Bill Moyers Journal (2007-2010); 1326; Mark Danner; Santa Ana Health Crusade

This week on Bill Moyer's Journal, I don't know if you've ever heard of Bill Moyer's journal. I don't want to just end the war, but I want to end the mindset that got us in the war in the first place. That's the kind of leadership I intend to provide. But can he do it, a sign the reality of Afghanistan? It seems to me he's thinking, you know what, my original ideas about this place, things I said in the campaign and so on, should not bind me and keep me from making the right decision. And she's a doctor who's organizing her community and won't take no for an answer. If we are invisible to the people that allocate money, if we are invisible to the people that have the resources, there's something wrong with that picture.

Stay tuned. Funding for Bill Moyer's Journal is provided by the Partridge Foundation, a John and Polly Gutt Charitable Fund, Park Foundation dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues. The Colbert Foundation, the Herb Alpert Foundation, Maryland and Bob Clemens and the Clemens Foundation, the Fetzer Institute, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Public Welfare Foundation, and by our sole corporate sponsor, Mutual of America, providing retirement, plant products and services to employers and individuals since 1945. Bill of America, your retirement company. From our studios in New York, Bill Moyer's. Welcome to the journal. President Obama has been holding one meeting after another, trying to decide whether to escalate the war in Afghanistan. He would do well to hold off another discussion until he has sent everyone home for the weekend

to read this new book with the provocative title, Stripping Bear the Body, and the cover that holds the eye like a magnet. The subject is politics, violence and war, and running through it is an old truth often forgot. You start a war knowing what you're fighting, but in the end you find yourself fighting for things you had never thought of. In the meantime, you make decisions that inflict on people in far off places suffering you never imagined. That's but one stark truth you'll find in these pages. The wars we find and the violence that feeds them reveal like nothing else the hidden structures of power in Washington, the personal rivalries, the infighting and deal-making, the ambitions that decide our policies and often our fate. Stripping Bear the Body you will discover is a moral history of American power over the past quarter century. Its author is Mark Dana, who throughout those 25 years reported from more mean places in the world than any journalist I know, Iraq, the Balkans, Haiti, and Washington among

them. Despite more than one close brush with death, he keeps going back. He writes for some of our leading magazines, and has produced a series of acclaimed books winning awards left and right, as well as receiving the MacArthur Fellowship. All the while, Mark Dana has been teaching journalism and foreign affairs at both the University of California, Berkeley, and Bard College in Upstate, New York. He's been at this table before, and it's good to welcome you back. Thank you, Bill. It's good to be here. First, the title. Very provocative. Where did it come from? Well, it comes from a former Haitian president who survived in office for about four months before being overthrown in the coup d'etat. And he said, he told me in certain speeches subsequently, that political violence is like stripping bear of the body, the better to place the stethoscope and hear what's going on beneath the skin. He meant that times of revolution, coup d'etat, war, any kind of social violence going on tends to form a kind of moment of nudity, as he put it, in which you can actually see

the forces at work within a society stripped bear. It's like one of those models in biology class where you see the body, you see all the organs beneath it. And suddenly you see who's oppressing whom, who has the money, who has the power, how that power is exerted, and that that is the time to seize a society and look at it, to x-ray it, try to understand what exactly is going on in its intimate recesses. That's what one finds in the book that when you do these moments of nudity or nakedness reveal power structures that you don't see without that violence. Exactly. Whether it's in the Balkans, or Haiti, or certainly Iraq, the struggle between the Shia and the Sunni, for example, which was complex, multi-ferious, sectarian, and intra-sectarian, Haiti itself struggles over poverty and power, places, a place where we thought a democracy could take root immediately after the Duvalier dictatorship.

Where any democratic vote, in which everyone, one man, one person has one vote, was deeply threatening to the power structure that had existed there for 200 years, same thing in the Balkans, complex social interaction, complex ethnic makeup, which, as is so often the case, when it comes to American power, the assumptions of our leaders are that we can apply discrete, specific power in a given spot and alter the social landscape and solve political problems. And in all of these places, I mean, Haiti is a very good example, 7 million people, very poor country, that the United States has occupied twice in the last century and was essentially unable to change things. Given all its great power, a country of 300 million, the most powerful military power in the world, and trying to alter the dynamics of a country of 7 million, and we failed miserably, not least because when you apply American power, or certainly when you send American troops,

you start the forces of nationalism in reaction. And we've seen that, I think, in every place Americans have intervened, including Afghanistan. But in Iraq, some things have changed. Have they not? Saddam Hussein is gone. There's no question Saddam Hussein is gone. There now is a Shia government in power, which represents the majority of the people of Iraq. Saddam, of course, was a Sunni, and he represented a minority in power. Now it's Shia power, sympathetic to Iran. It's unclear whether this invasion, at the end of the day, really helped American interests at all. You know that it left 100,000 or more Iraqis dead, it destroyed politically the Bush administration, and it left the American public, and I think this is very significant, skeptical indeed about further U.S. military deployments, and this is what Obama has been left with when he has to try to cope with Afghanistan, a public exhaustive and skeptical.

