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Until this month, the Syrian revolution-turned-war had largely slipped from the news pages. It bursts into view in snapshots: the image of a drowned toddler, face down on a Turkish beach as his family fled a war that has killed at least half a million people; the black flags of the Islamic State fluttering, and all the barbarity and fear that accompanied them; the Kurdish girls with guns opposing the jihadists. There was always more to it, of course.

Syria is complicated, it is messy, and although it might be “7,000 miles away,” as President Trump recently put it, the world is too small to look away. What has happened in Syria since 2011 has affected what has happened elsewhere, a chain of events that has destabilized the Middle East and the world. And that will be as true of Turkey’s recent incursion, with American approval, against the Kurds as anything that came before.

The Syrian war enabled a resurgent Russia to expand its influence in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia and Qatar imported their feud into Syria, backing different rebel groups and fomenting rivalries that in part helped splinter the armed opposition. Iran and its Lebanese ally, Hezbollah, supported the government of Bashar al-Assad. Hezbollah’s domestic Lebanese opponents supported the rebels. At one point in Lebanon, every fourth person was a Syrian refugee.

Jordan, too, has borne the brunt of the refugee crisis. Turkey, the conduit for foreign fighters and munitions into rebel ranks, absorbed 3.6 million Syrian refugees and hosts the world’s largest refugee population. All of Europe, by comparison, is home to about one million Syrian refugees, an influx that has nonetheless upended Europe’s politics.

And then, there was the rise of the Islamic State, and Al Qaeda’s use of the Syrian conflict to rejuvenate its ranks and recruit men and money. Both groups exported horror well beyond Syria’s borders.

The war shattered Syria into slivers. The Islamic State established a so-called caliphate. It was vanquished by Kurdish-led forces who set up their own version of utopia in the same territory, before they, too, were pushed out this month by Turkey, which was never going to tolerate an armed Kurdish canton on its border. For Ankara, Mr. al-Assad is a safer neighbor than Kurds who dream of autonomy.

On Thursday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey outfoxed Vice President Mike Pence, who flew to Ankara to give Mr. Erdogan almost everything he wanted: a cessation of hostilities in the northeast (the Americans called it a cease-fire, the Turks a pause) and a Kurdish withdrawal from the area. Turkey appears to have dodged American sanctions and gained approval to keep its troops in northeast Syria. A day later, Mr. Erdogan said he intended to populate the zone with some of the millions of Syrian refugees currently in Turkey, but how voluntary will any returns be? It’s illegal under international law to send refugees back to a country where they may be at risk, but Syria — where chemical weapons have been used repeatedly — is a graveyard for international norms.

Turkey’s assault has unleashed chaos. Many Islamic State members, captured and held in camps by the Kurdish-led Syrian forces, have now escaped, along with suspected affiliates and sympathizers. They will regroup, accelerating a resurgence that has already made its presence felt in parts of Iraq. What do they now have to lose?

For the Kurdish forces, backed until recently by American power, the loss of clout is especially stinging. Before 2011, hundreds of thousands of Syrian Kurds were denied citizenship in a country that did not allow them to teach their language. Because of Mr. Trump’s greenlighting of the Turkish offensive, Syria’s Kurds in the northeast were forced to cut a deal with Damascus, which, the Syrian deputy foreign minister said last week, views them as “agents of Washington.” Mr. al-Assad’s forces didn’t have to fire a bullet to regain huge swaths of the northeast. Idlib province, in the northwest, is now the only large part of the country that Mr. al-Assad doesn’t control.

It may be difficult to remember now, but the Syrian tragedy began in 2011 with peaceful protests against an iron-fisted system that has governed Syria for decades. The conflict is now in its eighth year, and although it is nowhere near over, its outcome has been determined: The Assad regime has won. Mr. al-Assad rules a fractured nation of corpses and rubble and tired, traumatized survivors.

To be clear, the Middle East — at least most of it — is not typically pleading for more American military intervention. And ending endless wars, as Mr. Trump claims he wants, is a noble idea. But the hasty, unplanned manner of the White House’s policy has had immediate bloody consequences, not just for who controls what in Syria but also for how the world views the United States.

The Syrian opposition believed that the United States (and the West more generally) had its back, from the earliest days in 2011 when President Barack Obama said Mr. al-Assad must go, to Obama’s empty “red line” warning in 2012 against the use of chemical weapons.

Russia has conducted itself strategically in Syria. The United States? As a Syrian rebel fighter from an American-backed faction named the Hazm Movement told me in 2014, America “doesn’t even know who its friends are or what it is doing.” Russia, he said, is “more honorable and trustworthy than the United States, because at least it is really standing alongside its ally,” Mr. al-Assad. “The United States had people, it had partners in us,” he said, “but I don’t think the Americans are real allies.”

