, do. And, like, that's why our organizations will always be stronger than those created by capitalism or the state. Yeah. Unfortunately, speaking of capitalism or the state, we're taking our last ad break. Yeah, hopefully it's Hertz rent-a-car. We are back. So,

I want to wrap things up by doing a couple of doing a few things. One, I want to talk about some kind of basic organizing things that you're going to have to do that are not very difficult, but are extremely important. And second, I want to talk a bit about how we did the first organizing project that I ever was involved in, which was tenants organizing.

Because it's really not that hard, right? If you just go do the thing, it will happen. And suddenly it ceases to be this like, oh, this domain of expert knowledge or this like, oh, this is a really difficult thing. If you just, I don't know, you go give food to someone and suddenly you've done that and it's happened.

So there are things that are important to like basic organizing stuff, knowing how to book rooms from like churches, from libraries, from whatever meeting spaces, and also knowing how to book rooms in places that like accommodate disabilities.

is a huge thing because a lot of people book meetings in places that are wheelchair accessible and it's a fucking fiasco and you can avoid that very easily but you have to put a little tiny bit of work into it. Yeah, literally I reached out to a friend to book a room

last night because I knew they were good at that stuff. Yeah. You know, there's a range of people's schedules, getting people to show up for stuff, things you can do to prepare if what you're doing is basically all the things we've been describing, right? Getting together a bunch of people to do a thing that is technically forming an organization. Yeah. Now, how formal or informal you want it to be or just, you know, maybe it's just your organizing project or whatever. There's things you usually want. You want some kind of email so people can contact you.

In tandem with the email, something that's very helpful that I think younger people tend not to think about is getting Google Voice. Yes. When Google Voice lets you set up a voicemail account so people can call you and leave phone messages. I mean, everyone should just do this because this is the way that a lot of older people communicate, right? They won't send you an email, but they will leave you a voice message. And it's very, very useful for this. Childcare is something that's important. I did. I mean, a lot is probably too strong of a word, but like I did childcare when I was four

organizing and it wound up being really helpful because there's a lot of people with kids. And so, you know, there's a couple of ways that this could work. One is that, you know, you have everyone bring their kids, you have like a little space, you bring them like coloring stuff, you bring them toys, you bring them games, and you just sort of watch everyone for a while. And as an organizing thing, again, if you're good with kids, that's very useful, staggeringly useful organizing skill. Another way this stuff happens is, you know, everyone pulls together 10 bucks and you hire a babysitter

Yeah. For a bunch of kids. And that's a very useful organizing thing. Yeah. I organize with people who have kids. I remember four years ago. Fuck me. 2020. A long time ago. And also yesterday. But like we were organizing to feed unhoused people. We were having a big Thanksgiving dinner. And like some of my friends have very young children and they bought them. And I think that's actually really cool to do that. A, like...

For those kids, it is normal that like we look after people in our community. This is what we do. And ever since I've been little, this is what we did. And like, it's also very nice for people like,

A lot of my friends also brought their children down to the border, especially last year when we had... Because there were children there anyway, right? Yeah. Some of my friends who bring their children down, and their kids would play with the other kids. And it doesn't matter that some of the kids are Kurdish and some of the kids are from China and some of them are from Colombia or whatever. They'll get along just fine when they're four or five years old. They don't care. They just want to kick a ball or see a teddy bear or something. And I think it's really good for your children to... You're bringing them into a world which is...

cruel and at times unequal and like your kids seeing that like we can make a difference and we can do this I think it's one of the best educations you can give your children. Yeah, and it's something that's good for everyone involved. Yeah, exactly. And it's also very I think one of the things I see a lot when people are organizing with refugees of the unhoused is like they're just people like you don't need to be afraid of them like they don't want to hurt your children and

Having your children around shows that you have grasped that they're just people and that you feel safe and your children are safe around them. And I think that's valuable too. You're giving both parties some dignity in that moment. There are some other very basic things that I think are very important if you've never done this before.

I'm going to talk a little bit about how you run a meeting. Yeah. And you would think that this doesn't matter until you watch a group of 100 people who don't know how to do this attempt to get anything done, and it just is a fiasco. And this is even true of sort of smaller groups. Yeah. So I'm going to give you how to run a meeting 101. Okay.

Okay, a very common way to organize meetings that people use all over the world, and it's very effective is you have two things, you have an agenda, and you have a stack. And those are like the technical terms for them. The agenda, I mean, it's an agenda, right? You know what an agenda is, you put the things that you need to do on it.

And another thing that's very helpful with these is, you know, you're going to be operating under time constraints because people don't have 45 hours to be in meetings. And my God, you don't want to be in a meeting for that long. Yeah. You know, knowing how long roughly you want to talk about these things is very, very useful and making sure that you're sort of moving the conversation through the stuff on the agenda because you have more stuff that you need to talk about. Yeah. All of this again, like this all sounds very obvious. And again, you know how to do it.

But until you've been in a room where people have not realized they need to do this, you don't understand how important this stuff is. The pain of it not happening. God, I have watched rooms full of like, these are like professional scientists, right? This is an entire room of 150 people with physics PhDs.

who don't know how to run a meeting. And it's a shit show. And all of this stuff could have been avoided with some very, very simple things. Yes. The other thing, and this is genuinely a piece of social technology, right? It is the stack. It is very simple, right? You have one person who is the stack keeper. And when someone wants to talk, you have one person talking at a time. And when someone wants to talk, they raise their hand or they make some kind of signal to the stack keeper. And that person writes their name down. And so you now have a list of who gets to talk in what order.

And so you go down the list and people get to say things. And again, you know how to do this. This is not like a complicated thing. But again, I have watched people who collectively have like more PhDs than like I earn money in a week. Like,

who know I cannot be able to figure this out. And you do. I believe in you. I believe in you, dear listener, that you can do this. There's a very common... Sometimes this is one person and sometimes this is two people. A very common way to do it is to have a stack taker and then have someone who's the facilitator. And the facilitator's job is to call on the people and to try to move the conversation forwards and make sure everyone's involved. And also another important part of this, and this is, again, something you'll know from your stupid work meetings...

is you have to get people like me to shut up. Your meetings can't just be one person giving a speech. You have to cut them the fuck off and you have to get to the next person. Yeah, and doing that courteously is a skill. Yeah, yeah. And finally, on this note, there's a lot of, if you want to go into more technical stuff, part of the things the facilitators use and part of

you know, the formal name for this is like the progressive stack, but it's just a thing that's very useful in organizing is you want to make sure everyone in a room is engaged and talking and that it's not just three people who talk all the time.

