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The Road decision, based in a Texas case, had survived with modification for almost half 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.

The nineteenth 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.

sign of impregnation. This moment varies widely for women, but it generally happens during the fourth or fifth month of pregnancy.

from midwives. It provided wisdom on how to relieve mensual cramps, Yet pregnant and breastfeed midwives provided abortion services as well. Women attempted to end pregnancy with varying degrees of success by consuming penny royalty or savn juniper, or a combination of iron and quinine. They took hot baths or rode horses bareback in order to cause a miscarriage.

Abortionists told patients they could provide quote French cures for what was referred to as quote menstrual blockage.

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 used 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 the sensationally cover cases in which women died during abortions performed by midwives. This created momentum for the enactment by eighteen eighty of laws banning and criminalizing abortion. Every single state except Kentucky were stake courts that already rendered such procedures illegal.

quote race suicide. President Theodore Roosevelt later argued that white women had a patriotic duty to bear at least four children. Logically 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.

a eugenesis with a national audience. The surgeonets served in the Confederate Army and argued that masturbation and homosexuality were dangerous indications that individual came from a family line that not fully evolved or was biologed logically 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 say America's biological future, he said, was by cash strating not just gay men and masturbators who would cause the evolution of white America to swing in reverse, but also to sterilized as sexually promiscuous, the mentally ill, those with disabilities, and the criminal element as well.

kill or leave a woman infertile. Both outcomes undesirable for a eugenicist like Daniel, who cared for fit white patients.

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 the reputations and to relieve them of the financial and physical hardships of unwanted pregnancies.

doctors willing to provide the prohibited medical procedure. Wheat, called Maddie by friends and family, found such a physician, doctor S. M. Jenkins.

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 first for the operation, charging him with murder.

The newspaper told its readers, But then the trial came to an abrupt and shocking end.

As the assassin fled, Jenkins's 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 nineteenth century Texas, But because of the modern image of Texas as reliably and even harshly anti abortion, it might be startling that the public one hundred and twenty five years ago actually sympathized with a doctor who faced prison after his patient died as a result of an incompetently performed abortion.

fifty after burying eleven children. Sanger coined the term birth control in nineteen fifteen, and, just before World War One, launched a movement that promoted contraception as sexual and political reform aimed to reduce human misery. She had to flee the country in nineteen fourteen 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, Sager complained, led to abortion, as she has said in a nineteen fifty seven interview with reporter Mike Wallace on CBS News.

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.

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, doctor U Savage of Fort Worth, the president of 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 nineteen sixty nine, members of the Texas Medical Association who were surveyed approved liberalization of abortion. Laws by an overwhelming vote of four thousand, four hundred and thirty five to five hundred and thirty six.

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.

but she only succeeded in making herself nauseous. She's 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 office. Then I saw dried 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. Attorneys Linda Coffee 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.

unfair criminal justice system in Texas gave him. Wade would claim a ninety percent 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 nineteen fifty six.

have been open and shut. Wade's staff won a conviction in March nineteen sixty four, but the verdict and death sentence Ruby received was unanimously overturned by the Texas Court Criminal Appeals on October fifth, nineteen sixty six, 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 Trialway died of pneumonia cancer in nineteen sixty seven.

constitutional research done by Weddington and Coffee. This Assistant General j. Floyd won no allies on the Supreme Court when he opened his argument with comments considered sexist and condescending even by the standards of nineteen seventy three. When the Supreme Court rendered its verdict, Wade reportedly never bothered to read it best.

over the next half century. Americans divided almost evenly. Soon after the Supreme Court announcement, a Gallop survey indicated that forty six percent supported a woman's right to choose and forty five percent opposed granted women access to the abortion care. In the days following the Road decision, reactions were often surprising. Wa chris Well, 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 thirteen 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 nineteen seventies, Chriswell would emerge as a national leader of the religious right and would help make opposition to abortion gay rights a centerpiece or

Republican politics. Shortly after Rowe, however, he struck a very different tune. Quote I've always felt that it was only after the child was born and I had a life separate from its mother that became an individual person, Chriswell said, And it always therefore seemed to me that's what's best for the mother and the future should be allowed.

and 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 faced today.

at different stages of pregnancy. After being baptized in a swimming pool by evangelicals in nineteen ninety five, 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 nineteen ninety eight she converted to Catholicism, but towards the end of her life, while being interviewed for a twenty twenty documentary called Aka Jane Rowe, 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.

abortion with women who sought the procedure. In twenty thirteen, a state Senator Wendy Davis a Fort Worth stage of dramatic thirteen hour filibuster Senate Bill five, legislation that banned abortion after twenty 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 twenty fifth, 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 in Senate

Bill five passed. Her efforts propelled her into the twenty fourteen gubernatorial race, but she was crushed by Greg Abbott by twenty one point margin.

