Photo by Concrete Forms
Summary
In the fall of 2017, a series of devastating earthquakes rocked southern Mexico. But what if it’s not the earthquakes themselves that pose the greatest threat to these communities? The conflict between institutional and grassroots disaster response in the aftermath of these earthquakes provides a powerful illustration of the tensions that have underlain the concept of development ever since President Truman’s second inaugural address in 1949.
In this episode, Oaxacan deprofessionalized intellectual Gustavo Esteva guides us through his thinking on capitalism, disaster response, and what lies beyond development.
Shownotes
This episode features Gustavo Esteva, founder of Universidad de la Tierra and author of numerous books.
Special thanks to Ilana Fonariov, Andrjez Kozlowski, Doňa Margarita and her family, and Kirsty Johnstone Munroe Cameron.
Music for this episode was produced by El Temporal, kmathz, NCTRNM, and Sunfish Moonlight.
A lot of research goes into each episode of Future Ecologies, including great journalism from a variety of media outlets, and we like to cite our sources:
Esteva, G., Babones, S. J., & Babcicky, P. (2013). The future of development: a radical manifesto. Bristol: Policy Press.
Esteva, G., & Prakash, M. S. (2014). Grassroots post-modernism: remaking the soil of cultures (2nd ed.). London: Zed Books.
Illich, I. (2009). Tools for conviviality. London: Marion Boyars.
TeleSUR. (October 10, 2017). Mexico's Richest Man to Profit From Mexico City Rebuilding. Retrieved from telesurtv.net.
This episode includes music from the Project Gutenberg Library. It also includes audio recorded by cormi, James Swift, bigpickle51, geerose, pfranzen, and Uminari, protected by Creative Commons attribution licenses, and accessed through the Freesound Project.
You can subscribe to and download Future Ecologies wherever you find podcasts - please share, rate, and review us. Our website is futureecologies.net. We’re also on Facebook, Instagram, iNaturalist, Soundcloud and Youtube. We’re an independent production, and you can support us on Patreon - our supporters have access to cool supporter-only mini-episodes and other perks.
Future Ecologies is recorded on the unceded territories of the Musqueam (xwməθkwəy̓əm) Squamish (Skwxwú7mesh), and Tsleil- Waututh (Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh) Nations - otherwise known as Vancouver, British Columbia.
This season of Future Ecologies is supported in part by the Vancouver Foundation. Learn more at https://vancouverfoundationsmallarts.ca/.
Transcript
[Synthesizer pulse]
Mendel Skulski 00:05
Hey, everyone, this is Mendel. And before we start the show today, I just wanted to say thank you for listening. This officially marks halfway through our first season. Now, you may not know it, but this podcast is really just Adam and I working in our spare time. We don't have interns or researchers or a production team. This is just something we wanted to make. And because of that, we've decided to take a mid-season break. We'll be back with the rest of Season 1 in about a month. In the meantime, we have a listener survey up on our website, futureecologies.net. It would be a huge help to us to find out a little bit more about what you like about the show, and what we could do better. It should only take about five minutes to fill out. If you like the show and you want to support this work, we would love it if you could become a Patreon supporter. Our patrons have access to many episodes released in the weeks between our main feed. You can sign up at patreon.com/futureecologies. With a small monthly donation of your choosing, we'll send you stickers and a secret code so you can access all of those mini episodes. If you can't support the show financially, we would really appreciate it if you just told some friends about it. This is something we want to see grow, and maybe someday it won't just be the two of us. If you'd like to get involved, you can fill out the form on our website, that's futureecologies.net, or send an email to Mendel, that's mendel@futureecologies.net. Okay, that's it. We'll be back in about a month for the rest of Season 1. But for now, today's episode, "Help Not Helping".
[Trumpets and drum roll]
Media Clip 01:56
[Unspecified speaker] Raise your right hand. You, Harry S. Truman, who solemnly swears...
[Harry Truman] I, Harry S. Truman...
Adam Huggins 02:09
In January of 1949, President Truman addressed a nation that was only just beginning to embrace the postwar mantle of "Leader of the free world". And he had big plans.
Media Clip 02:22
[President Truman] We will embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas.
Mendel Skulski 02:35
This is the first known use of the word "underdeveloped" to refer to the so-called Third World, a term which would not appear for another three years.
Media Clip 02:43
[President Truman] More than half of the people in the world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate. They are victims of diseases. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant. Their poverty is a handicap and a threat both to them and to more prosperous areas. For the first time in history, humanity possesses knowledge and skills... these knowledge and skills will relieve the suffering of these people.
Gustavo Esteva 03:14
We need to remember that the main promise of President Truman when he coined the word "underdevelopment", the main promises that we will catch up, meaning that we, the underdeveloped, will, because we will have development then we will be like the developed ones.
