The longer I thought about the exploitation of Bolivia by foreign organizations and the role I had played in it as an EHM, the angrier and more depressed I grew. I considered flying back to La Paz or to Colombia or to one of the other Spanish-speaking countries and joining a resistance movement. It struck me that it was what Tom Paine would have done. Then I realized that rather than use a gun he would have taken up a pen. I asked myself how I could be most effective.
The answer began to materialize during one of my trips with the nonprofit organization that worked in Guatemala. Talking with a Mayan elder, I decided that I needed to return to Ecuador's Shuar territory, where I had lived as a Peace Corps volunteer more than two decades earlier. I was, I see now, extremely confused, torn between old loyalties to my EHM colleagues, a guilty conscience, a desire to expose the wrong I had done, and an addiction to that vice that so pervades our society, materialism. Someplace in my subconscious lurked the idea that the Shuar could help straighten me out.
A friend and the publisher of my books on indigenous cultures, Ehud Sperling, and I took an American Airlines flight to Quito, Ecuador, and a smaller plane down the Andes to Cuenca. We spent a couple of nights in that colonial city high in the mountains where I had lived following my tour in the rainforest. Then we rented a jeep and driver, left very early in the morning, and wound our way along treacherous mountain roads toward the jungle town of Macas.
The trip was spectacular; descending from the top of the Andes through an endless series of switchbacks, it was the old potholed road I remembered from two decades earlier, sheer cliffs rising on one side and a deep gorge of cascading water on the other. A few rickety trucks coming up out of the jungle forced us to pull over precariously close either to the rock wall or the drop-off. Otherwise, we had the place to ourselves. It was truly another world, far removed from our lives in the States. I wondered how I had ever managed to make the transition from this to EHM. The simple answer was that back then, a very young and frustrated man who had grown up in rural New Hampshire, I had craved the excitement and money that the profession offered. Like a fish seduced by a shiny lure flashing through the water, I had snatched it.
Around noon our jeep drove into a small community where the road had previously ended; now it continued on, rougher and muddier, soaked by rains that swept up from the Amazon basin, toward the town of Macas. I began to tell Ehud how I had felt when I first visited Macas in 1969. It got us to talking about the role our country has played in world history.
The United States exemplified democracy and justice for about two hundred years. Our Declaration of Independence and Constitution inspired freedom movements on every continent. We led efforts to create global institutions that reflected our ideals. During the
twentieth century, our leadership in movements promoting democracy and justice increased; we were instrumental in establishing the Permanent Court of International Justice in the Hague, the Covenant of the League of Nations, the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and many U.N. conventions.
Since the end of World War II, however, our position as leader has eroded, the model we presented to the world undermined by a corporatocracy hell-bent on empire building. While a Peace Corps volunteer, I was aware that Ecuadorian citizens, as well as those in neighboring nations, were outraged by our brutality and baffled by our overt contradictions in policy. We claimed to defend democracy in places like Vietnam; at the same time, we ousted and assassinated democratically elected presidents. High school students throughout Latin America understood that the United States had overthrown Chile's Allende, Iran's Mossadegh, Guatemala's Ar-benz, Brazil's Goulart, and Iraq's Qasim—even if our own students were unaware of such things. Washington's policies transmitted a confusing message to the world. Our actions undercut our most hallowed ideals.
One way the corporatocracy exerted control was by empowering autocratic governments in Latin America during the 1970s. These governments experimented with economic policies that benefited U.S. investors and international corporations, and generally ended in failure for local economies—recessions, inflation, unemployment, and negative economic growth. Despite mounting opposition, Washington praised the corrupt leaders who were bankrupting their nations while amassing personal fortunes. To make matters worse, the United States supported right-wing dictators and their death squads in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua.
A wave of democratic reforms swept the continent in the 1980s. Newly elected governments turned to the "experts" at the IMF and the World Bank for solutions to their problems. Persuaded to adopt SAPs, they implemented unpopular measures ranging from privatization of their utilities to cuts in social services. They accepted outrageously large loans that were used to develop infrastructure projects that all too often served only the upper classes while leaving the country burdened with debt.
The results were disastrous. Economic indicators tumbled to new depths. Millions of people once hailed as members of the middle class lost their jobs and joined the ranks of the impoverished. As citizens watched their pensions, health care, and educational institutions decline, they also noticed that their politicians were buying up Florida real estate rather than investing in local businesses. The communist movements of the 1950s and 1960s never took hold, except in Castro's Cuba; however, a new wave of resentment against the corporatocracy and its corrupt Latin collaborators swept the continent.