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 Road decision, even as far back as the nineteenth century.

where a procedure remained illegal. In twenty twenty three, Amanda Zerwarski almost died waiting for a life saving abortion when doctors hesitated to provide care because they feared criminal prosecute. For years, abortion ride 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 sword fifty six percent.

the fetus' heartbeat had stopped. Fearing criminal charges, doctors refused to medically accelerate the delivery of the dying fetus and let forty hours pass. Barnica writhed in agony, begged to be allowed to see her daughter, and a fatal bacterial in fact ravaged her body. She would die three days later, leaving her young child without a mother.

prescription for antibiotics. Sent home or conditionally worsened, Crane was driven to another hospital in town Christa's Southeast Texas, Saint Elizabeth. Her fever soared to one hundred and two and she was bleeding, but her doctors continue to do nothing but administer antibiotics. Eventually, she was wheeled into a third emergency room. Doctors gave her two ultrasounds, two, in their words, confirm

fetal demise. Crane's mother, who had long been opposed to abortions, screened at the medical staff to help her dying child. Cranes suffered for twenty hours before her heart failed.

and Ohio. Many pundits believe 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 twenty twenty five, but they foundered in Nebraska and South Dakota, as well as Florida because the support of fifty seven percent of voters fell

short of the required sixty percent supermajority. In Texas, Trump, once a pro choice person but now the proud instigator of the Dobbs decision, carried fifty six percent of the vote.

One of the most prominent Trump supporters, University of Texas PhD. 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 nineteen sixty five Griswold v. Connecticut's Supreme Court decision that overturned state laws banning control pills and devices.

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 Machelli, I'm Michael Phillips. Thanks for listening.

the only one. Drone fever is just sweeping the nation right now with the new Jersey drone panic somehow making headline 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 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 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 twenty twenty

four 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 ten thousand individual flight records from July twenty twenty one September of twenty twenty three, containing more than twenty two point three million coordinates.

The investigation showed that poor communities, especially working class and immigrant communities, were disproportionately surveilled with police drones in Cheula Vista, flying over neighborhood blocks on the west side more than ten 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 twenty twenty, the San Diego Union Tribune discovered that the Cheulavista Police Department was sharing its license plate reader data directly with ICE. Now it's still unclear how many drones Cheulavista PD currently has, but as of twenty twenty two, they had thirty two of these high definition camera mounted drones, drones which have now done over twenty one thousand flights since twenty eighteen.

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 drowne 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 case is once again back to trial court to finalize

details of how certain footage should be released. So, without further ado, here's my episode from the twenty twenty four 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 of 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 pedled to the many industry attendees of CEES. 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. 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.

Cheula Vista is the southernmost kind of medium sized city in California, with the population of two hundred and seventy eight thousand people. Cheulavista has a police force of two hundred and eighty nine sworn officers, as well as one hundred and twenty civilian employees. On top of their nearly three hundred officers, they operate a drone fleet ten hours a day, seven days a week, launching high deff 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 Cheulavista's police drones back in February of twenty twenty three. Quote. Cheula 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 foreign 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 one five hundred 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 nine to one one calls, the first of which was Cheu La Vista PD launched their quote drone as first Responder program back in twenty eighteen

with the goal of having an unmanned aerial system or drone be proactively deployed before an officer is on SENE. Now we'll hear from Chief Roxanna Kennedy of the Chula Vista Police Department talking on the drone technology panel at CEES.

for much longer flights in restricted airspace. Chula Vista Pedi was the first department to get a BEVLOST waiver. The MIT Tech Review estimated last year that roughly two hundred and twenty five more departments now have one as well.

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 tam or 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 nine one 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 and 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 cheul to PD's own drone response to stats, the vast majority of deployments I estimate around seventy percent are for what the director of investigations for the privacy rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation refers to as quote crimes of poverty unquote, which he believes will be the target of most drone policing as opposed to violent crime. Nearly thirty percent of Chula Vista's drone deployments are for what's categorized as disturbances.

Almost fifteen percent are for psychological evaluations, ten percent are for quote, check the area and information, over seven percent are for welfare checks. Six point five percent is for quote unknown problem and over six percent is for suspicious person and another six percent for traffic accidents. Now, some drone deployments do result in patrol units not having to be dispatched, but CVPD also says that drones have assisted

in thousands of arrests. And I'm really not sure if having a drone following someone around is the best thing for a fifty one to fifty psych evaluation. The presence of a police officer doesn't always make the 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 to Levista PD currently has, and on their website they list ten different drone models currently being in their fleet, most of them really expensive DGI drones like the DGI Matrix, the DGI Inspire, the DGA Phantom, the dj 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.

So we don't have huge budgets that are abouted for drone programs, and so we've 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 going forward. So funding is always going to be a challenge and dependent upon.

software programs that are on private servers. But you'll see that there's a lot of discussion about drones and what drones.

million dollar operating budget. Back in twenty twenty, the Loprenza 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, ria gear, among other miscellaneous technology as a part of a DHS grant program due to

their close proximity to the US Mexico border. Chula Vista was one such department, and as of twenty twenty, so four years ago, they had already received over one million dollars in grant funds from this DHS program, titled the

quote Urban Area Security Initiative. Considering Chief kend these 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 twenty four seven because of 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.

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 door cameras to create a network of life 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 to such technology to their arsenal of surveillance tools. It almost becomes expected to Levis Tipdi 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.

as the officers are responding. But one of the criticism was, go on the way back, is your drone just going in my backyard?

because the camera never actually stops recording. She just claims that it tilts slightly upwards in between nine one one calls, but it's still capturing footage up to three miles away the entire time it's in the air. Police in Cheulavista have flown over eighteen thousand missions with their drowns. That's

a lot of footage. When talking about the privacy concerns had by some residents of Chewulavista, 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.

strong relationships with every aspect of our community. So it was about in twenty fifteen when we started talking about the concept and the possibility of drones, and I laughed with chant and said, George Jentsen, because that's my story that I used to and I love it because I made fun off my guys. When they said that we want to fly drunes, I said, oh, come on, now, what are we in beet George jetson flying rap the cars.