You know, I call this, in the book, the Athenian problem, which is, how do you have... Athenian being Athens of Greece, right? Exactly. How do you have a democratic empire? How do you have an imperial foreign policy built on a democratic polity? It's like some sort of strange mythical beast that's part lion, part dragon. You know, at the bottom is a democracy, and then it's an imperial power around the world. And the problem is that the things demanded by an empire, which is staying power, ruthlessness, the ability, and the willingness to use its power around the world, is something that democracies tend to be quite skeptical about. And this is a political factor that looms obviously very large in its calculations. When you strip bare the body politic of our own country, after all of these years of war, Vietnam, two wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans, other places, what do you hear with that stethoscope you apply to us? I think that the United States, we're now living still in the backwash of the war on terror,

we're living still in what I've called Bush's state of exception, which is to say a state of soft martial law, state of emergency, state of siege that was imposed after 9-11, whereby warrantless surveillance was allowed without the supervision of the courts, whereby widespread detention was allowed, not only of illegal aliens but American citizens, and whereby especially torture extreme interrogation techniques, as some call them, was developed, allowed, and legally certified within the Department of Justice. And all of these things represent the legal shadow and the political shadow of the war on terror, which Obama, phrase that Obama no longer uses, but that indeed has changed the country, I think, quite dramatically. And this is something else he is trying to cope with. How do you perhaps change some of these decisions made by the Bush administration without leaving yourself politically vulnerable in the case of another attack?

And we see this struggle going on when the former vice president Dick Cheney comes out advocating not only torture, but condemning the Obama administration for renouncing its use. We see the political stakes here, which is that if indeed President Obama is seen to leave the country vulnerable in the wake of another attack on American soil, especially, he will be politically destroyed. You say that the decisions being discussed and are about to be made in Afghanistan right now, have very little to do with the war in Afghanistan and more to do with the politics in America. Explain that. I think the political background here is extremely important. We have a new president who made his case on foreign policy during the campaign on his opposition to the war in Iraq, and that opposition to quote his speech in Springfield in 2002 was built on the perception that he is not against all wars, just dumb wars. So in this construction, the smart, the dumb war was Iraq, the smart war, the right war was Afghanistan.

Afghanistan allowed his dovishness on Iraq. So he has come into office having vowed to prosecute that war and fight it because it was an American interest. And now he has found, especially in the wake of the failed elections in Afghanistan, that he is getting into, he's taking on a hornet's nest, putting his hand into a hornet's nest in a way I think he didn't anticipate. You make the point that we're more likely to be a target of attack because Obama is trying to win over the heart of mind of the Muslim world. I think that's true. I think that he is a political threat. And I think you have to look at the character of this war. We're accustomed to calling it the war on terror, even though Obama is no longer using the word. But it isn't a war where you try to seize territory. It's not a war where you're going to kill every jihadist. It's a war about politics. Think of a target. What you want to do in this war is prevent people from moving toward the center. That is, you want the people giving the money to not become more active supporters. You want the more active supporters to not become active jihadists to actually go into the fight.

So you're trying to do something political. You want to stop young Muslims from supporting this movement and taking part of it. That's the only way that this war will eventually be won, quote unquote. And when you look at it in these terms, George W. Bush was an enormous gift to the jihadist, an enormous gift. Because he embodied the caricature of the United States that Osama bin Laden had put forth an imperial power using its power blunderingly around the world, suppressing Muslims, repressing Muslim countries, occupying Saudi Arabia. Think of that image of Lindy England, the young military woman standing in her fatigues, smiling at the camera, holding a leash, a leash that goes down to the neck of a naked Muslim man lying on the ground, grimacing in pain. Osama bin Laden, if he had hired the most expensive advertising agency on Addison Avenue, could not have embodied more brilliantly his ideology, which is that the United States is suppressing, humiliating, shaming, undermining the Muslim world, and especially Muslim men.

