Author Archives: scott

Post-Trauma or Mid-Trauma?

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PTSD is invoked in the context of a discourse that is dominated by ideas of an innocent and victimized ‘child soldier’. My discussion suggests that this discourse might not necessarily mirror the FAP’s [formerly abducted person’s] own view of his past. The concept of PTSD is based on assumptions, some of which should be challenged in the context of northern Uganda. Parker, reflecting on mental health in the context of north-east Africa, writes: ‘One of the most important issues which requires attention includes the following: PTSD is imbued with culturally culturally specific conceptions of normality and deviance and it is thus difficult to make appropriate diagnosis’ (Parker 1996).

An essential feature of PTSD is an aetiological event in the past – a distressing experience that lies outside the range of usual human experience. The problem, of course, is that what my informants would consider a usual experience is probably quite distinct from the usual human experience of someone living in the Western world. In fact, the narratives presented here suggest that even within their own life the idea of normality is a shifting category.

[….]

Another issue is that the disorder works within a temporal framework: the disagnosis of PTSD follows the logic of a traumatic event in the past that is connected to the present in forms of defined symptoms. As Young puts it: ‘[PTSD’s] distinctive pathology is that it permits the past (memory) to relieve itself in the present […] The space occupied in the DSM-III classificatory system depends on this temporal-causal relation: aetological event –> symptoms.’ (Young 1995).

In Uganda, narratives of PTSD go hand in hand with ideas that locate the FAP’s traumatic experiences in the past with the LRA. An alternative view suggested in this chapter emphasizes the periods of transition. While one period of transition takes place with the LRA after abduction, another distressing time might be experienced after return from the bush when the LRA fighter witnesses further threats and the breakdown of the moral space in which he acted as an LRA combatant. Thus, what could be described as a traumatizing time lies not only in the FAP’s past with the LRA, but also in the present. To diagnose PTSD against a background of continued insecurity, terror and fear is difficult, Parker writes: ‘- especially as some of the primary symptoms may be adaptive responses to particularly awful circumstances.’ (Parker 1996).

These are excerpts from Ben Mergelsberg’s chapter in The Lord’s Resistance Army: Myth and Reality. I’ve never really thought about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as a cultural construct, but it makes a lot of sense, especially since what constitutes traumatic events is rooted in what one perceives as normal. More importantly, Mergelsberg makes the important distinction that many returned abductees are still in the midst of what could be labeled traumatic events. After spending much of their lives, and indeed very formative years, growing up in the culture of the LRA, they have been uprooted – voluntarily or not – and are stuck in a transition into a new community with new rules and new behaviors. Can one suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder while still in a state of trauma, or is what we see there something different? Especially in the context of Mergelsberg’s wider argument – that returnees are balancing two separate worlds: one as rebel and one as civilian – it’s something to keep in mind when trying to understand what happens to returnees as they adapt to life out of the bush – with or without rehabilitative services.

Weekend Reading

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Come get some:

One of the most surprising, and perhaps confounding, facts of charity in America is that the people who can least afford to give are the ones who donate the greatest percentage of their income. In 2011, the wealthiest Americans—those with earnings in the top 20 percent—contributed on average 1.3 percent of their income to charity. By comparison, Americans at the base of the income pyramid—those in the bottom 20 percent—donated 3.2 percent of their income. The relative generosity of lower-income Americans is accentuated by the fact that, unlike middle-class and wealthy donors, most of them cannot take advantage of the charitable tax deduction, because they do not itemize deductions on their income-tax returns.

What happened in Steubenville makes me sick, but we are kidding ourselves if we think that it is not representative of what is happening in basement parties after the homecoming game all across America. Our kids want to talk about it. They need to talk about it. We need to have conversations about consent that are not centered around what should have been done, but are instead centered on what will be done in the future. Our teens can handle it, I promise they can.

