RSN: Ronan Farrow | The Search for Dirt on the Twitter Whistle-Blower
14 September 22
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Many of Peiter (Mudge) Zatko’s former colleagues have received offers of payment for information about him.
Hours earlier, CNN and the Washington Post had reported that Twitter’s former head of security, Peiter (Mudge) Zatko, had filed a whistle-blower disclosure to federal agencies, accusing the social-media platform of reckless security practices. Zatko’s sweeping claims, if proven, could aid Elon Musk in his attempt to terminate his forty-four-billion-dollar agreement to acquire Twitter, a legal fight with implications of billions of dollars for investors. The dozens of e-mails and LinkedIn messages received by people in Zatko’s professional orbit appeared to be mostly from research-and-advisory companies, part of a burgeoning industry whose clients include investment firms and individuals jockeying for financial advantage through information. At least six research outfits—Gerson Lehrman Group (G.L.G.), AlphaSights, Mosaic Research Management, Ridgetop Research, Coleman Research Group, and Guidepoint—approached former colleagues of Zatko’s at Stripe, Google, and the Pentagon research agency DARPA. All offered to pay for information, sometimes noting that the compensation would be high or apparently unrestricted. At least two investment firms, Farallon Capital Management L.L.C. and Pentwater Capital Management L.P., also sought information from individuals close to Zatko.
An associate at AlphaSights reached out to Wasserman via e-mail. She did not identify her firm’s client, but she wrote that they wanted to understand Zatko’s “personality, leadership style, validity and history.” She added, “We compensate well because we know this is a difficult and confusing ask at first.” Another Stripe veteran, Jaclyn Schoof, wrote to the Slack group that she had received the same offer from AlphaSights. “They said they didn’t care how much it would cost them… seems really weird,” she said. A fourth member of the group, Niels Provos, who had worked with Zatko at Google and was later persuaded by him to fill his role at Stripe, received offers of payment from AlphaSights, as well as from two other firms, Farallon and Mosaic. “They were happy to pay $1000/hr when I was fishing for more information,” he wrote, of Farallon’s consultant. (A spokesperson for Farallon said that payment was discussed only after Provos broached the subject.)
The consultant told Provos that its analysts were assessing Zatko’s “personality professionally and socially,” his “strengths and weaknesses,” “motives for his whistle-blower complaint and any similar past complaints,” his “need for attention,” and whether he was a “zealot or ideologue,” “conspiratorial,” or “vengeful.” She also said they were interested in Zatko’s “view of Elon Musk and Musk’s bid for Twitter.” G.L.G. included links to detailed sets of questions discussing Zatko and Twitter’s C.E.O., Parag Agrawal. “In regards to Peiter Zatko, can you discuss thoughts on recent news with Peiter, what he did, why he was fired from TWTR?” read one of G.L.G.’s questions.
The firms cast a wide net. Some of the recipients, such as Wasserman, knew Zatko well, but others, including Foster, had never met him. More than a dozen of the people who received the messages told me that they found them unusual, compared with other research inquiries, because of their aggressiveness, persistence, or focus on an individual, as opposed to a product or a technology. One of the messages from G.L.G. suggested that the information was intended for an investment firm, Davidson Kempner Capital Management L.P. (A source close to G.L.G. told me that it represents multiple clients with an interest in Zatko but has no connection to Twitter and added that compensation for experts is standard.) Farallon, an investment firm rather than an expert network, identified itself in its inquiries. The other companies declined to identify their clients, though at least one told recipients that they were working on behalf of an unnamed hedge fund.
As the inquiries proliferated, the group of ex-Stripe employees began to believe, Wasserman told me, “that multiple different sources, multiple different people, multiple different companies, were all basically trying to dig up dirt on Mudge, all seemingly at the same time.” The firms, Provos surmised, were “trying to get information that could further discredit Mudge,” an effort that “seemed incredibly shady.” Jonathan Kaltwasser, Stripe’s former chief information security officer and a member of the Slack group, quickly alerted Zatko.
“My family and I are disturbed by what appears to be a campaign to approach our friends and former colleagues under apparently false pretenses with offers of money in exchange for information about us,” Zatko told me. “These tactics should be beneath whoever is behind them.” On Tuesday, Zatko is expected to testify before Congress and may reveal new details about what he has said are glaring data-security lapses by Twitter. He is also expected to play a key role in a trial set to begin next month in a Delaware courtroom, during which Musk will seek to be released from his agreement to acquire Twitter. Musk’s attorneys have subpoenaed Zatko, and a judge ruled last week that Musk could amend his countersuit to include Zatko’s allegations. A Twitter spokesperson, Rebecca Hahn, told me, “We look forward to presenting our case in Court beginning on October 17th and intend to close the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk.”