Media Clip 03:34
[President Truman] Such new economic developments must be divided and controlled to the benefit of the peoples of the areas in which they are established, guarantees to the investors must be balanced by guarantees in the interest of the people whose resources and whose labor go into these developments. The old imperialism, exploitation for foreign profit, has no place in our plan. What we envision is a program of development based on the concepts of democratic fair dealing.
Gustavo Esteva 04:14
You want to help, and help destroys the people. Most of the time, what the governments, the international institutions, and the do-gooders do after a natural disaster is clearly worse for the people than the natural disasters. Of course, the example for the world is Haiti, that any person in Haiti can tell you horror stories.
Media Clip 04:43
[News reporter 1] The 2010 earthquake in Haiti killed 220,000 people and left millions more homeless.
[News reporter 2] Red Cross raised almost $500 million, but built just six permanent homes.
[News reporter 3] More than five years of the initial outbreak of cholera, people are still dying.
[News reporter 1] Some former Oxfam staff payed for sex while on a relief mission after the island's devastating 2010 earthquake.
[News reporter 3] Throughout this time, the UN has steadfastly refused to accept any responsibility for the outbreak, despite allegations that its peacekeepers brought the disease onto the island and infected water sources through their actions.
[Unspecified speaker] On behalf of the United Nations, I want to say very clearly, we apologize to the Haitian people.
[Unspecified speaker] A few privileged men abusing the very people they were supposed to protect.
[Unspecified speaker] We are profoundly sorry for our role.
[Unspecified speaker] I'm sorry, we are sorry, for the damage that Oxfam has done, both to the people of Haiti...
[News reporter 1] Now the British government is threatening to cut off aid funding...
[Unspecified speaker] ... but also to wider efforts for aid and development.
[Upbeat Mexican guitar music by El Temporal]
Introduction Voiceover 05:58
Broadcasting from Vancouver, British Columbia, on the unseeded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.
Adam Huggins 06:07
This is Future Ecologies. I'm Adam Huggins.
Mendel Skulski 06:11
And I'm Mendel Skulski. And today we're going to find out what earthquakes, Austrian-Croat social theorist Ivan Illich, and Zapotec ejidos can tell us about development and disaster response.
[Music swells and vocals begin by El Temporal]
Adam Huggins 07:04
And to do that, I'm going to take you to the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, where when I'm not chasing down fried grasshoppers with mezcal, I got to speak to a truly remarkable man.
Gustavo Esteva 07:16
Yeah, I am Gustavo Esteva. I usually introduce myself as an de-professionalized intellectual. But I'm currently more inclined to introduce myself as a person activated by the people, not an activist, because the idea of an activist is that you are activating the people. And in my own story, it's exactly the other way. It is the people that activates me. And that is what I am, a person activated by the people.
Mendel Skulski 07:48
That's a wicked intro.
Adam Huggins 07:49
Yeah. And Gustavo has lived a life that justifies it. He was born in 1936.
[Classical Mexican guitar]
Gustavo Esteva 07:55
I was raised in Mexico City. I was living in Mexico City. And in Mexico City, they were establishing something like the American way of life.
Adam Huggins 08:06
There's a lot to talk about. So I'm going to abbreviate this a bit. He was 13 when he watched President Truman's second inauguration on television...
Media Clips 08:14
[President Truman] ... the old imperialism...
Adam Huggins 08:15
... and became aware, for the first time, that he was among the so-called “underdeveloped”. So he got an education, got a job at the bank, and eventually became the youngest executive at IBM at that time.
Gustavo Esteva 08:27
The point was, some people reacted saying, "Well, okay, my country will never be developed, they will not be like the developed countries. But I will be developed, I will join the ranks of the minorities."
Adam Huggins 08:42
But it didn't feel right to him to live on an island of development in a sea of underdevelopment, so to speak. So when he was 22, he abandoned his career, and joined the Marxist guerrilla movement in Mexico City, riding the waves of the recent revolution in Cuba.
Media Clips 08:57
[Unspecified speaker] Our revolution is something like a hope of Latin America. We have to save our revolution. We cannot violate the principle of no intervention, as the protections from the intervention of the United States in Latin American nations.
Adam Huggins 09:20
But the violence of this, and against this movement, alarmed him. This was the time of the Tlatelolco massacre in 1968.
[Sounds of tanks rumbling]
Adam Huggins 09:31
So he joined the ascendant populous government of Mexican president, Luis Echeverría Álvarez
Media Clips 09:35
[Luis Echeverría Álvarez] [speaking in Spanish]
Adam Huggins 09:41
... eventually becoming a high ranking official, something like a cabinet minister, to carry out development programs. He was very successful, but discovered to his horror that the well-intentioned but really large programs he was administering were doing more harm than good. So he quit.