Good luck to the next American leader looking for coalition allies in a Middle East where memories are long.

First published inThe New York Times

It Always Comes Back to Syria, by Rania Abouzeid, is brought to you by Deca.

The mood of the crowd gathered alongside a highway just outside Denver is euphoric. Around 75 people stand in the brush beneath a roadside billboard with their phones out, filming one ­another and tossing around a beach ball that looks like a globe. Several of them are livestreaming the event, part of the kickoff for the Flat Earth International Conference, the largest ever summit of its kind. A drone buzzes overhead, collecting footage. Every few minutes, a passing car slows down to honk, and the crowd erupts into cheers. The billboard reads: “GOOGLE FLAT EARTH CLUES.”

This stretch of road has few landmarks beyond a Best Buy distribution center, so to direct attendees here, conference organizers gave them the coordinates on Google Earth. People seem unbothered by the apparent contradiction. They owe the rapid spread of their belief that Earth is flat to the technologies of the so-called globular world. Some speak of YouTube, a Google property, with something close to reverence.

A man named Robert Foertsch approaches me. He wears a black T-shirt and carries a large reflective sign, both urging people to “YOUTUBE TRUTH.” “Should I warm you up?” he asks. It’s a brisk afternoon, and he helpfully tilts the panel so the sun’s rays hit me. “I used to drink vodka for breakfast and smoke cigarettes in the shower,” the homeschooling dad from South Carolina tells me. First he found Jesus. Then, four years ago, came the conversion he believes was more consequential: He realized he was living on a flat disc.

I have flown to Denver to learn why a growing number of people could believe this, despite thousands of years of science showing that our planet is spherical. In the fourth century B.C., Greek scholar Aristotle observed that Earth always casts a round shadow on the moon during a lunar eclipse. He concluded the planet is round, and for the following two millennia, people mostly accepted that as truth. It took until the 1800s for the notion of a flat Earth to take hold in limited ­circles—​and until the past few years, aided largely by YouTube, for people to reject the globe in large numbers. The movement’s rise tracks with the emergence of more-dangerous conspiracy theories, like the idea that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting is a hoax.

Like almost everyone I meet over the coming three days, Foertsch switched to flat Earth ideology as a result of clicking on a YouTube video. That clip led to another, and before long, he was a believer. Early in his conversion, Foertsch came to Flat Earth Clues, a 14-part ­series by Mark Sargent, a baby-faced man from South Whidbey Island, ­Washington, whom those outside the movement might know as the star of the 2018 documentary Behind the Curve. The videos in Flat Earth Clues, which together have amassed more than 2 million views, feature Hollywood movie stills, meme-​­worthy images, and a calm but unsettling narration. The series hinges on simple questions. Why are most of the photos of the Earth from space composites? Why is it so difficult to find a nonstop flight between two cities in the Southern Hemisphere? Why do the major nations of the world seem content to share control of Antarctica? (Many flat-Earthers hypothesize that the North Pole is at the center of a flat disc, with the continents fanning out around it, and Antarctica forming the disc’s icy circumference.) Sargent’s approach sometimes seems reasonable. He mostly avoids other conspiracy theories. Religion comes up only in episode 10. At the end of each episode, he includes his email address and telephone number, along with the line: “Do your own research. And ask questions.”

When he finished watching Flat Earth Clues, ­Foertsch called Sargent. It was 3 a.m., but Sargent picked up. YouTubers who become famous for, say, unboxing videos are generally content to keep their work online, but flat-Earthers have parlayed internet followings into a real-world presence, by organizing experiments, meetups, and even dating events. (The Denver conference organizers plan a flat Earth cruise in 2020.) “Hey, Mark,” Foertsch said. “I know that you’re exposing a powerful lie. Thank you for that.”

After the billboard event wraps up, I hitch a ride with some of the group to a Crowne Plaza near the Denver airport. There I find Sargent sitting in the hotel restaurant with other movement stars and a few admiring fans. Sargent is scheduled to present the Flattys video awards at the end of the conference. He wears a black T-shirt and a black cap, like a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. I listen as he chats with an engineer named Bob Knodel, who is on the board of a group called FECORE that runs experiments aimed at proving Earth is a plane, like beaming lasers across large bodies of water in an effort to show a lack of curvature. “We’re literally in a battle for humanity,” Knodel says. “That may sound grandiose, but that’s what it comes down to. And that’s why flat Earth is so heavily ridiculed.”

Sargent and Knodel discuss changes afoot at ­YouTube, which, along with other internet heavies like Facebook, is under public pressure to curb the impact of fake news. In a July 2018 House Judiciary Committee hearing on social-media responsibility, YouTube director of public policy Juniper Downs cited flat Earth videos when describing the sort of content that requires policing.