So Obama, on the other hand, stands for, you know, he has an African name, he's black, he has a Muslim middle name, he speaks about inclusion, I mean, look at his Cairo speech. Ideologically, he's an enormous threat to Osama bin Laden, because he does the opposite of what Americans are supposed to do. As you speak, I think of something that Obama said, doing one of the debates last year. I believe it was early in January, just as the campaign for the nomination was starting. And he said, and I'm paraphrasing, I'm running for president, because I want to change the mindset from waging war to peace. Now what was that naive? I don't think it was naive, and I think he has begun to do that, begun. I think one of the, you know, one of the reasons behind the Nobel Prize, for example, was a recognition that the rest of the world is so grateful he's in place, and he is speaking eloquently about a world of inclusion, of cooperation, and not of unilateralism, because

the Bush administration was really the nightmare that the world had always feared, which is in America, unbounded by anything but its own power, unbounded by international law, judicial processes, anything. And Obama has changed that impression of the United States, which is extremely important, and ideologically it's important when it comes to the war on terror, when it comes to, you know, relations with Europe, European countries, European leaders can cooperate more easily with the United States when the American president is popular among their publics. It stands to reason. These are democratic countries. So this has had real consequences. The question is, can he make institutional changes? Can he go to the next step? Can he represent inclusion when it comes to multilateral institutions? Can he expand the security council? Like, they don't. They don't move in. They don't move in IMF, World Bank. G20, for example, where he has, indeed, taken, you know, what was formally the group of eight countries, industrialized countries, which made the big decisions on economic, world

economic decisions they met together. He now has shifted that decision-making power to be fair, carrying on a change that was going on under Bush, to the group of 20, which actually does include Brazil. It does include it. We have a much broader spreading of decision-making power that, I think, is extremely important and that indicates a way to put these beautiful words of Obama into real actions. So, for a moment, I mean, you've got a marvelous chapter in here on the imagination, as it applies to politics and war. Use your own imagination for the moment. And try to get in the mindset of that group of nice, norwegians, peace-loving people who are giving their shiny prize for peace to a man who's only been in office nine months, who has no real accomplishments to his credit, yet, and that's understandable only nine months. What were they? What message were they sending? Why did they do it? I think they're thinking his eloquence, the vision he sets forth is so beautiful, and

its beauty now is especially striking because of the darkness that it follows. And the great risk is that those aspirations will remain only aspirations, and we must do what we can do to ensure that they're not only set forth, but in some way that they're embodied by true action. And our way of doing that is to confer this honor on them. I think they perhaps didn't anticipate that it might have a controversial reaction within the United States. But do you think it's a clear expression of this enormous crevasse between the way he has viewed domestically in the United States and the way he's viewed internationally? That beautiful vision, you talk about which they seem to be acknowledging, encouraging, and supporting. How does that balance off against the realities of what he faces in Afghanistan? Oh, I think I would not like to be in President Obama's position in making choices on Afghanistan.

I think he's in a terrible place where this war is already deeply unpopular among the American public, and deeply unpopular within his own political party, if he expands it dramatically as his general, his hand-picked general, has suggested he should by sending 40,000 or more new troops, fresh troops. He will lose much of his democratic support at home and be reliant on Republican support. If, on the other hand, he rejects this recommendation, the Republicans will attack him, and it will be part of the bill of particulars that will be cited against him in the event of another attack, along with the renunciation of torture. I began the show with the reminder that, as you've said in here, that we go to war for one thing and usually wind up fighting for different things we could not have anticipated. What are our aim now in Afghanistan?

What are our basic interests there, and what are we fighting for? Well, part of what we're seeing now is assorting out on the part of the administration, and particularly, I think, in the mind of the President, in answer to precisely that question, what are our interests? We've been told that our interests are to prevent the gathering, the re-gathering of al-Qaeda and Afghanistan as a jihadist base of operations from which more attacks, like 9-11, can be launched. But the fact is that these people have a very light footprint, the idea that you can simply keep them out of a place by occupying it with, in effect, a handful of troops. I think is quite mistaken. There are other places they can go, Somalia, Sudan, various other countries. So, I think, you know, what happens very frequently, our goals change during a war. The one goal, which George Kennen, I quote, saying in the book, the reason that we go in is often forgotten, and suddenly the goals become something like maintaining our dignity, keeping up our international authority, preventing a loss, and the damage such a loss will