Gustavo Esteva 09:59
I came to Oaxaca, at 8 kilometers from the place where my Zapotec grandmother was born. I live at the top of a hill, next to a beautiful forest in the Zapotec community. And I produce perhaps 60 or 70% of what I eat.
Adam Huggins 10:19
He now lives in a small indigenous village outside the city of Oaxaca, where he serves as an advisor to the Zapatistas, and has authored several books on post-development, as well as running an organization called Universidad de la Tierra, literally, the University of the Earth.
Gustavo Esteva 10:35
This university that is totally free for the indigenous people, that was created with Indigenous people for the Indigenous people of Oaxaca. They don't need to pay anything for all the... the whole learning process that they have.
[Music ends]
Mendel Skulski 11:01
So he flipped, he went from trying to work with development aid to really working on behalf of underdevelopment. How did that work?
Adam Huggins 11:11
Yeah, it's kind of a complicated story. But it has a lot to do with Ivan Illich.
[Sound of tape cassette starting, deep bass hum]
Media Clips 11:16
[Ivan Illich] Each of the new miseries, which I've listed, is a very specific byproduct of over efficient production. Each represents the internal frustration of the basic purpose of the corresponding industry: acceleration in locomotion increases the time spent in traffic; health care beyond a certain level decreases the ability of people not only to adapt, but also robs them of the ability to do something about an unhealthy – a sick-makening – world.
[Click of tape stopping]
Adam Huggins 11:49
Have you read Ivan Illich?
Mendel Skulski 11:50
Briefly, once.
Adam Huggins 11:52
Nice.
Mendel Skulski 11:52
A long time ago.
Adam Huggins 11:53
We've wandered actually pretty far from our connection to ecology here. It's a little bit tenuous, so I'm not going to get into Ivan Illich's work, although that could be a really fun podcast where we just deconstruct. Okay, nevermind. Um...[Laughs] Suffice it to say that a central thrust of his work argues that when certain aspects of our lives, which we conceptualize as verbs, like learning, or moving, or healing, when they become institutionalized, when we come to think of them as nouns, like education, or transportation, or health, the institutional systems we create are actually counterproductive and damaging.
Gustavo Esteva 12:35
Of course, Illich knew these very well in 1973. He was writing that the more you invest in producing food, the more hunger you will produce. This is literally a phrase to of Ivan in 1973, that the way to create hunger is to invest in producing food in the modern way in industrial mode production.
Mendel Skulski 12:59
So when did Gustavo meet Illich?
Adam Huggins 13:02
1983, in Mexico City.
[Sounds of foot traffic, horns, guitar, and drums]
Mendel Skulski 13:09
And that's when he got to thinking that maybe development is one of those nouns that have become institutionalized to the point where it's actually hurting people?
Adam Huggins 13:16
Yeah. And that's actually assuming the intention of development really is to help poor countries, which is debatable.
Gustavo Esteva 13:24
Well, in 1960, the rich countries were 20 times richer than the poor countries. 20 years later, 1980, the rich countries were 42 times richer than the poor countries... meaning for us, that was our awareness, we will never be like the developed ones. Second, development is very good business for the rich countries and very bad business for us, that this has no meaning. The reaction of most people in the early 80s in our countries, in our places, was a kind of rage. We were angry. The expression was: Why we are doomed to be all the time at the end of the race? What kind of destiny is this? Who organized this kind of situation in which there are some people left behind, and there are some people very advanced?
Adam Huggins 14:26
This questioning of the idea of development led to a series of conversations.
Gustavo Esteva 14:32
In the late 80s, Ivan Illich invited us to have a reflection and conversation about after development. That was what I was feeling in the 80s, that we were already beyond development.
Adam Huggins 14:46
And these conversations helped to crystallize Gustavo's ideas on development, which are really helpful actually. He introduced me to this idea of the Sachses of development.
Mendel Skulski 14:58
Is that like some kind of parable?
Adam Huggins 15:01
In some way, it is. And Gustavo will introduce us to the three Sachses... right after the break.
[Musical flourish and applause]
Gustavo Esteva 15:23
We can clearly associate the current attitudes about development with three Sachses. The first Sachs is Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street investing company, perhaps the biggest investor in the whole world.
Adam Huggins 15:41
Sachs number one is one we're probably all familiar with, Goldman Sachs.
[Rhythmic drum and closed hi-hat]
Gustavo Esteva 15:48
The ideal for Goldman Sachs of equity investment will be an offshore oil drilling 10 kilometers from the coast where no local activists can put pressure on them. That is savage capitalism. And this is the idea of development, shared today not just by the investors, by the all the governments, and all the international institutions are promoting this kind of savage capitalism. They are becoming a barbaric kind of operations, destroying everything. They cannot stop these destructions. This is the dominant position at the top of the governments all over the world. I cannot think of one single government that is not sharing these basic ideas about development.
