Peasants

Think of the 10 women who just had their fallopian tubes tied at a clinic in northern Colombia as foot soldiers in Erwin Goggel's lonely war on overpopulation and poverty. A film producer and heir to a dairy fortune, Goggel is offering nine-acre plots rent-free to poor men and women who agree to have vasectomies and tubal ligations. He pays for all the surgical procedures, including the 10 operations performed late last month in Monteria, the capital of Cordoba state, about 30 miles south of here.

Ask Arleth Mendoza whether she feels safer now that the Colombian government has demobilized right-wing militias and all but declared victory in its decades-long war with leftist rebels. Her husband, Antonio, a city councilman here who stood up for landless peasants, was gunned down in July, leaving their three children, all younger than 9, fatherless. "There was no warning, no threats. They killed him in cold blood," said the widow, who appeared still to be in shock six weeks later.

The Ethiopian government plans to move 3 million more peasants into new villages next year, Premier Fikre-Selassie Wogderess said on Friday. Fikre-Selassie told the committee promoting the country's village program that by the end of 1988, almost four years after the program began, the authorities will have resettled 31% of Ethiopians, or about 14.3 million people.

Soaring coffee prices mean good times for peasant growers, but because financial speculation in part is fueling the prices, the high prices eventually could threaten suppliers of organic and other "socially conscious" coffees. U.S. retail coffee prices have risen more than 20% over the past 12 months and more than 57% in commodity markets. It's a windfall for growers after nearly a decade of horrible prices. "We haven't seen this kind of price in many, many years," said Linbano Cruz Alvarado, an organic grower who belongs to Union Majomut in Mexico's mountainous southern state of Chiapas.

This morning's Times (Feb. 25) had a front-page article that got me to thinking. It wasn't the contents of the article but the reference to the word peasants. These particular peasants were from El Salvador. I searched my memory for other media references to calling some of the world's inhabitants peasants. And this is what I came up with. Most South American countries have peasants. England and France do not have peasants. There are Italian peasants as well as Chinese and Spanish peasants.

I take exception to Peter F. Drucker's comments about Balkan peasants in your Oct. 22 story. I came from that part of the world, and was one of those peasants Professor Drucker is referring to. Dear professor, we do not steal! The Balkan population, peasants in particular, suffered a lot during history at the hands of its neighboring countries. We ended up being poor for choosing honesty. In addition, to liken Wall Street traders (and indirectly, Balkan peasants) in the second paragraph to "pigs gorging themselves at the trough" is, to say the least, very vulgar and flagrant.

Czech filmmaker Dusan Hanak's "Pictures of the Old World" (the Nuart for one week only) is so astonishing in its beauty and power it seems safe to say that as a depiction of what it is like to be old it is very nearly unique. Instead of sentimentality or special pleading, Hanak celebrates the sustaining power of nature as he acquaints us with a number of elderly peasants in the Carpathian Mountains.

Under a rain of ashes and hot sand, 4,000 peasants fled the slopes of a 2,600-foot volcano that erupted unexpectedly in the northwest of the country after having been dormant for more than 20 years. Several people were injured when the roofs of their homes collapsed under the weight of ashes but no deaths were reported.

The government soon may allow Chinese peasants to buy and sell their land rights, letting some leave the land for good and others farm more efficiently on a larger scale, a Communist Party official said today. The announcement came as the party held its first national congress in five years to reaffirm top leader Deng Xiaoping's policy of introducing market reforms and opening to the world.

"Name?" "Maria Santos." "Identity card?" "No." "Can you read and write?" "No." "Do you have land?" "No." "Why did you leave the country?" Santos, 47, hesitated in front of the young immigration official filling out the questionnaire. "Fear," she replied, looking down into her apron. Santos was one of the first of nearly 4,500 peasants to begin their return to El Salvador on Saturday after living nearly seven years as refugees in Honduras.

He was an illiterate peasant who is said to have built a multibillion-dollar smuggling empire with his wits and a gift for cultivating powerful officials at a pleasure palace he called the Red Mansion. When the central government finally caught up to him, he narrowly escaped and made his way to Canada. But Thursday a federal judge cleared the way for Lai Changxing, after more than a decade in Canadian courts appealing for asylum, to be extradited to China, where he'll face criminal charges.

Colombia's decades-long armed conflict has left tens of thousands dead and forced more than 3.6 million people off their land. Last month, President Juan Manuel Santos vowed that despite its troubled past, the country was "not condemned to 100 years of solitude," as was the fictional nation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's epic novel. To avoid that history, Santos has embarked on implementing the Victims and Land Restitution Law. The ambitious measure, signed into law in June, calls for restoring up to 4.9 million acres (an area nearly the size of New Jersey)

If you're looking for the hot spots in Europe for 2011, consider these, which promise to be buzzing in the new year: People who love the Italian countryside are always looking for new territory to explore. These days that means going south to Basilicata, a region of canyons, plateaus and lonely back roads in the stonily silent, sun-drenched Mezzogiorno. Long isolated and ignored, it is coming back to life, led by the rock-hewn hill town of Matera, whose ancient cave dwellings are filling with gourmet restaurants and boutique hotels.

Mexico has been hit by another international human rights judgment against its army. In a long-awaited decision, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled against Mexico and in favor of two peasant ecologists who had long claimed they were illegally detained and tortured by Mexican soldiers working at the behest of powerful logging companies. It is the third such case to go against Mexico this year and was applauded by human rights organizations, which called for the government to submit military abuses to civilian justice.

Between cynicism and hypocrisy lies the 2,000-mile U.S.- Mexico border. America is raising a wall in the desert to separate Mexican drug exporters from American drug consumers, to separate Latin American peasants who will work for low wages from the Americans who would hire them. The Great Wall of America, straddling less than half the length of the border, descends into canyons and across the desert floor. For the Mexican, it represents a high hurdle. For the American, it is an attempt to stop the Roadrunner's progress with an Acme Border Sealing Kit. In some places the wall is made of tennis-court-style cyclone fencing or dark mesh of the sort used for barbeque grills in public parks.

Rodolfo Montiel's struggle to protect southern Mexico's mountainside forests from loggers and land barons landed him in prison, where he says he was tortured, and then left him in exile. Now he wants to clear his name. Montiel was part of a peasant movement in Guerrero state that fought to stop the vast and often illegal denuding of the forests of the Sierra de Petatlan in the 1990s. They blocked roads that logging companies used and staged disruptive demonstrations. To silence them, Montiel says, the local bosses who were profiting handsomely from the trade had him arrested on trumped-up charges and accused of belonging to a leftist guerrilla group.

More than 100 oils, watercolors, traditional Korean ink paintings and posters from the Korean Art Gallery in Pyongyang have been drawing a blurry line here between art and propaganda. Does the show at Vienna's MAK: Austrian Museum for Applied Arts/Contemporary Art offer a rare glimpse into an isolated and largely unknown North Korean art scene, or is it merely a stage for a regime that uses art not only as a messenger of its political ideology but also as a source of international funding?

Reporting from Bogota, Colombia, and Sao Paulo, Brazil -- A Brazilian court has convicted a rancher in the 2005 killing a U.S.-born nun, Dorothy Stang, in the third trial that the co-mastermind of her murder has faced. After 15 hours of deliberations, a jury found Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura guilty of planning the killing of Stang, 73. At the time of her death from six gunshots at close range, she was living among landless peasants in remote Para state in the Amazon River basin. Authorities have long alleged that De Moura, now 39, plotted Stang's murder because she blocked him and other ranchers from taking over land that had been set aside for the poor for sustainable development.