Hello, and welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westerveldt. Obviously, there is a lot to be outraged by and fearful of happening in the US right now, and as is the case whenever anything is happening outside of extreme weather events, there's been a chorus right now chanting who cares about climate change? Who cares about a far off problem when there are so many more urgent threats. It should go
without saying, but I'll say it anyway. Anyone who cares about mitigating climate risk should absolutely be showing up to fight for democracy. The same administration that is shooting citizens in the street for exercising their first Amendment right is after all, trying to get rid of the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and apple Miospheric Administration, and all of
the protections that go along with them. I would say that those of us who think the world should act according to the scientific evidence on not only climate change but also air and water pollution, should be able to walk and chew gum at least as well as the goon's intent on destroying the so called administrative state in the US giving a shit about the long term viability of the human species is very much aligned with protecting
your fellow humans on the streets today. There are also a whole bunch of ways that these issues directly intersect, one of which is the topic of today's show. From twenty twenty two to twenty twenty four, we reported, wrote, and produced an investigation into the increasing repression of climate protests around the world. It was called the Real Free Speech Threat, a not to the fact that while these supposed free speech warriors were worrying about cancel cultures were
actually threatening political speech all over the world. The problem has unfortunately only gotten worse, and in many ways, the backlash to climate protest lay the groundwork for the way we're seeing protesters treated in the streets of Minneapolis and lots of other cities around the world today. Last month, I caught up with researcher Oscar Bergland, who recently released the first ever peer reviewed study of the global repression
of climate protest. Some of Drill's reporting actually fed into that research, and I was curious to hear from Oscar what he and his team learn and how things have progressed in recent years. It tells us a lot about not just the fight for a livable world, but also the fight for a just one. That conversation is coming up right after this quick break.
I am a doctor Oscar Bergland, and I work at the School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol.
Tell me a little bit about this paper and what prompted you to write it. I was shocked when you put it out and noted that it's the first a pandemic peer of you paper on repression of climate protests because.
I had seen, you know, like a fair bit of media coverage topic and surprising to me that there hadn't been more research on it. So I'm curious why you think that is, and then what prompted you to want to do this paper.
Yeah, so the main reason why there isn't more research
on this is probably that research is slow. Academic research is slow, and adrilled have obviously been really early on on reporting about this and what this paper was the first of was kind of taking this kind of global, international perspective, and of course you have done that in your reporting, and Michelle Force, you know that you and Special Rapperteires certainly also takes a kind of international, global perspective in writing about these things, and talking about these things.
So it's not like we're the first in the world to take this global, international perspective. But this is, as far as I know, the first pre viewed publication to come out to do so. And probably remember, you know, I obviously have been kind of looking into these things for a couple of years now. You and I have talked about it before, and you know, we obviously give a shout out to your work.
I suppose what brought.
Me to study this topic in the first place is that I studied climate change activism. I studied civil disobedience very much, the kind of wave of twenty eighteen twenty nineteen climate protests, and then during the pandemic, particularly in twenty twenty one, it became pretty obvious that there was a clampdown on protests, and therefore I started.
Looking at that.
And I think when we started this project, because we've been doing this for two years here now, and when we started this, we started with a list very helpfully provided by you, which had laws, various laws in various countries or states that were criminalizing protests in various ways. So then we looked deeper into that. We've extended that list. When you look at these new laws. You can see
that they obviously have geographical differences. I think you can tell when places have extractive industries that there are certain types of protest tactics that are particularly targeted through new laws. So we can see this in Australia, for example, particularly with states that have extractive industries or go harsher on things like block ons and things that protesters might do
at sites of extraction. And there seems to be a fair bit of copy and paste, particularly in the US context of these anti protest laws, but there's also a lot of kind of local variation of what types of protest is being criminalized. And then we realized, well, actually, if we're talking about a repression criminalization of climate protests, then those laws are just one aspect of the criminalization.