Knodel sees this as evidence of official suppression, but Sargent thinks it’s just a minor setback. He says of YouTube and Google: “They’re in a tough spot because they’re making money on flat Earth.” The more time someone spends on the platform, the more ads they view—and former Google employees say that when people look into flat Earth videos, they tend to watch many of them. A cursory introductory clip ­asserting that the planet is a stationary disc, with the sun and the moon circling above it, sparks a lot of questions. What about the seasons? What about solar eclipses? For many people, these are answered by more flat Earth videos. Even haters tend to help the cause; they film reaction footage or get into drawn-out comment fights that drive traffic.

Celebrities have an effect too. Rapper B.o.B., social-­media personality Tila Tequila, and NBA player Kyrie Irving have all questioned whether the Earth is round. But none has gone so far as to appear at an event with everyday flat-Earthers. This year, organizer Robbie Davidson has hinted that an A-list star will show up, and conference attendees have been speculating for days. Some suspect it will be Will Smith. Sargent hopes that the secret guest, whoever it is, will give the movement a boost.

The next day, Knodel shows up in the Crowne Plaza’s conference room wearing a lab coat. The roughly 650 attendees who join him, armed with selfie sticks and tripods, look a lot like America. There are senior citizens, families toting young kids, and people of all colors. The media sometimes portrays the flat Earth movement as a white male pursuit, but in fact, it has the same problem that plagues the scientific establishment, along with the rest of the country: Its leaders are mainly white men.

The organizers stream most of the conference to YouTube. Presentations encompass topics like how to bring up their beliefs with friends and family, and how to spread the word for maximum impact. (One suggestion for guerrilla activism: Cue up tiny speakers to spew flat Earth arguments, then hide them in elevators.) At worst, the tone of the sessions is reductionist and confrontational. People crack jokes about “flat-smacking” and “flat-rolling” believers in the globe—that is, shutting them up by reciting evidence that supposedly supports a plane model.

Looked at one way, flat Earthism is the ultimate conspiracy theory, a rejection of the very ground we walk on. But looked at another, it is an expression of empiricism, a reluctance to accept as truth anything that cannot be seen with our own eyes.

For every die-hard extremist, there are people who had set out earnestly to answer the question: Why isn’t the Earth that we look at round? In its better moments, the event is like a mirror image of an establishment scientific conference. There is a session on the moon, another on the scientific method, and a panel dealing with gender representation in the movement.

That afternoon, I wander into a presentation by Stephen Knox and Paul Lindberg, known to the community as Knoxy and Paul on the Plane. They focus on gravity, which is commonly cited as proof Earth is round. Newton’s law of universal gravitation holds that objects with less mass are pulled toward the center of objects with more mass. On a round planet, humans fall downward toward the center of the sphere, no matter where they are on the surface. If the Earth were a plane, we’d probably be pulled toward the center of the disc; Australians could find themselves at the North Pole. But Knox asks, what if gravity doesn’t exist?

Knox is a video-game developer and animator based in Philadelphia. Back in 2014, he was working on an animation for a ­science-​­fiction novel he’d written called Plastic Life, in which characters live in a massive petri-dish-type enclosure. In order to visualize how the sun and moon would rise and set in that world, he looked up how people had envisioned Earth when they believed it was a level plane. He thought the search would be a historical exercise, until he stumbled upon Sargent’s Flat Earth Clues on YouTube. Intrigued, he joined a flat Earth Facebook group. Nonbelievers regularly trolled the discussion, and Knox, who had a talent for math and physics, soon found himself debating them. Lindberg, another member, spotted Knox’s ability and invited him onto his show, which broadcasts on the online ­radio station Truth Frequency Radio.

Then one day while helping some physics students make a short film, Knox shot a helium balloon rising. When he viewed the footage, he accidentally watched it upside down, so the balloon looked like it was falling. He started to wonder if gravity was in fact buoyancy working in reverse. He theorized that the force that separates an object from the air and fluid around it—what he terms discidial force—determines if objects rise or fall, along with the difference in density between the object and the surrounding fluid or air. He wrote a paper on the topic and emailed it to an astrophysicist at the ­European Space Agency, asking for input. The scientist replied, but ­eventually stopped responding. “It’s been very hard to get this peer-­reviewed,” he tells the room. “Once you talk about gravity not existing, scientists will not talk to you.”

Knox isn’t convinced that the Earth is definitely flat. The conference marks the first time he has met anyone in the movement in ­person—​including Lindberg, his collaborator. But he does now believe, after considering Lindberg’s and others’ experiments measuring curvature, that the planet isn’t the shape and size we’ve been told. Knox is genuinely curious and skeptical, qualities the movement embraces. He tells me that scientists are doing a poor job of explaining their work to the public, by citing equations and experiments the average person can’t reproduce. “Everything that proves the Earth is round is something we cannot prove for ourselves,” he says. “If you can’t trust the source of all your information, you have to go back and get the information for yourself.”