Sources close to three of the firms—Farallon, Mosaic, and G.L.G.—suggested that they were simply trying to obtain information about Zatko to guide stock trades involving Twitter and maximize profits. A person familiar with G.L.G.’s business said the outreach was “an attempt to assess the credibility of the allegations” and meant “to better inform investment decisions.” A spokesperson for AlphaSights said that, “as a matter of policy and contractual obligations, we do not disclose the identity of our clients.” Hahn, the Twitter spokesperson, told me, “We have no role in nor did we commission expert networks research regarding Mr. Zatko.” Two members of Musk’s team, who asked not to be named, owing to the sensitivity of the ongoing litigation, said that they also had no connection to the inquiries. “There’s a lot of hedge funds currently betting that the deal flows. And so they’re doing everything they possibly can to undermine that not happening,” one of them told me. “It’s obviously wrong. You can’t discredit a witness, as opposed to listening to what he has to say and taking seriously these security threats. . . . That should be the priority, not making a buck.”
Almost all of the inquiries that The New Yorker was able to document came from “expert networks,” enterprises that recruit specialists from various fields, like Zatko’s former colleagues, to share their knowledge with Wall Street investment firms and other companies. The firms deployed to uncover information about Zatko span the globe. According to its Web site, AlphaSights employs more than a thousand people, in nine cities around the world. Ridgetop, Mosaic, and Guidepoint are all New York-based firms of varying sizes. Coleman Research, a subsidiary of a Japanese company, maintains a network of four hundred and sixty thousand experts, while G.L.G.’s Web site claims a network of a million experts. The investment firm Farallon was founded in 1986 by the businessman and liberal activist Tom Steyer, who sought the Democratic nomination for President in 2020, and now maintains offices worldwide. Pentwater, another investment firm, which contacted one of Zatko’s attorneys seeking information, is one of Twitter’s ten largest shareholders.
The value of the sprawling expert-network industry surpassed $1.9 billion in 2021. The legality of the investigations conducted by such firms depends on the specific tactics used. They must strike a delicate balance, providing useful information to clients without running afoul of laws related to fraud, harassment, privacy, and insider trading. (In 2012, a G.L.G. expert was implicated in an elaborate insider-trading scheme uncovered by the S.E.C. He settled out of court. The firm was not accused of wrongdoing.) In 2016, a judge ruled that Uber’s hiring of a research firm called Ergo to interview, under false pretenses, people connected to the plaintiff in a lawsuit constituted “a reasonable basis to suspect the perpetration of fraud.” (The case later resulted in a settlement.) Michael Volkov, of the Volkov Law Group and an expert in ethics and compliance issues, told me that the inquiries received by Zatko’s associates were “definitely not something that is normal.” He added, “Seeking such information from former employees, without full disclosure of the interested party and without complete understanding of what confidentiality restrictions may be applicable to that party is beyond risky. . . . potentially illegal and could result easily in civil litigation.”
The apparent urgency and aggressiveness of the inquiries around Zatko underscore the enormous financial stakes bound up in Twitter’s dispute with Musk. If the judge rules that Musk must complete the acquisition, it will greatly enhance Twitter’s stock value; if he is permitted to walk away, the stock may crater. A spokesperson for Farallon told me that the moment reports of the whistle-blower claim broke, Zatko’s reputation became tied to billions of dollars of market value. “The value of Twitter stock depends on the outcome of the litigation and what happens with the buyout. The announcement that there even was a whistle-blower case impacted the stock price right off the bat,” the spokesperson said. “Investors have been trying to get their bearings, assessing the whistle-blower’s credibility, and to decide whether to buy or sell.”
One of Zatko’s attorneys, John Tye, of Whistleblower Aid, said that the inquiries highlight the many barriers whistle-blowers face in coming forward. “There’s a lot of people with a lot of interest in attacking his credibility,” he told me. “Campaigns to source disparaging information under apparently false pretenses is something we’ve seen when the facts of the disclosure are beyond dispute.”
Twitter hired Zatko, a prominent hacker and a respected network-security expert, in 2020, several months after the platform sustained a grievous breach, during which teen-agers hacked the accounts of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Kanye West, and used them to solicit Bitcoin payments. This January, Zatko was fired by Agrawal, Twitter’s C.E.O. Hahn, the Twitter spokesperson, said that Zatko was fired because of “poor performance and ineffective leadership.” Zatko disputes that. His legal team wrote in a statement that Zatko was removed after he “repeatedly raised concerns about Twitter’s grossly inadequate information security systems.”