do to our international profile. In other words, they all become, I think, what, what, what, uh, revolutions called heuristic. They're about the origin, they're about the mission itself not achieving anything. Yes, there are troops there dying for primarily political reasons for prestige, which the diplomats say is essential to maintaining our position in the world? I think that's a very large part of it. I think the, the, the other irony here, and I think it's important to say this, one of The goals of 9-11 itself of that attack was to draw the United States into Afghanistan to fight a counterinsurgency, as the Soviets had done before them, and like the Soviets, to destroy the remaining superpower. That was actually what they were thinking. It's one of the reasons why a major Northern Alliance leader was assassinated. It was blown up a couple of days before 9-11. The anticipation was this would draw the United States in, and the United States would be defeated on Afghan soil.

The fascinating thing is that the Pentagon, of course, at the time in 2001, avoided this. They didn't want a major ground involvement. They used Arab bombardment and Afghan allies on the ground. They've been much criticized for this, but in fact, they were trying to avoid what is exactly happening right now, which is a major land involvement, which will become, in David Halverson's famous words, a quagmire. You say our boys, our soldiers, they are bait. They are indeed. They are fascinating when you look at what the procedures are. You have it the moment anyway, a lot of quite small bases, where you have 20, 40 soldiers. They go out each day on patrol. It's very difficult territory. Very often these bases are at the bottom of valleys. They go out on patrol, essentially trying to elicit or encourage what soldiers call contact engagement, that is, people shooting at them. It's the only way they can find the Taliban. They use themselves as bait and then hope to be able to respond. They have an enemy who, you know, it's their territory.

They can blend into the population. Taliban. Yes, and they are extremely experienced. It's a thankless job, I think, for the soldiers. You don't answer it in stripping bear the body, but you leave me perplexed with the unresolved account for this boundless capacity for evil that expresses itself all over the world and from deep in human nature. You have any thoughts about that? I wish I could, you know, there's a sense, and I say this in the book, that the wonderful voluptuous thing about reporting, the great voluptuous pleasure of it, is that you will look at a place from afar and it will seem you will think you understand it. You will look at a rock and you'll say, my God, look at what's going on. I understand it. Why can't they do this and this and this? And as you get closer, as you set foot on the ground, as you talk to people, tens of people, you know, scores of people, as you travel around, as you see what's going on on the ground, bit by bit, your certainty is stripped away, and you know less and less.

Until you reach a moment, a couple of weeks in, usually in my case, where you've been bombarded with sense impressions. You've been bombarded with opinions. You've been bombarded with descriptions, and you suddenly think, I know nothing. I know nothing about this place. And that is a wonderful place to reach, because you've achieved a kind of tabula rasa. You know, now I can try to understand it on my own terms. It's a wonderful thing about reporting, but unfortunately, it's not necessarily very good at understanding the ultimate ontological questions that you push or that you just put to me. What is evil? Where does the evil come from that lies behind someone like Saddam Hussein, or Rodovan Karatech, or general cloud Ramon and Haiti? As I say, I've tended to find these people, I mean, Saddam, I've never met or interviewed, but these other people, to be rather disappointing. Their political goals were mundane. What they had working for them was opportunism, was very often cleverness, and was ruthlessness.

So evil becomes a tool? I think it does. It's a tool, and it's an advertisement. It's a means of persuasion. If you can, you know, in the Balkan Wars, the ruthlessness of the Serbs allowed them to kill only 100,000 people, rather than 500,000 people. They were able, through their own use of rape and mass murder, they were able to send five times that many people fleeing Serb territory. So they used it to cleanse the land, ethnic cleansing, as we call it, quite inaccurately, because the ethnic groups were actually the same. But I wish I could find for you, you know, the ontological source of evil. But I think the more reporting I do, the more I see violence used in an instrumental way, and also I should say our own tendency when we use violence, because the United States does use it extensively, to ignore what we think of as the hygienic use of force.

You know, the Iraq War, in the first couple of weeks, the so-called combat stage, is that George W. Bush administration called it, the best estimate made by the Associated Press of civilian casualties, civilian deaths, which is certainly an understatement. It's a hospital count. So it's only people who were brought to hospital morgues, was 3,400 people. This is in two weeks. This is more than the number in the United States who died in 9-11, and of course Iraq is a tenth, or an eleventh, the size of the United States. So the equivalent on the U.S. side would be 35,000 people, died, civilians in that war. They were never on camera. You never saw those bodies. You saw very few bodies. It was as if the American Army simply marched up the road to Baghdad, and in fact, you know, the military before the war estimated collateral damage at 10,000, 15,000, something like that. And you know, when you make a decision like that and say 10 to 15,000 or 7,000 or whatever the number was, will probably be killed as a result of this intervention.