And what we see perhaps much more is what we call here creative and strategic legal interventions, which is basically using or misusing laws created for a different purpose and using it against climate and environmental activists, or changes to court procedures and so on. What you've seen loads over here in the UK where limit what can be said
in court, what kind of defenses can be used. I mean, now they're even trying to get rid of jury trials for certain kind of trials, because juries are more likely to find defendants not guilty than if you just have sort of judges making that decision.
So that's one aspect, and then.
Of course you have this third very important aspect, which is that most of the repression and criminalization that activists face is in relation to the police. I mean, most of them don't end up in court, right. So then you know, looking at house arrests used, how surveillance used, and harassment and other kind of forms.
Of police violence.
So for the report that came out a year earlier and then the paper that came out last month, looking at the data and we see quite you know, important and interesting differences in how the police police protest mental activism. So which shows us, for example, that you know, France, you're much more likely to get violently attacked by the police. Police are much more likely to use gas or water canons or other forms of police kind of violence against you than you are in a country like the UK
or in most other European countries. And whilst you know, in the UK and Australia you've had this huge amount of arrests for example, which obviously is because you've had extinction rebellion and groups like that habit use the arrest as a means of protest in a way that is behind that data. But like still it shows, you know, differences in police in practices for sure. So those three three different categories all for us come under this kind of criminalization aspect.
And two of my.
Colleagues that have written this paper with identify as criminologists, so they see themselves as criminologists. I'm more of a political scientist, and so host Chris, who's another course or the paper. And so if that's criminalization, then when we move over to the even darker aspects of this, which is you know, the killings and disappearances which arrive in certain countries, then that's beyond criminalization.
If you murder somebody minorizing them, that's you know.
So that's why we felt we needed you know, criminalization isn't enough to capture this.
We need pression.
We need repression more rarely to capture all of this. And actually those killings and disappearances often follow the kind of harassment and surveillance that are part of police action. Then of course, in many countries have state actors with the Trio police that carry out a lot of those killings.
And then lastly, you know something that you have covered a lot as well, is that all of this is kind of justified and enabled by a constant vilification by media outlets, by politicians and on social media, trolling accounts and so on of climate activists. During the time that we've studied this, you know, you had use of anti terror legislation against suliman Let in France. You had organized crime legislation used against Leicster generacy in Germany, and against
Tottutal in Spain. So you know, these are all European countries that are supposed to be the more democratic ones that use that kind of legislation that obviously is not designed to be used against non violent activist groups, right, and in a way that I mean, how is that different from what the Filipino state has been engaging in in for a long time now, which is you know this no red tagging where they label any activists that they don't like, they label them, you know, communist terrorists
and hence the red tagging, and therefore they removed a whole bunch of rights that otherwise they would have right, which is it's it's the same process, right for sure, in Germany and France. You run a lot lower risk of in you know, killed by the military, as you certainly do in the Philippines, but the process is the same in many ways. So I think that that surprised
us a bit. I think the extent to which and I've been we've been following this more closely as posed in the UK because we live here, but the extent to which court processes are constantly changed, and how the goal posts are constantly changed, and this really strange thing which I think would not be possible in a lot
of countries. But what has happened in the UK at order is that you can do a Protest Act in twenty twenty two before the Public Order Act becomes law, and then you go to trial two years later and you're sentenced using the Public Order Act, which didn't exist in that form when when the when the acts took place. I mean, that's insane.
Kin imagine if people tried to do that to you know, corporations with tax law, there'd be yeah, we'd never hear the end of it.
We wouldn't.
And so that's and obviously so you know, the UK is so probably the place where I have spoken more to activists because you know, I live here and I know I've been and speaking to these people who oh, you know, have live court cases and are yeah, really
really scared about that kind of thing. The the way in which you know, it really matters who your judges, and you know, if you certain judges have real grudges against activists, whether those whether they exist the kind of actual financial links or not, whether it's just kind of political grudges that judges have against activists.
But it's obvious that.
