The poorest country in South America, Bolivia, had been devastated by neoliberal economic policies.

After the ignominious collapse of the Copenhagen global climate change summit in 2009, Bolivia organised a People’s Summit with 35,000 participants from 140 countries – not just representatives of governments, but also civil society and activists.

After Hiroshima was bombed, I saw a photograph of the side of a house with the shadows of the people who had lived there burned into the wall from the intensity of the bomb. The people were gone, but their shadows remained.

In the late Fifties and early Sixties, opposition to state terror and aggression and torture and so on was zero. That was a horrible time: the massive Kennedy terror operation against Cuba, the first attacks on Vietnam in 1962, the imposition of national security states in South America.

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.