It Could Happen Here - The History of Bread Riot, Part 2

Episode Date: July 13, 2022

In part 2 we look at the a new kind of bread riot that continues to this day: the IMF riots, and then take a look at the two latest uprisings in Sri Lanka and Ecuador.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech

brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit.

The podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audio books while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect podcast network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AT&T. Connecting changes everything. I love how often the Holocaust has been trending over the last year. That's good. That's a thing you want to see trending in 2022 um it's it could happen here all right chris continue with your bread riots

yeah we're back there's more riots uh now last episode we talked about historians declaring the end of the bread death of the bread riot and like in the 60s and early 70s like i i think that this this is one of the the ways you can tell that period people genuinely thought the world was going to get better was that like they genuinely believed that like the centralized state and like capitalism can always provide foods you want to bread riots anymore you get marches going you if you were born in that period you like grew up and people were fleeing from dinonicuses inuses in the street and getting eaten by woolly mammoths. And then by the time you're 40, you've got the telegraph. So I get it, right?

I get why people think that progress was really going back in those eras because they wiped out the Deinonychuses. Yeah, I mean you have seen Howard Taft building the pyramids. Right, exactly, exactly exactly exactly you have you have you have seen the future rise up literally in front of you and yeah you went from eating mud to hershey's chocolate it's it's an incredibly impressive sort of sort of period of modern historical evolution and you know one of the things you see like like you'll see like marxist calling bread rise primitive rebels doing like populist mob politics that's been like displaced by proper marxist class

politics and then like every single one of these people was like the most wrong anyone like basically from that period until until the moment uh the the the end of history guy starts writing they are the most wrong people like on the planet well it's also funny to hear that idea that like there there was something primitive about these people's class analysis because if you look at like the brothers gracky in ancient republican rome a lot of the shit they're saying is not at all primitive class analysis like it's it's pretty developed yeah and i mean like the the marxist will do some long argument about how like oh they have they have false consciousness they're not trying to abolish

the class system or whatever and it's like well i mean like i look at the martin the marxist didn't abolish the class system either so like yeah but like yeah like these are these are very and this is something we're gonna be coming back to a lot this episode is that the people doing this are incredibly sophisticated political actors and one of the the sort of modern version of this is in the 1970s uh not only did bread riots not end there's a new kind of bread riot and these riots are collectively known as the imf riots um from from january 1976 to october 1992 there were riots in peru egypt ghana jama Jamaica Liberia the Philippines Zaire Turkey Morocco Sierra Leone

Sudan Argentina Ecuador Chile Bolivia Brazil Panama Tunisia Dominican Republic Haiti El Salvador Costa Rica Guatemala Mexico Yugoslavia Zambia Poland Algeria Romania Nigeria Hungary Venezuela Jordan the Ivory Coast Niger Iran Albania India and Nepal

were you just doing like the wacko the wacko Venezuela, Jordan, the Ivory Coast, Niger, Iran, Albania, India, and Nepal. Were you just doing like the wacko Warner song? That's literally all the – I found the chart that has all of them. It's like there's just so many. They just keep happening. Again, that's only until 1992. They're still happening. And the other thing I should mention is those are just the ones that are called the IMF riots.

There's a bunch of other riots, some of which are bread riots that aren't called the imf riots because they're not really sort of like directly involved with the imf and and that this raises the question of what the fuck is an imf riot uh and the answer is that i unfortunately to understand why people are throwing molotovs through bank windows we have to talk about banking a little bit. I have talked, I guess, at length. Yeah, I apologize. But we will get back to the riots. Damn it, I promise. We just have to do a little bit of banking.