Twitter later agreed to pay Zatko a seven-million-dollar settlement for lost compensation, the Wall Street Journal reported last week. A source with knowledge of the settlement, who asked not to be named, told me that the company hoped that nondisclosure provisions in the agreement would prevent Zatko from airing criticism of the company but left open the possibility that he could do so as a whistle-blower to federal agencies. In July, Zatko filed his disclosure to the S.E.C., the Federal Trade Commission, and the Department of Justice—an eighty-four-page document arguing that Twitter was replete with “egregious” security vulnerabilities and susceptible to foreign influence, which could pose a threat to national security. He also said that the company was led by executives willing to cover up the platform’s security issues, including by discouraging Zatko from informing its board of directors about them. (Hahn, the Twitter spokesperson, told me that Zatko’s portrayal of the company was “riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies, and lacks important context.”)
None of the members of the Stripe chat who spoke with me said that they accepted payment or agreed to speak to the firms about Zatko, and all said they wished to defend his credibility. For Zatko, the inquiries have been another source of anxiety in a dizzying period that has thrust him into an intense spotlight. He has been simultaneously preparing for his upcoming Congressional testimony—to which he has devoted long hours of preparation in recent days—and for a deposition in the Musk trial. “When I decided to become a lawful whistle-blower, I knew my claims would be aggressively scrutinized, and I welcome that,” he told me. “What I didn’t expect and find so disappointing are the anonymously sourced ad-hominem attacks—and especially the harassment of our friends, to find new ways to disparage and undermine us.”
Pages from a Department of Justice court filing last month in response to a request from Donald Trump's legal team for a special master to review seized documents. (photo: Jon Elswick/AP)
Justice department court filing argues that judge’s special master ruling impedes its review of highly classified documents
The claim came in a strongly worded court filing urging a district judge, Aileen Cannon, to reconsider her ruling last week granting Trump’s request for an independent “special master” in the case.
The Department of Justice argued that the order stops it continuing its review of thousands of documents, some reportedly containing details of a foreign power’s nuclear secrets, seized during an FBI search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach last month.
Federal agents discovered the papers in a basement storage area and a desk drawer, despite assurances from Trump’s lawyers that all documents he took with him after leaving the White House in January 2021 had been returned to the National Archives.
“Markings [on the documents] signify that their unauthorized disclosure ‘reasonably could be expected to result in damage to the national security,’ including ‘exceptionally grave damage’,” Tuesday’s justice department filing said, adding that a delay would cause “irreparable harm”.
“Plaintiff has characterised the government’s criminal investigation as a ‘document storage dispute’ or an ‘overdue library book scenario.’ In doing so, plaintiff has not addressed the potential harms that could result from mishandling classified information or the strict requirements imposed by law for handling such materials.”
Cannon, a Trump appointee to the federal bench, has been widely criticized for the “special master” ruling, which some have argued placed Trump “above the law”. She has given no indication if or when she will reconsider the order.
Trump’s lawyers have urged Cannon to leave the order in place, claiming without evidence that the former president declassified the documents before he left office.
The justice department rejects that argument, insisting that even if Trump had taken such an action, which it notes has not been asserted in any of Trump’s legal filings or sworn declarations, the papers still belonged to the government and are not his personal property.
Also on Tuesday, another judge unsealed additional portions of an FBI affidavit laying out the basis for the search of Mar-a-Lago, showing that agents earlier obtained a hard drive after issuing a subpoena for surveillance footage recorded inside Mar-a-Lago.
A redacted version was released last month, but the justice department requested permission to show more of it after Trump’s lawyers revealed the existence of a June grand jury subpoena that sought video footage from cameras near the storage room.
According to the newly visible portions of the agent’s affidavit, the FBI subpoenaed the footage on 24 June, weeks after observing about 50 boxes of records in the storage room at Mar-a-Lago.
The Trump Organization provided a hard drive on 6 July in response to the subpoena, the affidavit says.
“Because those aspects of the grand jury’s investigation have now been publicly revealed, there is no longer any reason to keep them sealed (i.e. redacted) in the filings in this matter,” the justice department filing said.
Protesters march outside the Indiana state Capitol building on July 25, 2022, in Indianapolis, as activists gathered during a special session. (photo: Jon Cherry/Getty)
Indiana lawmakers passed legislation banning most abortions in a special session in early August. It includes narrow exceptions for rape, incest, and certain serious medical complications and emergencies.
Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb, a Republican, issued a statement soon after lawmakers approved the bill saying he was signing it into law as part of a promise he'd made "to support legislation that made progress in protecting life." Holcomb said the law includes "carefully negotiated exceptions to address some of the unthinkable circumstances a woman or unborn child might face."
Reproductive rights groups including the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and others are challenging Indiana's law in state court. A hearing in that case is set for Sept. 19, four days after the law's effective date.
For now, abortion providers in the state will not be able to offer the procedure in most situations. In a statement, Whole Woman's Health of South Bend said it would be forced to stop providing abortions but would continue operating its clinic there to provide "support to all who seek abortion services, and to continue its activism and organizing to roll back cruel, unjust anti-abortion laws."
The group also noted that affiliates in other several other states, including neighboring Illinois, will continue to offer medication abortion where the pills are legal and to help patients travel for abortions.
The ban will affect patients well beyond Indiana, said Tamarra Wieder, the state director for Planned Parenthood in neighboring Kentucky, where there is currently no abortion access as a result of two anti-abortion laws that took effect after the Supreme Court issued Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization in June. That ruling did away with decades of precedent guaranteeing abortion rights and opened the door for states to prohibit the procedure.
Wieder said Indiana has been the next-closest option for most of her patients seeking abortions. Many will now have to travel to Illinois.
"That's really going to double or even triple the driving time for Kentucky residents seeking abortion care," Wieder said.
Indiana became a center of controversy surrounding abortion rights in the days after the Dobbs decision after Dr. Caitlin Bernard, an Indiana OBGYN, spoke out about providing an abortion to a 10-year-old girl from Ohio who'd become pregnant as a result of rape. The girl was denied an abortion after her home state's so-called "trigger ban," which does not include a rape exception, took effect because of the ruling.
In response, Indiana's Republican attorney general, Todd Rokita, questioned Bernard's credibility and threatened to investigate her, publicly suggesting without evidence that she'd failed to report the procedure. The state later released documents confirming that Bernard had filed the report. Bernard said she faced threats and other forms of harassment in the aftermath of the attention surrounding the case.
Indiana's law is taking effect as West Virginia moves closer to enacting its own new abortion ban. After failing to agree on a bill during multiple special sessions in recent weeks, West Virginia lawmakers approved a proposal in a brief special session on Tuesday. It prohibits most abortions, with a few exceptions for cases of rape, incest, and certain medical complications and would become law as soon as Gov. Jim Justice signs it.
Voting rights activists during a protest in Austin against the Texas voting legislation. (photo: Mikala Compton/Reuters)
Across the country, from California to Georgia, people like Olivia Coley-Pearson and Faye Combs are working through stigma and increased restrictions as they help people who struggle to read exercise their right to vote.
For all the recent focus on voting rights, little attention has been paid to one of the most sustained and brazen suppression campaigns in America: the effort to block help at the voting booth for people who struggle to read — a group that now amounts to about 48 million Americans, or more than a fifth of the adult population.
Across the country, from California to Georgia, people like Olivia Coley-Pearson and Faye Combs are working to help citizens with low literacy skills exercise their constitutional right to vote, but doing so requires fighting through stigma and increased restrictions on accessibility.
While new voting restrictions in states like Florida, Texas and Georgia do not all target voters who struggle to read, they make it especially challenging for these voters to get help casting ballots. ProPublica analyzed the voter turnout in 3,000 counties and found that places with lower estimated literacy rates tended to also have lower turnout.
See for yourself: For the launch of its Right to Read series, ProPublica partnered with Gray TV’s Investigate TV team, which produced the segment above.
Mary Turner, president of the Minnesota Nurses Association, left, joins nurses striking Monday, Sept. 12, 2022, outside North Memorial Health Hospital in Robbinsdale, Minnesota, for a three-day strike. (photo: David Joles/AP)
Nurses at seven hospitals in the Minneapolis and Duluth metro regions halted work Monday in what the union says is the largest strike ever by private-sector nurses. The hospitals recruited temporary nurses to maintain most services during the three-day strike.
One of Wisconsin's largest hospitals narrowly averted a strike when negotiating teams representing nurses and UW Health hospital announced Sunday a proposed settlement. More than 4,000 nurses in Michigan this month authorized a strike over what they described as unfair labor practices.
The strikes punctuate workforce shortages that worsened during the coronavirus pandemic as nurses navigated safety risks to care for Americans in crowded hospital wings. Now, nurses are fed up after years of being overworked and underpaid — conditions that they say jeopardize patient care.
The American Nurses Association, which urged the Biden administration last year to declare a national nurse staffing crisis to fix the "unsustainable nurse staffing shortage facing our country," reiterated a call for federal action.