A strong understanding of consent as an enthusiastic and unequivocal yes is essential to reversing the culture that our teens have grown up in. The amazing thing is the way my students responded to the conversation. Our students want a better way, it is our responsibility to show it to them, even if it is scary, especially when it might make us uncomfortable.

Goma’s growing significance as a ‘humanitarian space’ also brought about important socio­geographic changes and left a visible imprint on the urban landscape. The city’s development and expansion has to be situated in a context of informality and quasi absence of state authorities in urban planning.The presence and interference of humanitarian agencies only further strengthened the shift towards privatised urban planning and development.

While a massive influx of IDPs resulted in the emergence of new informal districts in the urban periphery that were deprived from any urban infrastructure, water provision, electricity network, schools, health centres or markets, at the same time a gentrification of the central districts could be observed as a consequence of the settlement of international humanitarian organisations.

With its numerous NGO establishments, UN compounds, luxurious residential areas, hotels, bars and rebel headquarters, these central districts gained increasing importance and came to represent modernity, global culture and new lifestyles. Specific demands for housing and working infrastructure as well as economic demands increased the socioeconomic significance of these central districts, and improvements in the overall urban infrastructure (such as electricity, internet, roads and water) turned them into the real ‘quartiers riches’.

Weekend Reading

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Read these links before they disappear!

Both priests placed the blame for their kidnapping and subsequent torture on Jorge Bergoglio, who was then in charge of the Jesuit Order. It was, after all, Bergoglio who stripped them of their functions and, in doing so, removed the protections provided by the church. Shortly thereafter, a paramilitary group delivered the priests to the ESMA. Both had served impoverished communities. They were only freed after the Episcopate agreed to grant an audience to General Roberto Viola and Minister of Economy Jose Martinez de Hoz. A day before the audience, Yorio and Jalics were drugged and transported by helicopter to an open field in the outskirts of Buenos Aires.

Imagine if a democratically-elected mayor was suddenly neutered and replaced by an “emergency manager” with the power to steamroll City Council. Imagine if the manager had the authority to unilaterally modify or even eradicate collective bargaining agreements and used that authority to entirely wipe out public sector unions. For Detroit, and its staunch labor movement, that scenario is less far-fetched than it sounds. In fact, it’s already happening in the Michigan city of Pontiac.

Since Lou Schimmel became Pontiac’s emergency manager in 2011, he has privatized the Department of Public Works, outsourced police services to the Oakland County sheriff’s office, and turned over the city’s fire department to nearby Waterford Township, killing the public sector unions which represented the city’s firefighters and cops. He’s put every city property, including City Hall, up for sale and cut the city’s public employee workforce by about 90%. And he’s done it all without the consent of the city council.

There is no reliable data to prove the assertion that MOOCs are revolutionizing anything; such rhetoric, moreover, gives a progressive and agreeable tinge to what may be a harmful, exploitative, and short-lived bubble of entrepreneurial capitalism. Something like 5-10% of the people who enroll in these so-called “classes” complete them, and almost none receive academic credit. And what does “primarily free” mean? MOOCs are only available to people with excellent broadband internet access and fast computers, which excludes about half the population and leans heavily towards the already privileged, and white, sectors—unless they live in rural areas, where such access is largely absent. Internet provider data caps and fee-based download plans are already raising questions about the cost or feasibility of taking such courses. As a so-called “access” campus, we have to be concerned about the effect of online instruction on success rates for underprepared students, especially students of color, whom studies have shown benefit the least from online instruction and flourish most when engaged on campus through residential housing, mentorships, and involvement in student organizations and community service.

Arizona Universities Keep Hiking Tuition

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On Friday I saw two pieces of jarring news: that tuition at Arizona universities had gone up 96% since 2007, the year I started my undergrad at ASU; also, that tuition has increased in 18 of the last 20 years. Tuition hikes were a frequent and terrible thing while I was a Sun Devil – in short span the state government cut the $1 billion higher ed budget in half. I was privileged enough that my parents had agreed to help me with my tuition, but I knew a lot of people who worked all semester long in order to pay for the next semester – and each year that got harder.