So, yeah, I've talked extensively on this show about the crisis of the 70s. The short version is that in a thing that is completely unrecognizable today, the global economy collapses, inflation skyrockets, countries across the global south start taking out these adjustable rate – they've been taking out these adjustable rate loans, and then suddenly their interest rates spike and they start defaulting on these loans. Here's free markets and food riots talking about it. run deeper by the 1970s many smaller nations began to feel the strains of insolvency as a result of a world-wide recession successive oil price shocks declining world commodity prices and accelerating debt service obligations so basically like if you're a small country right the price of everything you need to buy like oil is going up and the price of what you can sell which is like commodities like copper tin is collapsing and these lead to what are like these massive uh what are called balance of payments crises and so we should we talk about

what about what a balance of payments crisis is and this winds up being really important here there's the story about che guevara like right after like literally right after the the the uh cuban revolution is he so he goes to the u.s and he's in a he he sits he's in this meeting with a bunch of bankers and he's trying basically to get cuba's gold reserves and cuba sort of like foreign exchange reserves out of the u.s the u.s doesn't steal it and it was funny about it is all the bankers who are talking to him like all of them report afterwards like well wow this guy talks like a banker not a communist and the the specifically the reason they were like oh hey this guy talks like a banker is that he knew what balance of payments was um the short answer is that a balance of payments crisis is when

there's more money flowing out of the country than there's is coming into it and the result of this is that you run out of money uh and particularly the thing you run out of is american dollars which is the thing that you need to like buy oil so you get these countries that are massively in debt and they run out of money. And the only thing they could do is turn to, like, is turn to the International Monetary Fund, or the IMF, who, like, the only description of the IMF that I have is that, like, they're basically, like, if the cartoon Bank of Evil from Despicable Me,

like, ran the entire world economy, they, you know, so the IMF shows up to these countries and is like, lol, Lamau, eat shit. And they force these countries to implement – in order to get loans, they force them to implement what are called stabilization programs because of the, quote, conditionality of the loans. They have all these – this really technical, boring, neoliberal legal language for it. it uh the like the the this is this is all sort of banker speak for if you wanted other loans you can buy food you're gonna have to rob every single person you know and hand them and hand us all your money uh this eventually becomes known as structural adjustment programs this is all of this sort of technical language just guys what's going on but what's actually going on is that in order to pay

off in order to pay the bankers for these loans they are taking food for the mouths of children um yeah here's a more technical i guess explanation of what's happening here austerity programs include stern measures or shock treatments that trigger market mechanisms to stimulate export production and increase government foreign exchange reserves so according to the theory currency devaluation make third world exports more competitive in the international market. Reduced public spending curbs inflation and saves money for debt repayment. Privatization of state-owned corporations generate more productive investment and reduce public payrolls.

Elimination of protectionism and other restraints on foreign investment lures more efficient export firms. Cuts in public subsidies for food and basic necessities help to get prices right, benefiting domestic producers, wage restraints and higher interest rates reduce inflation and enhance competitiveness, and import restrictions conserve foreign exchange for debt servicing. So this has winners and losers. And the losers are like everyone in the country this is happening to. And this is pretty cross-class. These policies, they hurt workers, they hurt peasants, they hurt small shopkeepers. The middle class is annihilated. Just like people who are consumers who buy goods. And even the local capitalists just get screwed by this. screwed by this because what the imf is doing is forcing everyone to have lower wages taking massive benefit cuts and massively spiking the price of food and you know i i i i once again remind everyone that uh this this is explicitly what the federal reserve is trying to do to us right now like this is this is the kind of stuff that they're talking about in order to curb

inflation is to just make the pay everyone less make everyone take benefits cuts and then increase the price of shit so the winners of this are like six bureaucrats international investors and like a class of like absolutely horrific large agricultural landowners and this this has about the effect that you would expect it to um between 1976 and late 1992 some 146 incidents of protest occurred reaching a peak from 1983 to 1985 continuing to the present without attenuation now the authors who are writing this right they're writing this in 1994 so when they say they continue to the present without attenuation they mean 1994 but the thing is the last one of those riots ended like a week ago oh yeah yeah they're still they're still going um

so and you know and these these riots are slightly different than the sort of like classical bread riots right because they are about the increasing price of food they're also about the increasing price of fuel or sort of broader austerity measures or cuts to services, stuff like that. Here's a quote about what these things actually look like. Demonstrations and riots typically target specific institutions perceived as responsible for the depredations. Marches and protesting crowds converge on major thoroughfares and government buildings such as the treasury or the National Bank or the Legislature or the Presidential Palace. Looters attack supermarkets and clothing stores, where fuel and transportation subsidies are part of the austerity package.