People who have no relate, you know, are not military and so on. That it strikes me as an extremely serious thing. It's not like trying to kill civilians in a terrorist attack, needless to say. It's not because that's your intention, but it's not entirely different. I mean, you are setting out, and knowingly, on an operation that's going to kill large numbers of civilians. And we tend not to look at it, and then we tend to forget it. As we... American amnesia. As we speak, Congress is about to pass a law forbidding the Pentagon from releasing any more of the photographs of American troops torturing Muslims. What does that say? Well, I think it's a mistaken decision. I think President Obama and the new administration should have gotten this stuff off out of the way immediately. I think these photographs should have simply been released. Is torture the purest expression of evil that you've seen? I think if you're looking for a pure expression of evil, torture is pretty...is a pretty good candidate.

Well, because you are taking...I mean, it's also the most illiberal policy, the sort of most diametrically opposed to what we are as a polity. A liberal state has, as it's hard, the notion that government is limited, that there is an area of privacy of our daily lives in which governmental power, state power, cannot intervene. And torture takes over someone's nervous system. Torture takes over what they feel. Torture takes over and penetrates into their mind and into their body. It's not only illegal, it's immoral, and it's against the heart of what the American political tradition stands for, which is an enlightenment tradition, and in which the abolition of torture, by the way, in the 18th and 17th century, was extremely important. So it's going back into darkness, I think, in a very dramatic way. Last question and an unfair question. You write stories and report. You don't make policy, but what would you do about Afghanistan at this point if you were

the president? I think that the first point to be made is there is no solution in Afghanistan. Solution I put in quotes. We live in an op-ed culture, which is to say, you always need to have a solution. The last third of that op-ed piece needs to say, do this, this, this, and this. There is no this, this, this, and this, that will make Afghanistan right. I think the first thing we need to do is be clear about our interests there, which I think are very, very limited. I think we need to be clear about the fact that our presence on the ground is going far toward undermining the very raison d'être for our presence, which is to say we do not want to encourage future terrorist attacks on this country. We don't want to allow large-scale, jihadist organizing, if we can prevent it. But our presence in Afghanistan is a major rallying cry for those groups precisely. I would gradually disengage from Afghanistan.

But I think the war is going badly there, and frankly, it's going badly here. I'm glad the Obama administration, I think the president himself, has, in the wake of the Afghan elections, because that really was the turning point, the realization that the partner on the ground there was corrupt and illegitimate, and in the wake of those elections, all of the early perceptions about the war that Obama had set out on are being reconsidered. And I think sometimes we should admire that in a president, which is to say it seems to me he's thinking, you know what, my original ideas about this place, things I said in the campaign, and so on, should not bind me and keep me from making the right decision. And I'm encouraged by that. I'm encouraged by his willingness to reconsider and actually look at the facts on the ground. I don't know what decision will come to, as I say, there's no right decision here as in so many other instances. This is a remarkable book of reportage and writing, stripping bear the body, politics,

violence, and war. And Mark, I appreciate you being with me to talk about it. Thank you. Thank you. President Obama was in Texas today with the first George Bush urging Americans to volunteer for more community service, a good thing to do. Barack Obama actually began his political career as a community organizer on the south side of Chicago, since his run for the presidency. Special attention has been paid to this unglamorous and tough line of work.

Community organizers go toe-to-toe with the powers that be, and so they're often feared and ridiculed by those who believe America should be run from the top down. Remember last year's Republican National Convention? He worked as a community organizer. What? I guess a small town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities. Despite such rank disparagement, dedicated community organizers never give up. They work at the grassroots to help their fellow citizens stand up for the change needed to improve their lives and their communities. This year on the Journal, we've reported on some remarkable community organizers. In Chicago, we met James Tenwell, speaking out on behalf of low-income workers for better pay and jobs.