Mendel Skulski 16:45
So, what he's talking about is like development with a capital D.
Adam Huggins 16:48
[Singing] Development!
Mendel Skulski 16:50
... the kind that's like... we're going to create all these jobs by building this dam, or building this pipeline, or this mine in your community and so on and so on.
Adam Huggins 16:59
So many jobs... you can have so many jobs don't even know what to do. Okay, yeah, it's essentially the imperialist investment and resource extraction masquerading as development that Truman explicitly condemned in his speech.
Media Clips 17:14
[President Truman] Exploitation for foreign profits...
[Music ends abruptly]
Mendel Skulski 17:16
Yeah, so much for that. But aren't there still a lot of humanitarian development initiatives?
Adam Huggins 17:22
Which brings us to Sachs number two, Jeffrey Sachs.
Mendel Skulski 17:25
That name sounds familiar.
[Music returns with synthesizer pulses and sustained bassline]
Adam Huggins 17:26
Maybe you heard him speak on Freakonomics, or in the press. The man gets around.
Mendel Skulski 17:31
I actually have no idea who this guy is.
Gustavo Esteva 17:32
The second kind of attitude is the attitude that we associate with the name of Jeffrey Sachs. This was an advisor to the governments of Bolivia and Poland. And they wanted to dismantle the governments to put everything in the hands of the market. And Jeffrey Sachs was a fanatic of this attitude. But he is an intelligent man and he knowledged that they were creating, as we know in development, misery and hunger for many people. Yes, they create development, but development creates misery and hunger. He said, "Really, we want to protect development and capitalism, this is the best. But we don't want AIDS and we don't want hunger and we don't want misery, then let's do something to address directly with this state, with this government, these apparatuses is that we are destroying. Let's use them, and do-gooders, and then he asks people like Borno and Bill Gates, these kinds of people, supporting them to do something directly to protect the people mostly affected by development. But this, I will insist that they are doing something of that kind. In many cases, this is also counter-productive, this is also destroying things, destroying the subsistence capacity. I... I must say that capitalism can be described as a war against subsistence. If the people are trying to keep the light by themselves, to live by themselves, with their own means, what capitalists need, in the tradition of the original enclosure of the commerce, what capitalism means is to destroy any possibility of autonomous subsistence, and they are trying to destroy that subsistence. Then Jeffrey Sachs, and other do-gooders are trying to destroy subsistence, helping them to live with full dependency of what they provide to them. And perhaps the slogan for these people can be "a chicken in a pot”, “cover against flies in every bed", and "a condom on every penis". And that, that will be the basic slogan for these kinds of things.
[Music fades out]
Mendel Skulski 20:08
Well, ah, sounds okay, I guess, unless you don't like chicken.
Adam Huggins 20:13
Or condoms.
Mendel Skulski 20:14
Or if you really actually do like getting bitten by mosquitoes.
Adam Huggins 20:18
I love it.
Mendel Skulski 20:19
[Laughs] You freak. But I get the idea. We're going to try to take the negative impacts of Goldman Sachs' style development and, and try to mitigate them and use our wealth that maybe we got from investing in one of these projects or whatever, to help others live like we do.
Adam Huggins 20:33
It's kind of circular, right? And as Gustavo points out, assume that we have a shared notion of standard of living.
[Music returns with a dark bassline]
Gustavo Esteva 20:40
Development is a very stupid definition of what is the good life, define the American way of life in a very stupid way of defining the American way of life, with a certain collection of things, and the American way of life as the definition, the universal definition of the good life. First, you can say that it is not valid even for the United States. You have among Americans many attitudes about what is to live well. There is not any standard. But to apply this standard to the whole world is pretty stupid. We will never have the American way of life. There is no possibility in ecological terms. And no way to have for every person on Earth, the per capita consumption of energy that you have in the US. It is impossible that the planet will explode for ecological contradiction. There is no way that we can have for every person on earth that kind of life. But the most important point is that it does not seem to be for many of us a good life. And then we still have a lot of traditions of what is to live well.
Adam Huggins 21:57
Which brings us to Sachs number three: Wolfgang Sachs.
[Multi-layered guitar and synthesizer]
Gustavo Esteva 22:03
The third, we associate the third position about development with Wolfgang Sachs. When Ivan Illich invited us, several of his friends, what is “to be beyond development”, and then we discussed it for three years this in Mexico and Puerto Rico, in Ivan’s home in Cuernavaca and in many other places, and then after two years' conversations we produced what was known as “The Development Dictionary”. We have 19 entries dismantling all the aspects of development in that specific book, and this book was edited by Wolfgang Sachs. But it is not that the people are following Wolfgang Sachs but that people are resisting development. Not by the millions but by the billions. More and more people are today resisting development in all possible ways. Then without reading Wolfgang Sachs, but doing in practice, what we are saying in that specific... resisting development and doing something is trying to live their own life.