Yeah. And, you know, and so the idea of the progressive stack, right, is you're trying to find the most marginalized people in the group, people who are least likely to speak, and you're trying to get them in first. And sometimes this is literally just like, hey, someone hasn't been talking in a meeting this whole time. And you can like ask them what they think about something or ask if they have anything to say. And a lot of times they will, but they just don't feel confident enough to say it. And this is this is a very, very important skill for a facilitator or just even you could just do this in a meeting too, right? Like,

You can be the person who goes like, hey, do you have this person have anything to contribute? And that is an enormous thing. Sometimes it can be, you know, sometimes it can be a little bit awkward, but it's a very important thing because you're just losing out on people who have really, really valuable ideas and contributions and plans. And if you just let the same three people give speeches, you can't get to the stuff that's actually useful. Yeah, definitely. If you've been a teacher,

Or in any way, you probably have this skill. You might not consider it a skill, but even if you've been a TA in grad school, something like that, you probably know how to do this. Yeah. So I'm going to put all of this together briefly, and I'm going to run through basically how we started the first organizing project I ever did, which was a tenants' union in Chicago. Okay. So, and this is based on my memory. It's been a long time since I did this, but my basic memory of what we did was...

Okay, so one of my friends is an experienced organizer. I was like a tiny baby, right? This was my first offline organizing project ever, right? I had no idea what I was doing. I still thought I was a guy, which like that's how much of a fiasco like little tiny baby Mia who doesn't know anything this was, you know, and so my friend talked to some people that he knew and he knew that I, you know, I was interested in getting involved in tenants organizing and we like went to a cafe. Mm-hmm.

And we sat down and we ate and we just talked about what we wanted to do, what our plans were, what things we needed to do to get this organization set up. We talked about ideological stuff. And that's actually is something that's important, too, is part of organizing is getting people to think intentionally about their actions and think politically about their actions. Yeah. Yeah.

And that's something that's very useful. You also have to make sure that you're not forming a book club. Like book clubs are fine, but you need to make sure your organizing group, if you're trying to do a thing, hasn't just become a book club. Yeah. But that, that's, you know, that, that was something that was very useful to us. And, you know, we, we started making a plan and our plan was, okay, we made a bunch of flyers and then we went out and I did this and I walked around through a bunch of streets and put them on light posts or whatever. And then we put them like we, we hung them up in the buildings of tenants, you know, because you can just like walk up the stairs, right. And you just put them on the walls and you,

you know, we had this flyer, this flyer had information, this flyer said, okay, we're starting a tenants union. If you have tenant, if you have issues with your landlord or you want to talk about tenant stuff, like come here at this time, we had an email, you can send us stuff. We had a phone number that you could call, you know? And so, okay. And so parallel to this, we like, I forget if it was a church or if it was some building, um,

some center or something. We booked a room. We were kind of lucky in that we had like local press people. Nice. Who we sort of knew. And this is another useful, like if knowing a journalist can be a very useful skill because one way to get a project off the ground, if you're trying to get to a bunch of people is by finding a journalist who is willing to cover it because, you know, we're, we're finding, we're founding like the first tenants union in this place. Right. Yeah. And you know, so we had media coverage and we got kind of screwed with, when this event eventually came together because there was like three feet of snow that night. Yeah.

People still came. People still came in the blizzard. A lot of people showed up for this. What are things we do? We also started talking to people. We started talking to tenants about their problems. We talked to our friends. We talked to the people they knew. We ended up talking to someone. And this is the thing that just happens. As this spreads by word of mouth, people start contacting you. We ran into a really long-time tenants organizer recently.

in the city who had a bunch of incredible stories about how our corrupt politicians got their jobs by betraying the old tenants organizers. Right. And like, that's the other thing is, you know, another thing that happens in projects is you'll, you'll sometimes you'll just, you'll just pick up someone who's, you know, has been doing this since like the sixties. Yeah. And it rules because they have a wealth of experience and they, they want to go, they want to do stuff.

We plotted out what we were going to do at our meeting. We were going to do some political education. We were going to have a bunch of time for people to talk about stuff. And we were going to get people to understand what we were doing, how they could start organizing. And then we did it. And I, unfortunately, don't remember much of what we talked about because I was off in another room taking care of a bunch of people's kids, which was very nice. But I don't remember what we talked about. But all of those things, all of those steps from the start of organizing

You get five of your friends to go eat dinner, and you talk about what you want to do through... Someone makes a flyer in, like, Microsoft or whatever. You make it in, like, PowerPoint. MSP. Publisher. What's the one I'm blanking? I haven't used it in so long. The one you make greeting cards in? Word up. You're asking the wrong person. There's, like, an actual program, and I've forgotten what it is. You see us make Christmas cards. But, like, you know, okay, so we made a flyer, and we walked around, and we put the flyers up,

And we made it, we made an email, you know, we, we got a space together. We figured out what we wanted to do and then we did it. Yeah. And you know, and there's a bunch of organizing from there. Right. But like we had started a thing and you can do every single one of those steps. And if you can't personally do one of those steps, you can think of a person who, you know, who you can bring in to help you do these things because organizing, you already fucking know how to do it. Yeah. You just have to go out there and do it. Yep.

You can have faith. Yeah, and this has been It Could Happen Here. Go organize.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, is

Does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, Not Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That?

It's the opening? Really, no really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Andrew Sage. I run Andrew and Sam Ufa on YouTube, and I'm here with the voice of Garrison Davis. Hello. Hello.

Hello, hello. And today we're going to continue our journey through Latin American anarchisms and their histories with a sort of a four for one special. Exciting, exciting. Very exciting.

We talked about Peru, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Cuba so far, as well as the Mapuche struggle in Chile and Argentina. And now is the time to explore what's going on at the top of the South American continent, the territory of the former Gran Colombia. And that is the territories of Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, and Venezuela.

But if this is the first time you're hearing about Gran Colombia, let me give a quick and a brief historical context rundown. Gran Colombia was a short-lived political entity that emerged in the early 19th century during Latin America's struggle for independence from Spanish colonial rule. It was formed in 1819 and it encompassed the territories, like I said, of present-day Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama, as well as some parts of northern Peru, western Guyana, and northwestern Brazil.

The republic was envisioned by Simón Bolívar, who had dreamt of uniting the former Spanish colonies into a powerful federation that would be able to resist foreign intervention and secure their independence. The Congress of Angostura declared the creation of Gran Colombia with Bolívar as its first president.

The Republic was a centralized state with a strong executive branch. So, unsurprisingly, tensions soon arose among the constituent regions due to their differences in political vision, economic interests, and regional identities.

Centralized governance had alienated local elites and debates over federalism versus centralism deepened existing divisions. Plus Bolivar's increasingly autocratic rule. I mean, he literally tried to push for a lifetime presidency, obviously sparked internal opposition. So Gran Colombia was facing external threats from Spanish royalist forces and internal fractures.

By 1830, Bolivar had to resign from the presidency, disillusioned by the failure of his vision. And in the same year, Gran Colombia dissolved into three separate nations, Venezuela, Ecuador, and the Republic of New Granada, which later on split into Colombia and Panama. Unlike the other countries of South America that we've covered, these countries had far less large-scale anarchist movements.