In Boston, we saw Steve Meacham, organizing neighbors to fight back against the banks and protect their homes from foreclosure. We have intervened in a key arena, which is stopping evictions after foreclosure. And by doing that, we are getting leveraged and negotiate good deals with the banks. Half a world away in Liberia, Leima Bowie organized the Women in White. They stood in righteous defiance of violence and war and helped topple a brutal dictatorship. I am going to be in the front of the line with my sisters. If we get arrested, fine, but just to say, I feel your pain, I've been down this road and I walk this walk with you. For our final report in this series, we want you to meet a woman whose very name reflects hope and faith in her adopted country. America brought you, came to Santa Ana, California, a decade ago to fight a public health crisis in the town's Latino community.

But her struggle against one disease blossomed into a much broader mission. Every time she is organized and helped to empower a core of homegrown leaders determined to help their community. If on this bright summer day, you were just to pass her by, you would never guess that these people are celebrating a dream coming true. This young man wasn't even born when that dream took hold in the dusty ground of this vacant lot seven years ago. But in a few months, he and the other kids here will be swinging from monkey bars, playing ball and chasing each other around a brand new community center in a public park that only a handful of hearty souls ever thought possible. The creation of this park is only part of our story. Our story is also about what people can do when they finally find their voice.

If you ask me what that Lord means, it means you could see it like it doesn't mean anything. It's just a small vacant lot that is going to be a park in an area in an neighborhood that lacks so much. But you could see it that way or you could see it as one major accomplishment for a community that went from not having any voice to getting a park built. To get why one small park is a major accomplishment, you need to know a few things about Santa Ana and its environment. This is Orange County, California, one of the richest spots in the Golden State, home to Disneyland and not very far, John Wayne Airport, Crystal Cathedral and Saddleback Church.

It's also home to enough fantasies to fill hours and hours of cable television. For several years now, cable TV is practically camped out in Orange County. At least four different series have portrayed this place as a rich, sun-baked oasis stretching along 40 miles of ocean beaches. But it's a different picture here in Santa Ana, who's three out of 50,000 residents live a world apart from their TV counterparts. 70% of Santa Ana is Latino. The average family of four earns just above poverty level wages. Four years ago in a national survey of the toughest cities to live in America, a survey that weighed levels of crime, poverty and disease, Santa Ana ranked number one. So it's hard to imagine a park sprouting up on these neglected streets, but it's happening

here and it came about in a most unexpected way. It all started when this woman, America Bracho, a public health doctor by training, founded an organization in 1993 called Latino Health Access. The community she wanted to serve was facing so many challenges she knew she couldn't confront them all at once, so she settled on one to begin with. We did a survey in Orange County, among Latinos, and we found that they were major diseases devastating this community. And one of those conditions is diabetes. Diabetes is causing blindness in a very young community. So you find a dad at 40 blind. You find a productive woman at 42 amputated. So this is part of the diabetes program.

They have to help people complete their performance. So diabetes not only was a relevant agenda, but diabetes is a great entry point to community work because it's pretty safe. It's pretty safe. I didn't think it was strategic to enter our community dealing with racial gangs or with domestic violence. So we decided to start very quiet. We didn't say we want to transform Orange County, we don't want to transform our communities, we just wanted a good program that could produce outcomes. The best way to achieve these outcomes Bracho knew was to recruit her experts from among the very people living in the neighborhood who were themselves living with diabetes. With good training, each one could teach one. We wanted to use the model of promotores, which are community workers. And these community workers, we wanted to train them to be in charge of the programs.

And there is something powerful in having people with diabetes, telling another person with diabetes, I was there. I wanted to die. And guess what? Now I learned to manage my diabetes and I don't want to die anymore. We started teaching classes in laundry mats, in garages, in apartments, in churches, everywhere, thousands of people with diabetes have come through our classes, excellent clinical outcomes. And when we started having those incredible outcomes, then hospitals started calling us. Well, what exactly are you doing that you are having these results? We are not having those results even with our doctors and nurses. What do we talk? So again, that was our beginning. Latino Huff Access is disorganization that uses community people as teachers. And they are called promotores, and actually they give results, clinical results. Within a few years, Bracho had deputized dozens of these promotores, which in Spanish

means promoter. They fanned out across the neighborhood like missionaries, spreading the word about diabetes and inviting people to their free classes. All this effort started a human chain reaction, one that gets to the very heart of successful community organizing. Promotores are very connected with the community and they will tell you what is happening immediately. They have the pulse of that community. So what came next was that these community workers started seeing other things in the community. They started identifying that many of our clients, many of our participants in the diabetes program were victims of domestic violence. And we created our first domestic violence program. And on it went.