And yet, I never stopped to think about how rapid the change between 2007 and 2011 was compared to years prior. Anne Ryman, who covers higher education for the Arizona Republic, sent me this link [pdf] on tuition over the last 20 years. The shift in the scale of tuition hikes is pretty dramatic, so I decided to graph it out. The result is not a happy one:

azbor tuition

And I’m not 100% sure if this data includes university-imposed fees – which fall outside of what the Arizona Board of Regents approves. when I started high school in 2003 the tuition hikes had just begun in earnest – they stood at $3,593, and when I started at ASU it was a few dollars shy of $5000. When I finished my student teaching and graduated in 2011 it was $9,716 for the seniors that I had taught. And subsequent freshmen continue to pay more and more.

On Friday, the university presidents issued their proposals for next year’s tuition. Arizona State is proposing a 3% increase which will bring it within a stone’s throw of $10,000 – touting the small increase as the lowest in the past decade. The University of Arizona proposed the same percentage (they’re already above $10,000), and Northern Arizona University asked for 5%. If these are all approved, the three universities in Arizona will be over or dangerously close to $10,000 tuition a year. With that in mind, if you take a glance at Article 11, Section 6 of the Arizona Constitution, you will see the words: “The university and all other state educational institutions… shall be as nearly free as possible.”

The Creepy Side of Pageants

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Content warning: includes descriptions of attempts to coerce sex.

Both pornography and pageantry are often criticized for a slew of reasons. Every once in a while they collide. Just last month, the winner of Miss Delaware Teen USA resigned amid allegations that she had done porn. According to some accounts, once she turned 18 she did some porn and entered some pageants because she was strapped for cash. I recently linked to a post in which Amanda Hess wrote:

Now she’s being publicly shamed by former friends and international news organizations because a pretty young woman like her can publicly compete for money in a beauty pageant, or she can collect some cash in amateur porn, but she’s not allowed to do both at the same time. Thirty years after Vanessa Williams was pushed from her Miss America pedestal over leaked nude photos, we’re still breathlessly reporting on the moral fiber of these fallen beauty queens without stopping to assess the hazy value judgments being passed.

Hess goes on to point to the similarities between the picture beauty pageants and amateur porn sites convey: “the sexy-yet-virginal girl-next door who parades around for the public in skimpy swimwear, but saves sex for that special someone” and “the good girl gone bad—for the very first time.” Of course, only one of these things is seen as okay for women to be involved in.

And now there’s this account of a what a woman encountered when she tried to get into the competition for Miss California USA:

When the two met later that week, Rodriguez showed up without any paperwork and asked Ashleigh to get inside his car. She felt uncomfortable but got inside; he was an official Miss USA recruiter, after all, and she had come this far. Once the doors were closed, Rodriguez told Ashleigh that the agreement wasn’t written. It was oral.

“Basically, I had to give him head and other ‘sexual favors’ if I wanted to be on the cover of the magazine,” Ashleigh said. Rodriguez explained that this was simply the “fast track” that 90% of all successful actors and models took to the top: if she performed additional sexual favors for the powerful men on the modeling circuit, her path to fame would be guaranteed.

Ashleigh said Rodriguez asked her to “prove herself” right there in the Starbucks parking lot. When she looked upset, he let her out of the car and told her to think it over. Instead, she spoke with an officer at the Tracy Police Department the very next day. But because Rodriguez hadn’t actually forced her to go down on him, the incident was a civil matter, not a criminal one.

That line between porn and pageant just keeps getting thinner, doesn’t it?