Buses and gasoline stations are burned. The international dimension of austerity are recognized symbolically in attacks on travel agencies, foreign automobiles, luxury hotels, and international travel agencies, or not that too, but also international agency offices. And this is going to sound familiar from last episode. It turns out that just like the 18th century people, the attacks of these things are very targeted. Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter?

Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez.

Elian, Elian. Elian Gonzalez. Elian, Elian. Elian Gonzalez. Elian, Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him.

Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not.

Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29,

they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving

deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me in a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters.

From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Black Lit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast the sort of like forms of resistance have changed over time because you know this is now we do have modern political organizations right uh like we get general strikes you get sometimes

you get just noble bread riots uh sometimes you get these just things that are like large protests and then they turn into riots and what's interesting about them is that these are very sort of these are very sort of cross-class movements right you have your sort of classical sectors of the urban poor you have like particularly in the global south you have your shanty dwellers you have unemployed youth you have street vendors who are like a crucial sort of element of these things. You have like just your guy selling cigarettes on the street. You also get like parts of the industrial working class. Sometimes you get unions. A lot of times you get students.

You get public employees. Sometimes you get professional groups. One of the interesting things I was reading about this, I've read like a few books in this era who were talking specifically and this this is in like the 90s right we're specifically talking about professional groups in sudan and it's like it's like okay it's 1994 people are talking about professional groups in sudan backing rioters against the government it's 2019 people are talking about professional groups backing protests against the government it's like it's i don't know like there's this extent to which all of these things like the imf riots have just been happening over and over and over again for about 50 years and a lot of the elements are incredibly similar one of the other things that's going on here is that these protests are driven

are driven by mass urbanization. Typically, austerity protests were precipitated by dramatic overnight price hikes resulting from the termination of public subsidies on basic goods and services, proclaimed by the government as a regrettably necessary reform urged by the IMF and international lenders as conditions for new and renegotiated

loans. Five deaths in the first Peruvian protest began a pattern of violence.u remained a hotbed of austerity protests with students and workers demonstrating against increased food prices in 1997 followed by followed in 1978 by a march of public employees over state layoffs this protest though cheered by other public workers watching from surrounding office buildings was dispersed by police tear gas so like that that's that's a very sort of yeah yeah like we i mean this is this was happening this was happening in peru

like last year right actually was it last year was it earlier this year i don't know time is fake and that's actually like the other thing that's sort of startling about this is is like the places that riot are still the places that are rioting in an enormous number of cases. It's the same places. Sometimes it's the same people. I think probably the most famous protest of this sort of era is called the Caracazo – I'm pronouncing that extremely badly, my apologies – in venezuela which is a reaction to a 1989 like 50 to 100 increase in train and bus fares and there are these are like these are massive riots um at least a hundred and probably like a couple of thousand people are like gunned down by the army

and three years later a relatively unknown colonel named hugo chavez tried to overthrow the government that had carried out the price increases uh chavez i you know chavez is better known for his other works but he's the sort of tie between the imf riots and the sort of next phase of of political resistance to this stuff which is called the anti which is like known as the anti-globalization movement in sort of the 90s and early 2000s and the thing that's interesting about these things is that i don't know the imf rights don't go very well like either they lose or at best what they were able to get was like temporarily stall some of these reforms and i say like reforms quote unquote like the sort of neoliberal like slashing benefits if they were able to pause them a bit and then they would sort of get restarted after people left the

