Moving the Bar: My Life as a Radical Lawyer by Michael Ratner

Author:Michael Ratner [Ratner, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Bisac Code 1: POL000000, Biography & Autobiography, General
ISBN: 9781682193099
Google: 1q_-zQEACAAJ
Publisher: OR Books, LLC
Published: 2021-05-15T23:34:45.600946+00:00

5 A Miskito Indian from the English-speaking Atlantic coast of Nicaragua, Myrna was a courageous and eloquent voice in the fight against the contras—especially when they tried to claim the Miskitos should not be governed by the Spanish-speaking FSLN. She became a lifelong dear friend.

7

THE END OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Shortly after Jake’s birth we took advantage of CCR’s generous six-month paid parental leave policy. Karen, Jake, and I moved upstate to our small cabin. I went on long walks in the woods with Jake in a Snugli, while Karen rested after a wakeful night feeding him. To get the baby to fall asleep, we took long drives through the Catskills.

In early 1989, Karen received a grant to make a film about how Bolivians used popular video to further their work. Karen and I were excited, but nervous. It meant taking an eleven-month-old to a very poor country, where we’d live in La Paz, a city at an altitude of more than 12,000 feet, with almost no paved roads. What would we do if Jake became ill? There was no internet, no easy way to make phone calls, and we would be quite isolated. Bruce, Ellen, and Karen’s parents all said we were crazy to go. We went anyway.

We arrived in Miami to discover that our flight to La Paz was cancelled because of a strike. We slept on the carpet near the gate until midnight, then took a ten-hour night flight on Lloyd Air Bolivia, an old colonial airline. We stopped in Caracas, Venezuela, then in Manaus, Brazil, a mining and timber town on the Amazon. With lightning flashing all around us, we waited on the ground for an hour and then took off into the worst storm I’d ever experienced, bouncing up and down like a ball in waves. We strapped Jake into two empty seats, and luckily he slept the entire flight.

We landed in El Alto, Bolivia, then the highest commercial airport in the world at 13,615 feet. Leaving the plane, I felt the ground shaking. “We’re in an earthquake!” I said to Karen. It wasn’t an earthquake, but the effect on our bodies of suddenly being thrust into extremely high altitude. Doctors in white coats stood at the gate, with oxygen masks for those who fainted or needed help.

While we waited for our taxi, we drank tea made from coca leaves. Popular (and legal) in Bolivia, the tea was supposed to help with altitude sickness. The taxi drove us through El Alto, the second largest city in Bolivia, where we saw small adobe houses clinging to the sides of the mountain, accessible only by very steep footpaths. We took the only road connecting the airport to La Paz. Block that road, and the capital is cut off from the rest of the country. In 1781, Túpac Katari led an indigenous uprising against Spanish rule and blocked this same road. In 2003, peasants and workers again blocked the road to La Paz, cutting off supplies of fuel and food.

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