But we'll still take a look at what little impact anarchists did make in the past two centuries in these places. This whole series, by the way, wouldn't be possible without the scholarship of Angel Capileti, whose research I drew upon heavily for this historical review. I suggest reading his book, Anarchism in Latin America, for further details. But let's first take a look at the history in Ecuador. At the turn of the 20th century, Ecuador was reeling from a liberal revolution that had just taken place in the country.

The country was shifting as industrialization creeped in, the bourgeoisie were on the rise, and feudal landowners were losing their grip on power. A new secular cultural wave was also beginning to take shape as the clerical authorities began to lose their power. The workers naturally needed a voice in this process and they found it first with the rise of the Partido Liberal Obrero or the Liberal Workers' Party in 1906.

Around the same time, on New Year's Eve of 1905, the Confederación Obrera del Ecuador was founded in Guayaquil, a city that would become a hub for worker activity. Both organizations shared a vision rooted in social reform and worker empowerment. It was also around this time that the Cuban anarchist Miguel Albuquerque made a name for himself in Ecuador. Originally, he had come seeking assistance with Cuba's independence struggle, but eventually found himself playing a key role in Ecuador's labor movement.

He established the Sociedad de Hijos del Trabajo, or the Society of the Sons of Labor, and other anarchist groups would also begin forming, contributing to the struggles taking place at the time. The first recorded strikes with anarchist influence took place in 1919, where workers in the graphic arts industry organized to demand better conditions.

By 1922, Guayaquil was the epicenter of a massive general strike, shaped in part by the anarchist-Nicolists who were obviously right in the thick of it. The strike was driven by dissatisfaction among the workers, particularly among the city's urban laborers and dock workers, who were facing really poor wages, long hours, and deteriorating living conditions. Tales all this time.

The strike culminated in a violent crackdown by government forces, also a tale as old as time, with estimates suggesting that hundreds of workers were killed when the military suppressed the revolts.

Most workers returned to their jobs after that, but the trolley workers continued their strike until the 21st of November, when most of their demands were met. How much crossover was there between revolutionaries or workers' rights people or anarchists in Cuba and places like this? Because I assume there was a lot more growing sentiment in Cuba based on how that whole situation turned out in the next 20, 30 years.

And I feel like there would be a decent number of crossroads, or at least some travel between some of these other nearby places. For sure, because Cuba, as we know, gained independence much later than the rest of its Latin American neighbors. Places like Mexico and Central America and Gran Colombia and the rest of South America, they all gained their independence and Cuba was still under the Spanish thumb.

And they remained under the Spanish term until they ended up having to struggle with the Americans as well, and eventually to gain their own independence. I mean, it's all one big pond, I like to say, the Caribbean Sea. So there would have been a lot of transfer and communication between these independent Latin American republics and Cuba, which was still at the time a colony. And so it's really interesting to see when, you know, these Cuban characters sort of show up in other parts and end up stirring up some trouble.

Totally. Well, and it shows just how like pop in the 1920s were kind of like everywhere.

Like, yeah, whether you're looking at, like, labor movement in the United States or, like, everything that you've been talking about these last few episodes about Latin American anarchism. Like, always in, like, the 1920s, there was always just, like, crazy shit going down consistently. For sure. Unfortunately, 1920s is also the time of a lot of decline for a lot of the anarchist movements because 1920s follows, you know, the rise of the USSR. And a lot of people ended up abandoning anarchism

and following that sort of

popularity at the time. Well, and similarly, once we start getting into the early 30s, I remember in the last few episodes that you've done, you see the resurgence of right-wing populism really hard. Yes, we tend to see a lot of resurgences. And all this revolutionary potential that's been growing the past few decades all gets co-opted or channeled into right-wing nationalism, right-wing populism, and that's a whole other pivot that happens.

Not just the more like, you know, communism's statist one in like the 20s. Do we see a resurgence? We do see a resurgence in the right-wing populism. Yes, we also see a resurgence in the anarchist politics. Remember the 30s was also the time of the Spanish Civil War. Sure. And so in that time, you had the anarchists picking up steam again, and you also had following that Civil War.

a lot of the anarchists from Spain spreading out into a lot of the former colonies in North America. I think part of that rebirth is just because of how tied anarchism and anti-fascism is. That's true. I think inadvertently, the rise of fascism may actually give birth to the rise of more anarchists as people get involved in anti-fascism because these things are so like

you know, sister movements in many ways. I think that may be a contributing factor. That's certainly how I kind of got into this sort of stuff was through anti-fascism. And, and I suspect that that may have also been the case even a hundred years ago. For sure. For sure. I think, um, every story needs a good villain. Unfortunately. And this is the story of anarchism. I mean, the fascists tend to make really, really impactful antagonists. I think. Yeah.

Indeed. At the same time, we also had in Ecuador, as we had these strikes going on, we also had the anarchists doing, you know, that thing that anarchists like to do, which is a study group. Many such cases. Many such cases, many such cases. But I mean, it is an important aspect, the struggles, that sort of consciousness raising. Yes. So these anarchists in particular in Guayaquil, they founded the Centro de Estudios Sociales, which was a libertarian study group in Guayaquil.

And then a decade later, 1920, Yanakis also established Centro Gremial Sindicalista or the Sinicalist Guild Center, which had a mission to, and I quote, liberate all the oppressed of the earth by bringing them into a libertarian syndicate that will replace the present system and opposing all political and religious doctrines as destructive and prejudicial to the rights and aspiration of workers. End quote.

As in the rest of the region, their publications played a key role in spreading the ideas. Again, early 20th century, late 19th century, the anarchists were making papers. Yeah. Newspapers, newspapers, newspapers. I mean, it is a bit of a blueprint for what anarchism continues to be in many ways, even with like

the rise of distroism in the past decade or so, and like popular anarchism. Less newspapers, more zines being held together by possibly one or fewer stables. I like to think that I also continue that tradition, and you and I as well, by creating this kind of audio and visual content. I am a zine enjoyer. I have many zines. But we also have to evolve with the times in some ways.

Not everyone's going to be reading newspapers. Not everyone's going to be reading booklets. Unfortunately, as much as I encourage people to do so, I do think there is value in attacking the information ecosystem that people more often use. That includes, you know, podcasts. That includes your fantastic videos on YouTube. Thank you. Thank you. And yeah, I agree. For sure. For sure.

But they didn't have things like YouTube or the internet at the time. Instead, they had, at least in Ecuador, they had newspapers like El Proletario and El Cacahuero and Pandera Roja, which were carrying these anarchist syndicalist ideas to the workers across Ecuador. They also had the first truly anarchist papers that hit the country were Rendención and Luz y Acción in 1922 and 1929, respectfully. But

as we were anticipating, the 1930s brought some challenges. Marxist-Leninist thought began to dominate leftist circles and figures like José Carlos Marieta Gui and his general Amauta ended up wielding significant influence.

in the workers' struggles. And by the end of the decade, anarchist groups found themselves vastly overshadowed as Marxist-Leninists consolidated power through unified political parties. But despite these shifts, anarchism in Ecuador was really never entirely extinguished. It actually continues to influence workers' organizations, like the Federación de Guayas, well into modern times.