[Music ends with a guitar strum]
Mendel Skulski 23:19
So we've got Goldman Sachs as in "sachs of money". And if you don't like it, then that's "sachs" for you, man. [Laughs] And then we've got Jeffrey Sachs as in "let's make sure we send poor people these sachs of potatoes and condoms". And then we have Wolfgang Sachs who's kind of like the free jazz "sachsophone" of the group. I get that, to Gustavo, he typifies the idea of moving beyond development, which is, I can admit pretty "sachsy". But I'm a little hazy on what moving beyond development even means.
Adam Huggins 23:55
[Laughs] That brings us back to earthquakes. Also, that was an absurd amount of puns.
Mendel Skulski 24:04
Hey, don't give me that, you wrote it.
Adam Huggins 24:05
You're giving away our secrets.
[Several synthesizer pulses]
Adam Huggins 24:13
Alright, so if you had been in Mexico City on September the 19th 1985, and you would turn on your TV at 7am, this is what you would have seen.
[Deep rumbling and rattling]
[Speaking in Spanish, crackling distorted warning broadcast]
[Plucked bass and kick drum]
Gustavo Esteva 24:39
Can you imagine, it was a city of 50 million people at that time. It was a city in which 150,000 houses collapsed. And there were millions affected by the whole earthquake. The first thing that came for help, coming from Switzerland, was a jumbo jet full of water. Can you imagine sending water to a city of 50 million people from Switzerland? It is just a pure foolishness of sending whatever you have, and... and perhaps they will need water... yes send water! And that's it, it is, it is a very stupid way of reaction.
Mendel Skulski 25:28
Wait a second. So why wouldn't that be helpful though? Sending water seems like the first thing you'd want to send to people who just went through a disaster.
Adam Huggins 25:35
Yeah, it's counterintuitive. That was actually my first reaction when I talked to Gustavo. But there's actually been quite a lot written on this. Essentially... no matter how much bottles of water you send, it can only cover like a tiny fraction of the population's water needs, and then only for like a tiny fraction of that population and for a tiny portion of like even a day. And then... you have all this plastic water bottle pollution that's gonna end up in local waterways anyway and jam them up. And so you've essentially spent millions of dollars to send water halfway across the world, just to create more pollution when you could have spent that money actually fixing local water infrastructure.
Mendel Skulski 26:14
Hm, yeah, yeah... I guess, I guess that makes sense. It's the unintended consequences of your best intentions.
Adam Huggins 26:20
Yeah. And that's just simple charity. Then there are the institutional programs. Gustavo was working in an infamous neighborhood called Tepito.
Media Clips 26:33
[Speaking Spanish]
[News reporter] This is Tepito. Throughout the country, it's known simply as the "Barrio Bravo", the roughest neighborhood in Mexico City. It's lived through the Spanish conquest, the revolutions, and devastating earthquakes. It's the oldest part of the capital, and it's survived by playing to its own rules.
Gustavo Esteva 26:55
A few days after the earthquake, we were working in the area most affected in Mexico City. And then in a very real sense, we were the people affected by the earthquake, we were involved within the whole process.
Adam Huggins 27:12
And then there's this project he hears about.
Gustavo Esteva 27:14
FAO, the Food and Agricultural Organization, the boss in Rome, called the representative, resident representative of Mexico City, and told him you have $1 million, you need to expense this million dollars in the next few months.
[Music stops abruptly and restarts with a gong]
And this guy... immediately to one of the projects he had at his desk that he had not been able to fund and started to implement it. It was for the area to create popular restaurants with the appropriate nutritional balance, to teach the people how to eat The people of the area in Tepito were really furious. They said that in the 40s and the 50s, they had nothing. And then in that time, they were collecting leftovers from friendly restaurants. And they were cooking these leftovers in big pots in the street. And they were eating that kind of things. They were calling that kind of remains of food “escamoche”. That was not good food. That was the mix of everything left by the clients in the restaurants. After very solid work, organization, creativity, imagination, in Tepito they created a market for 500,000 people coming every weekend to buy many of the things that they are producing by themselves or they are bringing from other places. And then they created a whole culture, autonomous culture. And you can see perhaps dirty children around because they are playing all the time [laughs]. But you don't see malnutrition or people suffering of hunger, they are eating very, very well. And they said that 40% of the income comes from producing and selling food for the people that come to visit them every weekend. And then with these popular subsidized restaurants of FAO, they will deprive them of their main source of income. And second, they said, "We don't want industrialist escamoche, again the leftovers of the society. For us, we know very well how to eat, and we eat very well, and very good food."