Although the nation added 48,000 health care workers over the last year in hospitals, doctors offices and nursing homes, the number of Americans with health care jobs still lags pre-pandemic levels, Bureau of Labor Statistics show.
"The challenges that we highlighted around the fatigue and the mental well being of nurses continue to this day," said Zina Gontscharow, a senior policy adviser at the American Nurses Association. "Nurses are really feeling a lot of stress with not having adequate (staffing) on the floor, overtime and long shifts."
Kelley Anaas, an intensive care unit nurse at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis, said the pandemic strained working conditions. She said nurses in her wing typically must cover two patients at a time, a challenge when critically-ill patients need constant monitoring.
"We're doing twice as much work essentially for the same compensation and with fewer resources," said Anaas, who has worked at the hospital 14 years.
'Vicious cycle of low morale'
On Monday, nurses began walking the picket line at 7 a.m. outside Children’s Hospital in Minneapolis, one of 15 hospitals affected. Clad in the red T-shirts of the Minnesota Nurses Association and carrying signs with such slogans as, “Something has got to give,” several said their chief concern was patient safety.
Tracey Dittrich, 50, a registered nurse at the hospital for nearly 24 years, said nurses are tired of “hospital administrators and managers that are telling us to do more.” The hospitals need more nurses and more support staff, and higher pay will help, she said.
Union spokesman Sam Fettig said the nurses chose a three-day strike, rather than an open-ended walkout, out of concern for patients.
The hospitals have offered a 10-12% wage increase over three years, but nurses are seeking more than 30%. Hospital leaders called their wage demands unaffordable, noting that Allina and Fairview hospitals have posted operating losses and that the cost of such sharp wage increases would be passed along to patients.
“The union rejected all requests for mediation and held fast to wage demands that were unrealistic, unreasonable and unaffordable,” said several of the Twin Cities hospitals under strike in a joint statement.
The statement said people with emergency issues should continue to call 911 or go to emergency rooms. People may see some delay in being treated, it said, despite staffing hospitals with “experienced nurse managers, trained replacement nurses and some existing traveler nurses.”
The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated longstanding nursing workforce challenges, said Patricia Pittman, a George Washington University professor and director of the Fitzhugh Mullan Institute for Health Workforce Equity.
While unions have authorized a handful of strikes, she said most of the nation's nine major nursing unions are willing to negotiate with hospital administrators rather than halt work. And nurses in large swaths of the country are not unionized, Pittman said.
But she said nurses likely sympathize with the hard-bargaining tactics employed by aggressive unions seeking better pay and staffing.
"It's is symptomatic of something that is felt among the entire nurse workforce, not just those that are unionized," Pittman said.
Hospitals used pandemic relief money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to hire travel nurses from staffing agencies who often were paid more than nurses employed by hospitals. Some nurses quit their hospital jobs for more lucrative travel nursing positions.
Because hospitals have struggled to adequately staff facilities during the pandemic, many hospital-employed nurses have become frustrated over pay and bad morale.
"You're creating basically a vicious cycle of low morale of the people who stayed behind," Pittman said. "They're fundamentally angry about being put in a position where they could lose their license and patients could die because there are not enough nurses."
Anaas cited surveys predicting many nurses plan to leave bedside care. Elsevier Health, which provides health research and analytics, reported 47% of U.S. nurses and physicians planned to leave their current position within two to three years.
She said her fellow Minnesota nurses are striking to call attention to hospital administrators about demands for better staffing and pay, factors that will improve patient care, she said.
"What's driving this is just like fear for the future of our profession," Anaas said. "When we're out here fighting for better contract language, improved working conditions, improved compensation, it's about making nursing a desirable profession — a profession that people can stay in for an entire career. Right now, it isn't."
Those who supported the rejection of Chile's new constitution to replace the Pinochet-era one protest against President Gabriel Boric a day after the constitutional referendum, Santiago, Chile, September 5, 2022. (photo: Javier Torres/Getty)
For Chileans who resisted Augusto Pinochet’s regime, the election of left-wing president Gabriel Boric offered hope. Yet the rejection of a proposed new constitution threatens to hobble his government and reverse the democratic breakthrough of recent years.
Violetta, an old friend of my mother’s, a warm, chaotic, and sharp woman, was passing through Paris, visiting Europe to see her daughter who had fallen in love with a political-prisoner-turned-exile now living in Norway. We were joined by Pablo and Victor, two exiles who had settled in France.
All three had been active in or around the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR), the revolutionary organization formed in 1965 to prepare for the armed struggle in the case of a coup. After the overthrow of the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, and the takeover of the state by General Augusto Pinochet in 1973, its members were systematically hunted down and murdered by the Chilean military.