But now let's make our way north to Colombia as a similar story unfolds of anarchism taking root in the early 20th century. And this is actually a fun fact here because both Elise Reclus and Mikhail Bakunin visited Colombia. Reclus was there for research purposes and Bakunin wasn't an anarchist at the time. So they didn't directly contribute to the anarchist movement as far as we know in the country.

By the 1910s, anarchist ideas were definitely spreading, finding a home among students, artists, writers, and workers.

And this wasn't just idle philosophizing. They also got to work building worker societies and organizing mass actions like the May 15th demonstration in 1916, which of course met with brutal police repression. From there, the movement gained momentum. In 1920, port workers in Cartagena went on strike. And by the following decade, anarchists were at the forefront of workers' militancy all across the Caribbean coast.

which was more connected to global struggles in the rest of Colombia and was thus a hotbed of organizing unrest. If you know the geography of Colombia, you'd know that there's a lot of jungle and mountainous region in the middle of the country. It's at the coast where you tend to have more of the activity and connection with the neighboring countries in the Caribbean Sea.

Fun fact, there's actually a lot of people in the English-speaking Caribbean aren't aware of the fact that there are people in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean who consider coastal Colombia and coastal Venezuela to be part of the Caribbean. But that's like the sort of niche discourse that you get on r slash ask Caribbean. Yeah.

The few anarchists that were present in Colombia were part of nearly every major uprising, including the Barranquilla strike of 1910, the labor wave that swept Cartagena, Barranquilla, and Santa Maria in 1918, the first strike against the notoriously bloody United Fruit Company in 1918, the Girardot railroad strike and the artisans and labor strike in Bogota in 1919, the oil strikes in Barranca Bermeja during the 1920s,

including one against the Tropical Oil Company in 1927, which cost 1,200 workers their jobs and painted a target on the backs of the organizers because how dare you mess with oil? And then finally, there was the famous Santa Maria banana strike of 1928, where workers demanded fair wages and better treatment, and the government responded at the behest of the United Fruit Company by claiming hundreds of lives.

After the massacre, the anarchist movement in Colombia was heavily repressed and because of how small it was, it didn't quite pick back up. As historian Max Nedlao noted, publications like Organación in Santa Marta and Fia Libre in Barranquilla disappeared by the late 1920s. This crackdown on anarchists, coupled with the rising influence of Bolshevik-led unions, shifted the landscape and by the 1930s, anarchist organizing was all but silenced in Colombia.

But it's a part of Colombia that we're missing. You see, at one point, Panama was considered part of the country. So there must have been stuff happening on that little sliver of land, right? You'd be surprised.

If we rewind to the mid-19th century, between 1850 and 1855, Panama saw the construction of a trans-ismos railroad. And this massive project was followed by two phases of canal construction. The first by the French between 1880 and 1895, and the second by the US from 1904 to 1914. These projects brought tens of thousands of workers from Europe, Asia, and the United States.

Asia and the Caribbean effectively turning Panama into a melting pot of laborers who brought their skills their culture and their ideas. Asian workers for example that is people from Barbados if I recall correctly there was a time in Barbados's history where it was some massive number I'm not sure if it was like a full quarter of the country's income was just coming from remittances from people who had like had family members sending them money from the canal project back home

And it's not just the Caribbean that was impacted, obviously, as workers from Europe and Asia were also part of this project. And it's the workers from Europe and particularly Spain that brought many of the ideas of class consciousness and anarcho-syndicalism that have been brewing in that region of the world.

And such ideas were of course sorely needed in the horrific working conditions of death and disease that marked the Panama Canal construction project. Workers organized some successful strikes in both the French phase and the American phase of construction, both before and after Panama gained its independence from Colombia in 1903. But it was just before the transition to American control over canal construction that Panama officially banned anarchists from entering the country. For the anarchists that were left,

Well, when the Americans took over the canal, Governor of the Canal Zone General George W. Davis actively suppressed the anarchist workers that remained. In 1907 or ever, despite that repression, 2,000 Spanish workers went on strike for better wages. In 1924, a prominently anarchist syndicalist group founded the Sindicato General de Trabajadores, which was Panama's first central workers' union.

It grew to thousands of members and brought together a mix of ideologies, anarchists and Marxists alike, even those who would later found the Communist Party and the Socialist Party of Panama in 1930. But on such a small sliver of land with so many people mixed in there, there was bound to be a vibrant mix of ideas. And not all of the anarchists in Panama were of the syndicalist flair. Believe it or not, they were actually workers within Panama who aligned themselves with Max Stirner's philosophy.

He had egoists and anarchist egoism. Interesting. In Panama. Yeah, exactly. This blew my mind as well. You don't expect to see that in such context. Were they reading Stirner in Panama? I'm not sure if they were reading Stirner. I'm assuming so, because otherwise, how would they have come to identify with his philosophy? But they did launch a paper called El Unico in 1911. That's what I was wondering is if...

Instead of widely distributing Sterner's actual books, was there some Sterner-influenced newspaper that people were running? Yeah, yeah. Because that makes sense. Exactly, exactly. So I'm assuming some of the people either would have read Sterner abroad or they brought Sterner in.

And they were obviously inspired by it. And they were skeptical of the sort of mass movement, syndicalism that was popular at the time. Sure. Many people are. They were questioning its effectiveness as a strategy for anarchy. Yeah. And so they were focused primarily on organizing sort of smaller affinity groups. Yep. And one of those groups ended up launching that paper, El Unico, to spread the ideas. And obviously it called itself an individualist publication. Yeah.

That's so funny. That's so emblematic of where we still are with anarchism. Oh, that's good. That's good. Yeah. I also think that this kind of diversity of thoughts and strategy is really, really beautiful. And I'm glad to see it in the most unconventional and surprising of contexts. It's why I consider myself an anarchist without adjectives. You know, I really, absolutely. Yeah. I think we benefit greatly from conversation between these traditions and

between these strategies. And so seeing that there were more than one form of anarchism in such a small context, it's really quite inspiring. Yeah, I am with you there. By the way, for those listeners who may not be familiar with the anarchist egoist tradition, I know the word ego and egoism might... Conjure up some psychoanalytical Freudian... Yeah. Yeah.