street but in the late 90s and early 2000s people start winning um argentina is sort of famously forced to like tell the imf to fuck off and they default on their loans after this like enormous autonomous uprising 2001 that like very nearly overthrows the government and forces out like five heads of state there's the whole sort of pink tide in latin america the imf gets like driven out of a bunch of countries in east asia and then 2008 uh the entire world economy collapses which it turns out is bad for everyone and this does this does two things for our story uh the first is that like countries are suddenly going again, and because they're completely broke, the IMF is just back and is able to sort of enforce programs on places like Greece and Spain. And the second thing it did was set off an enormous wave of bread riots and uprisings. And I think most people, if you tell them that uh 2008 set off like an enormous

wave of like protests they're immediately gonna go oh you mean the arab spring and i am talking about that but that's actually not specifically what i'm talking about here there there's there were like immediately in 2007 2008 immediately after there was another massive wave of bread riots that every like just everyone is completely forgotten unless the thing that you do specifically is study bread riots um here's from here's from the uh a piece called a political economy of the food riot in 2007 and 2008 the world witnessed a return of one of the oldest forms of collective action the food riot countries where protests occurred ranged from italy where pasta protests in sept September 2007 were directed at the failure of the Pradi government to prevent a 30% rise in the price of pasta, to Haiti, where protesters

railed against President Préval's impassive response to the doubling of the price of rice over the course of a single week. Other countries in which riots were reported, including Uzbekistan, Morocco, Guyana, Mauritania, Senegal, India, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Yemen, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Mexico, and Argentina. And some commentators have estimated that 30 countries experienced some sort of food pressure over the period. Now, we've been talking a lot about food consumers in this because that's mostly the people who are involved in bread riots. But as was happening in 1700 with the sort of original stuff, this whole time this is going on, there's this sort of massive shift in the global food economy happening. And this has been happening for a long time now, but it's been accelerating the last about half a century which is that the number of people who are like peasants and who produce food for themselves has been massively declining and people are getting forced into cities

and this means that there's you know there's there's been a number of other things that have gone along with this uh there's been this massive increase in like cattle production for example you get all these monocultures um and another thing i think i've mentioned before is the world trade organization's like agreement on agriculture like outlaws agricultural subsidies for the global south but you know the u.s is still allowed to have like farm subsidies which means that you know if when you're when you enter these free trade agreements you get all of this like enormously cheap food from the u.s dumped into all these other countries

and you know if you're a mexican farmer suddenly you can't compete with all of this food from the u.s because the food from the u.s is cheap because the american government subsidizing it but the mexican government can't and this just like absolutely annihilates any attempt by a country to maintain food security by like producing food for themselves and this this sort of class of like self-sufficient peasant farmers who'd been you know they support themselves by producing their own food and selling to the market these people just get annihilated and they get forced into what's called sort of casualized labor that they you know that they the later version of this is like uber right but they're

forced into gig work they're kicked out of sort of the normal economy and you know because they don't have sort of fixed contracts or you know a lot of people are working with for no contract with no contracts at all they're enormously insecure and once these people are forced into the labor market like changes in the global economy can make them like almost immediately unable to afford food because you know like if the the the less sort of economically secure you are the the more the more you're affected by price increases which is obvious but it's worth saying because it dictates a lot of like who does bread riots and yes so governments are not entirely like blind

to this and their concern is that they're going to get overthrown and so you see a bunch of governments trying to respond with sort of price stabilization stuff. I think the most famous example of this is that the Egyptian army literally controls an enormous number of Egypt's bakeries and they directly run them. And they directly run them so they can control the price of bread

to try to stop revolutions from happening. But in 2008, they just kind of stopped working um here's the political economy of the food riot again over the year between 2007 and 2008 the 130 increase in the global price of maize and the 75 increase in the price of rice with similar price increases in soybeans and other major food commodities um yes there are these massive food price increases and this you know this does the thing that massive food price increases does right there's there's and there's immediately enormous riots and there's this cycle that happens where the protesters you know the protesters