Weekend Reading

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Here’s your serving of weekend reading:

I am trying to imagine a white president forced to show his papers at a national news conference, and coming up blank. I am trying to a imagine a prominent white Harvard professor arrested for breaking into his own home, and coming up with nothing. I am trying to see Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli, and I find myself laughing in the dark. It is worth considering the messaging here. It says to black kids: “Don’t leave home. They don’t want you around.” It is messaging propagated by moral people.

The other day I walked past this particular deli. I believe its owners to be good people. I felt ashamed at withholding business for something far beyond the merchant’s reach. I mentioned this to my wife. My wife is not like me. When she was 6, a little white boy called her cousin a nigger, and it has been war ever since. “What if they did that to your son?” she asked.

And right then I knew that I was tired of good people, that I had had all the good people I could take.

One of the challenges to organizing on campus is getting undergraduate students—many of whom are being buried under mountains of student debt—to realize that their degree will probably not result in the comfortable middle class lifestyle that they’ve been told awaits them after graduation. This runs counter to their day-to-day experiences in which they do not yet find themselves in the uncomfortable position of not being able to pay back their loans. In a way, we are asking students to anticipate their own future failure. We need to think through the temporality of what people are being asked to act on and how that impacts participation. This requires a longer term relationship with students that may even extend beyond the time it takes them to graduate. Community involvement needs to include alumni and a more intergenerational approach to thinking the figure of “the student.”

With regards to graduate students and faculty, we need to dispel the notion that your scholarship can be your activism. Participation in university-based activism means material risk for individuals whose careers are tied to the institution in such an intimate way. Many of our colleagues, while championing anticapitalist, antiracist, and feminist politics in their work, routinely fail to participate in an open struggle to change the structures that govern our lives. While our writing and research can feed, nurture, and illuminate our struggles (and vice versa), the two should not be conflated. As scholars, we need to put our bodies where our theory is.

Given the current state of student debt, a vicious administrative class, and the prevalence of idealism and creativity, we believe that university campuses are logical and essential sites of struggle. That being said, the university is a trap—only university-based struggles that aim at generalization, at escaping the university and becoming part of wider social condition of refusal (as in Quebec), will have a shot at avoiding either recuperation or reformism. For us, this implies a two part, long-term organizing problem: first, organizing enough students to form a powerful bloc capable of acting on the terrain of the university, and second, organizing the communities that surround us.

Another reason Up falls short as political commentary is because pinning a society’s inequities onto the backs of a dozen kids and expecting them to perfectly reflect those ills sets up the project for failure. As Apted comes to realize, one person’s life is not a data point — at worst, it’s an irrelevant anecdote, and at best, it’s a metaphor. It would be a mistake to universalize the experiences of these 14 and hold them up as evidence of England’s failure to provide opportunities for all children.

That being said, the series hints at a number of socioeconomic trends that become particularly relevant to the next generation of characters — the childrens’ children. Tony and his wife take care of grandchildren that their daughter can’t raise. Paul’s daughter went to college and studied art history (a degree she doesn’t use at her job, naturally) while his son has five kids and is precariously employed, leaving Paul and his wife to take over when they’re needed. There were no “twentysomethings” in the original series — with the exception of Suzy, briefly, they all went straight from adolescence to adulthood. That’s not the case for their adult children, who, as Sue points out, are much more dependent on their parents than their generation was.

The very opportunities the original Up characters had seem to be fading, too. Will Sue’s daughters, who decide not to go to college, have a shot at the job their mother had — or will they end up working at Tesco? If tragedy or illness befalls Jackie’s boys, will they have a safety net to soften the blow?

One Year After Kony2012: Resources for the Lord’s Resistance Army

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Today marks a year since Kony 2012 was released, which means a year minus a couple of hours since it went viral. In the aftermath of the controversy, I threw together a link roundup about the video. To mark the occasion, I wanted to try my hand at a definitive reading list on the conflict and its many facets. I’ve broken this into categories to help anyone looking for specific aspects of the LRA conflict. A lot of the links are open access, but there are a lot of journals too. If you have trouble opening any articles, drop me a line. Please let me know in the comments if you know of other works I should include.