After Knox’s presentation, I find him at the hotel bar in a heated discussion with a group of young scientists and students who bought tickets to the convention on a whim. They thought it might be fun to observe flat-Earthers. If they got bored, they figured, they could go skiing.

One of the men, Ian Wessen, has an undergraduate degree in physics. He is locked in a debate with Knox about his theory of discidial force. Wessen suggests that they do an experiment: Submerge a cork in a bucket of water and hold it to the bottom, then release the cork while dropping the bucket. They place bets on what will happen to the cork before the bucket hits the ground. “I say the cork will not go anywhere,” Wessen says.

“The cork would probably rise a little bit,” Knox counters. I expect someone to get up and ask the bartender for the needed supplies, but no one seems to want to leave the debate. Knox and Wessen talk about buoyancy and gravity for nearly an hour.

Physics instructors sometimes teach the experiment ­Wessen described, and he is right about the outcome. Buoyant force—what makes a cork float—disappears when a container of fluid is in free-fall, meaning the cork will stay submerged until the container hits the ground, then pop up to the surface. But when I later search “cork in a bucket gravity” on YouTube, I find ­instructional videos for building a gravity bong—a device whose invention required some knowledge of physics but is not ­generally known to make people smarter.

After the convention, I meet up with Jan Willem van ­Prooijen, an experimental psychologist based at Vrije ­Universiteit Amsterdam, who has studied conspiracy theories since 2009. Back then, he says, some of his colleagues were dismissive, but as social scientists realized that such theories can have a real impact on civic life, their sentiment began to shift. “It influences whether or not people get their children vaccinated,” van ­Prooijen tells me. “It influences whether or not people support policy to reduce global warming. It influences who people vote for.”

Scholars like him are now trying to dispel the notion that conspiracy theorists are firmly on the fringe of society. “These are normal people who have normal everyday lives,” van Prooijen says. “This isn’t just a few lunatics who are in the basement of their house being lonely.” He notes that some go to YouTube to satisfy real inquisitiveness. ­Flat-Earthers “may be a bit too open-minded” when it comes to accepting evidence, but in other ways, “they’re much like scientists in their curiosity about the world and in their desire to figure out how things work.”

Whether people convert may hinge on what they find when they go in search of answers. YouTube’s efforts to prioritize videos that promote accepted truths have not solved the crux of the problem: Most content about the globe is simply not as compelling as the alternative. And for would-be converts the movement calls “flat-curious,” science communicators can come across as obnoxious. Among the videos that pop up in a search on the platform for “is the Earth flat” is one by the website Big Think, in which a viewer asks NASA ­astronomer Michelle Thaller to list some of the easiest ways to prove that the Earth is round. “Apparently this is something we’re ­debating,” she blurts. “I have no idea why.”

“That dismissiveness can undo the goal of those videos,” says Asheley Landrum, a science communications researcher at Texas Tech University who studies the flat Earth movement. “It’s not enough to just share facts. You have to do so in a way that is not going to create more of these boomerang effects, where people are going to reject your information.”

Ultimately, combating the spread of flat-Earthism might come down to tech-company accountability. Alex Olshansky, a doctoral student and colleague of Landrum, attended the Denver convention and did qualitative interviews with its participants. All but two of his 30 subjects cited ­YouTube as the source of their conversion. (The outliers were first brought on board by followers but turned to the platform for additional info.) In many cases, the people he interviewed didn’t actively seek out videos disputing the shape of the planet. Instead, YouTube recommended the clips after they had watched other conspiracy-driven videos. “YouTube’s algorithm is spreading information to people who are most susceptible to accepting it,” Landrum says.

Former Google developer Guillaume Chaslot alleged on Twitter in fall 2018 that the company’s algorithm promotes flat Earth videos “by the hundreds of millions” for the very reason Mark Sargent proposes: “Because it yields large amounts of watch time, and watch time yields ads.” The company did not give figures on how much money it makes on such clips, but YouTube says it changed the algorithm in January so that it recommends such content less often. A Google spokesperson claimed that in the five months that followed, clicks on flat Earth videos dropped by 67 percent.

When I relay that figure to Sargent, he says that newer channels now have trouble attracting subscribers, but more-​­established flat-Earthers continue to see significant views. “YouTube did nothing but help us for three years, and we were being recommended way more than we should have.” As the feeds gained a ­following, they attracted media coverage, and the people who see that often then search for content directly, making platform recommendations less critical for success. Now that the movement has momentum, Sargent says, “we don’t need YouTube as much. They are taking their foot off the gas, not hitting the brakes.”