It might bring some sort of feelings about Catholicistic individualism or like extreme selfishness and that kind of thing. Kind of like screw everybody except me. But

There's actually a much deeper philosophical bent to anarchist egoism that I think everybody should give a chance. I actually recently read what is considered the first manifesto of anarchism. And it was written by this French anarchist named Ancelme Bellegarigue. And he was actually an individualist anarchist. And you actually, in reading that, end up seeing a lot of the influences that would later sort of develop further into anarchist individualism.

from the very beginning. I highly recommend reading it. It's called Anarchy: A Journal of Order. It's available on the Anarchist Library. It's a surprisingly contemporary piece, in my opinion. It was translated by Sean Wilbur, who's another anarchist scholar who I'm really inspired by lately. And it really gets into some of the ideas that I think we've forgotten

in terms of what it takes to achieve the complete liberation of all people. So that's Anarchy, a Journal of Order? Yeah, Anarchy, a Journal of Order. He ended up not publishing more than two issues due to low readership, but that's what happens, I think, when you have many such cases. Many such cases, many such cases. Yeah, I will pull that up on the Anarchist Library and give that a read myself.

Yeah, it happens when you're ahead of the times in a sense. And he actually ends up becoming at least partially relevant to the next episode I'm going to do on the Latin American anarchism series because he ends up making his way to Latin America at one point in his life. In fact, he dies in Latin America, but we'll get to that in time. Finally, we turn to Venezuela. By the late 19th century, refugees from the field of Paris Commune arrived in Caracas.

bringing with them the radical spirit of the International Workingmen's Association. From a few of these immigrants, small anarchist cells emerged, but they were stifled by the brutal dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gomez from 1899 to 1935.

Though few in number, the anarchist immigrant efforts to form mutual societies, organize strikes, and spread propaganda gained them a notoriety that put a massive bullseye on them for Gomez's persecution. And yet amidst the repression, a few sparks of anarchism did survive.

In the cultural fabric, writers like Miguel Eduardo Parlo portrayed anarchists as spiritual revolutionaries, likening them to saints. Sounds familiar. It does sound very familiar. Yes. If you know, you know, back in the days of St. Andrewism. There you go. But his novel, Todo en Pueblo, described anarchists as apostles of justice, which is a really fire title, I must say, as they carried the flame of liberty around.

into the streets. But it wasn't all pros. The early 20th century also saw a spike in industrial strikes. In 1918, for example, a pivotal strike involving transit workers included at least one known Italian anarchist named Vincenzo Cusati. Although defeated, the strike left a mark in the country's consciousness. Inspired by such a strive for freedom, workers united through various mutual aid societies which they were disguised as religious guilds.

the anarchist influence quietly spread among bakers, bricklayers and oil workers. Truly it was the oil boom of the 1920s that reshaped Venezuelan society and of course continues to affect it today. While anarchists and anarchists maintained underground networks in the grown oil sector, state and corporate power proved to be too much.

By the mid-20th century, after the fall of Gomes' regime, the rise of political parties like Acción Democrática co-opted many of the workers who might have otherwise embraced anarchist syndicalism, and anarchist ideals became increasingly marginalized, eclipsed by party politics and state repression.

Between 1936 and 1945, in fact, anarchist repression also gained a constitutional footing in the form of the Lara Law, which banned strikes, associations, meetings without permission from the state, political propaganda, and basically all the usual dictatorial stuff.

After the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Franco, more Spanish anarchist immigrants came to Venezuela. You see, I said they would be relevant. Yes, yes. But they didn't end up impacting Venezuela so much. As immigrants, they ended up creating a mostly self-contained scene, primarily through the founding of the Federación Obrera Regional Venezolana in 1958, which was affiliated with the International Workers Association.

But, as I said, they didn't make too much of a splash in the broader Venezuelan population. They mostly affected other Spanish immigrants. So anarchism never developed into an explicitly mass movement in Venezuela, but elements of it did persist and the unyielding pursuit of freedom was still felt even in the harshest of conditions. So looking today at the countries that composed the former Gran Colombia, I would argue that the spark of anarchism still hasn't died.

In Ecuador, uprisings continue to challenge extractive economies and demand autonomous control over indigenous territories. And some anarchist collectives are active in solidarity, providing logistical support during protests and pushing for horizontal forms of organizing in the broader social struggle.

After the 2021 national strike in Colombia, some anarchist practices have begun to infuse movements against police brutality, privatization, and austerity measures. Mutual aid networks have also emerged, inspired by anarchist practices, to support the communities hit hardest by economic crises. In Panama, anarchism exists on the fringes, but it hasn't been used as a means of

has the potential to provide inspiration to those who are actively confronting neoliberal policies, advocating for workers' rights, and engaging in anti-corporate actions. Finally, in Venezuela, economic collapse and authoritarianism have created space for anarchist ideals to spread through grassroots initiatives. Mutual aid and self-organized community groups have stepped in where the state has failed.

Across these countries, anarchist ideas still have potency. And really my hope is that these places continue to explore the creativity and solidarity that are necessary for liberation. That they continue to struggle and that they go further still. You know, viva la libertad. All power to all the people. Peace.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus...

Does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's what I'm talking about.

It's the opening? Really, no really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Andrew Sage. I'm also Andrewism on YouTube. And I'm here once again with Garrison Davis. Happy to be here. Happy to have you. And we're going to continue our journey through Latin American anarchisms and their histories. We've already discussed Peru, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Cuba, the Mapuche struggle, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, and Venezuela.

And so there are just a few territories left that are considered Latin America. So just before we get to Mexico and Uruguay and possibly even Quebec, I want to round up all the anarchist histories in the smaller states. You're not wrong, but it still is funny. Yeah. Quebec, I mean, honestly, you could say the same for like Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's even a lot of anarchists in Montreal today as a booming anarchist movement, but it still is a little funny. Right, yeah, yeah. I actually wanted to include explorations of Haiti and Guadeloupe and Martinique in this episode, since it's, you know, fairly small anarchist movements there, but...

I mean, I suppose I could just summarize it one time, which is that Martinique had a section of the Internationale at one point in 1895. There was also a branch of the Internationale in 1866 on the island of Guadeloupe. And it is very difficult to establish whether there were any anarchist groups in Haiti ever.

from my research. There was an appearance of socialism more broadly as part of the struggle against domination taking place in the country, but the dictatorships of Haiti have made those kinds of movements very difficult to spring out and thrive. Yeah, I can see that.

But today we're going to be focusing on the anarchist histories in the rest of the smaller states of Central America and the Caribbean. So we'll be covering the sparks of anarchism in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. And as with previous episodes, this is all possible thanks to Angel Capaletti's exhaustive work titled Anarchism in Latin America.

But let me set the scene first and foremost across the lush rainforests and turquoise seas of Central America. Historically, there were several indigenous peoples that have called it home, and that home was violated in the early 16th century as Spanish conquistadors carved bloody paths through the region, replacing the once vibrant pre-colonial societies with the feudal-like arrangements of the encomienda system.

which forced indigenous peoples into labor under Spanish landowners. The colonial era saw the rise of vast plantations for cash crops like cocoa, indigo, and later coffee, enriching a small elite while indigenous and Afro-descending populations endured brutal oppression over the centuries. Fast forward to the early 19th century and the wave of independence sweeping across Latin America reached Central America.