Some do and have been much much harsher in the restrictions that they have put in in their courtrooms and so on, and the kind of deep politicization of the courtroom or you know, attempted depoliticization of the courtroom here in the UK, and which I think is replicated in several other countries as well, where you know, you're not allowed to talk about climate change and or allowed to talk about anything about what motivated you to do it.
I mean that's insane.
Any crime that has been committed, you talk about the motivation, right, That's part bit, isn't it. But no here in these in these what is political trials, you're not allowed to talk about about the politics of it.
So talking the other day and back to one of the health workers that is on trial for protests in the UK, I think their their trial is February, and they were saying that in their initial hearing too, that they were yeah, like effectively told that they whatever they had to say wouldn't wouldn't qualify as a legal defense anyway, so they couldn't say anything, which I'm like, I don't understand how that doesn't constitute effectively not allowing someone a defense.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And if you look at the experiences of these activists that have gone through the trials and so on as well, what these knew what the Public Order Act did was you know, really limiting their civil liberties when they are out, you know, on remand or just been released from prison that you know,
on paper, they're not allowed to do anything. They're not allowed to go anywhere near a protest, They're not allowed to go be engaged with perfectly legal groups of activists. So you know, whether you know that is ultimately policed or not is of course another matter, But on paper, they're not allowed to do very much at all, and their civil liberties are significantly restricted. And that kind of brings me in the point about you know, is it
police or not. That brings me into because in the kind of theoretical criminalization literature, there's this kind of distinction between you know, one thing is what is criminalized in law, and one thing is what is actually in practice criminalized. So you know, like the law allows for the whole bunch of types of criminalization that aren't actually then policed
or acted on in society. And here we can see that, you know, the new powers that were given to the police in the UK early on were used almost exclusively against climate protesters, soil against against just topoil, and that was a group that was very heavily criminalized by the
state and by their police. Now I think we've seen very obviously a heavy criminalization of the Palestine protesters as well, and not at least obviously Palestine action that was proscribed as a terrorist organization again very much you know, misusing
this label. And here also done many interviews with foreign journalists who all, you know, think that it's ridiculous that this happened, because you know, it's easy to criticize what goes on in other countries harder to do it in their own country.
Yeah, I'm curious because we're thinking about building on a series that we did on criminalization of activists to look at criminalization of civil society.
Organizations now is sort of like the next phase.
I'm curious what you think about that and if you looked at that as.
Part of the oppression tactics as well, or what you found as you were looking.
Yeah, absolutely so in some countries that's really obvious. And to be honest, the way that criminalization has happened in Russia has been a lot about foreign NGOs, and now one of our countries that we look at is Peru, and in Peru you have a new law that particularly targets NGOs that might in some way support activists in the country. So that is definitely a really important part of repression and has been more common in some countries
than in others, for sure. But it's scared so you see that more Where have you seen it stuck the case in the US?
Yes, And now the foreign influence law thing is becoming a real in the US, both at the national level, which is interesting because actually Farah was something that we've used in the past as a reporting tool to understand like which us PR firms and whatever else are doing work for like Saudi Arabia for example.
That's been like the use of Farah in recent years. This is the foreign agent station, and now the Trump administration is using it to go after climate organization.
Yeah, they're talking at there's now a few local level foreign influence laws.
Being floated, which I have not seen in other countries.
So they're talking about state level foreign influence laws, which would be really, really weird.
