Discipline and Punish Presidential Session

Latin American Studies Association Presentation

What’s the role of the activist academic/intellectual (whether in the U.S. or elsewhere)?

I want to begin with two of quotes that get at the heart of this question.

Rabea Eghbariah writes that “scholars tend to sharpen their pens after the smell of death has dissipated and moral clarity is no longer urgent.”

Edward Said also offers us invaluable insights into what an intellectual is and should be: Nothing is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position, which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take.

For me, these two quotes show the cowardice of academics who self-proclaim themselves as critical and radical. Even some decolonial scholars aspire to be part the broker intellectual class, who, with their “nuanced” takes, give license to Israel to continue with its project of death and destruction.

The intellectual always has a choice, as Edward Said reminded us. The choice, as he put it, is to either to side with the weaker, the oppressed, the less well represented, the forgotten, the ignored, the colonized (refer to long tradition in Latin America—Theology and Philosophy of Liberation). The other choice to side with the more powerful by either staying silent or outright supporting domination. This resonates with what the Palestinian intellectual and martyr Basel Al-Araj wrote: He said that if “If you don’t want to be engaged—if you don’t want to confront oppression—your role as an intellectual is pointless.”

The intellectual is not the person who coins concepts or who theorizes for theorizing’s sake. The intellectual is more like an antenna, as Rita Segato reminds us when writing about Anibal Quijano, a receptor of the sociopolitical context that creates the conditions of possibility to think and do otherwise, particularly when one’s thinking is situated in the sites of struggle one is committed to. The intellectual who is politically committed serves as a conduit for the genius of the people—the genius that is born in struggle, as Cedric Robinson put it.

As the genocide continues, we must position ourselves clearly and militantly. We must continue to disrupt the spaces that we know will one day claim to have been against genocide. We know that those who remain silent today will one day write books and articles on the genocide but only after the fact, when moral clarity, once again, is no longer urgent.

Steven Salaita suggests we must speak and write as if people in Gaza can hear and read us. Or as the Zapatistas wrote in 2009 when Israel was bombing Gaza, “words from afar may not be able to stop a bomb, but they do crack open the dark room of death [that is Gaza], letting in a small ray of light”. The least we can do in times of genocide is precisely that, to speak and write as if life depended on it, to speak and write with urgency because there’s no other way to speak and to write in times genocide.

What did last spring—and subsequent events—make clear about the current state of activism on and related to college campuses?

For me, the student-led Gaza solidarity encampments in the US and in Europe unveiled the political limitations of the usual symbolic gestures and reformism that characterizes academic activism.

It was students who made more visible the importance of going beyond institutional reform, and the counterinsurgency that that entails.

It was students who pointed to the ways in which the university is not only implicated in ideologically justifying the genocide in Gaza but also actively participating in genocide by having direct links with the production of technologies of colonial violence battles tested on Palestinians are exported to be used against others.

It was students who risked their careers while so many professors watched them get arrested, beaten, and deported.

It was students who put everything on the line for a dehumanized people they have been told are not worthy of their solidarity.

Students seeking to delink their universities from their material and symbolic investments in colonial projects reveal their decolonial potential. Dismantling the colonial and capitalist foundations of universities is not solely a discursive task, though this seems to dominate in academia.

While decolonial thought has critically examined the colonial foundations of the humanities and social sciences, the technologies of violence universities produce are not always made as explicit as one would like in terms of thinking about universities as agents of coloniality rather than mere knowledge-producing institutions that legitimate domination ideologically or discursively.

Certainly, knowledge underpins the production of technologies of violence used to maintain coloniality, but it is nonetheless important to shed light on the material dimensions of these institutions in order to sever the colonial links or at the very least sabotage the production of knowledge and technology that indeed have direct and concrete effects for those on the receiving end of settler colonialism. It is insufficient, to conclude, to solely focus on the critique of discourse while leaving in tact its materiality.

How might we connect what’s happening in the U.S. vis-à-vis academic activism to broader histories of struggle across the Americas?

The student-led movement and the faculty and staff aligned with this struggle in the US is deeply and historically entangled with the struggles of Abya Yala. There’s a reason why movements continue to chant that no one is free until Palestine is Free.

I’ve briefly addressed the technologies of colonial violence student activists sought to divest their universities from. But I want to emphasize that this is by no means solely a national concern. This is, more than anything, a transnational antiimperial/anticlonial movement that primarily took place in universities that have direct links with weapon manufacturing companies. It makes logical sense that this form of activism would take place in the Global North. Settler-colonial states, such as the U.S., Canada, and Israel (to name a few), have developed technologies of violence, management, and control that make the displacement and repression people much more effective. Technologies of colonial violence range from surveillance, military weapons, counterinsurgency, military training, and torture to population control through reservations, open-air prisons (e.g. Gaza), concentration camps, and ethnic cleansing, which is often portrayed euphemistically as “relocation.”

These technologies of violence have historically been used to repress social movements and Indigenous struggles for liberation and decolonization. There are countless movements that have resisted death squads, the disappearance of activists, and imprisonment and torture of activists. We should think of this as two sides of the same imperial coin, whereby the activist work here is focused on the production of technologies of violence while protests in Latin America have in various instances protested the dictator regimes that apply these same technologies of violence, surveillance, and dispossession against liberation movements.

Important to keep in mind is that when anti-war movement became too strong or when the international pressure was too high, US congress passed weapons embargoes on certain regimes that the US in fact supported. When the US is unable to overtly support a regime, Israel has stepped in to defend the geopolitical and imperial interests of the US by exporting technologies of violence the US and Israel manufactured in collaboration with one another and with the assistance of universities.