On the last day of the conference, ­organizer Robbie Davidson takes the stage in the Crowne Plaza conference room to reveal the secret celebrity guest: 24-year-old internet influencer Logan Paul, who rose to stardom by posting six-​­second prank clips on the social-​­media platform Vine. Since Vine shut down in 2016, he has favored YouTube, and by his conference debut, he has 23.6 million subscribers, many of them teens and tweens. As Paul hops onto the stage wearing a T-shirt advertising his brand Maverick, his film crew trails him. He looks out at the crowd and smiles beneath a flop of blond hair. “I’m not ashamed to say: My name is Logan Paul, and I think I’m coming out of the flat Earth closet!”

By then, Sargent is on a plane back to ­Seattle. He bought a ticket home after hearing that Paul was the featured celebrity. “I detest this man and will not be seen with him in the same room,” he explains to me in an email. In early 2018, Paul sparked outcry when he traveled to a so-called suicide forest in Japan and filmed a victim for his video blog. Sargent says he has had friends who committed suicide, and he abhors exploiting people’s trauma for clicks. Also, he thinks there is a solid chance that Paul is trolling the conference, and Sargent doesn’t want to appear on film when that happens.

In March, Paul released a scripted film called Flat Earth: To the Edge and Back. In it, Paul—who plays himself—travels to the Denver conference with his roommate. Over the course of the film, he becomes infatuated with a flat-Earther, argues with a friend who happens to be a dwarf, and runs through the city naked. In a behind-the-scenes video, Paul claims the project demonstrates his opposition to the conspiracy theory. But the film does not question the role YouTube played in birthing flat Earthism—or question much of anything, for that matter. The romantic subplot even gives the impression that a convention might be a good place to fall in love.

Sargent’s instinct about Paul turned out to be right, but it is hard to know who is the clear winner—except for Paul’s brand, and ­YouTube itself. As of this past July, Flat Earth has garnered 5.7 million hits. That’s far more than any actual flat Earth video, but also more than any educational offerings explaining that the planet is round, making it the most popular video about the shape of the Earth, period. In the end, clickbait wins out.

Source: Meet the flat-Earthers of the modern era | Popular Science

Meet the flat-Earthers of the modern era, by Mara Hvistendahl, is brought to you by Deca.

One brisk evening in January several thousand people, warmly dressed in jumpers and scarves, took their seats in a stadium on the outskirts of Delhi for the latest round of India’s Pro Wrestling League. The PWL is to wrestling what the Indian Premier League is to cricket: a jamboree of international athletes, bright lights and big money. Of all the wrestling stars out that night, one shone more brightly than the rest. At 8pm the announcer’s voice came through the speaker system to whip the crowd up for the next bout. Then, with the athletes ready backstage, he roared her name, “Viiiiinesh Phoooooogaaaaat!!!” Vinesh Phogat, a tiny woman of 24 with delicate features, perfect teeth and muscles as round and taut as fresh oranges, emerged from the tunnel in a red cape and strode towards the wrestling mat through an avenue of flames.

Phogat is one of the world’s leading freestyle wrestlers. She won her first gold medal at the Commonwealth Games in 2014, followed by another in 2018. Four months later, she became the first Indian woman to win a wrestling gold at the Asian Games. Phogat comes from a family of wrestlers: two of her cousins have won Commonwealth golds, and her husband, Somvir Rathee, is also a professional wrestler. But though her cousins have been derailed by fame or injury, Vinesh Phogat continues her climb to the pinnacle of the sport. She is now odds-on favourite to win at the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.

In wrestling you score points by pinning your opponent to the mat. During the three bouts that Phogat had fought in this year’s league so far, she had conceded just three points and won 28. Her opponent that night, another Indian called Seema, was the underdog. The wrestlers took up their starting positions on the mat, crouching low with their arms entwined and foreheads touching. For several seconds they were locked in this position, feeling for any loss of poise in their opponent that might give them an opportunity to take them down. Then suddenly Phogat pulled on Seema’s arms, knocked her off balance, and lunged at her like a cheetah attacking a stumbling gazelle.

On the mat, the cheetah became a boa constrictor. Phogat wrapped her opponent in her arms and legs, locking her there and squeezing the fight out of her. An apparently vulnerable position can be quickly reversed with a sudden surge of energy. With Seema trying to tug her down to the floor, Phogat ducked under her opponent’s outstretched arms to seize her around the waist. Then, bending her knees low to get her weight under her opponent, Phogat rolled backwards and flipped Seema over her shoulder. In the audience plump dignitaries in bright orange turbans sat comfortably on white leather armchairs, discoursing on the spectacle. Soon Phogat was leading 6-0.

Phogat’s success makes her a rarity twice over. Wrestling is hugely popular in India: millions tune in to watch live bouts on TV. But the vast majority of fighters are men. The average Indian woman makes less than 200 rupees ($2.80) an hour. Yet as a star wrestler – and one of the few females in the sport – Phogat earned around $35,000 for five matches at the PWL, each lasting six minutes. Only one male wrestler earned more. Last year, her total earnings from wrestling were around $500,000.