I suppose one thing that we really wanted to do in the paper is to you know, address this kind of separation between kind of global North of global South, or kind of more democratic and or less democratic countries and actually say, obviously, you do run much more risks being an activist in the Philippines or Mexico or Brazil than you do in the in the US, or in
the UK or in Sweden. But a lot of the similar strategies are used to repress protest and activism across this so it's not a kind of categorical difference in most instances, it's a difference in degree and so on. Take the thing about angios, right. I mean this is justified in terms that would be justified in Russia, and that we would be our governments would feel really free to create de size Russia about being authoritarian about but
then they do very similar things at home. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And that's the kind of I suppose thing that we really want to call out and observe. And I think it's scary that those lines are being increasingly blurred. So I'm Swedish, proven right, and Sweden and are two countries with vastly different histories and civil liberties, equality, all sorts. So when people ask, you know, is this going to
basically kill protests? Obviously it doesn't, right. I mean, people protest under the most horrendous, repressive circumstances, you know, as we are, well, it would be wrong to see that we're seeing it. But I mean something is going on in Iran as we speak, and it's certainly not the case that Iranians don't protest because of how repressive the Iranian regime is. Protest has continued to happen in Iran.
Obviously it becomes a lot more dangerous, but repression is ne one hundreds percent successful in repressing protests so this is a really interesting question that you know, people, you know, how does this change protest? And I think that's something that we want to explore further and understand more about, because it doesn't kill off protests, it changes the conditions under which we protest.
Yeah, that is something that I think we saw a lot in the reporting too, that it's like more violent and maybe more obvious in some global South countries, but not dissimilar in the person I would say.
And you know, now, at.
Least in the US, we're starting to see a huge uptick in state violence as well.
So two things.
One completely accidentally because I was looking, I was pulling all a video from various press conferences that Marco Rubio, is the Secretary of State for the US, has been doing since March, because there's quite a bit in what he was saying that.
Has to do with what's happening in Venezuela right now.
So I was just sort of like, Okay, what's he
been saying over these months or whatever. I didn't know this was happening before I watched all of those videos, but it seems like the press corps that was traveling with him like decided amongst themselves that one of them at each press conference he did, would ask him about the repression of campus protest and it's very it's pretty amusing because he gets very irritated by it every time they have, you know, unfortunately, many varieties of questions to ask,
but one of the things that has come up in is a that he way that he.
Talks about protesters in general.
And definitely it seems like, you know, the way that a lot of these countries have been talking about and treating climate protesters was then just like copy pasted to Gaza protesters as well. So one of the reporters in I think it was in Surinam asked him, you know, you had condemned China in twenty nineteen for repression of student protests. Would you say that today you agree with the Chinese government and its view of protest.
It's good and now it's done for ETWO from the.
New York Times, I thank you, mister Prinsident of mister secretary for taking questions from US. Mister secretary, first to you related to China. In twenty nineteen, you supported legislation to have the US government support the protesters in Hong Kong. The pro democracy protesters, and mostly the protests are peaceful,
but also occasionally the disrupted public life. And so, based on your rationale for deporting campus protesters in the US, would you now support the Chinese Commanist Party or hall authorities deporting foreigners who took part in those protests in twenty.
Nine of person It is silly because so the people that we're getting rid of in our country are vandalizing call They're not protesters who are taking over college campuses. They're harassing fellow students.
We let them in our country to study.
We gave them a visa because they said I want to go to a university, I want to get a degree. They didn't say I want to go to university and I want to vandalize your library, and I want to wear a mask over my face like off it's Halloween and terrorized people. We didn't give them a visa to do any of that. So we don't want those people in our country. They're not they're not demonstrating for there. They're going beyond demonstration. They are going and they're creating
a ruckus. They are creating riots basically on campus, and it's making it's unfair for students. Some of these schools are some of the most expensive schools we have in America. People bay a lot of money to go to these schools. They borrow money to go to these schools, and you can't even go to class because some want a tech who's covering their phase is running through campus, spray paying things, harassing people, and they're in my country.
As a guest.
We want them out, every one of them. I find We're going to kick them out.
That's an amazing question.
Yeah, I do wonder, like, how how close are some of these supposedly democratic countries getting to countries that, you know, the Global North has always pointed to you as examples of like the most intense state oppression of speech.
Yeah. I mean it's.
Equally you know, golling to see UK government ministers coming out and call out propression in other countries when there are currently you know, three Palestine action hunger strike is on the brink of dying, and that the government won't even acknowledge that they are on hunger strike and not even you know, open negotiations with them. I mean the longest one has been now for over seventy days, which is insane that she's still alive and.
