Cochabamba

The other one, that her grandmother used to be a midwife.

And the third, that she just retired from the Quechua radio in Cochabamba.

So those three things were very important for me because she had this connection with the culture She had the knowledge, I mean, as a granddaughter, but she was very close to the burnings and the role of being a midwife.

But also as a locutor, as a broadcaster, she had this power with the voice.

We now have Republicans saying they're against AI and coming up against Democrats who are in favor of AI because local communities are coming together.

MAGA supporters, uh, you know, progressive people saying, "We may not agree on everything, but that water is precious." I learned that from, um, and I'm lo- I'm just conscious of my time, but I learned that from a, a, a, a man who was a shoemaker in Bolivia, uh, Cochabamba, Bolivia in the late 1990s when the World Bank forced the Cochabamba to take in, uh, uh, um, to set up a private water company.

And they came in and they tripled the price of water, and this is a poor indigenous community, right? And then they said, you can't believe this, but it's true, "We own the rain coming from the, the sky, and if we catch you capturing it, we will put you in jail or fine you." And he led a revolution.

He was a shoemaker.

He'd never been outside Cochabamba before, and he found the, the, the voice in him and, and, and the leadership, and they, they, he, they led a revolution.

The army was called in.

People were killed.

And so when people, you know, know me from, from high school and I c- show up, they're like, "The artist formerly known as." [laughs] I get a lot of that, you know? They're, "You're not Prince.

Who do you think you are?" But, uh, I, I worked down in Cochabamba, Bolivia one summer when I was in college, and I, I worked with some orphans, teaching them art and some English classes, and the kids could not pronounce Joey.

It came out like Jajajota, and they would kinda spit on me, and they, they had very few teeth, so it get, got really messy.

And there was already a Jose, you know, in my group, so they loved saying Herbito, and it would give them these huge smiles, and, ugh, I wanted to adopt a couple of them with me.

It's a precisely engineered compromise between one person's right to their own roof and the rights of everyone downstream.

now cross an ocean and climb a few thousand meters to Cochabamba in Bolivia.

In 1999, the city handed its water system to a consortium called Aguas del Tenari.

By 2000 prices had shot up.

Mass protests, clashes in the streets, a full-blown political crisis.

The pressure was so intense the contract was torn up.

Cochabamba became a symbol, water not oil not land could be the thing that sparks a revolution.

Against that backdrop, a United Nations General Assembly vote in 2010 reads as more than a formality.

Mm-hmm

... and our cities l- but they're s- they are surprisingly similar in terms of how they are built, the density, and that's why a mini car works so well in Cochabamba, where Quantum is, uh, is based.

So we've n- we've seen and we have identified a demand for these types of vehicles, and we know they're being sold in other Latin American countries.

So we believe first we will be, our vehicle will be interesting to our Central and South American neighbors.

We'll remember during this time, for instance, the raising of the stories of the small Pacific islands, in particular Nauru, Kiribati, Maldives, US Marshall Islands, et cetera.

And, you know, there was a turn around, somewhat ironically, the Cochabamba meeting that was held in Bolivia and called for by Evo Morales, away from both the COP meetings and the international sphere.

And I think North American climate activists, quite rightly in some sort of ways, heard the message that you guys need to clean up your own shit.

Like, you know, go back and, and see what you can do about your governments because they're wrecking us or whatever else.

Yeah, so it's a, a great question and, and a real problem for me, in part because I had and have been more drawn to the, let's say, theory of change that these movements have espoused.

And so when the outcomes did not quite work the way that I anticipated, I've really had to try and think about what has been the context that has changed and what have been the tactical and strategic things that we might need to do differently because that context has changed.

So I do think a couple of different things about both Line 3 and Stop Cop City are not quite always recognized in the sort of retrospective stories that have been told about them, or at the very least, one of the things that I keep sort of doing, similar to my question about Cochabamba, is, is trying to reflect and re-periodize how we think about what happened in the 2010s and the early 2020s to see if there's another way we can frame it that, that becomes revealing.

So let me just try to do that really quickly.

And I always say the fastest way to this shortcut, let's put it that way, to this process is to create human rights for the earth in your area.

So we know, you know, this began with Cochabamba in Bolivia and Ecuador gave human rights to their mountain and different things and protection.

But now like Pittsburgh, I think has done that to their aquifer.

They said it has a right not to be fracked.

The Strongest had traveled east for a friendly tournament connected to the celebrations in Santa Cruz.

On their return journey, their plane lost contact after passing Cochabamba.

Its wreckage was found in the Cordillera Tres Cruces within a difficult mountain area near the mining community of Villalo.

The scale of it is hard to absorb through a number, even when that number is seventy-four.

Luego no habla de Cerimedo, habla del gaucho, el argentino.

Y luego dice: "Y a nosotros nos dieron la orden" y da otro apodo, Toño, del gobierno de Cochabamba, pero tampoco da nombres propios.

Sí.

Y cierro con esto.