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 Cheulavista Police Department has denied all FOYA and public records requests for any drone footage in response. Are Tuno Castnares, a Cheulavista resident and owner of the local bilingual newspaper Loprenza, 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 Cees, the California Fourth District Court of Appeals ruled that this blanket exemption is invalid and that not all drone first responder footage could be classified as a part of uppending or ongoing criminal investigation, pointing to examples such as nine one one 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 Trulavista Police, as the chief herself expressed at the panel, and we're real.

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 Scheula Vista. With drone first Responder programs is spreading to police departments across the country modeled after the one

in Chula Vesta. 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 to Lavesta, PD is planning to expand their ten hour a day drone first responder program to a constant twenty four 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.

But that's a huge expense for us to pay lead for each site right now with the operations that we have to pay about one hundred thousand dollars per year, So that's four hundred thousand dollars for four locations beyond all the other processociating and so if you get expense and my hope is that and we keep hearing about you've see some of the testing and we've been testing

it as well in our area. Are what's called drone in the box or there's 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 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.

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 drone in the box. And these are

only going to become more common and cheaper. Imagine having ten of these throw out a city, launching from like ten different rooftops, being able to fly around by themselves, constantly going around in communities, constantly going to GPS coordinates linked to the nine one one calls, creating a whole wealth of footage instantly available to police live streamed from

the air. Matt Sloane, 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. Jeu la Vista likes to market itself as a pioneer of this smart city movement, which consequently makes them able to receive a whole bunch of grant funding.

have many many consequences. But anyway, back to drones. According to a twenty twenty article in the newspaper Loprenza, cities in San Diego County like Chula Vista, have received equipment such as tethered drones used for stationary surveillance, poll 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 CEES, 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 US 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 leg work. Instead of having to manually map someone's movements and track down what niche etsy shirt someone's wearing, these aisystems 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 MITA 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.

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.

using drones to surveil first time in activity stuff. And I know you recently lost a court case regarding the availability of drone footage, so I'm curious about the kind of 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.

They did lose the case. The Fourth 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 the details of how much footage is subject to public disclosure and figure out a process for standardizing the release of the footage.

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, the city declined to provide the copies because doing so might have violated

individual privacy rights. The city would have to manually review and redact every video recording to protect information considered personal, such as the images of faces, license plates, backyards, and more. 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 two hundred and thirty days. I'm going to read

a little bit more from the city's recent statement. Quote, while the city takes very seriously obligation to provide the public access to public records, the city is concerned that the Court of Appeal's opinion may compromise significant privacy concerns of members of the public in this case or in

future requests. 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.

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 it 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 for one month will probably end up not taking two hundred and thirty 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, it's all the way back to April of twenty twenty one, so hopefully, hopefully more than three years later, we'll finally get a look. Special thanks to Laprenze 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 the website to Leprenza dot 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. It's it could happen here.

to orgs in a bit. But what I'll say about orgs is that, 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 in fighting or talking about doing work, you join them.

organizers haven't been able to do in like thirty years. Yeah, and it's just by random people who don't think they know how to do anything.

about right before the twenty eighteen mid terms. And at that time, they were corraling 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 Psalm after like a couple of days, right, you know, kids in leady mud and shit, and I particularly know what to do, but evidently there were people there who were hungry and thirsty, and so I get three of my friend my friends.

At this time, I was still making about half my many riding bicycles and in the other half riding so my friends and I was 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. Which we do. We called a friend who has a company who makes waffles. Where we obtained like 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 scheduled. Yeah, it is a bit chaotic at times, but we were able to do that, and we're with a lot of other people. Clearly wasn't just us right, but we were able to process tenths of thousands of

dollars and feed thousands of people. Be everyone there, And I've seen this countless times, especially working and organizing with well with refugees. For the most part, people are so good at organizing each other in themselves. Like when we got there with bottles of water and food. There are a thousand people that who have not had sometimes 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.

do this. It is 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 you know, work a job right. You know, like one of the things that comes up a lot in this which is less discussed and also kind of annoying. But you know, you have to manage it is that organizing is about people and sometimes you have to you know, you have to do things like you have to manage

people's egos. But like, I don't know, almost all of you work jobs or have work jobs, right, you have had to like deal with your boss being on one right, you have the skills to do this. You know how to do the interpersonal relationship stuff. It's just that you don't think about that as organizing, even though that's that's just what it is.

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.

concerned with Liuvede 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 Like when we had the end of Title forty two and people were in between the fences that a lot of the people who I organize with now or who helped people with now,

I didn't know. I just showed up with a giant sider generator that I happened to have and some stuff that we had to whip around a call 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.

a very very it's a cool organization. You can just like found a food nut Bobs chapter. 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 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 you, presumably at some point in your life, have like organized a group of friends to go do something, right, Like I've gotten a group of people together to go accomplish a task.

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 that's an auxiliary benefit to all of this is that it's a great It's a great way to sort of break break the isolation we're all under.

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, 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 onto a next thing, or you know,

any any number of things that can happen. You want the organization to still be able to keep working without you, and you want you want 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 you in a second, right, Or like, I don't know, I have a call. That's a huge skill. There are so many different skills that are so useful for so many things. I'm just gonna go over lots of things that are actually really useful to get to get people a sense of like the

kinds of things that there are. There are massive roles for so one of the most important ones, and this is something you can you deliberately look for. You know, this is 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 because again, most most organizing

is just talking to people and building relationships. And you know, one of the things you do when you're when you're doing your sort of they call it power mapping, but when when you when you're figuring out 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 you know, can sort of like organize people down the chain because they

have they have their relationships already and also they're good they'll be good at, you know, talking to new people and and spreading your 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 oporary social. But you probably have a friend that you're thinking of right now who is very good at conversations that is charming and is good at making friendships.