That the government won't even you know, acknowledge it happening.
So yeah, absolutely, it's that kind of you know, double standards, which obviously is a classic thing in politics, right, but I think particularly in this sphere of oh, you know, civil liberties, political liberties, I think it is it is scary how quickly they have deteriorated in in many global Norse countries. And I think that one of the sources that we use, so we use various databases sort of evidence based in the paper, and one of them mister
Civicus database, which is really really good. And you know, Civicus do this grating of countries and the extent to which they are free basically, and you know, it's a grim picture. It's a grim picture around the world. Very few countries are going up on Freedom Index, whatever it's called, and you know, most countries are becoming a lot worse. And you know, I'm not surprised that the UK are doing you know, increasingly bad on it and the US,
but so are a lot of other countries. And interestingly, even I mean Sweden is like green on the Civicus thing, but I mean Sweden's had you know, they were threatening one academic at the University of Land with deportation because you know, he participated in non violent climate protests. So
you really are seeing seeing this everywhere. And yes, the way that it's so easy to support protests in other countries and criticize repression, I mean, that's what's so going, right that they actually, you know, they they they kind of yeah, they they express all of protesters in other countries whilst throwing nothing but scorn in their own countries.
And I think that vilification, which we're really talking about, then, the realification of activists that politicians and the media do, is really important to understand here and sort of in the other research and I've looked at public opinion on protesters and so on, and a lot of these protest groups have been really unpopular in the countries. But I mean that's not strange if you look at the media reporting about right right.
Yeah, I was going to ask you about that too.
That is what's the latest kind of research showing in terms of I guess you can't point to any one thing as being the driver of public opinion on protesters, but I guess, even just sort of qualitatively.
How much influence do you think that has.
I can't remember the last time I saw coverage of a protest that was either just like very neutral this happened, or was remotely positive. And I wonder what you've seen on that front, how much the way that people are are seeing protests in the media impacts how they think of it.
Yeah, so we've actually in a different team of mine. We're about to come out with an article in the next couple of weeks about just a boil and the public opinion and media reporting about just up oil. And there actually the media reporting in The Guardian, which is left leaning according to some not very left leaning, but nonetheless one of the big British newspapers that is fairly neutral. The reporting about just apoil in the Garden was pretty neutral.
But outlets that reported the most on just a boil were called right clickbait media and there obviously it's incredibly negative and used always use these kind of derogatory terms to write about them, but that wasn't the case in the Guardian. And then relating to what you were saying, I think, how big is the impact of these kind of media discourses, and I'd say significant.
So we.
Studied the government discourses around justtop Oil in twenty twenty three. And then we also carried on carried out interviews with members of the public that just respond to a survey that we did, and you find a lot of the sort of discourses in the media and by politicians being repeated by members of the public. So you know, issues about energy security and things about we need new oil and gas to be an energy independent from Russia and
so on. So things that are like just political discourses that are not grounded in the truth of energy security in the UK are very much repeated by people and they swayed like opinion about so like obviously just ap Ooil were campaigning to stop ail in gas licenses in the North Sea, and when that heated up anything else in the summer of twenty twenty three, then public opinion did swear like basically most people instinctively actually think that let's not dig out more oil in gas.
That's probably if we let it be.
But because of those discourses, they managed to sway a proportion of the public to be for new oil in gas licenses. Now that then swung back later when the issue kind of was removed from the headlines and so on. Another way, of seeing this is when you look at polls or surveys that have been done about criminalizing protests. We found that in the abstract people don't want to criminalize nonviolent protest, but when you ask questions specifically about just stop oil, then they do.
Yeah.
And you think that that is because I see a lot of even.
Kind of like quote unquote climate people will look at.
