Cuba USA

US academicians expose Bowman expeditions

by Gilberto López Rivas

translation Cuba-Network in Defense of Humanity

It is quite opportune the publication of the excellent book “Weaponizing Maps: indigenous peoples and counterinsurgency in the Americas (militarized maps) written by Joe Bryan and Denis Wood (Guilford Press, New York, 2015.

This work is especially important to check the content of counterinsurgency in the Bowman Expeditions done by geographers of the University of Kansas, at the service of the Office to Study the Military for the US Defense Department. Their funds derive from a program of research by the Pentagon called Minerva Initiative for studies of social sciences in strategic areas for the policy of national security of this government.

Bryan Wood analyzes the military and corporate use of maps made of indigenous lands to exhaustively review documents and references and through field work in which they interviewed Oaxaca indigenous intellectuals and participants in the Indigenous Mxico Project who denounced in 2009 that the geographers headed by Peter Herlihy, According to news reports and emails from Honduras and Costa Rice he continues working among the indigenous peoples in the former country while in the second he has tried to convince university audiences, without much success, on the “merits” of indigenous work and his academic vocation at the service of Peace. The authors point out “By affirming the simple mapping of these territories, Herlihy relies on a powerful alibi to cover the active role played in transforming intelligence for the United States military, Herlihy continues to present himself as the “good guy” who makes benevolent maps with the sole purpose of academic interest to document the world, in places of strategic interest for his benefactors in the army.

In the book he begins reviewing the Zapotec communities of the Jurez Sierra in Oaxaca where the Herlihy team made maps in 2006 of Yagila and San Miguel Tiltepec, Ixtlen de Jurez and collected key information of these peoples.

Bryan Wood confirms that Herlihy conveniently hid from the community authorities his connections with the US military and did not inform that all the information he collected went straight to the United States Army through the purchase of technologies, administrators of projects hired by the Defense Department, when it becomes public knowledge in 2009.

The authorities of San Miguel Tiltepec released a declaration in which they express their total disagreement with the search done and warn “all the peoples and Mxico indigenous communities and the rest of the world not to be fooled b the research of the Bowman expedition or any other researcher only interested in benefiting the groups the represent.

Bryan and Wood explain that the office of foreign military studies supports the Bowman expedition based on two objectives;”On the one side to test the possibility of using social scientists to obtain open intelligence that the army cannot collect another way; while, on the other hand they try to build a world land registry to monitor the transference of property, especially in indigenous areas, in centers of “organized crime” and the great belts of urban poverty that the foreign military consider could be a threat in the future.

In the research they study the trajectory of the American Geographical Society; the first activities of geographers in Ro Coco, Nicaragua, during the US invasion in the war against General Sandino and developed a small wars manual – prior to the current manuals of counterinsurgency; production of maps in Canada and the expropriation of lands of the indigenous peoples; intervention of US geographers in Nicaragua during the counterrevolutionary war of the 80s. This is a subject of particular interest for those us involved in internationalist tasks related to autonomy here. Of course, the authors don’t register the depth of political changes that the Sandinista Revolutionary government puts in practice in 1984 and 1985 in which peace talks were held with the Misurasate leadership (in the cities of Mxico and Bogot) and a national commission for autonomy is set up that leads to the constitutional recognition and establishment of two autonomous regions in the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua (1987).

Bryan and Wood develop with extraordinary precision, the line of argument and foundation in the rise of the “War Scholars” (such as Peter Herlihy, Geoffrey Demarest, Jerome Robson) in the context of counterinsurgency and recognition of property rights aided by the maps. These coincide with the military perspectives of security that gives priority to private property and value of American land that is essential for a strategy of successful counterinsurgency and for the maintenance, without problems, of the free market. In other words capitalism in its current neo liberal period.

Hopefully books like these could be translated to inform the thoughts of other valuable United States intellectuals who do research really in favor of peace and for the indigenous peoples in resistance.

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