Mendel Skulski 29:53
It's wild to see how something that seems like such a good idea at first, turns out to be such a bad idea.
Adam Huggins 30:00
And yeah, and the Tepitians end up being subjected to so many good ideas that they get fed up.
Mendel Skulski 30:08
Pretty literally.
Adam Huggins 30:11
[Laughs] You and the puns today.
Gustavo Esteva 30:13
And then our friends in the area, our friends, the Tepitians in the area, asked us to go to the US and Europe to stop the flow of aid.
[Upbeat bongo rhythm]
And time for us to explain how this was a problem for them, how they were killing them in a very real sense. And I accepted. I called my friends, and I started a very foolish trip of 15 cities separated from each other in 11 days. The media were very, very interested in an argument. They were waiting for... with checkbooks, assuming that I was coming to ask for money, ask for support. And when the message was exactly the opposite, "Please don't help us. Please don't send a penny. Please don't do anything. You are really affecting us." That was news, and I was in the front page in TV, etc. But the whole trip was a total disaster. Because when I came back, in my office, there was a line of 50 people waiting for me, of all the agencies. They got the instructions from the people in Germany or every country that I visited, telling them, "This guy should know what to do. Then you must go and offer [laughs] all the resources that you have to this guy for him to spend the money."
Mendel Skulski 31:47
[Laughs] Oh my god.
Gustavo Esteva 31:50
[Music] Then I told my friends what was happening and then we took a decision. Then we went for 5 days, just to have a solid reflection, if we need something from the people that want to help us, then under which conditions we can accept this kind of help, this kind of support. And then we came back with the conditions. And I must say that, of all the 50 agencies offering us help, only 3 of them accepted our conditions.
[Organ keyboard flourish]
Gustavo Esteva 32:30
And I must say that they were pretty effective.
[Music ends]
Adam Huggins 32:39
And now, more than 30 years later, Gustavo is seeing a repeat of the same story.
Gustavo Esteva 32:45
This is clearly happening, happening right now in the Ithsmus, happening in Puebla, happening in... in all... all places, because of the actions of the government or because of the actions of the of the do-gooders.
Mendel Skulski 32:59
Wait, what's happening?
Adam Huggins 33:01
History repeats itself, right after the break.
[Several synthesizer pulses]
Adam Huggins 33:09
So let's say that you're back in Mexico City. Sitting on the couch, you turn the TV on. It's September the 19th, 2017, exactly 32 years after the 1985 Mexico City earthquake.
Media Clips 33:25
[Speaking in Spanish]
[Loudspeaker in background, sounds of objects collapsing]
[Plucked bassline]
Adam Huggins 33:48
Last summer, somewhere between the coverage of flooding in Houston, wildfires in California, and hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, you might have heard about the earthquakes that hit Mexico, several in quick successions. This footage was from the earthquake that hit Mexico City. But about 12 days earlier, a magnitude 8.2 earthquake hit off the coast of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, which connects southern Mexico to Central America.
Media Clips 34:16
[News reporter] Days after a powerful earthquake killed 96 people and left millions in need of aid, Mexican officials are rushing to get food and water to afflicted communities in the country's poor south.
Gustavo Esteva 34:27
I was already in bed. I thought that I was dizzy, or something was happening, and then nothing to do. This was just suffering the earthquake. And then trying to call my family, but no way, their phones were not in operation then I didn't know what happened with my family, until the next morning.
Adam Huggins 34:50
Thankfully, Gustavo's beautiful adobe house and his family were fine. But closer to the epicenter of the earthquake, on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the damage was pretty extensive, all centering around this village of Juchitán.
Media Clips 35:04
[News reporter 1] Hundreds of residents in this town of nearly 75,000 in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec region, which connects Mexico to Central America, are sleeping outside their damaged homes.
[Unspecified speaker] [Speaking Spanish]
[News reporter 1] President Enrique Peña Nieto, accompanied by many of his cabinet members, visited Juchitán.
[News reporter 2] The President was in Juchitán...Enrique Peña Nieto, pledging that the federal government would provide aid to rebuild. You know, there's a lot of skepticism if that's going to happen. I think a lot of people are cynical that the government really will help because there've been promises made in the past previous natural disasters, and that aid tends to be very slow, or many times doesn't get to where it needs to get.
[Percussion joins bassline]
Gustavo Esteva 35:48
We're talking about 10,000 aftershocks, then it is permanent vibration in the Isthmus. And it has been extremely difficult because many people have been living in the streets since then. They cannot, no longer live within the houses, what remains of their houses, because they can collapse at any moment. And for several weeks, there were rains. And they were not prepared for this. And then it was very, very difficult to survive in that kind of conditions. In the emergency, we had an immediate support of many different kinds, the people themselves and the people around them, I can present immediately the contrast between two different kinds of initiatives.