That person unbelievably useful, incredibly useful and compelling skill.

high 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 campaign bosses.

information on the Internet, and it's very easy. And I would imagine that if you're under fifty and maybe if you're over fifty two, like you just know how to do this because it's what you do anyway 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.

This happens all the time. It can be very very useful for bosses and 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, like the people they're hiring to be researchers are just you, but they got a job being a researcher for a union. Like they

have the same skills as you. They know how to like Google stuff, and they know how to look through people's like data profiles and like look through their their facebooks and their Instagrams and like A big one, A big one that that the rich people especially do not think about, is like cash app and venmo oh venop because yeah, yeah, because because people's peoples trying, people just leave public transactions out there like that. That's how they

got what's his name, the congressional magates. Can I legally call him the congressional pedophile? I guess they call him the accused pedophile?

Having a car, 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. Being able to just drive a bunch of water to a place, oh yeah, huge, staggeringly useful.

like going in helping migrants. Like being able to hike is staggeringly useful skill.

People who are undocumented, people are on temporary migration statuses are going to be definitely afraid of any interaction with law enforcement. If you can change the bulb on someone's tail light or their turn signal indicators of US in the UK, then you can meaningfully protect that person in a really important way. And it can literally take ten minutes.

your job that can be very useful. I mean, having someone to manage 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 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. That is what 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?

of my friends could do that. And one of my friends was making 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, yeah, 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.

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 there's something you can you know, find in your friends. You can find in the sort of the people around you.

tell people that there's a thing happening. Yea, 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, these 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. 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 if that's the thing that you can do, well, 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.

and like we were sitting around with these. We had some seek guys, had some Weiga folks come from China, and then some Kourdish people and they were all displaying their different music and it was so nice like that, taking people out of a shitty situation for a moment with music. Again, like, don't underestimate how important that it. Don't feel like if you have that skill, it's not a useful one.

depressed to do it. Yeah, And being able to raise people's morale, it's it's this massive if you want again, want to go into technical language, is a massive force multiplayer 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.

string instrument. It's a string instrument, is what it is. And like that made everyone so happy. We had such a nice evening. Everyone was able to like get through

it's a relatively difficult thing. Like, you know, it sucks that people are being killed and just for driving around are existing, and they're bombing all this c really 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 fifteen thirteen years of war, and it's because it is important, and so don't overlook that.

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 that 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 captialty organizing thing all the time. Your organization will not hold together. There has to be actual like bonds formed between you

and the people you're organizing. With and the people you're trying to help.

Christmas Holidays, which is nice. And it was cold, 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 MRIs left the refugee emory

sort of vegan. Lots of us are vegan, so we were like, we're not going to find any other vegan food in the middle of nowhere out here, so we'll set around eating the little vegan MREs and like just talking and like sharing some thoughts and things we experience over the last months of doing this, And like, it's those moments that make you're organizing groups so much stronger.

No one's telling anyone to do anything, you know, there's genuine bonds and that 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 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. Yeah, And the stronger your relationships are, the more lucky 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 like you know, even if you're doing a potlucks, it's good to you know, you do like one capital 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.

The reason I believe that that is the way we should organize and the way we will continue to organize in a 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 fucking hurts, rent a car doesn't care or know about its employees in a way that we who organize with people and care and I love one anob do and like that's why our organizations will always be stronger than those created by capitalism of the state.

do the thing, it will happen. Yeah, and suddenly it ceases to be this like, oh, this domain of expert knowledge and there's 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 are a 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.

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.

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.

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 like it doesn't matter that some of the kids are Kurdition and some of the kids are from China and some

of them are from Columbia or whatever. Like they'll get along just fine. When they're four or five years old. They don't care. They want to kick a ball or see a Teddy Bear or something. And I think it's really good for your children to you know, 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.

And another thing that's very helpful with these is you know you're going to be operating at our time constraints because people don't have forty five 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 of moving the conversation through the stuff on the agenda because you have

more stuff you need to talk about. 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 realize they need to do this, you don't understand how I put.

wants to talk? You have one person talking at a time, and what someone wants to talk, they raise their hand, 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 the 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.

get and make sure 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.

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 degrees, 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 asked if they have anything to say, and a lot of times they will, but they just don't feel confident enough.

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.

that you're not forming a book club. Like book clubs are fine, but you need to make sure you're organizing group. If you try to do a thing, has it just become a book club. But that's you know that that was something that was very useful to us. And you know,

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 a light post or whatever, and then we put them like 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 know, we had this flyer, this firehead information. This flyer said, okay,

we're starting a tenant's union. If you have tenant, if you have issues with your landlord, or you want to talk about tenants 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. Yeah, 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, 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 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, but people still came, like people still came in the blizzard, Like a lot of people showed

up for this. What are things that we do? We also, like, you know, we just we just started talking to people, right, We started talking to tenants about their problems. We just you know, we talked to our friends, we talked to the people they knew. We ended up talking to someone, you know, And this is the thing that just happens as it spreads by word of mouth, right, people start

contacting you. We ran into a really long time tenants organizer in the city who had a bunch of incredible stories about how our corrupt politicians got jobs by portraying the old tenets organizers, right, And like I said, the thing is, you know, another thing that happens in projects is you'll you'll sometimes you'll just you 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 want to they want to

do stuff. We plotted out what we were going to do at our meeting.

