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No Trespassing! | Reviews
by Joe Knowles, In These Times
Work hard, don't bitch, and, whatever you do, please don't mooch off the government. Such are the industrious dicta central to all capitalist mythology, from Horatio Alger to Rush Limbaugh. So why, when so many dispossessed people try to do just that, are they evicted from their homes, robbed of everything they own, and sometimes even hunted down by death squads? Simple: They're squatting.
Anders Corr’s No Trespassing: Squatting, Rent Strikes and Land Struggles Worldwide takes a long look at this central paradox to life under capitalism, where corporations are lavishly rewarded for what, in all too many cases, is not much more than wide-scale organized theft, and entire classes are outlawed for trying to take back some measure of what has been stolen from them. One of Corr's many cases in point is the community of Tacamiche, Honduras, where in 1994 hundreds of landless peasants occupied neglected property owned by the notorious banana exporter Chiquita Brands International (on whose behalf the United States has orchestrated various coups throughout Central America this century). Over the course of a year and a half, the peasants, without any government charity, built for themselves a functioning village, including a school, health center and three churches, and made the land—which Chiquita had abandoned as a strike-busting tactic—productive again.
After surviving one eviction attempt when police tried to chase them out with tear gas, rubber bullets and baseball bats, Tacamiche briefly became something of an international cause célèbre and an inspiration to other ongoing land occupations in the region. It was clear that presenting the villagers with one vacate deadline after another only encouraged deeper entrenchment and popular support for the squat. This was enough to get the Honduran state—like most Third World governments, eager to appear friendly to international business—very worried. So without warning in February 1996, Chiquita moved in with 400 of its own hired thugs and 500 Honduran soldiers.
Overnight, the goons arrested 100 Tacamiches, bulldozed all of their crops and buried the entire village—except the schoolhouse, which was left as a base for an armed garrison to prevent anyone from returning. The U.S. ambassador, sounding more like a viceroy than a diplomat, approvingly noted that "the government has complied with the law, since the land is the property of [Chiquita]."
It is precisely that distortion of "property" that motivates Corr’s tough, erudite book. As Corr notes, for John Locke, the pre-eminent Enlightenment theorist of property, common land became private when someone "mixed his labor with it, and joined to it something that is his own." In the meaningful sense of the word, then, the property at Tacamiche belonged to the hard-working villagers—not absentee Chiquita executives—who cultivated the land from "the state that Nature hath provided and left it in." The same is true of squats all over the world, from New York City to the Brazilian hinterland, where ordinary people in desperate situations turn to extraordinary means—and carve a living out of what was once derelict.
There is much to admire in this book, from the artfully reported late-night heroics of San Francisco’s Homes Not Jails, whose members surreptitiously scope out abandoned buildings and quietly house the homeless, to the eminently practical chapter on strategies for achieving a permanent end to the various forms of modern feudalism. If you¹re sick of do-nothing armchair radicalism and liberal hand-wringing over poverty, turn to Corr’s book, a rich mixture of reportage, philosophical rigor and concrete advice for action.
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