That stuff and say, oh see, just stop Oil's tactics are bad. People don't like them, But do you figure out what impact potentially, you know, whatever choices they're making on campaigning have versus how the media and politicians are positioning those tactics.
How much of people's opinion of just Stop Oil do you think is shaped by how the media and politicians frame their tactics, because I've seen some people will point to that and go, oh see, like.
Their tactics are bad, people don't like them, as opposed to having a more nuanced understanding of well, they've been sort of uniquely vilified in the press and bipoliticians, and that plays into it.
I think there are a lot of critiques of justop oil and such groups from many angles. Some of them I think have more merit than others. But this paper that we have coming out soon looks specifically at claims counterproductivity about just a boil and see if there's any credibility to say that those protests are counterproductive. So just a boil were not counterproductive in terms of people's opinions about oil and gas licenses. It was not counterproductive in
terms of actually banning oil and gas licenses. I mean that is still the policy of the current UK government, the Labor government, and it was before, so you know, just stop boil's unpopularity or whatever, it did not change that. So in that sense they have not been counter productive. Now I think another claim is that stop oil would have been counterproductive and that they weakend the overall climate movement. But even that there's a very vague evidence for that.
People often pointed this German survey which was done, you know, to ask what you think of climate activists basically, and when they think about just stop oil, they or about lesser general asy on in that case, you know, that's they think very negatively about climate activists, and maybe a few years earlier when they thought about the school strikers, they had more positive views of climate activists. But have they fundamentally changed the way that climate activists or the
climate movement is viewed. Well, all, there's a fair amount of scholarship on what's called, you know, the radical flank effect, and a lot of that points towards the fact that actually it doesn't really damage organizations that are more kind of moderate in that sense.
The fact that just the boil are.
Unpopular, it's you know, it turns people against that group, but it doesn't really change people's opinions on the matter at hand or support for other groups. And then, of course, you know this question, does the fact that just a boil had a kind of tactic of wanting to get arrested or kind of pushing the boundaries of the law and so on, has that kind of increased the repression against activists in general? And it's like, sure, you can see that there, but I mean, you don't blame the
person people being repressed for that. And actually, through the work that you have done and that I have done, we've shown that this is a global phenomenon. The criminalization and oppression of climate and environmental activism is global. It would likely happen whatever just the boil we're doing. And even though of course the way that it has happened in Okay has been very much targeted against them and
what they are doing. So I think that you know, claims that just Aboard and such groups counterproductive they might are you know, unfounded. They may not have been the most productive, they may not have achieved very much, and they have certainly been very risky for the people involved, the people that have done the protests, that have paid a very high price for it. So in that sense, you could, you know, question it in terms of being
being worth it. But what we have found is very much that claims of it been counterproductive are wrong.
Thank you. You mentioned this paper that's coming out in a couple of weeks. What else are you looking at to kind of follow on from here?
So we want to.
Continue the research into criminalization and repression globally. So the research that I want to carry out next is taking this global angle, but also zoning in on four countries and that's the UK, Australia, Philippines and Peru that are all in different parts of the world obviously two of them and the global North two of them, Global South, two of them with significant risk to life of doing climate environmental activism in the Philippines and Peru and two
countries have had very high levels of arrest and a lot of new kind of anti protest laws in Australia and the UK and looking at these and using this kind of framework that we've developed in the article to look deeper in these countries and carry out interviews with people involved, so activists for sure, but also a lot of the legal profession also involved with this, and other and of civil society groups to see what are the effects of criminalization and repression and how does it change
what people do and how do you resist it as well? So what are the efforts to resist criminalization and repression on. So we have these partner organizations in these countries and we want to be really yes, studying this in depth to really see the effects. At the same time, we also want to keep this kind of global aspect, so we want to interview more kind of international stakeholders who have this kind of global overview and look at policies.
You know, I think it's one question that drives us in which we don't have the answer to yet, is you know what international global processes are kind of driving this, how policy move how are these policies adapted in different countries, you know, are they kind of transferred, copied and pasted. Who are the actors that drive them? Obviously your research has a lot to say on that. Beyond your investigative journalism. I don't think we have much to go by there.