The transnational flow of technologies has therefore greatly impacted the struggles in Latin America and the Caribbean. Let me give a few concrete examples.

Caribbean

Dominican Republic: Israel began selling small arms to the Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo as far back as the 1950s, during his oppressive 31-year rule over the Dominican people.

Haiti: Under Jean-Claude Duvalier, Uzi machine guns and armored vehicles were imported to repress dissidents. In exchange, Haiti supported Israel’s occupation of 1967 in the United Nations.

Central America

Guatemala: We know that Israel exported military personnel and weapons to the government. Counterinsurgency against Indigenous and campesino communities involved a genocidal campaign similar to the one against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed and more than a million people were displaced. The period that saw the most death and destruction was precisely when Israel stepped in to help the Guatemalan government systematically raze hundreds of villages. It is estimated that more 100,000 women were raped.

El Salvador: At the same time in El Salvador, death squads were trained for counterinsurgency measures. The estimates indicate that 83% of military imports came from Israel, and that 75,000 people were killed during the civil war.

Nicaragua: In Nicaragua, Israel provided 98% of the arms Anastasio Somoza García used in the last year of his dictatorship, when 50,000 Nicaraguans were killed. Israel armed the brutal Somoza family until the very end. Reagan’s war on communism resulted in the formation of the Contras (counterrevolutionary/counterinsurgency) after the Sandinistas took power (tangent: I’ve recently started to reflect on my personal experience to make connections between the primary reasons the campesino communities where I’m from, which are located in the mountainous region near the Nicaraguan border, began to migrate. The violence of the 80s undeniably shaped the migration patterns of my village and that of my family, where we all lived in southern California undocumented, without healthcare or financial aid for higher education, with constant encounters with police violence, incarceration, and threats of ICE raids and deportation. The technologies of violence tested on Palestinians and sold to the dictatorial regimes of Central America were used to torture and kill dissidents, including students, campesinos, and Indigenous peoples. The same technologies of violence used against Palestinians and later used against my people in Honduras were certainly used against us by the cops who surveilled our neighborhoods and policed and criminalized our every movement. When I speak of the entangled relationship between Palestinian settler colonial dispossession and neocolonial dispossession in Honduras or in Latin America, it’s no longer an abstraction. It’s concrete. A matter of life and death. The interconnectedness of our struggles is so deep that those who were displaced and/or forced to migrate because of counterrevolutionary violence directly linked to Israel are now speaking out and organizing against the technologies of violence universities assist in producing. Many are facing consequences, punished for making connections between their histories and geographies of colonial dispossession with the dispossession and genocide of Palestinians. It is this entanglement between struggles across time and space that those in power fear most. It is these connections that enable real coalitions to be built. It is this transnational solidarity that historically has held most strength. And we know that concerted efforts to fragment movements is always part of the long history of counterinsurgency.)

Loewestein shows how “Israel was asked to take a much larger role in the region and join the US in its campaign against the Sandinistas” (p. 37). Counterinsurgent ideological warfare played a key role as well to such an extent that “American Jewish group, some with ties to the Somoza era, spread falsehoods about supposed anti-Semitism in Nicaragua that led to even greater US and Israeli backing for the brutal Contras. The same accusations are being made today against those who oppose genocide. To illustrate the linkages between Palestine resistance and repression in Latin America further, Lowestein points out that “the AK47 rifles Israel sent to the contras in the 1980s had been confiscated from the Palestine liberation organization in Lebanon (after the Israeli invasion in 1982)” (ibid). The death squads that proliferated in the region in the 1980s in Central America received their training from Israeli intelligence officers who then shared that knowledge with the CIA. Israel’s role was indispensable.

Honduras: During the U.S.-backed dictatorial regime of Honduras (2009-2022), Israel also gave military support to train the military police. Thousands of people were imprisoned, tortured, orkilled.

Honduras: During the U.S.-backed dictatorial regime of Honduras (2009-2022), Israel also gave military support to train the military police. Thousands of people were imprisoned, tortured, or killed.

South America

Some of the worst authoritarian and dictatorial regimes in South America have depended greatly on Israel’s support.

Argentina: Israel in Argentina, 30,000 people were “disappeared” under the junta military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983. The Argentine Anticommunist Alliance was responsible for arresting, torturing, and killing dissidents. Many Jews were arrested, tortured, and disappeared. While Jews constituted only 1% of Argentina’s population, they made up 12% of the victims. Declassified documents show that Israel was not concerned about this as it was more worried about getting Argentina’s support of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Meanwhile, Jews were left in torture chambers and concentration camps similar to those in Nazi Germany. Israel’s policy at the time, which continues until today, was that it would offer military support to any country except for those who were anti-American—that is, anti-imperialist. Whenever the US was unable to overtly support a regime, Israel supported the US’s covert counterinsurgent actions. As the Israeli minister of economy, Yaakov Meridor stated long ago, ‘where you cannot sell arms directly. Let us do it…Israel will be your intermediary” (Loewenstein, 2023).

Chile: The Pinochet dictatorship that ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990, which committed acts of murder, rape, and torture against its opposition, including trade unionists and socialists, obtained crowd control equipment from Israel, including vehicles equipped with water cannons. Israel also provided surveillance support to the Pinochet regime.

I can continue giving examples in the region and in Africa or Asia, but I’m afraid that would take hours if not days to cover the extent to which Israel has served as a proxy state in defense of US’s geopolitical imperial interests.