In 1821, the region officially threw off Spanish rule and in 1823, Central America gained its independence from the Mexican Empire. For a fleeting moment, from 1823 to 1839, Central America united as the Federal Republic of Central America, modeled after the US Constitution and encompassing modern-day Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. By 1838, the cracks in the federation were becoming too large to ignore.

I mean for most of its existence the capital of the country alternated between Guatemala City and San Salvador so they couldn't even decide on that. Liberals and conservatives were also split on the economy, centralization vs decentralization and the role of the Catholic Church. And Guatemala was kinda resented by the other states because it had such disproportionate influence. So political infighting and regional rivalries eventually caused the union to splinter. Each state went its own way.

But the collapse of the Federation wasn't the end of the story, as seeds of resistance would sprout across the former territory of the Republic. And among those seeds were the anarchists. So let's start from Costa Rica and head north. In the early 1900s in Costa Rica, you had libertarian newspapers popping up all over the place, as usual. And when you say libertarian...

You don't necessarily mean the... I mean anarchists. Yes, yeah. I refuse to let them appropriate that, too. Yes. So you had names like El Aurora, Social, El Trabajo, and La Lucha, which were echoing the struggles of local workers and the cross-continental knowledge of international discourses.

But even before these publications, would you believe there was enough anarchist danger to stir up the establishment? A very little anarchist danger is enough anarchist danger to stir up the establishment. No, but to tell you how unsettled the establishment was.

So, you know, we're recording this a couple weeks before Christmas, right? Yes, this is going to come out, I think, right after New Year's. Okay, and I don't know if you've gone to church for Christmas before, if that's a thing that you've done. I have, I have. Okay, I have as well. And imagine 1892. You go, it's Christmas time, you go into church, you sit down to get your little... You know, you're supposed to keep the sermon short and sweet, let people get home to do what they have to do.

Right?

But in 1892, Bishop Thiel decided to use his Christmas sermon to one against anarchists. That's pretty funny. Like, imagine just trying to go home and eat your Christmas lunch, and you have to listen to this guy preach against, like, these radical anarchists who are coming to, like, mess up the country. They're giving out food. They're healing the sick. I mean, to be fair, the anarchists at the time were generally a threat to the clerical establishment.

Sure, of course. As was our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Jesus H. Christ. Jesus and his affinity group of 12 traveling around the countryside, stirring up all kinds of trouble. Indeed. Indeed. Seeding revolt against the Roman Empire. We got to stop them. Yeah, I mean, gosh, that's the whole kind of wounds I could have gotten into right there. It sure is. It sure is.

I mean, seriously, Christianity went from being a response to the Roman Empire to being the Roman Empire. And that is like one of the biggest downgrades of the millennia. Yeah, no, it's a super successful recuperation. And that's why I do find as much as it has some problems, liberation theology is

especially the version in the South, to be kind of compelling. I wouldn't consider myself a Christian necessarily. But as a religious sect goes, I am interested in what liberation theology kind of does and how it tries to re-radicalize forms of Christianity. For sure, for sure. I have some concerns about it and other strands of...

Christian anarchism. Same. As somebody who grew up Christian. Yeah, same. But of course, this is not the place to digress about that topic, as we do have quite a few countries to cover. So the Costa Rican anarchists were not just being called out by the bishops, bishops, you know, they were also struggling, you know, for an eight hour workday, such as with the Baker strike in 1905.

And they would also demonstrate against the assassination of anarchist educator Francisco Ferrer. They would also found the Centro de Estudios Sociales Criminal, which was a collective of intellectuals and workers who focused on studying and expanding upon anarchism. And in 1911, they would launch the journal Renovación, which lasted an impressive 70 plus issues. They helped to organize Costa Rica's first May Day celebration in 1913.

And even as late as the 1920s, groups explicitly formed for libertarian action. But unfortunately the anarchist influence wouldn't be as impactful in the country heading into the mid-20th century, as the country faced two dictatorships. However, the defeat of the latter in 1949 actually ushered in the most peaceful and stable political situation in all of Latin America.

I suppose that might be because the Democratic government that followed didn't transgress U.S. interests. They do have a U.S. military base in the country, after all. But let me not speculate too much. Look, who doesn't have a U.S. military base these days? Come on. Cut them some slack. That's right. That's right.

Andrew, I thought you were pro-internationalism, but here we go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look at this parochial, backwards regressive. You're telling me you don't want boots on the ground in your country? Globe emoji in bio version of internationalism. So moving on north to Nicaragua, the spark of labor organization began to flicker in the early 1900s.

But there's little evidence of any anarchist-specific influence. In 1918, the Federación Obrera Nicaragüense, or the FON, emerged and pulled together various mutual societies from across the country, from shoemakers to bakers to tailors, from León to Managua. But this federation wasn't anarchist in character. Both conservative and liberal elites actually tried to use these workers' groups for their own ends.

Within the FON, the Grupo Socialista ended up emerging as a rebel force to challenge these elites and their influence in the workers' movement. But even that rebel group was reformist in nature. Now it is possible that libertarians from Spain and Mexico played roles in the stevedore strikes of 1919 in Corinto, which was Nicaragua's major port city, but I can't say for sure from my research.

We do know that at least one influential person was perhaps inspired by anarchism and that was Augusto Sandino, the leader of the Sandinista rebellion against the US occupation of Nicaragua. Sandino worked alongside anarchists during his time in exile in Mexico during its revolution and the red and black of the Sandinistas actually came from that anarchist influence.

By the 1930s, after the US withdrawal, the labor movement had to navigate a Somoza family dictatorship, which was marked by severe repression of anything that even smelled red. Yet even in the face of state violence, unions and workers groups continued to organize, laying the groundwork for future resistance, including the eventual Sandinista revolution that overthrew the Somozas in the late 70s.

Some social progress was then possible in the country, but it was still marred by corruption and authoritarianism, made worse by the re-election of Daniel Ortega in 2006. He still holds the presidency in Nicaragua to this day, managing to stave off the swell of protests against him between 2018 and 2020, of which anarchists, however small in number, did indeed take part.

If we turn to Honduras now, there's not too much to say about anarchists, again, but Honduras did have a vibrant labor movement. In 1890, La Democracia, one of the country's first mutual aid societies, emerged, with a cooperative spirit that laid the foundation for what was to come.

By the early 20th century, the workers' movement in Honduras had begun to heat up even more, particularly among miners and banana plantation labourers, two groups that were central to the country's economy. In March 1909, miners struck against brutal conditions and poverty wages. The response? Garrison, maybe you can guess? Uh...

Bad things? Violent, brutal repression. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Yeah, that is, you know, what I was assuming, but I didn't want to, you know, make a fool out of myself. 1916, Banana Plantation. Workers at the Cuimo Fruit Company. What was their response? Oh, violence, murder,

I assume. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. 400 strikers were arrested and imprisoned in the infamous Castillo de Amor. I don't see any evidence of mass deaths in this particular case. Which is honestly progressive considering the time.

