Peru: Living Without Water

Living Without Water

Directed by Henry Richards and Samuel Kinsley (2016)

Film Review

In 2015, the World Economic Forum identified Peru as the country post likely to face life threatening water shortages. Yet as this documentary reveals, Peruvians access to water relates directly to their income. In Lima, rich Peruvians easily access water for their swimming pools and golf courses – and pay less for it than poor Peruvians in the surrounding desert.

Low income Peruvians in standard rental housing pay 50 euros every two weeks for water delivery. The water truck fills their tanks with enough water to supply each member of an average family 200 – 300 liters per day (while rich urbanites pay 5 – 7 euros for a comparable quantity of water).

Residents still have to boil the water to protect their children from diarrheal illnesses.

It’s illegal for the trucks to sell water to Lima residents who are too poor to afford rental accommodation. The latter, who squat on disused land in shacks they build themselves, send their children door-to-dorr with 10 litre plastic jugs to beg water from neighbors who access tap water 1/2 hour a week. Those who share their water face hefty fines from city authorities.

Farmers in nearby mountains use fog nets to catch condensation during winter (four months). They rely on tanker trucks the other eight months.

Many farmers have been forced to give up their farms owing to the boom in water intensive export crops (avocado, asparagus and exotic fruit). Owing to rapid aquifer depletion, the water in their wells is increasingly saline.

The World Bank has become increasingly critical of Peruvian policies that deprive poor residents and farmers of water (in one of the driest countries on Earth) to support a growing export crop industry. They are pressuring Peru’s government (but not very hard it seems) to modernize their water systems to guarantee access to all residents regardless of income.

America’s $33 Mercenaries

America’s $33 Mercenaries

Press TV (2013)

Film Review

This is a Press TV documentary about the $33 third world mercenaries lured into the Iraq war by private US private security companies like Blackwater and Triple Canopy. Unbeknownst to the American public, shortly after the 2003 invasion and occupation, the Pentagon began using private security firms to recruit private mercenaries to serve on the front line. In 2008, 70,000 of the western combatants were mercenaries, with 10% from the US and 90% from developing countries like Peru, Uganda and India.

The mercenaries were contracted through extremely profitable private security agencies like Triple Canopy (later renamed Special Operations Consulting), who charged the US government $15,000 a month per mercenary and paid the mercenaries $1,000 a month ($33 a day). By 2011, SOC discovered they could recruit mercenaries from poorer countries for $11 a day and reduced the pay scale even further.

The film follows the plight of Peruvian mercenaries SOC deliberately misled into believing they would be working as security guards in the Baghdad Green Zone (which is protected by US troops). Instead they found themselves deployed to the Basra front line in Basra when they finished their training in Jordan.

Those who were injured were denied proper medical care, resulting in needless deaths and horrendous disabilities. At present, the Peruvians in the film are suing SOC for reneging on the health and disability benefits injured mercenaries were guaranteed in their contract.

The documentary is in 2 parts, with Part 2 starting automatically when Part 1 finishes.

How 20th Century Missionaries Opened Up Latin America for Wall Street

The Missionaries: God Against the Indians

By Norman Lewis

Penguin (1988)

Book Review

The Missionaries is a travelogue by British journalist Norman Lewis recounting his visits in the fifties, sixties and seventies to remote regions of Vietnam and Latin America. His purpose is highlighting the systematic genocide of indigenous tribes during this period and the role played by evangelical missionaries (with close CIA collaboration) in evicting native peoples from land US corporations sought to exploit it.

As a prologue, Lewis describes the English invasion and occupation of Tahiti in 1767. English missionaries spent seven fruitless years trying to voluntarily convert native Tahitians to Christianity. They eventually resorted to force, collaborating with colonial police to execute natives who refused to convert and outlaw cultural practices such as dancing, tattooing, surfing and wearing flowers. The usual sentence for engaging in such practices was hard labor on the roads.

Over the next 25 years, the British and French governments successfully colonized all the South Pacific islands and virtually extinguished all native culture.

The book fast forwards to World War II, when the invention of the caterpillar tractor allowed Europeans and Americans to finally penetrate inaccessible jungles in South East Asian and Latin America – enabling them to kill and displace even more indigenous populations.

Lewis focuses mainly on the two most powerful missionary organizations: the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) and the New Tribes Missions (NTM). Both assisted the CIA and their puppet dictators in displacing thousands of indigenous groups from the jungles of Columbia, Peru, Venezuela, Brazil and Paraguay. The evidence he lays out directly implicates these missionary groups in the slaughter (in some cases by aerial bombardment), enslavement and forced prostitution. In most cases, individual  missionaries had their own commercial stake in colonizing these regions (eg selling food to native populations following the destruction of their jungle habitat and hiring out their female children as domestic servants and prostitutes).

The callous attitude (towards the enslavement and extermination of their converts) of these so-called men of God is quite astonishing. They rationalize their actions based on the “inevitability” of native assimilation. If the transition to civilization kills most of them, so much the better. By baptizing them, the missionaries can ensure they go straight to Heaven.

Once Mexico, Ecuador, Brazil, Panama and Columbia ousted their US-sponsored military dictators, all five countries banned both the SIL and the NTM, which were ultimately denounced by both the UN and the Organization of American States (OAS) for violating the UN Genocide Convention.

People can read a more detailed account of the CIA/SIL collaboration to open up Latin America to US corporate interests in Thy Will Be Done the Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil