NACLA is saddened to report the death of Deborah Poole, a long-time Naclista and editorial committee member, a scholar of Peru and Mexico, and a committed and passionate voice for progressive change in the Americas. She was the author or editor of five books, a wide range of important scholarly articles, and dozens of pieces of public scholarship, many of them published by NACLA over the last three decades.
In 1991, Debbie and her long-time compañero and collaborator Gerardo “Chacho” Rénique wrote a letter to NACLA drawing attention to a backroom treaty that had just been signed between the regime of Peru’s Alberto Fujimori and the U.S. government. The agreement opened the door for $34 million in military aid despite Fujimori’s rampant human rights abuses; at the time, Peru led the world in forced disappearances. Debbie, then at the New School, and Gerardo, at City College, were working on their book Peru: Time of Fear, a ground-breaking analysis of the country during the era of the Shining Path. Written in the first year of the Fujimori government, the book sought to analyze both the violence of Sendero Luminoso and the violence of the state, a tension that shaped Debbie’s work for years.
Debbie soon joined the NACLA editorial committee, where she served for many years, frequently writing for the Report on the Americas and later the website. Here we revisit a sampling of her writing for NACLA. Debbie’s voice lives on in this work, as a small but meaningful part of her broader scholarly and political legacy.
Always offering a clear analysis of power—and its vulnerabilities—as lessons for those engaged in political struggle, Debbie’s 2007 piece on the “Vladivideos” stands out. The recordings of corruption and bribery made by Vladimir Montesinos, Fujimori’s head of intelligence, eventually landed both men in jail. The essay drew attention to how these videos brought to light the previously hidden workings of Peru’s National Intelligence System (SIN), the regime’s notorious domestic spy apparatus. As Debbie argued, the videos revealed the surprising fragility of power: Fujimori’s reliance on such machinations demonstrated, in her words, the “structural vulnerability and arrogance of a form of governance that is based on the quick accumulation of individual wealth, the devaluation of all forms of collective action and property, and the exclusion of the nonprivileged.” The videos laid bare the “rot,” she wrote, of a system “in which democratic procedure and popular participation have been sacrificed to the goal of individual wealth.”
By the 2010s, Peru had taken a number of turns, including the surprise election of Ollanta Humala, who many hoped would challenge the neoliberal onslaught. In “Humala Takes off His Gloves,” Debbie and Chacho argued that the president had turned away from his pro-poor campaign rhetoric in favor of neoliberal technocrats. As with all of their work, they centered the social movements that maintained their opposition to neoliberal resurgence. Their writing also drew early attention to the growing scourge of extractivism in Peru and brought the voice of Peruvian Indigenous leader Mario Palacios to North American readers.
Debbie’s commitment to public scholarship and human rights ran deep.
In the wake of Barack Obama’s election, NACLA editors convened a roundtable to present policy lessons for the new president from movements and leaders in Latin America. Debbie’s contribution built on a letter written to Obama by the Colombian Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca (ACIN). Her piece drew attention to the movement practice of minga or collective work, and the “minga of resistance” that erupted in Cauca in 2008. As always, Debbie sought to bring lessons from social movement practice in the region to progressive thought and practice in the north. In this case, she argued that the minga offered a vision of politics beyond the state administration of life. Could we not, she asked, “imagine policies that deterritorialize resources[?]” Why cling to the assumption that public goods must be administered exclusively by nation-states? She concluded, “Our task as leftist policy critics is to insist that this sidelining of popular political projects is not acceptable either politically or as an accurate picture of what Latin America is today.”
Debbie’s commitment to public scholarship and human rights ran deep. Among many moments of speaking truth to power, she joined fellow scholars and NACLA editors in organizing an open letter in 2008 to then-Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia Phillip Goldberg, denouncing the surge of right-wing violence against recently elected President Evo Morales. In 2009, she joined another letter calling on the Obama administration to “denounce the ongoing human rights violations perpetuated by the coup regime in Honduras.” (Despite both the United Nations and the Organization of American States recognizing the events as a coup, the Obama administration refused to do so and worked to block efforts by other countries, including Bolivia, to return President Manuel Zelaya to office.)
In 2010 Deborah signed on with 150 others to protest Georgetown University’s decision to appoint former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe as a “Distinguished Scholar in the Practice of Global Leadership.” It was well known that Uribe had a hand in human rights abuses, and was linked to paramilitary organizations and right-wing death squads that had overseen the extrajudicial killing of thousands of civilians labelled as “false positives” (i.e. dead guerrilla fighters). The struggle continued. In 2013, Debbie and Chacho, along with many NACLA editorial committee members and scholars of Latin America, signed “An Open Letter to the Media” related to the U.S. attacks on Edward Snowden, the whistle-blower who leaked thousands of files revealing extensive U.S. war crimes in Iraq.
This fiery commitment to rigorous analysis and to righteous indignation in the face of neoliberal and right-wing violence ran through all of Debbie’s work.
In addition to their work in Peru, Debbie and Chacho also lived and worked in Oaxaca, Mexico. While carrying out research there, they wrote about the 2006 uprising in a piece on the “Oaxaca Commune,” as well as an interview, co-written with Benjamín Alonso Rascón, with a Mixtec tortillería owner, Ramírez Leyva. Leyva’s restaurant, Itanoni, was then a collective initiative that sought to rethink capitalist models of food policy through peasant cooperative production, the defense of heirloom Indigenous varieties of maíz criollo, and food sovereignty. Debbie and Chacho continued writing on Mexico for the NACLA Report, including pieces on resistance to the neoliberal education reforms of 2016 and state failures after the 2017 earthquake, when authorities engaged in what Naomi Klein terms “disaster capitalism.” As they noted, grassroots groups stepped in to lead recovery efforts, “fueled by a long history of resistance and political organization.”
This fiery commitment to rigorous analysis and to righteous indignation in the face of neoliberal and right-wing violence ran through all of Debbie’s work. In academia, she was widely known for her scholarship on violence, the state, and visual culture in Peru. Her 1994 edited volume Unruly Order explored the effects of state and revolutionary violence in southern Peru. Her 1997 book, Vision, Race, and Modernity, looked back at the Peruvian past to trace how photography shaped racialized and racist visions of Indigenous people, a process intertwined with the making of a fractured Peruvian national project. A 2004 volume co-edited with Veena Das, Anthropology in the Margins of the State, drew attention to the ways in which states are both weak and powerful, relying on non-state actors—landlords, criminals, and intermediaries— to shore up the workings of power.
As NACLA editorial committee member Javier Puente recalls, Debbie’s work—much of it translated into Spanish—also had a significant impact in Peru. Javier first encountered her writing as an undergraduate at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, where her work was already known and revered. Debbie’s book on visual culture found a wide audience in Peru, and her generosity as a mentor and friend is remembered by all. As Javier writes, “Her passing is indeed profound. However, her legacy for anthropologists and scholars of the Andes will endure forever. Many of us are deeply grateful for her teaching, scholarship, and friendship, both directly and indirectly. Her voice will forever be a source of inspiration.”
As U.S. imperialism now sheds any pretense of disguise, may Debbie’s voice and political clarity continue to shape our work and our struggles.
Bret Gustafson is a NACLA co-executive editor and the author of Bolivia in the Age of Gas.
Christy Thornton is an Associate Professor of History at New York University and a member of NACLA’s Board of Directors.