For a broad overview, there are two big things you should read. The e-book, Beyond Kony 2012, edited by Amanda Taub, is available at whatever price you’d like to pay. It includes everything from the history of the conflict to advocacy responses to Invisible Children, all from great people in various fields. The Lord’s Resistance Army: Myth and Reality,  edited by Tim Allen and Koen Vlassenroot, is a good primer and tackles some of the myths around the conflict.

If you’re looking for other broad resources, International Crisis Group (ICG) has a report on understanding the conflict. The Justice and Reconciliation Project (JRP) has a number of field reports explaining and analyzing various events in the conflict’s history, all of which are worth perusing. For specific aspects of the conflict, Berkeley’s Human Rights Center and Tulane’s Payson Center for International Development have a report on LRA abductions. In additon, the LRA Crisis Tracker has just issued its annual security review on LRA activity.

There are quite a few decent articles on motivations and politics of the LRA: Frank van Acker and Ruddy Doom and Koen Vlassenroot have written good analyses of the LRA; Adam Branch situates the conflict around Acholi  peasants; Paul Jackson views the conflict from the greed vs. grievance perspective.

Patrick Wegner wrote a great piece on the Internationally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps in Uganda. Chris Dolan has written a whole book (Google Books preview here) on the camps, in which he details their damaging effect on the entire northern Ugandan society in a case of what he terms “social torture.” He was also the first to break the conflict into phases, pointing out the trends in the conflict which Branch and Atkinson would later pick up on. The Refugee Law Project has a paper [pdf] on effects of violence on displaced communities.

Adam Branch has written a book (preview) about the consequences of humanitarian involvement that is absolutely imperative – his analysis of IDP camps, of the ICC, and of AFRICOM are all vital, and his history of the war is probably the most comprehensive. Sverker Finnström‘s book examines living in northern Uganda during the conflict, and sheds light on the political motivations behind the LRA.

Regarding the ICC, Allen’s short book on the subject is best, but you can also settle for his DFID report [pdf]. Branch has written this short piece [pdf] and a longer one [pdf] on ICC involvement. My professor in undergrad, Victor Peskin, wrote this analysis of the ICC’s approach to both Uganda and Sudan. The Refugee Law Project has working papers on the ICC and traditional justice. Also worth perusing is a series of blog posts at Justice in Conflict about LRA commander Thomas Kwoyelo’s trial in Gulu.

On the flip side, regarding Uganda’s amnesty process, Louise Mallinder analyzes the amnesty process and Linda M. Keller looks at alternatives to the ICC. The first issue of JRP’s magazine, Voices [pdf], was about the amnesty process, and the Refugee Law Project has a working paper [pdf] on it as well. ICTJ and Berkeley’s Human Rights Center have a report on popular attitudes towards the ICC and amnesty, and ICTJ, Berkeley, and Tulane later published a joint report [pdf] on attitudes towards these ideas and reconstruction.

ICTJ and JRP have a joint report [pdf] on memorials and memory in LRA-affected regions. There’s also this piece on young adult perceptions of the LRA, which is an interesting perspective. Accord has a great report [pdf] on the long history of peace negotiations between the LRA and Uganda. They also put out this addendum [pdf] by Chris Dolan about the Juba peace process.

Looking at the military side of things, Mareike Schomerus has a look at the UPDF’s actions in Sudan, Sverker Finnström wrote about Kony 2012 and military humanitarianism; a group of authors wrote this article shedding light on what a military solution to the conflict would actually require. The Resolve LRA Crisis Initiative released this report right before Kony 2012, outlining what U.S. involvement should look like. More recently, Resolve helped release this report [pdf] on problems with the UN’s response. ICG has a report spelling out what else is needed beyond Kony’s capture/death.