Then, less than a year before Ehud and I headed to Ecuador, the first Bush administration made a decision that had a lasting negative impact on United States-Latin American relations. The president ordered the armed forces to invade Panama. It was an unprovoked, unilateral attack to unseat a government, ostensibly because it refused to renege on the Panama Canal Treaty. The invasion killed more than two thousand innocent civilians and sent waves of fear across every country south of the Rio Grande. The fear soon turned to anger.1?
I mulled these things over and discussed them with Ehud on that drive to Macas. I asked him if he thought there could be any alternative to the corruption that plagued the continent.
"Of course there is," he assured me. "Critical mass. That's all you need." He asked how I had journeyed to Macas in those days, given that the road had not gone that far.
"You could slosh through the jungle for weeks. Or you could take a 'stopwatch flight' on an old World War II Army-surplus DC-3. That flight seemed almost suicidal, but it's what I did."
"Stopwatch flight?"
"Those planes couldn't make it over the top of the Andes; they had to follow the river valleys. No radar. The pilot never knew when clouds would sock him in, so as soon as he left the ground, he clicked on a stopwatch. After thirty seconds he took a ten degree turn to the right, after another forty-five seconds a fifteen degree bank to the left. .. Pretty scary. Lost a lot of planes in those days. But it was better—and safer—than trekking through the jungle."
"So they built the road." He paused. "Why?" His arched eyebrows gave me the clue.
"Critical mass?" "Exactly."
People had demanded change. When the clamoring reached a certain level, it happened. In this case, that change had been on the side of commercial development opening up the Amazon basin. I knew that the critical mass had been heavily influenced by oil companies. Entering Macas, I saw that the road had transformed a sleepy jungle outpost into a bustling boomtown. Yet I could speculate that as more and more of us become aware of the threats to our future, the critical mass may shift to projects that emphasize peace and sustainability.
We checked into a hotel that had a couple of items I had never seen before in this part of the world: a flush toilet and shower. The latter greatly amused Ehud because of the electrical outlet next to the faucet.
"For electric shavers," I assured him. "To execute yourself," he replied.
The next morning we boarded a small plane. Ehud asked the pilot about the stopwatch. "My uncle used one." The pilot grinned. "But I got radar."
The plane deposited us on a mud runway deep in the forest. A cluster of Shuar men were assembled at the edge of the clearing. They looked pretty much as I remembered them—muscular, buff, laughing, happy people, except now they wore old T- shirts and Da-cron shorts the missionaries insisted they use to combat the sin of nudity.
As they unloaded supplies that had arrived with us, an old man approached me. When I announced my interest in helping his people save their jungle from destruction he reminded me that my culture, not his, was causing the problems.
"The world is as you dream it," he told me. "Your people dreamed of huge factories, tall buildings, as many cars as there are raindrops in this river. Now you begin to see that your dream is a nightmare."
I asked what I could do to help.
"That's simple," he replied. "All you have to do is change the dream ... You need only plant a different seed, teach your children to dream new dreams."
Over the next few days, we heard similar messages from other members of the community. Both Ehud and I were impressed with the wisdom of these people and their determination to protect their environment and culture. After I returned to the United States, I set in motion procedures for creating an organization dedicated to altering the way we in industrialized countries see the earth and our relationship to it. I did not realize it at the time, but I was endeavoring to reverse the process I had promoted as an EHM.
Eventually we named the nonprofit corporation Dream Change, in recognition of the message delivered to me that day in Shuar territory. Through it, we organized trips and workshops. We took people to live with indigenous teachers and we brought those teachers to the United States. We produced books, tapes, CDs, and films aimed at bridging the gaps between these two worlds. The Pachamama Alliance, another nonprofit, was formed as a result of one of our trips. It has raised millions of dollars to help indigenous communities, much of it used to finance legal battles against oil companies.
Thanks to my experience with COBEE, I had launched myself on a new career. Throughout the 1990s and into the early years of the new millennium, I traveled frequently to Latin America. I spent most of the time there with indigenous people in the Amazon and the Andes. I was deeply impressed by their commitment to environmental stewardship and a spirituality that surpassed anything I witnessed among the world's major religions. These people appeared determined to make the world a better place.
As a Pachamama Alliance board member I also met with lawyers, politicians, and oil company employees. It was over dinner with such a group one night in Quito that I first learned about Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. The oil company representatives despised this fiery military officer who founded the anticorporatocracy Fifth Republic Movement, but the politicians had to admire his charisma. My indigenous friends were encouraged that his ancestors were Indian and African as well as Spanish, that he continually lambasted the wealthy, and promised to help the poor to better lives.