They launched a series of after-school programs for kids. They started classes for moms who wanted to learn how to shop smarter and eat better. They taught a class on healthy weight so the kids won't become obese, and the friction that strikes one in three Latino kids in Santa Ana. What I want our community to know is that nobody is going to do this for us. There is a proof to that. There is a proof to the fact that nobody is going to bring a diabetes program to our neighborhood. And the proof is that it took for us to do it, to have one. In this promotores world, you don't recruit the brain. You recruit the heart because you can train the brain, but you cannot train the heart. So here we are talking about the clusters of skills for the promotores.

Bracho knew about promotores from her experience in her native Venezuela as a young doctor in the late 1970s. And I practiced in a little town in rural Venezuela, very, very poor, and I just was a rural physician. When I met these community workers in that town, they had all the kids immunized. And I remember asking them, how do you keep track of this? And they showed me Shurak. And in that Shurak, they had pieces of cardboard with the names of all the kids in town. And they will go, and they show me, they will go house by house. And these promotores will push and push and push to get people to respond and to be with all the immunizations of the day. 100% of the kids were immunized. There is something about being resourceful. There is something that is in the capacity of the community that you cannot compare with

computers and technology. Bracho came to the U.S. to get her masters in public health at the University of Michigan. And in 1988, she took a job there, helping to fight the AIDS and crack epidemics that ravaging inner-city Detroit. And again there, we just did it with community workers, and we hired people with AIDS. And we helped addicts. And in the same model, the peers, the people that can hear them and can reach them, the people that are not afraid to go in the crack house because they have been an addict. And the people going to reach the sex workers in those streets were not afraid of reaching them. But not only were not afraid, they actually love them, you know? When you recruit this sex worker that is infected and now she becomes a community worker and she's reaching other women, there is some level of love and solidarity. They are not just serving them to cafe salary, they are serving them because they have been

there. Don't that. And now understand that they want these women to have a chance in life. Irma Rivera is one of Bracho's newest promotors. She first came to Latino health access to learn how to manage her own diabetes. And she's been improving her health through exercise and nutrition ever since. Now she's on staff, teaching others. When we come here, we come with that goal, to teach them how to eat healthier, more nutritiously, in order to avoid obesity and diabetes for the kids in the future. Because right now, there are a lot of things that are eating that, unfortunately, the moms don't know or are unaware that are bad for their health. So that's our goal, to show them that point of view. Irma Rivera's work with Bracho taught her that living a healthy life is even harder when you live in an unhealthy neighborhood.

She says, for example, just look at the signs all over the apartment complexes in town. In the apartments where a lot of us live, you're not allowed to run, you're not allowed to play, you're not allowed to skate, to ride a bike, to play ball. We're not allowed to do anything. It's been the room we're renting, locked up and grounded remote to watch more television. Outside, kids wanting to play, encounter chained up blocks that read no trespassing. It's stunning, actually, block after block after block of vacant lots sealed off from the community. They're the result of the city's off-promised yet never delivered redevelopment plan. What's left is an urban desert. It's very dense, it's a very dense city. To Bracho, the chained up lots are only the beginning, but they prove a point she often makes.

This is a community designed to be sick. Some people choose not to see the issues, not to confront the problems, not to talk about it. It's really bad. As evidence, Bracho points out there are more liquor stores in this neighborhood than elsewhere in Santa Ana. She says budget cuts here mean that kids don't get the required physical education classes in school. As for parks, believe it or not, there's less open space per resident in Santa Ana than in New York City. Bracho doesn't think any of this happens by accident. I have to confess when I see that vacant lot and many other vacant lots, I see injustice. If we are invisible to the people that allocate money, if we are invisible to the people that have the resources, there's something wrong with that picture.

If you can make the decision as a political representative or as a leader of an institution, you can make the decision of putting a park in a place and liquor stores in another place and you put the liquor stores in my neighborhood and the parks in the other neighborhood, there's something that is wrong with that. That's French Park. That's what they call a park, right there to your left, look at that triangle. Is it like Central Park in New York, more or less? Of course, nobody can be active in this park. Here we are facing an epidemic of obesity and people cannot move. I always say in a park like this, what can they play, theoretical baseball? They can draw people playing basketball. We want a place where kids can run, and play, and jump, and be kids. Would you be in New York or New York?