immediately blame the government for the crisis and then the government is like well it's actually not our fault because uh you know it's happening because of things outside of our control and the protesters are like oh it doesn't matter who we elect uh they do the same things and like they're both kind of right like the government is just like fucking these people but it's also true that the sort of like the whole food system is designed to take like the means of food production out of the hands of like the workers who need the food and putting them in the hands of like you know enormous corporations and as people in places like sri lanka which we're going to talk more about later continually emphasize it like this this food sovereignty

issue is as much of a political issue like it's an incredibly political issue and it's it's it's as much like what's at stake in these bread riots as the sort of imf and austerity stuff okay this is probably a good place for an ad break, but I can't think of a transition. Yeah, you know who isn't allowed to eat is the products and services that support this podcast. All actively starving to death.

So get these deals now while you still can. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba.

He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian.

Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well.

Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not.

Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept,

but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house.

So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature.

I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me in a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry,

we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Black Lit on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast and we're back so all right now we're going to talk a little bit about the year of spring we're not going to talk an enormous amount

about it because that's a whole thing. If you've been following the stuff people have written about the Arab Spring, there's an enormous number of people who spend a lot of their time arguing about whether or not it was actually sparked by food prices. You'll get a lot of analysts

who argue that food prices in Tunisia, where the Arab Spring starts, weren't really higher than normal. And what you're seeing instead is, well, it's not actually food prices. It's just that there's a generation of people who've been farmers but can't support themselves anymore, who've been forced into fighting non-existent wage labor in cities. That is part of what's happening, but I think there's a sort of fundamental misunderstanding of what causes a bread riot, right? As we talked about in the first episode, one of the things that causes bread riots is it's not actually necessarily the magnitude of the price increase that causes them, right? What sets off bread riots is people feeling like they're not getting what they deserve. Now, obviously, if the price of bread increases by 200%, you're going to get a lot of people going like fuck this i worked my ass off and now i can't feed my family uh we deserve better than this it's time to riot but sometimes even if our prices are stable you you can get a you can get a thing where everyone like you know the amount of bread is bad everything is expensive and one day someone wakes up and just goes fuck this i deserve better and

they do a bread riot and and this is the case and you know and when that kind of thing is happening right when when you're dealing with you know what like moral economy stuff when you're dealing with with this gap between like what people think like like what people think their life should be versus the fact that their lives are just absolutely terrible even if you like decrease the price of bread that's not actually necessarily going to like stop people from rioting and if you look at like occupy for example too like you know that's also happening in this period like what brings people there isn't necessarily strictly the price of food it's the sense that like yeah i've been screwed by and i've been screwed by the ruling class and i deserve better than this and and this is this is what

you see in tunisia and one of the things what you see in sort of tunisia and syria is that like a lot of the uprisings like they have this huge sort of rural core with with this population of this huge population of people who've been kicked out of the agricultural sector and you know and like that that is a bread riot right and it's a bread right in the sort of double sense of like it's the people who are involved who used to be involved in in grain and now can't be, and then also that like people have hit this sort of expectation gap thing. And what I think is sort of interesting about this is that these bread riots, these rural bread riots are like – they're the closest thing we have to sort of the classical 20th century revolution right like that that's one that's the thing that causes like the 20th century revolutions are the first generation of people who are like the first like two or three generations people who come from

the countryside into the factories or the people who do revolutions um and but the thing is this is this is this is the 21st century not the 20th century like if you get kicked out of your farm there's there's no job in a factory like you're just unemployed and you know and this changes the dynamics of sort of everything and and i think okay like what people like broadly know the course of like the arab spring in the 2011-2014 wave of uprisings they happen they get crushed largely but there was another wave of these sort of riots protests and uprisings that started in haiti and like in mid-2018 over this massive fuel price hike and here is a partial list of places that like people have like rioted in in in large numbers since 2018 haiti sudan algeria honduras