After the bout Phogat headed to the dugout where she slumped down on the ground, exhausted. She buried her face in her sweatshirt while her husband and her physiotherapist, Rucha Kashalkar, watched her warily. When Phogat is not wrestling, she can be a picture of charm, with a politician’s flair for making someone she meets feel like they are the most important person in the room. But in training or during matches she is cold, hard and quickly angered by any sign of disrespect.

As she wound down, her fans began to inch closer to the dugout, leaning over its edge to snap selfies with her. Phogat mostly ignored them. But at one point a pushy man with a paunch thrust his way forward with his young daughter. “Autograph!” he shouted. “Take a photo! Take a photo!” “Vinesh!” the girl cried. Her father gently corrected her, telling his daughter to address Phogat as “aunty”. Aunty is a common but complex term, used by Indian children when they talk to their friends’ mothers or their mother’s friends. But it can also imply that someone is frumpy or conservative; if used to address a famous or successful stranger, it sounds condescending, as though you can be familiar with her just because she is a woman.

Phogat looked up. “Aunty?” she snapped. She has feline eyes and a warm smile, but when she opens her mouth the voice you hear is deep and raw. She comes from the rural, north-Indian state of Haryana, where the dialect consists of short, declarative sentences that shoot out like bullets.

“Well, you’re married now,” the man cackled. “So get used to being called an aunty.”

“This country is something else,” Phogat muttered as she turned away. Even with her face grey with exhaustion, her hair matted with sweat and her mouth hanging open as she cooled down, she was resolute and immovable. Phogat was no one’s aunty.

Phogat was born in Balali, a four-hour drive north of central Delhi. One morning in January I drove to the village to meet her mother, Premlata Singh, who still lives there. The 52-year-old has a very different life from her neighbours. Balali is a typical village in these parts, made up of an orderly series of single-storey houses with mud walls and tin roofs on which residents store food for their animals, unused bicycles and other household items, to make more space inside. Electricity is intermittent and the main source of fuel is buffalo dung, the scent of which drifts through the air along with the tweets and chirrups of red-wattled lapwings. Women with veiled faces hurry around performing chores and the men, their moustaches neatly curled, lounge on charpoys, tugging on bubbling hookahs and talking politics. “They think being seen to work lowers their status,” a woman sneered as she balanced a basket of dung on her head. “We look after the children, cook food, draw milk, wash the buffaloes and help with the harvest. We work, but they control the money.”

Farther into the village a mansion gleams like a moonstone from behind tall gates, its driveway furnished with a red SUV and patrolled by an Alsatian dog, a status symbol in this part of India. Phogat built this house for her mother, a Bollywood fantasy of the high life made real. Inside, a vast living room is furnished with ornately carved wooden furniture and vitrines full of Phogat’s gleaming trophies. A marble staircase leads to a warren of rooms that have balconies with sweeping views of the village.

Premlata Singh is sitting on a charpoy in the concrete courtyard, wearing a salwar kameez with a gold ring in her nose and slippers on her feet. Other than the sharp eyes that gleam out of her doughy face there is virtually no resemblance between her and her fierce young daughter. Singh isn’t a wrestler, she isn’t educated, and when Phogat was born, she wasn’t even pleased to meet her.

Singh was brought up believing that girls simply cost their family a dowry before dedicating their energies to their husband. One of her two sons died when he was a few days old. She prayed for another but ended up with two daughters, the second of whom was Phogat. “I thought, ‘two girls, oh no, what an expense!’ I didn’t know any better. No one did.” Even as a child Phogat understood her lowly place in the hierarchy. “Galti hoon main, galti!” she would shout in frustration. “I am a mistake, a mistake!”

The state of Haryana is unusually conservative, even by the standards of rural India. India as a whole has a skewed gender ratio because boys are so prized that many female fetuses are aborted. But in Haryana the ratio is especially uneven: 831 girls are born for every 1,000 boys, compared with the national rate of 940 to 1,000. Girls are often fed less than boys. “If the buffalo gives one glass of milk,” it is said there, “give it to the boy. The girl will drink water.” What made Singh distinctive was that, despite her own upbringing, she unlearned these ideas.

When Phogat was eight years old her father Rajpal, a bus driver, was shot dead by a relative after an argument. It was unheard of for Hindu widows to live alone and many ended up marrying their brothers-in-law. Singh declined Rajpal’s brother’s suggestion of moving in with him. “No thank you,” she said. “I will look after my own children.” Premlata throws her head back and laughs, as she remembers that time. And, just like that, she resembles her daughter Vinesh, celebrating gleefully after outwitting yet another opponent.