I don't I don't remember what we talked about. But like that, you know, but like you all of those things, right, all of those steps from the start of 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, M that's publisher.

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.

from Spanish colonial rule. It was formed in eighteen nineteen 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 Simon Bolivar, who are dreamt of uniting the former Spanish colonies into.

in political vision, economic interests, and regional identities. Centralized governance had alienated local elites, and debates over federalism versus centralism deepened existing divisions. Plus Bolivard's increasingly autocratic rule I mean he literally tried to push for a lifetime presidency obviously sparked internal opposition, so Grand Columbia was facing external threats

from Spanish royalist forces and internal fractures. By eighteen thirty, Bolivard had to resign from the presidency, disillusioned by the failure of his vision, and the same year Grand Columbia dissolved into three separate nations. Venezuela, Ecuador, and the Republic of New Grenada, which later on split into Columbia and Panama.

Unlike the other countries of South America that we've covered, these countries had far less large scale anarchist movements, but will still take a look at what little impact anarchists did make in the past two centuries in these places. This whole series, by they wouldn't be possible without the scholarship of Anhill Capelletti, whose research I drew upon heavily for this historic review. I suggest reading his book Anarchism

in Latin America for further details. Let's first take a look at the history in Ecuador at the turn of the twentieth century. Ecuador was ruined from a liberal revolution that had just taken place in the country. The country was shifting as industrialization creeped in, the bourgeoisie 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 Partiro Liberal Obrero.

Miguel Albuquerque made a name from self in Ecuador. Originally, he had come seeking assistance with Cuba's independent struggle, but eventually found himself playing a key role in Ecuador's labor movement. He established the side that the e Host del Trabajo or the Society 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 nineteen nineteen, where workers in the graphic arts industry organized the demand back conditions. By nineteen twenty two, Guyaquil was the epicenter of a massive general strike, shaped in part by the anarchist Nicolists, who were obviously.

the military suppressed the revolts. Most workers returned to their jobs after that, but the trolley workers continued their strike until the twenty first of November, when most of their demands were.

I like to see the Caribbean Sea. So there would have been a lot of transfer and communication between these independent Latin America and republics and Cuba, which was still at the time of colony.

is an important aspect of struggles that's sort of consciousness racing. Yes, So these anarchists in particular in Guyaquille, they founded these Centro their Studio Socialists, which was a libertarian study group in Guayaquille, and then a decade later, in nineteen twenty the anarchists also established a Centro Gremial Sindicalista or the Synicalist Guild Center, which had a mission to an end 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 endcode. As in the rest of the region, their publications played a key role in spreading the ideas again early twentieth century, late nineteenth century, the anarchists were make in papers. Yeah, use papers, newspapers, newspapers.

were anticipating in the nineteen thirties brought some challenges. Marxist Lennis thought began to dominate leftist circles and figures like Jose Carlos Mariettegi 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 Marcus Lenists consolidated power through unified political parties. But despite

these shifts, anarchistman Acuador was really ever entirely extinguished. It actually continues to influence workers organizations like the Ferracio and La guayas well into modern times. But now let's make our way north to Columbia as a similar story and

foolds of anarchism taken route in here twentieth century. And this is actually a fun factor because both Eli's Recluse and Mikhail Bercunan visited Columbia recluses there for research purposes, and Bercunen 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.

of course met with brutal police repression. From there, the movement came momentum in nineteen twenty Port Walter because in Katahina went on strike, and by the following decade, and I guess we're the forefront of workers militancy all across the Caribbean coast, which was more connected to global struggles in the rest of Columbia and was thus a hotbed of organizing and unrest. If you know the geography of Columbia, you'd know that there's a lot of jungle and mountainous

region near the middle of the country. It's that the coast where you tend to have more of the activity and connection with the neighboring countries in the Caribbean Sea. Fun of 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, you know, coastal Colombia and Coastal Venezuela to be part of the Caribbean. But as like the sort of niche

discourse you get an r slash ass Caribbean. The few Anarchistablu present in Colombia were part of nearly every major uprising, including the Baranquila Strike of nineteen ten, the labor wave that swept Cattahina, Barankuilia and Santimurri year nineteen eighteen, the first strike against the notoriously bloody United Fruit Company in nineteen eighteen, the hero Dot Railroad strike and the Artisans

and Labor strike in Bogota nineteen nineteen. The oil strikes in Baron Kabirmeha during the nineteen twenties, including one against the Tropical Oil Company in nineteen twenty seven which cost twelve hundred workers their jobs and painted the targets 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 nineteen twenty eight, 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 Columbia was heavily repressed, and because of how small it was, it didn't quite pick back up. As historian Max that Lao noted, publications like Organization in Santa Marta and Via

Libre and Baranquilla disappeared at the late nineteen twenties. This crackdown on anarchists, coupled with the rise in Floyd of Bolshevik led unions, shifted the landscape, and by the nineteen thirties anarchist organizing was all but silenced in Columbia. But it's a part of Columbia that we're missing. She At one point Panama was considered part of the country, so there must been stuff happening on that little sliver of land, right, He'd be surprised if we rewind to the mid nineteenth century.