This is my no means an exhaustive list of readings, merely the ones I think are the most important or ones with interesting perspectives, in addition to some reports with lots of information. Again, if you know of other things that are missing that you think are important, leave a comment.

Update (9/1/2013): I’m editing this post to add some things I’ve come across recently. Firstly, Ron Atkinson’s The Roots of Ethnicity: Origins of the Acholi of Uganda is about precolonial Acholiland, but the second addition includes a very thorough history of post-colonial Uganda, including analysis of the LRA conflict. In 2009 he also wrote two good essays about Operation Lightning Thunder. Also, Chris Blattman has linked to the data from the Survey for War-Affected Youth (SWAY) that includes tons of information. In the year since I initially wrote this post, Resolve has published two important reports [both pdfs]: one reveals that Sudan is supporting the LRA again, another is the most recent in-depth look at who makes up the LRA and outlines effective defection strategies.

Shameless Self-Promotion: At Guernica

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Short note to urge you all to go check out my article at Guernica Magazine‘s blog, Guernica Daily. I wrote a piece on the State Department’s Rewards for Justice program and legislation that passed in January regarding the LRA and the ICC. In the piece, I continue to stake out my middle-of-the-road stance, looking at both the success of Invisible Children and Resolve in getting more support for the ICC indictments and the drawbacks of the U.S.-ICC relationships as it stands now. If you’re interested, go take a look, and feel free to comment if you’ve got any thoughts.

Other developments on this topic include the recent split in Congolese rebel group M23 over turning in Bosco Ntaganda, whom Rewards for Justice offers a bounty for. As Michael Poffenberger at Resolve told me, even rebels might be persuaded to take advantage of the bounty, and it may already be playing out in the DRC. In addition  Colum Lynch recently penned a piece on the relationship between American conservatives and the ICC, although he doesn’t make the Invisible Children connection that I hint at and that Mark Kersten has also written about. If you find my piece at Guernica interesting, take a look at those links as well.

Lastly, huge high fives to the editors at Guernica. I wrote this piece right after the bill was passed, and it’s changed shape a lot over the ensuing weeks – and for the better.

Weekend Reading

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Cycling students through the global sites allows NYU to increase its enrollment without having to keep up the expensive New York infrastructure needed to house and support all those extra students. In Abu Dhabi, the entire project has been bankrolled by the emirate, while most of the other nodes are outposts run on the cheap, with faculties made up of relatively low-paid contract workers, not expensive and sometimes obstreperous tenured professors. The students, however, are still paying full freight. You pay NYU about the same for tuition, room, and board in Ghana as you would in Greenwich Village.

NYU’s globalization of education looks a lot like the offshoring of labor and industry in the 1990s: A multinational corporation makes more widgets for less money and uses the savings to grow even more. But while the administration is enthusiastically milking the GNU, faculty members remain skeptical of programs run in partnership with authoritarian regimes and with little academic quality control from professors in New York. “Abu Dhabi, who would want to go there?” Miller asks. “Are you kidding? You’re not even allowed to have a camera on the street there! Or be gay! Or be Jewish!”

In fact, with student and faculty participation in the GNU still lagging behind its hyper-aggressive targets, the administration has had to resort to informing departments that some of their funding will be conditioned on more enthusiastic cooperation.

You think a novel about an institution so violent and depraved that a woman would rather kill her children than be forced to hand them over is the stuff of nightmares? Imagine the waking nightmare Margaret Garner lived, faced with the awful “choice” of murdering her own kids or watching them be returned to slavery. And she was just one person out of millions. Any honest account of this history should disturb and unsettle us.

Of course, imagining that nightmare is precisely what Murphy is insisting that her kids shouldn’t have to do. The question is, does the math add up on a claim that one white kid’s bad dreams outweigh the value thousands of students get out of confronting a history we’re all still living with the ramifications of? Including many students who are bound to be the descendants of slave owners or slaves – in some cases, both?

