Above Photo: Joe Solomon
Social movement leaders to trek across the country calling for grassroots alternatives to the far-right resurgence in America.
“We are in the middle of a storm,” says Cindy Wiesner, national coordinator for the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance. “The system isn’t working, and we can’t depend on the two major political parties to change it.”
Wiesner is one of nearly 50 social movement leaders from around the United States and the world who will cram onto a bus and trek across the country from the Republican to Democratic National Conventions later this month under the banner, “It Takes Roots to Change the System: The People’s Caravan.”
Organizers from the frontlines of black and Latino social movements, campaigners at the intersections of climate and workers’ rights in Kentucky coal country and U.S. military veterans mobilizing against war will come together over shared concerns about what they see as the key conditions of our times: “white rage and misogyny escalated by the presidential elections; extractive dig-burn-dump economies promoted by politicians; and rising militarism at home and abroad applauded by the electorate.”
Equipped with giant puppets and large works of art, the caravan will line its path with creative direct actions, in concert with local community groups. Organizers say they will “stop in Baltimore along the way to build with the Movement for Black Lives, to honor Freddie Gray and to strategize with the black community around state violence.” While in Philadelphia, the group will “support actions around immigrant detentions and deportations through the Berks Detention Center.”
For participants, the issues are deeply personal. Honduran youth activist Laura Yolanda Zuñiga Cáceres recently lost her mother, the indigenous Lenca leader Berta Cáceres, to a political assassination. “Our struggle joins with struggles around the world to defend life in the face of weapons that try to quiet us, in the face of men in uniform who repress us, who assassinate us, in the face of those for whom our lives our disposable as people with many bodies, with indigenous, black and rebel spirits,” declared Laura Cáceres.
The demand to cut off U.S. military aid to the repressive Honduran regime has emerged as a key rallying cry of the caravan, in solidarity with the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras from which Berta Cáceres hailed. In the words of the People’s Caravan, “Berta didn’t die, she multiplied.”
The initiative, coordinated by Grassroots Global Justice, is taking on an ambitious journey at an inflamed time. Demonstrators against the recent police killings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling face fierce backlash, from militarized law enforcement repression in Baton Rouge to renewed nationwide push to arm police with weapons of war. Amid a U.S. election cycle defined by racist and anti-Muslim incitement, the United Kingdom faces a post-Brexit surge in racist hate crimes and xenophobia. Late June and early July were marred by a wave of mass killings in Turkey, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Baghdad, Saudi Arabia and France.
“We are on the cusp of what could be a very transformative moment, a very scary moment or both,” Nay’Chelle Harris, a volunteer member of Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE) in St. Louis, told AlterNet. “We have the candidate Donald Trump building a cult of personality around sexism, racism, transphobia, xenophobia, every kind of phobia. Within that we are finding people who are genuinely disaffected, but their anger is directed at oppressed people, not the oppressors. How do we resist that blowback? We have to come together, call it out and show that there is another way.”
Harris has been modeling that other way in her home of St. Louis through campaigns she says are aimed at “understanding racist system upon which policing is based” by looking at the relationship between state violence, exploitation and the extractive economy. “One thing we are campaigning around is the municipal court system, which is very corrupt and used to exploit poor people and poor black people in region,” explained Harris. “We are fighting the unreasonable ways that people are being arrested and detained for not having money.”
Now, Harris is eager to take that fight on the road as a participant in the caravan.
“It is important for all of these local frontlines communities to connect with each other and support each other right now,” she said. “It is a good way to build movements with people climbing different branches of the same tree. Whether it’s the Agua Zarca Dam in Honduras or fighting Peabody Coal in St. Louis or people in Baltimore fighting police violence, we are all connected by webs of racism, exploitation and extraction. We need to find ways to help each other.”