Between eighteen fifteen eighteen fifty five, Panama saw the construction of a trans Isthmus railroad, and this massive project was followed by two phases of canal construction, the first by the French between eighteen eighteen and eighteen ninety five and the second by the US from nineteen oh forty nineteen fourteen.

These projects brought tens of thousands of workers from Europe, Asia and Caribbean, effectually turned in Panama into a melting part of laborers who bought their skills, their culture and their ideas. Beijian workers, for example, that is people from Barberos. If I recall correctly, there was a time in Barbeos's history where there was some massive It was like a full quarter of the country's income was just coming from remittances from people who had had family members sending their

money from the canal project back home. And it's not just the Cribbean there was impacted, obviously, as workers from Europe and Asia 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 anarchist cynicalism that had been bruin in that region of the world. And such ideas were of course solely 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 gain its independence from Colombia nineteen oh three. 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 So in general, George W. Davis actively suppressed the anarchist workers that remained. In nineteen oh seven or whatever, despite that repression, two thousand Spanish workers went on strike for better wages. In nineteen twenty four, a prominently anarchist cynicalist group founded the Sindicato Heneral Destrabbaha Daughters, which was

Panama's first central workers union. They 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 nineteen thirty. But on such a small sliver of land were 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 Stuner's philosophy. They had egoists and anarchist egoism interesting in Panama. Yeah, exactly. This blew my mind as well. And they don't expect to see them in such contexts.

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 Anseel and Bella Garige, and he was actually an individualist anarchist, and you're 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. You know, 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, and it was translated by Sean Wilbow'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.

days of Saint andrew'sm There you Go. But his novel Toto and Pueblo described anarchists as apostles of justice, which is really fire title, I must say, as they carried the flame of liberty into the streets.

the anarchist influence quietly spread among bakers, bricklayers, and oil workers. Truly, it was the oil boom of the nineteen twenties that reshieed Venice Whelan society, and of course continues to affect

it today. While anarchistiniclist maintained underground networks in the grown oil sector, state and corporate power proved to be too much By the mid twentieth century, after the fall of Gomez's regime, the rise of political parties like Acxio Democratica cooperted 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 nineteen thirty six to

nineteen forty five. In fact, anarchist repression also gained a constitutional footing in the four of the Lara Law, which band strikes, associations meeting through a permission from the state, political propaganda, and basically all the usual datatorial stuff. After the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Franco more Spanish anarchist immigrants came to Venezuela.

into an explicitly mass movement in Venezuela, but elements of it did persist, and the unield in pursuit of freedom were still felt even in the harshest of conditions. So looking today at the countries that composed the former Grand Columbia, I would argue that the spark of anarchism still hasn't died.

On Ecuador, uprisings continue to challenge extractive economies and demand autonomous control over renditionous territories, and some anarchist collectives are active in solidarity, providing logistical support during protests and pushing horizontal forms of organizing in the broader social struggle. After the twenty twenty one national strike in Columbia, some anarchist practices have begun to infuse movements against police brutality, privatization,

and austerity measures. Mutual aid networks have all same emerged inspired by anarchist practice to support the community's hit hardest by economic crises. In Panama, anarchism exists on the fringes, but it has the potential to provide inspiration to those who are actively confronting the liberal policies, advocating for workers'

rights and engaging in anti corporate actions. Finally, in Venezuela, economic collapse and authoritarianism of 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, an ideas still have potency. And really my hope is at these places continue to explore the creativity and solidarity that are necessary for liberation, that they

continue to struggle and they go further still. You know, Viva I labored that or power to all the people. Peace, Hello and welcome, take it up. And here I'm Andrew Sage. I'm also Androwism on YouTube.

groups in Heiti. Ever, from my research there there was an appearance of socialism more broadly as part of the struggle against domination and taking place in the country. But the dictato ships of Haiti have made those kinds of movements very difficult to spring out and thrive.

zosis is all possible thanks to health, capitaleties. Exhaustive work titled Anarchism in Latin America, Bleming said, the scene first and foremost across the lush rainforests and turquoise seas of

Central America. Historically, there were several indigenous peoples that have called at home, and that home was violated in the early sixteenth century as Spanish conquistadors carved bloody paths through the region, replacing the ones fiber and pre colonial societies with the feuder like arrangements of the incomeendo system, which

forced indigenous peoples into labor under Spanish landowners. The colonial eras of the rise of vast plantations for cash crops like cocoa, indigo, and later coffee Inhrition a small elite, while indigenous and after descendant populations endured brutal oppression over the centuries. Fast forward to the early nineteenth century, and the wave of independence sweeping across Latin America reached Central America.

In eighteen twenty one, the region officially threw off Spanish rule, and in eighteen twenty three, Central America gained its independence from the Mexican Empire. For a fleet in moment from eighteen twenty three to eighteen thirty nine, Central America united as the Federal Republic of Central America, modeled after the US Constitution, and encompass in modern day Guatemala, Honduras, Salvador, Nicaragua,

and Costa Rica. Whe By eighteen thirty eight, the cracks in the federation would become in too large to ignore. I mean, for most of its existence, the capital of the country alternated between Guatemala City and San Southador, so

they couldn't even decide on that. Liberals and conservatives were also split on the economy, centralization versus decentralization, and the role of the Catholic Church, and Guatemala was kind of 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 seas of resistance would sprout across the former territory of the Republic. And among those seeds with the anarchists. Let's start from Costa Rica and head north. In nearly nineteen hundreds, in Costa Rica, you had libertarian newspapers popping up all over the place as usual.

who focused on study and expanded upon anarchism. At nineteen eleven, they would launched the journal Renovacion, which lasted an impressive seventy plus issues. They helped organize Costa Rica's first May Day celebration in nineteen thirteen and he resilate. As in the nineteen twenties, groups explicitly formed for libertarian action, but unfortunately the anarchist influence wouldn't be as impactful in the country heading into the mid twenty youth century, as the

country faced two dictatorships. However, the defeat of the latter in nineteen forty nine 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 US interests. They do have a US military base in the country after all. But let me not expeculate too much.