Murphy justifies keeping students from grappling with this history in the name of “[making] sure every kid in the county is protected.” In this reckoning, 17 and 18 year olds need protection from a few lost nights of sleep, from realizing that people are capable of doing truly awful things, from the knowledge that some people live with horrific, daily, inescapable violence.

The erasure of Quvenzhané’s name is an attempt, consciously or unconsciously, to step around and contain her blackness.  Yes, sometimes black people have names that are difficult to pronounce.  There aren’t many people of European descent named Shaniqua or Jamal.  Names are as big a cultural marker as brown skin and kinky hair, and there has long been routine backlash against both of those things (see: perms, skin bleaching creams, etc.).   This insistence on not using Quvenzhané’s name is an extension of that “why aren’t you white?” backlash.

Latin America’s Exception, From the Torture Network to the ICC

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About a week ago, Greg Grandin wrote a piece about the CIA’s extensive torture network, noting that, among the 54 countries involved, Latin America was completely absent. The article is a really great read and sheds light on why the region didn’t render itself part of the massive anti-terror network. The history of U.S.-Latin America relations is, of course, a dubious one. Grandin cites Cold War involvement as well as economic failures brought about by neoliberalism as setting the stage, and both the Iraq War and the U.S.’s aggressive post-9/11 militarization as informing the Latin American response to Washington’s requests. He cites several WikiLeaks cables regarding Brazil’s effort to prevent U.S. expansion into South America:

[The cable] went on to report that Lula’s government considered the whole system Washington had set up at Guantánamo (and around the world) to be a mockery of international law. “All attempts to discuss this issue” with Brazilian officials, the cable concluded, “were flatly refused or accepted begrudgingly.”

In addition, Brazil refused to cooperate with the Bush administration’s efforts to create a Western Hemisphere-wide version of the Patriot Act. It stonewalled, for example, about agreeing to revise its legal code in a way that would lower the standard of evidence needed to prove conspiracy, while widening the definition of what criminal conspiracy entailed.

It’s really fascinating to look at the reasons that Brazil and other South American countries might be wary of what the U.S. is trying to use them for. This is also evident in the context of the International Criminal Court. Every single country in South America – and almost all of Central America – are members of the ICC, despite U.S. efforts to prevent such membership in the Court’s early years.

When George W. Bush entered office, he quickly set out to cripple the ICC before it was even officially created. He and like-minded senators targeted the ICC and tried to discourage states from signing the Rome Statute, the founding treaty behind the Court. They passed laws like the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, which barred U.S. cooperation with the Court and prevented military aid and training from going to countries that joined the Court. The White House also set about signing Bilateral Immunity Agreements (BIAs, also called Article 98 agreements) with countries establishing that they would not extradite American citizens to the Court. If states joined the ICC but didn’t sign BIAs, they would no longer receive aid.

The Bush administration worked hard to either isolate the ICC or cripple it by preventing jurisdiction over U.S. citizens. The response wasn’t what conservatives had hoped. By October of 2005, 54 countries had denounced BIAs (pdf), including a number of Latin American countries. While countries around the world issues such statements, Latin American countries had much more to lose in aid dollars, and yet they still refused to cooperate with the U.S. attempt to derail international justice. Ecuador lost more in aid funds than any other country in the world, and Peru and Uruguay both lost over a million dollars, in 2004, with threats of more in years to come.

In 2005, General Bantz Craddock of SOUTHCOM testified before a House committee (pdf) that he was unable to work with 11 countries in his region, and that these countries were turning elsewhere for training and aid, causing severe damage to U.S. influence. Losing its sphere of influence in it’s own backyard, the U.S. eventually backed down, allowing aid to flow into these countries in order to reestablish military support, but apparently not enough to marshal admission into the CIA torture network. It’s not crazy to assume that holding aid hostage for U.S. gains in the early 2000s played a role when it came to trying to build anti-terrorist laws and programs in the region.