Adam Huggins 36:40
So we have these two separate parallel community responses developing. One is institutional, from the government and other countries, and one is, for lack of a better term, grassroots, originating in the community itself. These dynamics become even more striking when we look at the different responses to housing after the earthquake, because the Isthmus had really beautiful functional houses.
Gustavo Esteva 37:04
Many of these houses collapsed, then the idea was how we can reconstruct, keeping our traditions and keeping our beautiful places, instead of the so-called modernization. The government and the companies, the corporations, were very anxious to destroy what remained, and to build immediately other kinds of houses. And in many cases, they were trying to remove the people from the places, to put them in other places. Let me tell you the story... For the government offered support to the victims of the earthquake and came in a very arbitrary and corrupt way – to came to offer money to the victims of the earthquake in the Isthmus and everywhere. And next to them were immediately the constructors – the companies that will provide the materials and all the elements to build the houses. And in many cases, they were cheating the people, saying, "Well, really, I am not giving you the card you can give the card to these guys and they will give you the material that you need".. etcetera , etcetera. Then there is one of the richest men on Earth, Carlos Slim.
Media Clips 38:36
[Carlos Slim] I think the real philanthropist are the people that give his life for the people, not the money.
Gustavo Esteva 38:43
He's the richest man of Mexico. And then he offered to the people, to all the rich people of Mexico, that if you give one peso for victims of the earthquake, then I will multiply for 5, whatever you give. Then many people gave to him the money.
Media Clips 39:04
[Speaking in Spanish about the Carlos Slim Foundation]
Gustavo Esteva 39:14
And then they came, the whole organization came to the Isthmus. And they came to offer help to the poor people without the house. And here is the model of the house. A beautiful presentation of the house. You know how the architects can produce something like a dream house... in the presentation, in the lands, in the photos, etcetera. First, the people did not like those beautiful, magnificent, modern houses. First of all, because they know how it's to live in that kind of houses, what kind of, of horror it is. These modern houses particularly in our settings cannot be really inhabited. In many, many cases, these are jobs of heat, people are living outside the house because it is impossible to live inside the house with these modern materials. But second, this is a very good example: this was on credit, then it was not donation. Then Carlos Slim, like every other person involved in helping the victims, is transforming the donation into business. And then the victims of the earthquake will have to pay in the next 20 years. That money, of that house, they're getting for 180,000 peso. Then just two weeks ago, the people in Ixtepec had a big meeting with their council. And all the architects offering them, and the technical help, etcetera, etcetera. And they say "Thanks, but no thanks, we are not interested."
Mendel Skulski 41:11
God, taking donations for aid and then lending them out for profit? That's awful.
Adam Huggins 41:20
Yeah. I'm going to interject here and say that because we're just a team of two here at Future Ecologies, we don't have the resources to investigate specifically Gustavo's claims that Carlos Slim is using donations as loans. That would be an explosive story, one which we can't confirm here. It does match a troubling pattern of Carlos Slim and his family personally benefiting from charitable work, and we'll link to those stories in the liner notes. But the larger point is that misuse and abuse of development and disaster aid is rampant. And even when there's no corruption, the aid itself can be damaging.
[Rhythm ends]
Adam Huggins 41:59
But none of this is to say that it's bad to want to help out when your neighbor is hurting.
Gustavo Esteva 42:03
I must say at the same time that there are very good people coming to have, first of all their own hands, to work with the people in the Isthmus. And this has been thousands of people coming and say, "I am with you. What do you want me to do?" This, I will say is the main principle, is "Please don't take any decision for me. Please ask me, what is what I need, what is what you can do. And then we can discuss." This is the main element of attitude. This is not what Carlos does, what Carlos Slim, what the government… "I know what is the solution, and I am bringing in that solution, and impose the solution on the victims of the earthquake.” But there are of course people that are coming with an open heart, and saying "Yes, we will do what you need me to do."
Mendel Skulski 43:00
So it seems like it's important to defer to the needs of who you're trying to help, after all.
Adam Huggins 43:06
Seems pretty basic.
Mendel Skulski 43:07
Yeah. That, like, I guess, comes in terms of, of actions, what you're doing and, and also the philosophy of what it is you're trying to make.
Adam Huggins 43:16
Yeah, it's definitely easier said than done. Gustavo told me a story about when he invited Bob Rodale, a name that many of you will recognize of the Rodale Institute, and Wolfgang Sachs to visit him in Tepito after the 1985 earthquake.