Singh’s decision led to uproar. Family members from distant villages were summoned to convince her to change her mind. She had recently been diagnosed with uterine cancer and there was no way that she would manage without help, she was told. But she survived the cancer – “I outwitted the doctor,” she chortles – and she proved resilient and imaginative.

She fed her children milk, yogurt and clarified butter from the four buffaloes the family owned. With her husband’s pension she started a micro-finance business, charging interest on loans to other women in the village. Singh wasn’t familiar with traditional counting systems, so she invented her own. Her business venture, which was the first of its kind in the village run by a woman, was a success. “I just told myself I can do it,” she said. “‘I can do it!’ ‘I can do it!’ And then I did it.” Gradually, the objections to her single parenting quietened. “My mother took a stand,” Phogat says. “She was strong. And because of her I am strong too.”

With the exception of cricketing victories, India has a terrible sporting record. It has the lowest number of Olympic medals per head of any nation, and has only ever won one gold in an individual sport, the men’s ten-metre air rifle. In recent years this has begun to change, partly owing to the changing role of women. At the Sydney Olympics in 2000 a weightlifter called Karnam Malleswari lifted 240kg to win a bronze medal, the first Indian woman to make it that far in an Olympic sport. That she had overcome great obstacles amplified her achievement. Malleswari, who lived in Haryana, had trained in a thatched shed with barbells made from bamboo and rocks. After her victory, the state government gave her a plot of land and a cheque for $35,000.

Watching all this was Mahavir Singh, Phogat’s uncle. What grabbed his attention was the government’s prize for a gold medallist: one crore rupees, almost $140,000. Like Phogat’s mother, Mahavir had often wondered what he would do with the four daughters the Hindu gods had given him. Now he knew. He would train them to win the biggest jackpot in Indian sporting history.

Wrestling was the obvious sport to try. Its traditional form, in which men fight in mud pits, was wildly popular in Haryana. Wrestling competitions, or dangals, attracted thousands of spectators who treated such events like a carnival. Mahavir, a hefty man with a broad nose, thick eyebrows and slanted eyes which give him a look of perpetual scepticism, had himself competed in these tournaments in the 1970s and 1980s, travelling along dusty highways in the back of bullock carts and sleeping outdoors to fight in villages. But although he had won dozens of prizes, his father forced him to stop wrestling in his early 20s to get a “real” job. Mahavir never forgave him: “I would have fought in international tournaments.” He channelled his thwarted ambition, and his desire for money, into the next generation – his daughters and nieces.

Phogat remembers that she, her sister and her cousins were roused from bed at 4am on a freezing morning when she was only six years old. Winter had already settled on the mustard fields around Balali, but Mahavir marched the girls outside into the biting air. First they had to run laps of the fields to get their blood pumping. Then they were paired up to wrestle as best they could. Every day he made them practise for six hours. He beat them if they were late. He beat them for being slow to pick themselves up. He beat them for losing. Once he beat Phogat with such force that some of the villagers came running out to rescue her. The villagers soon nicknamed him “Devil”. “He wanted an Olympic medal,” Phogat says. “We didn’t even know what the Olympics were. ‘Who the hell is this Olympics?’ we’d wonder. We’re being beaten black and blue but Olympics still hasn’t shown up!’” When Mahavir got the man who trimmed the buffaloes to cut off the girls’ long silky hair, the villagers decided that he was crazy and best left alone. Who will marry his daughters now, they tutted.

To begin with, the girls wrestled each other in a mud pit that Mahavir dug for them. They sometimes had to compete against boys in dangals. The first time Mahavir’s eldest daughter, Geeta, participated, the bout was over after a few minutes. “Geeta quickly grabbed the boy by the arm, pulled him over her shoulder and pinned him down,” says journalist Saurabh Duggal, who has written a biography of Mahavir. “The mud stains on his back at the end of the bout reflected his quick defeat.”

Geeta was the most successful in the early years, but Phogat was also starting to distinguish herself. She was the smallest of the group but the first to arrive for practice. Already she was displaying certain attributes common to most elite athletes – an obsessive love of her chosen sport, intense focus and an overwhelming desire to win. “I practised like a crazy person,” she says. “Then I’d come home and train in my room.”

Local competitions led to regional and then national trials. At the Commonwealth Games in Delhi in 2010, Geeta won the country’s first-ever gold medal in wrestling. Hundreds of villagers made the trip from Balali to cheer her on. When she returned, many more gathered at the entrance of the village to garland her with marigolds. Geeta and her sister Babita, who won a silver medal, received around $175,000 for their performance at the games from the state government. It wasn’t long before Phogat also started winning. In 2013 she got a silver medal at the Youth Wrestling Championship in Johannesburg, and then crowned this with a gold at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow the following year.