Leon to Managua. But this federation wasn't anarchists and character both conservative and liberal elites actually tried to use these workers groups with their own ends within the fo When the group of Socialista ended up emerging as a rebel force to challenge these elites and their influence in the workers' movements, but even that rebel group was a reformist in nature.

Now it is possible that libertarians from Spain and Mexico played roles in the Steve Drow strikes of nineteen nineteen in Corindo, which was Nicragu's major port city, but a caste for Shure for 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 Nicagua. Sandino worked alongside

anarchists during his time in exile in Mexico. Unit's revolution and the red and black of the Sandinistas actually came from that anarchist influence. By the nineteen thirties, after the US withdrawal, the labor movement had to navigate the Soumotza family dictatorship, which was marked by the severe oppression of

anything that even smelled red. 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 seventies, some social progress was then possible in the country, but it was still marred by corruption and authoritarianism, made worse by the reelection of Daniel or Day in two thousand and six.

He still holds the presidency in Nicaragua to this d managing to steave off this swell of protest against him between twenty eighteen and twenty twenty, of which anarchists, however small number did indeed take part. If weteen to Hounduras. Now, there's not too much to say about anarchists so again, but Honduras did have a vibrant label movement. In eighteen ninety, La Democracia, one of the country's first mutual laid societies, emerged with a cooperative spirit that laid the foundation for

was to come. By the early twentieth century, the workers move when in Honduras had begun to heat up even more, particularly among miners and banana plantation laborers, two groups that were central to the country's economy. In March nineteen o nine, miners struck against brutal conditions and poverty wages. The response Garson, maybe you can guess bad things, violent, brutal repression and ding ding ding ding thing.

labor movement. Now will anarchists involve these movements as possible, as movements do bear much of the language and hallmarks of the anarchist cynicalis thought at the time, but identify specific names as difficult, and there doesn't seem to be any evidence of specifically anarchist groups.

inequality in the country. Two thousand and nine coup against President Manuel's u Liar marked another turning point in modern hundred resistance. Silia's progressive policies, including raised in the minimum wage and considering a Greeran reform. Imagine you're considered progressive,

even considering a careering reform. But for that thought crime of considering a Greeran reform, he was alienated by the business elite and the US aligned military and thus could and this triggered, of course, a wave of militarization and repression and protests. We met with violence and human rights abuses usual in the years fallen. The coup movements like Clatters Extensia unified a broad coalition of workers, indigenous crewsanist

students who were all demanding systemic change. But the essues persist Andruas 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 the Salvador. Anarchists, both local and international, played a key role in shape in the early labor movement Spanish, Mexico and Panamanian anarchisynicalists work with them ideas of collector resistance and workers autonomy.

One of the earliest milestones in the country was the Union Oprera Savalorina, founded in nineteen twenty two, which united workers under the principles of mutual aid and direct action. Nineteen twenty four, the Ferracrion de Ravadoresta Salvador or FRTs emerged and was initially steeped at anarchistinicalist ideas before shifting towards Marxism in the late nineteen twenties. In the nineteen thirties, the anarchist Centro sind Cal Libretario was founded and operated

in Sansa the Door. Unfortunately, for pretty much everybody in the outside of door, nineteen thirty two happened the devastating La Mantaza of nineteen thirty two. 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 to La matanza means un if you've be brushed up in your Spanish.

either killed or forced underground. This marked the beginning of decades of military rule designed to protect the interests of the land owned in oligarchy, the fourteen families that practically owned everything in El Salvor. But despite this repression, radical organizations have persisted. The mid to lay twentieth century saw the rise of armed revolutionary groups, culminating in the Salvadorda In Civil War from nineteen eighty eight to nineteen ninety two.

The war pitted the primarily Marxi Leninists and socialist factions against the US backed Selvadorra and military dictaisership. The Marxists transitioned into a political party after the nineteen ninety two peace accords, which ended the war but left many systemic inequalities unresolved. In the twenty fifth century, labour struggles have continued amid new liberal economic reforms and international financial pressures, while the left wing Fmelon won the presidents in two

thosey nine and held power on until twenty nineteen. Its tenure was criticized for failing to sufficiently addressed issues plague in the country. Recent years under President I have seen the construction of a proper mass casseral police state. What we're going to struggle against, privatization and our sterity measures. By the way, the rise of Achille is just really fascinating to me, particularly from a trendardy and context, because we have a pre surveyor murder rate situation going on.

Our murder rate has been rising steadily in the past two decades and there's just been in general, lot of crime is serious lately, and the response a lot I've seen a lot of Trindadians have toward the rise of a Chill and a Salvador. It's literally like, we do that too, We need to do that too, Like we need to you know, institute like a mass custual state as well. And I feel like I'm fighting a wave.