I don't know. Mass incarceration. Not really that much better. I mean, they literally got imprisoned in this castle, dungeon, jail. Not something I would want to be. Rats nibbling at your toes and stuff like that, you know? No, no. So following these early 20th century strikes, workers gradually began to build some momentum in their fight for rights, particularly during the 1954 general strike against the U.S. banana companies.

This strike led to significant gains including the legal right to organize and the emergence of a more unified labour movement. Now were anarchists involved in these movements? It's possible as the movements do bear much of the language and hallmarks of the anarchist and capitalist thought at the time.

But to identify specific names is difficult, and there doesn't seem to be any evidence of specifically anarchist groups in the early labor history of the country. As in other parts of Central America, it appears that Marxists had a bit more influence in their struggles. In response to the workers' gains, the US-backed military coups arose to counter that progress.

The 1963 coup against President Ramon Vieda Morales ushered in decades of military rule, which stifled labor movements and peasant movements violently. During the 1970s, the campesino struggles intensified as the people demanded redistribution and reforms. They did get some reform under General Oswaldo López Arellano, but these reforms were limited and met with the usual repression.

In transitioning to a civilian government in the 1980s, Honduras remained under heavy US influence, serving as a base for anti-communist activities in Central America. Then neoliberal policies in the 1990s eroded many of the hard-won social and labor rights, as privatization and austerity measures deepened the inequality in the country. The 2009 coup against President Manuel Zelaya marked another turning point in modern Honduran resistance.

Zelaya's progressive policies, including raising the minimum wage and considering agrarian reform. Imagine you're considered progressive even considering agrarian reform. But for that thought crime of considering agrarian reform, he was alienated by the business elite and the US-aligned military and thus couped. And this triggered, of course, a wave of militarization and repression and protests were met with violence and human rights abuses, the usual.

In the years following the coup, movements like La Resistencia unified a broad coalition of workers, indigenous groups, feminists, students who were all demanding systemic change. But the issues persist. Honduras continues to face crises of poverty, violence and migration. But grassroots organizing continues. The ground there is indeed fertile for an anarchist resurgence. And then we come to El Salvador.

Anarchists both local and international played a key role in shaping the early labour movement. Spanish, Mexican and Panamanian anarchist-syndicalists worked with them ideas of collective resistance and workers' autonomy. One of the earliest milestones in the country was the Unión Obrera Salvadorana, founded in 1922, which united workers under the principles of mutual aid and direct action.

By 1924, the Federación Regional de Trabajadores de El Salvador emerged and was initially steeped in anarchist-syndicalist ideas before shifting towards Marxism in the late 1920s. In the 1930s, the Anarchist Centro Sindical Libertario was founded and operated in San Salvador. Unfortunately for pretty much everybody in El Salvador, 1932 happened.

the devastating La Mantaza of 1932 to be specific. This was a massacre that was orchestrated by the dictatorship of General... Oh, I shouldn't have told you.

I should have asked you what you think La Matanza means. I don't know if you've brushed up on your Spanish. Unfortunately, no. My Spanish is actually quite famously bad. I really should work on it. I'm sure you're envying my stumbling through all these Spanish names throughout this series. See, that's usually me. I'm just happy to have it be someone else. So James doesn't laugh at me for reading too many books, but not

practicing saying things out loud as a kid. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel you. I mean, for me, I think one of the difficulties, I have been learning Spanish like all my life. Yeah. The difficulty is when you're speaking at a momentum in one language, at least in my experience, it's really difficult to switch the patterns of pronunciation to the other language. You know, the way that Spanish like reads vowels is different from how English reads vowels. So it's hard to like

quickly switch in and switch out. Yeah, that is always been my struggle, is reading their vowels like my vowels, and it produces some sometimes quite comical pronunciations, which is really, really my bad. I can imagine. But yeah, the La Matanza of 1932 was a massacre orchestrated by the dictatorship of General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez-Garza,

that aimed to crush the peasant uprising that was sparked by systemic poverty and land dispossession. Tens of thousands were slaughtered, many of them indigenous people, and the anarchists and labour movements in the country suffered immense losses, as activists were either killed or forced underground.

This marked the beginning of decades of military rule designed to protect the interests of the land-owning oligarchy, the 14 families that practically own everything in El Salvador. But despite this repression, radical organizations have persisted. The mid to late 20th century saw the rise of armed revolutionary groups, culminating in the Salvadoran Civil War from 1980 to 1992. The war pitted the primarily Marxist-Leninist and socialist factions against the US-backed Salvadoran military dictatorship.

The Marxists transitioned into a political party after the 1992 peace accords, which ended the war but left many systemic inequalities unresolved.

In the 21st century, Labour's struggles have continued amid neoliberal economic reforms and international financial pressures. While the left-wing FMLN won the presidency in 2009 and held power until 2019, its tenure was criticised for failing to sufficiently address the issues plaguing the country. Recent years under President Nayib Bukele have seen the construction of a proper mass carceral police state.

what we could struggle against privatization and austerity measures. By the way, the rise of Achilles is just really fascinating to me, particularly from a Trinidadian context.

Because we have a pretty severe murder rate situation going on. Our murder rate has been rising steadily in the past two decades. And there's just been, in general, a lot of crime issues lately. And the response I've seen a lot of Trinidadians have toward the rise of a killing in El Salvador is literally like, we should do that too. We need to do that too. Like, we need to, you know, institute like a mass car trust state as well.

And I feel like I'm fighting a wave. I'm like talking to a wall. I'm like really, it's really difficult for me, I think, to challenge that because I understand people's frustrations. But to me, my mind is just boggled at it. You know, like you really think we complain about corruption all the time, right? Like it's very openly nepotistic and corrupt in this place. People don't like either political party that is presented to us as the options. And

And yet people are so thinking about the crime situation that they're willing to put that much power in the hands of the government to make that judgment. And the thing is, we know that there are innocent people in peculiar prisons. You know, we know that journalists have been locked up for criticizing the government. We know that all people are locked up without charges, without rights, without anything. And what's crazy to me is that like,

People are like cheering it on until it's them. Until you happen to be unlucky enough to have a tattoo. I mean, yeah, as long as it's someone else, then it's not them. Yeah, exactly. It's like, oh, it's fine as long as it's somebody else. But like, let's say you have a tattoo or, I mean, the thing is the police,

I'm sure it's the case in El Salvador as well, because the police are themselves a gang pretty much anywhere in the world. But the police in Trinidad are literally connected in some cases with gangs. In fact, there's some gang members who end up like joining the police force later on in their lives. And so to just give that kind of power to them, you know, let's say you criticize an officer, you say something that they were like, and then before you know it, you're the one behind bars as well.

