The 2012 Mother of All Marches

Nancy Davies commens from Oaxaca for Narconews :

On the chilly Sunday evening of March 1 I learned that the mother of all marches is being promoted by three men traveling the world to organize organizers. Before coming to Oaxaca the group, called Gandhi International, spent four days in Chiapas, stopping in the Zapatista towns of Oventic, San Cristobal de Las Casas and Acteal. Prior to their Mexico visit (next stop Mexico City), they met with organizers in Latin America, contacting the poor and landless in Brazil, Paraguay, Chile, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica and Panama.

Who are these intrepid pilgrims? The three came to Oaxaca at the invitation of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO as it is known in its Spanish initials), one of which is Ramesh Sharma of India, whose role model is Mahatma Gandhi. Sharma led a 350 kilometer march of 100,000 (a figure cited by Christophe Grigri, the multilingual organizer on this tour) landless Indian campesinos who after a month on foot arrived in the capital, Delhi, to demand agrarian reform. As Sharma told me, the government granted two hectares to each participant family, finally complying with a law of 1894.

From that experience Sharma, one of the leaders of Ekta Parishad (Unity Forum), says that non-violence need not and should not be passive. He believes that a global display of dissent by the world's poor will warn governments that they can no longer ignore the vast numbers of human beings living in poverty and distress.

The two men accompanying Sharma are the French president and founder of Association Gandhi International, Louis Campana; and the organizer Chrstophe Grigri. All three see a similarity not only with the Oaxaca movement initiated in 2006, which Sharma said he learned about in India, but all the social movements which sprang to life after the neoliberal economic model was imposed globally. Sharma said it was easy for him to link India and Oaxaca, sharing information and experiences. Contact was made through the non-violent Investigadores Descalzos (Barefoot Investigators) the Revuelta Cultural Mexicano (Mexican Cultural Revolt), Universidad de la Tierra (University of the Land), VOCAL (Oaxaca Voices Constructing Autonomy and Liberty), La Casota, and Marabú Ediciones, all of whom assisted in programming the Sunday evening event with a discussion of strategies such as civil disobedience and the boycott.

The panel discussion was introduced by Dr. Bertha Muñoz who referred to the first non-violent resistance as that of the women in Aristophane's play “Lysistrata” who practiced, as she informed the audience, a “closed legs” policy of resistance to all their men until the men would agree to end war. From Ancient Greece she made the leap to India in the 20th century, enjoining us to see the movie “Gandhi.” I thought that probably there were few in the audience of less than 200 who recognized her references from their formal education, but all of those understood “la doctora” from first hand experience of non-violent action.

Association Gandhi's current plan is to contact all the popular organizations six months prior to the march, to give each an opportunity to be in contact with the network. During the march a popular court of justice will be held because, “It is very important that the people have the courage and ideas to accuse… we will try to coordinate all the marches by internet to organize in a sustainable way. Any repression will be met with world response,” Grigri told me. He also said that he found Mexico, especially Oaxaca and Chiapas, better organized than other groups in Latin America. As an example he cited the president of Paraguay who told Grigri that Monsanto has the power to overthrow the president in an instant, the “most desperate” observation Grigri had come across.

Luis Campana explained, “The world in which we are living is violent. It is structured for violence, since the Turkish genocide against the Armenians and then to Stalin in the Soviet Union where 200 million died so that he could establish his power. ..Cambodia, Africa…World War II with 40 millions dead… The Nuremburg Court established that we need not obey unjust laws or orders. Civil disobedience is a human right. Each time a man resists he is on the path to truth. There is no peace without justice and we are within our rights to struggle for justice…. The World March of 2012 is to gain the right to land and national resources, taking them back from world capitalism and corruption.”

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The threat of emerging ocean diseases

Much attention has been paid to newly emergent diseases that have afflicted humans in recent decades--HIV/AIDS, SARS, avian influenza, etc. Conversely, deadly diseases that have emerged in the world's oceans during the same time period have been largely ignored. While these diseases haven't caused epidemics in humans, they have proved troublesome to marine animal populations and to susceptible humans who have ventured into contaminated waters. Therefore, we should pay closer attention to what's happening in the world's oceans since it could be an important sentinel for global environmental health.

Take for instance, recent epizootics (epidemics in animals) of Atlantic Ocean bottlenose dolphins and endangered Florida manatees. They perished because of the neurotoxins produced by Karenia brevis, a marine plankton that lives year-round in the Gulf of Mexico. (See "Emerging Diseases in Marine Mammals: From Dolphins to Manatees." PDF)

A single-celled organism (called a dinoflagellate), K. brevis has two whip-like appendages, or flagella, it uses to swim through the water. The neurotoxins produced by K. brevis can kill fish and birds, as well as marine animals.

When they become aerosolized in sea spray and inhaled by humans, these organisms can cause people to develop respiratory and eye irritations. The toxins can also accumulate in shellfish such as clams, coquinas, and oysters, causing food poisoning in those who eat them. Symptoms usually begin a few hours after ingestion and include tingling and numbness in the tongue, lips, throat, arms, and legs and dizziness, nausea, and diarrhea. The symptoms usually go away after a few days.

Red tides--gigantic masses of seawater microorganisms such as K. brevis--aren't limited to Florida's coastal waters. For example, in 1995, a massive red tide stretched for 500 miles off the coast of California, and three years later, a red tide killed more than 50 sea lions in Monterey Bay, about 120 miles south of San Francisco. (See "Studies Bring New Data to Mystery of Red Tides.") In addition, there's evidence that other dinoflagellate species are expanding their range off of the Australian and Tasmanian coasts and in the Mediterranean Sea. Severe hurricanes can expand their distribution, and hurricanes and coral bleaching increase the risk of ciguatera fish poisoning, which, once rare, is now reaching epidemic levels--especially in French Polynesia.

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