Gustavo Esteva 43:32
Then they were basically in this area affected by the earthquake in 1985. And they came in Mexico City, and I was calling my friends, and I invited and then we had the whole morning with them. And at the end of the morning, Wolfgang Sachs told my friends in Tepito, "Well, you have a magnificent culture here, you have beautiful things, but still, you are very poor." And then my friends in Tepito reacted immediately, saying, "No, we are not very poor. We are not poor at all. We are Tepitians”. “What?” – said Wolfgang Sachs “Tepitians? The people of Tepito”. “Yes, you are a German, I am a Tepitian. Please have some... let's have some respect for each other. You are saying that I am poor because I don't have some things that you have and I don't have. I can say exactly the same of you. I am respecting you. Please have some respect for me." This is for me a very important principle. Let's have some respect for different notions of what it is to live well.
Mendel Skulski 44:44
So, when Gustavo poses the question of “what is it to be beyond development?”, how does he go about answering that?
Adam Huggins 44:51
He sums it up in a single word: hospitality.
[Upbeat drums]
Gustavo Esteva 44:58
When Ivan Illich invited us for the development dictionary, he knew about my activities, that's what I was doing. And he asked that first morning – I remember very well in Ocotepec – "Gustavo, if you are trying to describe to someone, what is to lead beyond development, what is the word that you will use?” And my immediate reaction was hospitality. What does this mean? That development is basically a very hospitable attitude. Say, in my way of life, the American way of life is a good way of life. I have no respect for your way of life, for the way of life of any person that is not living the way I am living. Then to be hospitable is to be hospitable to different ways of life, to different ways of living well. This was my reaction with Ivan, but this is a very the old tradition that I am using. Let me use as an ecological metaphor: 10,000 years ago, the people of this area, exactly of Oaxaca, and some people say that 18 kilometers from this place, invented corn. Corn was not there. We can say that the people in this area of the world is the outcome of a dialogue between the plant and the people. And the people in this area also invented milpa. Milpa is the combination of corn, beans, squash, and something like 100 different plants that grow wild with a milpa, and that are hosted by the milpa. Please try to compare these with eucalyptus, that you have plantations of eucalyptus everywhere. Eucalyptus is a very selfish plant. He absorbs all the nutrients around, and nothing can grow around one eucalyptus. In the case of milpa, you have a very hospitable system in which the cane of the milpa is hosting the bean that is growing around it; the squash is keeping... the leaves of the squash is protecting the humidity of the soil; the beans are putting the nitrogen taken by this really whole ecological niche, the whole setting, complementing each other and hosting the others in a very hospitable way. This is an image of the people in this area of the world that are very hospitable. I don't understand why, because for 500 years we have been suffering hospitality abuse. You have all the story of Montezuma hosting a guest, Cortez, hosting in the palace with honors. And then Cortez abused this hospitality, taking what Montezuma prisoner. This is the whole story. We host people, technologies, all kinds of things.... and they commit all kinds of abuses. But we cannot stop being hospitable, because it's a way of being, it's not something that you can choose to be.
[Uplifting Mexican guitar by El Temporal]
This is an attitude about the plants, it is an attitude about the world, about the rocks, about the hills, about the people, about everything. This is one way of defining how even after development, with development and with all kinds of colonization that we have suffered, we are still opening arms, and minds, and hearts, to other people and other ideas.
[Singing joins guitar]
Adam Huggins 49:36
Future Ecologies is produced by myself, Adam Huggins
Mendel Skulski 49:38
And me, Mendel Skulski.
Adam Huggins 49:40
And we are now halfway through Season 1, which means we will be taking a short break. If you're hungry for more Future Ecologies, listen back into our archives, there's lots of good stuff.
Mendel Skulski 49:48
Thanks for listening. We'll be back in about a month. Please tell everyone you know, subscribe, rate, and review the show wherever podcasts can be found. It really helps get the word out.
Adam Huggins 49:58
This has been an independent production of Future Ecologies. Our first season is supported in part by the Vancouver Foundation.
Mendel Skulski 50:04
If you'd like to help us make the show, you can support us on Patreon. To say thanks, we're releasing exclusive mini episodes every other week.
Adam Huggins 50:12
This season we're doing a mini-series on jellyfish species from around the world. But you won't be able to hear it unless you go to patreon.com/futureecologies.
Mendel Skulski 50:20
You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and iNaturalist. The handle is always 'futureecologies'.
Adam Huggins 50:27
And don't forget, we've got that survey up on our website this month. And we'd really appreciate it if you weigh in. It'll only take about five minutes.
Mendel Skulski 50:35
In this episode, you heard Gustavo Esteva.
Adam Huggins 50:38
Special thanks to Ilana Fonariov, Andrjez Kozlowski, and Doňa Margarita and her family. Theme music for this episode was produced by El Temporal from Chiapas, Mexico, other music was produced by kmathz, NCTRNM, and Sunfish Moon Light.
Mendel Skulski 50:54
You can find a full list of musical credits, show notes, and links on our website, futureecologies.net.
[Music concludes after several verses]
Transcribed by https://otter.ai and edited by Phanh Nguyen