chile iraq hong kong iran like four times lebanon like three like four times Lebanon like three times, Colombia like three times, a couple of things happened in France, there was Puerto Rico, there was Papua, there was Indonesia, we're on our second Ecuador one now, there was Catalonia, like people ride it in the US there were massive indigenous roadblocks like in Canada, Yucca Media Campo

went up, there was stuff in Socotra, like there were two different ways of protesting in India, there was Belarus, there was Kazakhstan, there was Kyrgyzstan, there was Uzbekistan, there was M up, there was stuff in Socotra, like, there were two different ways of protests in India, there was, like, Belarus, there was Kazakhstan, there was Kyrgyzstan, there was Uzbekistan, there was Mali, there was stuff in Nigeria, there was stuff in Libya, like, there was stuff in Sri Lanka we're about to get to. This whole thing has been happening, like, everywhere,

and it's been intensifying in the last, in the last sort of, like, three or four years. We're now basically in, like, year four of this cycle, and, you know, obviously, like, every single one of these protests has their own, like, local political conditions. And, like, a lot of these aren't even sort of loosely about the price of bread. They're just about sort of other stuff that's happening. and we're going to talk a little bit about sort of two of the most recent like protest waves um we're going to talk about ecuador we're going to talk about sri lanka because they're they're two very different kinds of protests even though they're both kind of bread riots or at least i mean they're both very much the modern equivalents of it um but they they look

very different and there's just i think i don't know i I think there's interesting reasons why. Yeah, so we're going to start with Sri Lanka. On a very basic level, Sri Lanka has a giant balance of payments crisis. This is the sort of large-scale political version of famines, right? There's plenty of food and fuel in the world, but the government in Sri Lanka does not have dollars to buy it with. Now, the reason the government doesn't have dollars to, like, buy fuel with is because the government is basically, like, an incredibly corrupt dictatorship that keeps, like, importing luxury goods it didn't need. And they did a bunch of, like, tax breaks on rich people. And suddenly the government was broke, and everyone was like, wow, how did that happen?

It must have just been the pandemic. And it was like, no, you gave all the money to rich people and then like as the crisis sort of went on um they the government decided to ban fertilizer imports and so this just meant that people couldn't get fertilizer so it's like farmers just didn't plant food because yeah that's a curious decision yeah it's like it's one of those things you look at it it's just like like who thought this was a good idea yeah what was the positive end of that game plan here i mean it like i like okay so like i i think what they were thinking is that like fertilizer costs dollars right we're running out of dollars so we're going to stop people from spending their dollars like on buying this stuff so we can keep more dollars in the economy but like what what are you what is your long-term

plan here if you don't have like anything to get dollars with or and you also don't have food so this uh to the surprise of exactly zero people except i guess the government of sri lanka causes a food crisis and a food shortage um and this is a kind of classic like this is the kind of classic like situation in which the imf would intervene in the 70s and they're intervening now and you know this is a classic like struggle against this starting right you have the ruling class blowing up the entire economy by like fueling debt money into pointless infrastructure projects and now they're doing these like massive austerity measures trying to get loans to bimf this is you know this is this is this is this this is this is stuff we understand and we've seen before um but this is also this is also a

food sovereignty problem right the sri lankan government has just completely screwed their farmers which means they have to import even more food and and you know the result of this is months and months and months a very impressive sort of cross-class protest with like basically every social sector in the streets and that's both a good thing and also a thing that is kind of a mess because you know like there was civil war the civil war ended like less than a decade and a half ago, right? So you have people in the streets from sectors who, like, do not like each other at all. And, I don't know, you know, you get the thing that happens here, right?