Pablo, an excitable and passionate man of small size and soft features, had been rounded up and imprisoned in Valdivia, where he was working as a university lecturer. He had managed to get out of Chile on account of a French passport his mother had been able to procure him because of her dual nationality.
He was one of those leftists who were being released from prison to present international organizations with evidence of proper judicial process. However, in order to leave the country, Pablo needed to declare himself a French national at the local police station. Many never returned from such mandatory post-release appointments. The “proper judicial process” that these cases were supposed to evidence usually belied the systematic para-judicial murders that concluded them. In Pablo’s case, the normal conclusion of this process was prevented by the French consul personally accompanying him to the police station.
He recounted with relish his final act of defiance before leaving Chile. On the plane, when offered a newspaper by the flight staff, he replied by asking for the French Communist daily: “Have you got L’Humanité?” Feathers ruffled. Request refused. We laughed about the pettiness.
Victor had served in the MIR bodyguard unit assigned to protect Allende, and at the time of the coup, was the head of the organization’s communications. A reserved and softly spoken man with a cloudy left eye, a large smile, and a cool demeanor, he had been less lucky than the likes of Pablo.
In the aftermath of the coup, like so many others, he had been detained and tortured in the infamous Santiago stadium. He then passed through a number of prisons and was finally interned in a concentration camp before gaining exile in 1977. No evidence of his membership of the MIR was ever found. He was from a mining village in the Atacama Desert that no longer existed; decades of political violence and neoliberalism had literally struck his home from the map.
A People United?
Our conversation soon turned to Chile’s current political situation. The far-right José Antonio Kast — son of a Nazi officer, brother of one of Pinochet’s ministers, a dictatorship nostalgist and consummate son of the Chilean bourgeoisie — was running in the second round of the presidential election against Gabriel Boric. A young left-wing politician and veteran of the student movements, Boric was surfing the wave of popular pressure and discontent with the economic conditions instituted during the dictatorship, which had remained largely accepted by the established parties of the following era, known as the Concertación period. The uprising crystallized into the process of writing a new constitution. The polls had Boric ahead, but Violetta remained worried.
As in many cases across the globe, the momentum gained by the popular movements since 2019 had been interrupted by the arrival of the pandemic. Frustration and discontent were vacillating between the conditions that had produced the uprising and the immediate insecurities under COVID-19. The movements’ ability to set the agenda had been stalled and the frames of public discourse risked shifting to terrains more favorable to the Right. Would the Constituent process become yet another frustration to be discarded? Had Pinochet definitively destroyed popular consciousness in Chile? Would this all just be a blip?
Violetta remained sorrowfully skeptical of a Boric victory.
Pablo was incensed that she could underestimate the Chilean people so. Even if Kast were elected, he claimed, the second he tried to dismantle the constituting process (a core campaign promise of his), the Chilean people would rise up to stop him and he would reach an impasse. Simple as that: El pueblo unido jamas será vencido. Victor agreed, adding a point of order: to overestimate ruling-class power was to play directly into its hands.
I was moved by their faith, but it brought me to a strange feeling of sadness. All of us there knew el pueblo unido had been defeated, in 1973, by sheer brutal violence and the systematic liquidation of the organized elements of the Chilean people. This fact lingered in the air around us, heavy and painful, saturating the silence.
Violetta confessed that if Kast were to win, she would not be able to stay in Chile — Ya no puedo más con la violencia. This — from a woman who lived out the dictatorship in clandestine resistance as comrades disappeared all around her — made Pablo and Victor think twice.
The truth is, if Kast had won, it would have been a massacre. He would have shut down the constituting process and this would, of course, have triggered mass protests. The country would have been plunged into political crisis once more, producing a situation of fatigue and frustration with no exit route. These conditions would have led to the unleashing of a dirty war against the opposition movements and leftists without public profiles would have been hunted down and put in holes in the desert next to their forebears.
Before such a terrifying possibility could sink in, Violetta reminded us that, so far, we’d only been talking about what happens if Kast wins: “The real question is what happens if Boric wins!”
Memories of the last coup turned to discussion about the prospect of another.
Boric’s Frente amplio is undeniably weaker, less organized, and less rooted in Chilean society at large than was Allende’s Frente popular, and the historically decisive international situation is not the same.
Although, as Victor said, “a coup is always possible; it will always be an option for them” — reflecting how all Chilean leftists feel, deep in their bones — this was, for now, an unlikely scenario. In a sense, Pablo was right: without help from cold warriors in the US State Department, as had come in 1973, even the radicalized Chilean bourgeoisie that chose Kast as its presidential candidate was not powerful enough to overthrow a government by force.