I'm like talking to a war like really, it's really difficult for me, I think, to challenge that because I know some people's frustrations, but to me, my mind is

just boggled at it. You know, like you really think we'll be complaining about r ouption all the time, right, Like it's very openly nepatistic and corrupt in this place, people who are like either political party that is presented to us as the options, and yet people are so think about the crime situation that they're willing to put that much power in the hands of the government to make that judgment. That's the things we know that they're

innocent people in for killers prisons. You know, we know that journalists haven't locked of 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.

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 powerity that 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 boss as well. I understand the frustration, I don't understand the response, and it remains to be seeing how Biguli's

policies continue to play out in the country. I feel like it's a disaster reason to happen, and so in many ways it is already a disaster.

the Marxists in the country had a different vision. They pushed for the formation of the Federacion Juianaloberradia Guatemala and with that the launch of Fangaradia Proletaria, a communist led people that aim to rally the working class behind Marxist ideas. At the same time, Spanish and Peruvian workers alongside Guatemala and students and workers came together to form the Committee Peroxio and Cindical, which was the space where anarchistyndicalism truly

found its voice in Guatemala. Gres you can probably guess the powers that be weren't going to let this kind of artical action stand. In nineteen thirty a military Dutay ships swept into the country, ending the Committee, effectively silence and anarchystynicalism in Quatemala and set in the stage for years of political oppression as the state worked tirelessly to suppress any form of workers self organization, often with the back end of the one and only yous say us

say us say. The mid twentieth century marked a period of extreme violence against workers movements, passive movements, and leftists movements, especially after the nineteen fifty four CIA backed coup. Despite these setbacks, workers and political movements really never stopped fighting.

In the nineteen sixties and seventies, Kriller movements gainablementum inspired by Marxist and anti imperialist ideologies, and although these movements were frequently crushed with state violence in the Fourth massacres and disappearances, they persisted until the end of the Civil War nineteen ninety six. Still social inequality and economic exploitation persisted. They moved on, especially in this sweatshop industry, have continued

to fight for workers' rights. Guatemalo today is still fighting to breathe free. Its people are still fighting against the continued dominance of new liberal economic policies, fighting against crop political elites, and most importantly, fighting for autonomy French, indigenous and working peoples. And that it's time to hit the

islands on Our first stop is the Dominican Republic. To the efforts of Spanish immigrant workers, the ideas of mutual aid and syndicalism found very fertile ground, particularly in the mid eighteen eighties, where we see the emergence of the first mutualist associations, such as La Alianza Chipayania in eighteen eighty four and Society dad at tsinale Ecost de Pueblo

in eighteen ninety. The riverald Workers Strike in eighteen ninety six, struck in protest against their conditions but working on the Puerto Plata Santiago line, among the first direct actions in the American Republic outside of its historical.

where the Confederacion dominican and del Trabajo was born. The demands were basic but crucial, things like the eight 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 to the end to the North American occupation, which had had

a heavy presence in the region for decades. The nineteen twenties also the rise of another powerful union, the Federacion Locale de Travajo de Santra Remingo, which was founded by thirty one different unions. Despite the strength of these movements, the Dominican Republic remained under the heavy influence of foreign

powers and corrupt local elites. In nineteen forty six, the Dominican Republics so a major strike in the sugar plantations of La Romana and San Pedro de Macoris, and this time the influence of Spanish anarchists who had fled the Spanish Civil War was undeniable. Today, the anarchist presence in the American 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 a final historical review.

Puerto Rico, as we know, was a Spanish colony until eighteen ninety eight, 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 there By Cuba, let us men, it wasn't there pushing back against the powers of b Anarchist militans, particularly from Spain, made their way to Puerto Rico in the eighteen eighties, bringing with them the fire of direct action and commitment to the idea that workers should control their own lives.

In the liberal period between eighteen sixty eight and eighteen seventy three, the first artist and based organizations started popping up. These were mutual aid societies and cooperatives. They weren't exactly radical orientation, a far cry from the anarchist of prizings happening elsewhere in that America, but there were spaces where workers could find solidarity and support. In eighteen ninety four,

things began to change. A monetary crisis hit, followed by a devaluation that ten prices kyrocketing, and the population decided to push back. This triggered a wave of strikes and mass protests, and that's where we start to see the direct influence of anarchists. Were not for sure that Spanish anarchists, who had settled in Puerto Rico were active in these

early struggles, push in fremancipation and denounced in exploitation. In eighteen ninety eight, when Puerto Rico was already under US control, anarchists and socialists came together to form the Federacrialricnale the Rostravadories, a group clearly inspired with the Spanish Federascriol and Richiernalespanola. Their program was a simple yet radical one, abolished the exploitation of workers and build a society without borders or masters.

But as with all movements, there were contradictions and splits. In eighteen ninety nine, a major rift occurred within the Federation, and 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 Federastrian Libre, a group that split from that original federation and stuck to

the principles of the First International. Yet, just a few years later, in nineteen oh one, this same group ended up affiliated with the conservative American Federation of Labor, which is a very strange Bedfellow considering their earlier anarchists commitments. But the anarchists didn't feed away just after these splits. They didn't achieve the dawn and 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.

There are Puerto Ricans and history who understood that freedom wasn't solely about political independence, but about deliberation of all people from all forms of exploitation. So I just take a step back and look at the broader picture of

labor and anarchist struggle across the region. Do the anarchist movements were not as vibrant as elsewhere, whether indeed dormant or dead in many cases, we still see a very powerful thread of resistance and a very flutile ground for anarchist development, which our comrades in these places can hopefully flourish within.