So I think those are the questions that would really drive this kind of research going forward.
Yeah, we're looking into that too, so if we find anything interesting, I'll let you know. But I actually do wonder how much some of the extractive companies themselves are spreading these ideas around. We found some indication, for example, that like a coal mining company was trying to encourage folks in Australia to adopt a foreign influence law that applied to organizations that were similar to FIKRA in India.
Which was pretty interesting, And I was like, I wonder how much that's happening with other companies because they are very global entities anyway, So I'm curious about that too, how it's traveling around and who's funding what.
I'm curious if, either in the research that fed into this current.
Study or just your work in general, if you are seeing any kind of a similar pattern or global kind of approach and people figuring out creative ways around the repression. So, like I mentioned the health workers in the UK, the ones I was talking about are these six medics that broke windows at gp bukin to protest their funding of
fossil fuel projects. And they are putting on a play that is basically just the transcript if they're hearing, to kind of show how ridiculous this legal process has become.
So we can come back to this question of what's criminalized in law and what's criminalized in practice. Yeah, yeah, and as activists we can increase the cost of criminalizing us in practice. And that's ultimately what you know, these so efforts to legitimize protesters and activism, which you do from a journalistic perspective, which I do, from an academic perspective, which this theater then does from a kind of artistic perspective,
are all. You know, we're a kind of ecosystem of trying to say that actually, protest and you know, climate environmental protest is not just justified, but it's good. These actors are fundamentally good actors. They need to be legitimized, they need to not be criminalized. The more spotlight is on that when these actors are criminalized, the costlier the repressionist.
Right.
So the people who repress you, the actors that repress you, they also make a cosset to benefit analysis of should we repress should we let it go? And for me more than you know, drawing on my actual research, like now,
for me, this is you know, deeply personal. My dad was a Peruvian revolutionary slash activist for all his life, and he if the Peruvian state and landowners would have had their way, they would have just shot him and or and you know, after that given him death penalty, or after that locked him up for all his life. But they weren't able to dodge, right, because there was
too much spotlight on him. So when he was caught in nineteen sixty three, he was lucky in that it was the security services and not the police who found him first, and the security services had orders.
To capture him and not to kill him on the spot. So that was you know, luck number one. And then when he.
Was you know, put on trial, there was on her whole kind of international campaign for his for his liberty, so he wasn't sentenced to death. He was sentenced to twenty five years in jail, and then in came a kind of progressive, proving government that didn't like him, but it was too uncomfortable to keep him in jail, so they released him, but deported him from from the country.
So like.
This is obviously under you know, deeply repressive realities of Peru in the fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties. So and it matters, like the spotlight, the international spotlight matters. And that's why I'm really motivated to be doing work with like Philippines and Peru and by you know, organizations that work with highlighting these things. Is like, you know, if the international spotlight is on, that's a level of protection, right,
That's like it makes the repression more costly. So that kind of makes it any Anything that we do in order to highlight and call out that repression and call it for what it is, offers some level of protection against repression, criminalization, or you know, in the worst instance, death for people. So I think that's really important to remember and for those on the front lines and for those of you and me who who in different ways right about this and research this is that that's worth it.
That's great. Thank you, that's such an interesting I didn't know about your personal background.
That's really interesting.
Well, it must be that much more interesting and scary to see this sort of like turn in Peru for you.
Yeah, that's it for this time.
We'll be back soon with another episode. Don't forget to check out our website at drilled dot Media. Our theme music is Bird in the Hand by Forenoon. Our artwork is by Matthew Fleming. You can also check us out on social media at drilled Media. You can sign up for our newsletter on our website as well that comes out once a week and gives in overview of an important story that's happening in the climate universe, plus suggestions
for the week's five must read climate stories. It's never more than a ten minute read, and people tell us it helps them keep up to date on all things climate