The weight of international capital, combined with political destabilization at home, was a more likely weapon of choice.
Right-Wing Counterpower
Domestically, the Right remains very powerful. The vast majority of Chile’s media is owned by only two media groups, both owned by two of the richest men in the country, and both with historic links to the Pinochet regime and the Chilean right.
The pressure on the newly elected President Boric is enormous.
Long-term problems do not go away just because a new left-wing government has come to power. The rise in crime and insecurity is an authentic concern for many people in Chile, not just the rich. The relations between the Mapuche indigenous struggle and the Chilean state will need a generation to be remedied; in the meantime, tensions continue, and violence erupts.
Furthermore, the threat posed by the current sequence of social uprisings has radicalized the Chilean right in a way not seen since the time of Pinochet. They have been backed into a corner. For Violetta, this process of radicalization is just the beginning. “The fascist paramilitary organizations are coming,” she told me, with the absolute certainty of someone who has seen this all before.
Meanwhile, because of the weaknesses of the Left in parliament, Boric’s government is dominated by the parties of the Concertación, pulling its center of gravity away from the social movements and under the influence of forces hostile to his reform project.
On the one hand, the threat of the far right makes the maintenance of a majoritarian bloc in parliament — articulating the center and the left together — all the more important.
No doubt Boric also knows his history. Already in the 1940s, it was the unsteadiness of such a bloc that caused the fall of the popular front government. In the 1970s, it was the retraction of support for Allende’s government by Eduardo Frei’s Christian Democrats that provided the opportunity for the Right to launch a coup. These are outcomes that, understandably, the new president wishes to avoid at all costs.
On the other hand, the influence of the Concertación parties risks compromising the true shift underway in Chilean politics: the form of the new constitution.
The finalized text, published in July this year, reflects the parties’ influence on the process of its preparation. Though very radical — the document constitutionalizes public services, among other things — commitments to the nationalization of resources were diluted to minimize the coercive legal power of the text — raising the question of how such services would have been funded.
The recent rejection (rechazo) of the new constitutional text, on September 4, has sent shockwaves through Chile and will determine the rest of the Boric presidency. It will be interpreted in one of two ways: as the consequence of the dilution of the text’s radicalism or as proof of the need for more moderation. The battle over the interpretation of the result will determine the form that the new constitution will eventually take.
The momentum and popular legitimacy of the Left has suffered a hard blow — and the triumphal popular upsurge which began in 2019 has now been definitively concluded.
In the new conjuncture, the constituent process will be thrust back into the parliamentary arena, one where the Left is weak. The profile of the new convention and the parameters of the new text are more likely to reflect the balance of powers between the established parties. Those forces that have sought to undermine the constituent process and destabilize Boric’s reform agenda are now in a strong position and will seek to take control over the process.
Boric will have to find a way to preside over this.
The alternative possibility — a repeat of the twin crises of social uprising and parliamentary impasse — would not bode well for a context in which the Left no longer holds the initiative. The popular pressure that the movements have so far exerted will now need to be articulated more institutionally if they are to prove effective. Without doubt, the waters have now been muddied.
After the Defeat
Violetta, Victor, and Pablo had not known each other at the time of the coup; they met once all the exiles started to openly return home, after the end of the dictatorship.
They were brought together by the work that many Chilean dissidents and exiles have dedicated themselves to since 1973: campaigning for the release of political prisoners. All three spent the entirety of the dictatorship working with clandestine groups in Chile to put international pressure on the Pinochet regime.
Violetta, the only non-exile of the trio, operated as a mirror between MIR cells in Santiago until she was given leave, under the cover of a European NGO, to go and campaign for her partner’s release in Argentina. After successfully getting him freed, and still under the cover of an international organization, she reintegrated the clandestine resistance in Chile and evaded detection or capture throughout the period.
Victor’s release from the camps was the result of people like him doing the work that he is doing now. Today, that work continues with a new generation of political prisoners from the 2019 Chilean uprising, who, he reminds me, “Boric has done nothing to facilitate the release of” — an utterly intolerable fact for him and others like him.
Victor and Pablo both live on housing estates on the outskirts of Paris. Victor’s was built by France’s Popular Front government in the 1930s: a nice, spacious, almost art deco building. They both have French children and grandchildren and have made their lives here as a result.
Pablo is an activist in La France Insoumise and is heavily invested in the new Nouvelle Union Populaire écologique et sociale (NUPES) coalition. Victor, less electorally inclined, has done a lot of work on police violence against the gilets jaunes and, in particular, the detention and imprisonment of protestors by the French state.