You get these moments of, like, incredible solidarity and then moments of incredible, like, what the fuck are you guys doing? And, you know, like, one of the things that happens a lot in these protests like in all all protests like this is like okay the protests are like pretty tame for literally months right like it's just people doing protesting and then i cops and people like allied with the government start attacking the protesters at which point people like burn down the house of the ruling family they start throwing people i think people probably saw the videos people like throwing cars of like government ministers into rivers which was a good time and like yeah like that that stuff was you know a direct reaction to sort of like the government's violence right um you know okay i can't give like a full like detailed political history here because like dear god it is incredibly

complicated and i don't understand it very well because you know i don't study sri lanka um if you want a good account of this uh brohini hensman's political dimensions of the crisis in sri lanka is a really good sort of like short like look at what's going on here um and and this is sort of like this is you know this is a broader trend like all these protests right uh like as like every single bread right takes place in its own unique context like sri lanka for example like sri lanka used to have the world's best and largest like mass trotskyite party like they were the trotskyites is like the only place on earth the trotskyites had like a real like mass political party and they were like a part of the real political process and then they like sold out the working class and entered a bunch of governments that like did terrible stuff.

And, you know, that's like a local context doesn't happen anywhere else. But, you know, every single one of these states, right, is embedded in global capitalism. And that means that every state is affected by the sort of like broader economic trends and sort of bureaucratic structures to hold everything together. They're affected by the IMF, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank. other they're affected by the imf the world trade organization the world bank and the thing that this means is that the timings of uprisings and riots tend to synchronize with each other in reaction to sort of broader like economic forces and the product of this is weight is these sort of like periodic waves of uprisings and so to close this out we're going to talk about the most recent of these well it might actually not be the most recent of these by the time this goes up uh but yeah yeah we're gonna talk about ecuador um the situation ecuador is very different from what's

happening in sri lanka uh the the biggest difference i guess is that instead of sort of like waiting for conditions to get bad enough that like an uprising happens like more or less spontaneously which is kind of what happened in 2019 inuador there there's a very huge protest there um but they were largely spontaneous but instead of like waiting for it people were just like wait what if we just called one of these and by by people here i specifically mean the confederation of indigenous nationalities of ecuador or conai and you know okay okay as we've seen through this whole sort of thing right like bread riots like adapt to the political organizations around them and in ecuador we're dealing with a quintessentially modern form of political organization which is the

indigenous confederation and i i guess i should sort of like preface this a bit with like the the the specific form of indigenous confederation in in latin america that emerges in this period is like a different thing than older ones because there have been indigenous confederations for a long time this is like a this is this is a very specific like political thing that emerged across latin america in in sort of the 70s and the 80s really really started showing up in the 80s as a result of like a lot of things one of which was like how shitty the old like Marxist-Leninist vanguard groups like were on indigenous

issues and one of the groups that forms in this period is Kona'i and Kona'i is one of the world's most militant like indigenous federations and since their founding in 1986 they've called half a dozen uprisings against neoliberal governments.

And I think they knocked off like three presidents, which is a pretty impressive track record. And on July 13th, 2022, faced with skyrocketing inflation on like basic consumer goods and a like really shitty, like far right government, they staged another one. And this is another sort of, I don't know, the thing is interesting about this is is that it's it's part general strike like part street protest part riot and part just like mass march for the from the sort of periphery of ecuador to the core and by periphery and core i mean in the sort of metaphorical sense like it's a bunch it's a bunch of indigenous peasant groups from all over the country just like marching on descending on the capital keto and this is a this is a complicated process like the you know okay like the left everywhere has like political divides and mostly they're kind of nonsense in a lot of way like okay like there's ideological

divides and there's personal divides and whatever but like ecuador's left has has real political divides and these aren't these aren't like sort of petty ideological like personal stuff like they're like they were caught under the sort of previous like old like leftist pink tag governments of rafael carrera like there are like soldiers and cops who are beating the shit out of indigenous ecological protesters and you know this means that like yeah you know okay so so carrera is like parties running for president again or is carrera is not running but carrera's party is like running in an election right and you know this means like yeah okay like maybe you're both leftist right but you know there's a lot of people who are like oh fuck no like i'm not voting for these guys these are the guys who like sent the army against our anti