I've lived in this area for nine years, since I didn't have a place to take my children to play. What I would do is, since the school's parking lot is here and there are no cars there in the afternoon, I would always take the kids there in the afternoon to play. Rivera would have liked for her kids to use the vast school playgrounds around the neighborhood, but they're all locked up after school. So they ended up playing in a parking lot. What she saw there would drive her to action. Two times, I saw cases in which a child was almost run over by a car in this section of the street. And there was one time when a car did hit a child chasing after a ball. I saw that mom's reaction. She was so scared, so desperate, to the point that she was crying from such a fright, from seeing that, such a big crash. As a mother, I felt horrible. I mean, these things can't happen.

Unfortunately, they are happening because we don't have any space. Mama was one of those moms that we met in a local school when we were teaching classes of diabetes. Here, she's listening to all of this advice that becomes MD if you have a community that is designed to be sick. You know, so, okay, so I heard that my kids should exercise so they can increase the opportunities of radiation. Where? Is that contradiction that raises your awareness to a point in which Irma said, I don't want to take this anymore. There has to be a way. And Irma approached us and said, can we organize the moms and get a park? And we said, very much at the Latino-Half-Axis style. With your help, we will. And that's how the campaign for a park began. With Irma Rivera, its unofficial leader.

He organized other moms, participated in rallies, and hounded city officials. They got the press's attention, too, generating coverage in several local papers. When Rivera and others from Braccio's group suggested this lot is a possible site for a park, city officials said no. It's within that proposed redevelopment zone and the city had other plans for it. But Rivera wouldn't give up. This is the city hall building where I came with a group of moms, many moms, who came to support this point of view concerning our park. We came to talk with our city councilmen, specifically because they have the power to say yes or no. I was a bit scared because I was like, well, maybe they will tell us no, maybe they'll ignore us. So in the beginning, that was my fear. And then I said, no, why be afraid?

It's something that I'm advocating for. It's my right. It's the right of my community. Not just me. There are so many moms. For turn around, I see many moms in the same situation I am. So that was my greatest motivation. And I'm still anxious to see what we started become a reality. Irma is a peer to many women in the neighborhood and she has a lot in common with the women in the neighborhood. When these women look at me, they see that a lot of the things that I have accomplished in my life is because I am a professional. They don't relate to me as a peer. When they see Irma, and they see Irma advocating and Irma caring and Irma going and offering testimonial, they say, well, you know what, if Irma can do this, I can do this. If Irma can open her mouth on behalf of her kids, I can open my mouth on behalf of my kids.

And the only thing that it takes is just to open your mouth. After several years, the pressure started paying off. In 2004, City officials agreed that this lot might work as a possible location, but quickly added that they couldn't afford one dime towards building it. So Braccio's group would have to raise all the money themselves and build a permanent community center on the site. This is the place our community center. It was a huge challenge. They'd need hundreds of thousands of dollars just to get started. The local hospital, St. Joseph's, weighed in on their side, even loaned one of their top engineers to help oversee the project. A local grocery chain donated an adjacent lot, making the proposed park a little bigger. Then one day, after reading one of those articles about the fight for the park, a wealthy local resident came through with a hundred thousand dollar donation.

It's taken seven years, but they're ready to break ground this November. They estimate they'll need nearly three million dollars more to run the park year after year. But for now, it was time to celebrate. You know that now people talk about hope a lot. We have been talking about hope forever. This is something very big for me, and I'm very moved to see that we have the support from our community. And I feel very proud of that. We've been looking for all the possible ways to get what we now have, saying God, which is this ground. Well, we're going to start. The seed has been planted. We will accomplish what we want for our children. This project has seven years, where people have been organizing and asking for it.

And finally, after a lot of struggle, the community, the access and many other groups, we can have this ground that you see here. This ground is more than land. This ground is the dream of seven years so that our community has a place where our children can move. For this project, to get to where we are, we have had to ask a lot. But it doesn't matter. It's not worth asking. And no one has to ask for it and fight. What we have to do is not participate so that our families have a better life, because if we don't do it, no one will do it. From day one, when we started this project, we said to each other, you know, the most important, but also the most dangerous part in doing community work is when people actually

believe they can transform their community. It's pretty dangerous, because when people believe that, they want to do it again and again and again. We have to admire America brought you up for fighting on, as well as those other community organizers around the country. But if they won't give up, the rest of us have no excuse for sitting it out. That's it for the journal. Go to our website at pbs.org and click on Bill Moria's journal. You can learn more about community organizers who make a difference, and you'll also be able to read essays and reporting by our guest, Mark Downer. That's all at pbs.org. I'm Bill Moria's, and I'll see you next time. For about Latino health access, log on at pbs.org.

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