When asked where their hope lies for the future of Chile, these three will rarely say Boric. This is not to say they don’t recognize the advance his government represents. Their hope, however, like all good true revolutionaries, lies with the people.
Although the institutional infrastructure of popular power in Chile has been whittled down to virtually nil since 1973, such institutions have begun to reemerge: from trade unions and political parties to the more idiosyncratically Chilean cabildos (popular councils). Violetta is active in her local cabildo in Santiago, where she still lives today.
For them, hope lies in the capacity of Chileans to rebuild such institutions of popular power. For without them, social transformation is simply not possible — no matter who’s in government.
Discreet Giants
It is often said that we stand on the shoulders of giants. But most of these giants are historically discreet creatures, modest and inconspicuous. We do not know their names, there are no busts of them, and they have rarely written tomes of reference.
People like Violetta, Victor, Pablo, and many, many more have held the torch in the darkest night and known the heat of the brightest day. They are people who have lived through social revolution, clandestine resistance, death squads, and exile. All have lost dear comrades to the struggle. Tortured. Murdered. Disappeared. They have witnessed their movement crushed under the boots of soldiers and scattered to the winds.
And yet they persevered.
Their sense of hope in the future is both dogmatic and profoundly lucid, seemingly transcending even the most cataclysmic defeats of the socialist movement — let alone its (few) electoral victories. They are but three of history’s many discreet giants. Their hope, which survived along with their bodies, belongs to an immovable truth: that the struggle for an idea will always continue. And so it does.
Deforestation from coal mining in a tropical forest on Indonesia's Borneo Island. (photo: Romeo Gacad/Getty)
That’s why a team of researchers published the first-ever study Monday to consider how industrial mining contributes to tropical deforestation.
“The energy transition is going to require very large amounts of minerals — copper, lithium, cobalt — for decarbonized technologies,” study co-author and Clark University geographer Anthony Bebbington said, as Reuters reported. “We need more planning tools on the parts of governments and companies to mitigate the impacts of mining on forest loss.”
The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, looked at deforestation caused by industrial mining in 26 countries with wet or dry tropical forests between 2000 and 2019. To do so, the scientists looked at the coordinates of industrial mines and compared them to the Global Forest Change dataset of deforestation, Eurasia Review explained.
The study authors wrote that mining activities directly led to the loss of 3,264 square kilometers (approximately 1,260 square miles) of forest. What’s more, 80 percent of that loss occurred in just four countries: Indonesia, Brazil, Ghana and Suriname.
Of these four countries, Indonesia took the lead, with 58.2 percent of direct deforestation taking place there, according to Eurasia Review. The driving force behind that deforestation was coal mining in the province of East Kalimantan, which increased due to rising demand from China and India.
“Although Indonesia’s total deforestation has declined annually since 2015, these findings emphasize the continued need for strong land use planning to ensure mining does not destroy forests or violate community rights,” professor of forest policy at Bogor Agricultural University Hariadi Kartodihardjo, Ph.D., who was not involved with the study, told Eurasia Review.
Brazil, meanwhile, was responsible for 10 percent of direct deforestation, followed by Ghana with 6.5 percent and Suriname with 6.2 percent, according to the study. In Brazil, the destruction was driven by iron and gold mining, while, in Ghana and Suriname, it was gold and bauxite mining, according to Reuters.
In addition to considering direct deforestation caused by mining, the study also looked at indirect deforestation. Direct deforestation is any deforestation that takes place within the borders of the mining site itself, the study explained, while indirect deforestation is the deforestation caused through attempts to fuel the mining process and build infrastructure as well as the settling of new areas as the mine is created. What the study authors found was that indirect deforestation due to mining was present in two thirds of the countries they studied. In these countries, there were higher rates of deforestation within 50 kilometers (approximately 31 miles) of mining sites.
Overall, the study authors called for greater environmental regulation of mining as potential demand increases. Mining now extracts double the amount of raw material it did in 2000, according to Reuters, and 65 percent of the direct forest loss observed by the study authors took place in the last 10 years.
“There is a broad range of environmental damage caused by mining operations on top of deforestation, including destruction of ecosystems, loss of biodiversity, disruption of water sources, the production of hazardous waste and pollution,” study lead author and associate professor at the Institute for Ecological Economics, Vienna University of Economics and Business. Stefan Giljum said, as Eurasia Review reported. “Government permitting should take all of this into account; an industrial mine can easily disrupt both landscapes and ecosystems. Industrial mining remains a hidden weakness in their strategies to minimize environmental impacts.”
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