I've been devoting most of my time in the last couple of days to Bolivia, in one way or another. Either I've been scouring the web for news from there as the referendum Sunday, today, has approached, or I've been preparing for our screening on Bolivia that we're doing Tuesday. Yesterday I made a DVD of our 4 videos that looks pretty great. Today I made the cover for it, and distributed flyers for the show around to other portland imcistas who agreed to help post them around town.

Meanwhile I wait and wonder if in a few hours the object of all our effort, that country that has been screwed over so much in the last 500 years, will blow up in more violence and bloodshed like last October. I'm ready to help funnel news of this to northern indymedias, but other than that I feel like a helpless spectator, so far, far away.

I've been reading Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America and really have learned a ton about the history of that part of the world. It's sort of a People's History of The United States for Latin America. Much more disturbing, though, because the opression is so much worse.

Strange or not so strange coincidence: I also have been reading Derrick Jensen's excellent A Language Older Than Words, and in it he mentions naming his new dog "Tupac Amaru." Just a day earlier I had read in Galeano's book about who Tupac Amaru was: an indigenous leader of a rebellion in colonial Peru. Very weird, and I never would have gotten Jensen's allusion if I hadn't also been reading Open Veins.

Of course it makes perfect sense that he would be aware of Tupac Amaru. In a way his book is a sort of superset of all the horrible exploitations described by Galeano. One can read of the genocides and enslavements and then turn to Jensen's book and read exactly what is behind our culture, this culture that hosts these atrocities and why it does.