mining protests and so you know the the thing the thing that's interesting here is that like like these protests don't even pull together the entire ecuadorian left um there's like other stuff going on here too like there there's some of the unions that went on strike in 2019 like don't go on strike this time because of some political stuff that's happening but the thing the thing about kona that's really impressive is that they're still organized enough and they still like they're organized enough that they're able to take control of parts of cities and they have a lot of allies and supporters amongst their students and workers in kido and this means that when the government makes this enormous mistake and arrests konai's like kind of newish leader uh okay this guy's name this guy's name i i guess in spanish it's like

leonidas aiza this guy's name is leonidas and he's the head of um he's the he's the head of conaes resistance federation um and he's he's been a protest leader he was a protest leader in 2019 that's how he got elected to like head this organization and they arrest him on day two of the protest and this is a catastrophic mistake the protest just like explode and you know by by by by like a week in i think that the government's claiming they were doing 50 million dollars of damage a day which i'm not actually sure i believe that because governments and corporations do this too when they're talking about losses from strikes. They tend to over-emphasize how much damage is

done because it makes them look better in the press and it makes the protesters look worse. But they are able to damage significant parts of the economy. And by June 30th, they kind of win. Basically, the government is forced to negotiate with them and

they don't get all of their demands, but they get price decreases for fuel and gasoline, which is a huge part of why these protests happened in the first place. They get bans on mining and drilling in indigenous and protected areas. They get strength in price controls. They get rural loan forgiveness, interest rate decreases.

They get subsidies for farmers. They get subsidies for families. They manage to get the government to declare a state of health emergency over COVID. This is impressive stuff. And the other part of this is that they're like, okay, the agreement is that we will stop protesting if you do this, and if you don't do this, we're going to do this again. Cool. So, yeah, I guess I might sort of wrap this up. yeah i guess i guess my to sort of wrap this up i there's there's an american proverb that is really common among sort of like american china watchers which is that i so supposedly

the chinese word for crisis is composed of two characters danger and opportunity and it's like not true as like linguistic and anthropological analysis of china that that's not what that's not what the characters mean, but everyone, like everyone in the U S like political establishment, like believes this, right. And,

you know, but like as, as an analysis of China, it is completely useless as an analysis of the U S of the American psyche. It's incredibly valuable, right? Because this, this,

this is the way the American ruling class thinks it's every single crisis is both a danger and an opportunity. And that's something that we in some sense also have to do because these are the sort of situations that we're in. been happening for thousands of years like presumably they will happen for thousands of more years and there's no use sort of like either pretending that they don't happen or making these sort of moral or tactical arguments like for or against them because they just happen and the question that we're that we're faced with is what are we actually going to do about it right are we going to sit them out are we going to side with the state and repressing them in the name of sort of like stamping out color revolutions or like providing order or stability or like protecting small businesses or are we going to you know take to the streets and fight alongside

them to sort of break the system that creates them and this the second question from here is if we're going to do this how and what we've seen from ecuador in the past month or so is that if you take the fight to them and you are sufficiently organized, you can win. And that means the question now, as our food prices continue to increase, as food prices are only going to continue to increase, what are we going to do? And yeah, that's all I got i have i have a single question yep what are we going to do well i'm kind of bummed we never brought up our good friend pete buddha judge in his uh bread his bread price fixing ordeals yeah i mean that that's kind of a sign of just like how kind of like

i guess you could say masculinized like our culture has been that like people didn't riot over that because like that is a thing like if if if if if you said pete budaj back to like a late 1700s village and he tries to do this thing like he does a systematic like bread bread price fixing right like all of these people would have been getting hit by rocks so yeah do that again

uh yeah do that again wow just bear just brazen incitement yeah yeah it's great Again, I... Yeah. Do that again. Wow. Do that again. Just brazen incitement. Yeah, yeah, it's great. Well, that is it for us today. We love to incite things, folks.

Until next time, go incite yourselves. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America.

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