I understand the frustration, I don't understand the response. And it remains to be seen how Bukele's policies continue to play out in the country. I feel like it's a disaster waiting to happen. In many ways it is already a disaster but you know there are people pointing to "oh look how safe things have gotten now" but I don't know how long that will last. Especially when the families that are responsible for so much of the disparity in the country

are still in their position of power. But I digress. The spirit of mutual aid, direct action and anti-authoritarian resistance still has the potential to persist in the country of El Salvador. At last we've reached Guatemala.

In 1926, the publication Orientación Sindical started circulating in Guatemala, calling for the kind of direct grassroots union action that went around or even opposed political parties as obstacles to liberation. Meanwhile, the Marxists in the country had a different vision. They pushed for the formation of the Federación Regional Obrera de Guatemala and with that, the launch of Vanguardia Proletaria, a communist-led paper that aimed to rally the working class behind Marxist ideas.

At the same time, Spanish and Peruvian workers alongside Guatemalan students and workers came together to form the Comité Proacción Sindical, which was the space where anarchist syndicalism truly found its voice in Guatemala. But as you can probably guess, the powers that be weren't going to let this kind of radical action stand.

In 1930, a military dictatorship swept into the country, ending the Comité, effectively silencing anarchist cynicalism in Guatemala and setting the stage for years of political repression, as the state worked tirelessly to suppress any form of worker self-organization, often with the backing of the one and only: U.S.A. U.S.A. U.S.A.

The mid-20th century marked a period of extreme violence against workers' movements, peasant movements, and leftist movements, especially after the 1954 CIA-backed coup.

Despite these setbacks, workers and political movements never stopped fighting. In the 1960s and 70s, guerrilla movements gained momentum, inspired by Marxist and anti-imperialist ideologies, and although these movements were frequently crushed with state violence in the form of massacres and disappearances, they persisted until the end of the Civil War in 1996. Still, social inequality and economic exploitation persisted. Their movements, especially in the sweatshop industry, have continued to fight for workers' rights.

Guatemala today is still fighting to breathe free. Its people are still fighting against the continued dominance of neoliberal economic policies, fighting against corrupt political elites, and most importantly fighting for autonomy for its indigenous and working peoples. And now it's time to hit the islands. On our first stop is the Dominican Republic. Through the efforts of Spanish immigrant workers, the ideas of mutual aid and syndicalism found very fertile ground, particularly in the mid-1880s where we see the emergence of the first mutualist associations.

such as La Alianza Chipaña in 1884 and Sociedad Artesanal Hijos del Pueblo in 1890. The River Road workers' strike in 1896 struck in protest against the conditions while working on the Puerto Plata-Santiago Line, among the first direct actions in the American Republic outside of its historical maroonages and slave revolts. In 1897, the first labor union was formed.

The Union de Panaderos de Santo Domingo. Not long after, strikes erupted across the country. Bakers, cobblers, bricklayers all marched in protest, often in the heart of Colon Park, fighting for better working conditions and respect from their employers.

Fast forward a bit and in 1920, we saw the first primer congreso de trabajadores dominicanos convene in Santo Domingo, where the Confederacion Dominicana del Trabajo was born. The demands were basic but crucial, things like the 8 hour workday, the right to strike, a salary schedule and profit sharing. But it wasn't just about improving their daily lives,

They also sought to fight foreign intervention. Specifically, they called for the end of the North American occupation which had had a heavy presence in the region for decades.

The 1920s also saw the rise of another powerful union, the Federación Local de Trabajo de Santo Domingo, which was founded by 31 different unions. But despite the strength of these movements, the Dominican Republic remained under the heavy influence of foreign powers and corrupt local elites. In 1946, the Dominican Republic saw a major strike in the sugar plantations of La Romana and San Pedro de Macorís, and this time, the influence of Spanish anarchists who had fled the Spanish Civil War was undeniable.

Today the anarchist presence in the Dominican Republic is not pronounced but the conditions are, as with the others, ripe for such a transformation. Finally, let's jump across to Puerto Rico for our final historical review. Puerto Rico as we know was a Spanish colony until 1898 but after that it fell under the control of the United States. Anarchism in Puerto Rico didn't have quite the same impact as it did in nearby Cuba but that doesn't mean it wasn't there, pushing back against the powers that be.

Anarchist militants, particularly from Spain, made their way to Puerto Rico in the 1880s, bringing with them the fire of direct action and the commitment to the idea that workers should control their own lives. In the liberal period between 1868 and 1873, the first artisan-based organizations started popping up.

These were mutual aid societies and cooperatives. They weren't exactly radical in orientation, a far cry from the anarchist uprisings happening elsewhere in Latin America, but they were spaces where workers could find solidarity and support. In 1894, things began to change. A monetary crisis hit, followed by a devaluation that sent prices skyrocketing, and the population started to push back.

This triggered a wave of strikes and mass protests and this is where we start to see the direct influence of anarchists. We know for sure that Spanish anarchists who had settled in Puerto Rico were active in these early struggles, pushing for emancipation and denouncing exploitation. In 1898, when Puerto Rico was already under US control, anarchists and socialists came together to form the Federación Regional de los Trabajadores, a group clearly inspired by the Spanish Federación Regional Española. Their program was a simple yet radical one.

Abolish the exploitation of workers and build a society without borders or masters.

But as with all movements, there were contradictions and splits. In 1899, a major rift occurred within the Federation when it became clear that some of its leaders were more willing than others to accept the support of political parties, something the anarchists traditionally rejected. This caused those that were true to syndicalist autonomy to form the Fédération Libre, a group that split from the original Federation and stuck to the principles of the First Internationale.

Just a few years later, 1901, this same group ended up affiliating with the conservative American Federation of Labor, which is a very strange bedfellow considering their earlier anarchist commitments. But the anarchists didn't fade away just after these splits. They didn't achieve the dominant position in Puerto Rico's worker movement, but they kept pushing forward anyway. And one of the ways they did this was through the press, as they spread ideas, shared literature, and built networks.

Boz Sumana, a publication based in Caguas, was one such example. The energy of anarchism in Puerto Rico was translated into action, especially in the labor front, where they were there and part of strikes and meetings and ongoing battles. So as we look to Puerto Rico today, whether with the fight for sovereignty, for labor rights, against colonialism, or whatever else, we can remember the potential of anarchism on the island. There were Puerto Ricans in history who understood anarchism.

That freedom wasn't solely about political independence, but about the liberation of all people from all forms of exploitation. So let's take a step back and look at the broader picture of labour and anarchist struggle across the region. Though the anarchist movements were not as vibrant as elsewhere, but are indeed dormant or dead in many cases, we still see a very powerful thread of resistance and a very fertile ground for anarchist development which our comrades in these places can hopefully flourish within. That's all from me today.

You can find me on YouTube at Andres Zellman, Patreon at Seen True. This is It Could Happen Here. All power to all people. Peace. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.