Money flowed. Mahavir refurbished a room in the village for the girls to wrestle in. He bought mats and set up a fully equipped gym. He expanded his family’s home into a fortress-like compound and drove a new car. “Mahavir’s fortunes changed because of his daughters,” says Rudraneil Sengupta, author of “Enter the Dangal”, a book on wrestling in India. With the influx of visible and previously unimaginable wealth, local villagers stopped protesting about how he trained the girls. Fathers now sought him out for advice on how to get their daughters into wrestling.

Source: In the ring with India’s most powerful woman

In the ring with India’s most powerful woman, by Sonia Faleiro, is brought to you by Deca.

One night in May, a strange and seemingly inexplicable thing happened in India. A divisive and ineffectual prime minister returned to power with a historic mandate.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s triumph on May 23 was conclusive. His Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won more than 300 of the 543 seats in the lower house of Parliament. But Modi had spent the last five years letting India down. Very little he had said on the 2014 campaign trail turned out to be true and virtually nothing he promised was delivered.

The prime minister had pledged to create 10 million jobs each year, but under him the country has experienced its highest rate of unemployment in forty-five years, with more younger and better-educated people than ever before stranded helplessly. His hasty decision to void the largest currency bills, in 2016, removing more than 80 percent of the money in circulation was supposed to curb corruption, but it cost more than a million jobs and did nothing to prevent graft in India or make business more transparent.

The year after that, a value-added tax was rolled out with great fanfare but inadequate testing; it quickly became a nightmare for small businesses, hurting some of the very people the government had claimed to want to help. Farmers, by then earning their lowest incomes in eighteen years, marched on Delhi carrying the skulls and bones of fellow rural workers who, they said, had died by suicide.

Whereas Modi had pledged “acche din,” or good days, for all, the only people who seemed to be enjoying them were the crony capitalists who had bankrolled his victory. Even as the votes were being counted on results day in 2014, India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, a staunch supporter of the prime minister, added almost $1 billion to his wealth as his holdings rose in value. Another billionaire associate, Gautam Adani, gained $600 million.

Other BJP promises—to eliminate open defecation in rural India, develop a hundred technologically advanced “smart cities,” and tackle pollution in the River Ganges—remain unfulfilled. Modi’s pledges, it soon became clear, were lies.

India under Modi was no longer the world’s fastest-growing economy. And whatever upward mobility was anticipated thanks to social welfare programs implemented by earlier governments could no longer be taken for granted. The prime minister’s opponents fought for a more equal society, but Modi himself, like strongmen elsewhere in the world, could only prosper in an unequal and divided one. And yet, Modi won again.

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To those who had paid close attention, his emphatic victory had always been the only possible outcome to the election.

These elections, reported the Centre for Media Studies, a non-partisan think tank in New Delhi, had been the most expensive “ever, anywhere.” has received almost 93 percent of corporate donations, leaving the remaining 7 percent for the other national and state parties to fight over.

Before the campaign had even started, the BJP had spent more money on ads than the previous government did in ten years. And when it came to electioneering, they were able to rent all the available helicopters and private jets in India, leaving the opposition stranded on the ground.

The mainstream media, particularly cable news, amplified the BJP’s message and drowned out the opposition. They editorialized the news, started rumors, and spread lies. Truth was an illusion, and everything was propaganda. The INC’s leader, Rahul Gandhi, was denounced as a fool and even a foreigner, while Modi, in a tradition that will ring familiar to people in Russia and China, was glorified as the great leader.

While Gandhi gave several interviews to a range of media, Modi gave one interview to a giggly Bollywood actor in pink trousers and another to a TV host who asked if he had written any poetry in the last five years. Sharp-eyed viewers saw that in Modi’s hand was a list of agreed-upon questions.

A survey conducted across eleven Hindi-language news channels later showed that Modi and his closest associate, Amit Shah, had received two and a half times more airtime than Gandhi and his sister, Priyanka Vadra, who campaigned for the party during the election. These same TV channels had presented Modi not merely as the frontrunner, but as the only choice.

Finally, the Election Commission of India, an institution once widely admired for its stern neutrality, made repeated rulings in favor of the BJP. Although Modi violated its code of conduct at least six times, he was given a pass—even when he shouted at a major rally that his main opponent was the son of the most corrupt person in the country. He was referring to the former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who was assassinated by Sri Lankan terrorists in 1991.

The commission had let a TV channel dedicated to Modi continue to screen coverage of the prime minister through election day, even though this was breaking rules that prohibit political broadcasting during the election. Subscribers didn’t have to pay for the twenty-four-hour channel, which appeared in the menu options just before the elections, and then, as mysteriously, vanished when polling ended. The commission also ignored credible complaints of electronic voting machines being transported without security and then going missing.

Then, in July, a group of former senior civil servants sent an open letter to the Commission calling attention to numerous cases of voter exclusion. These elections, the experts said, were among the “least free and fair” in three decades.

What reason could India’s once famously feisty media and its once admired Election Commission have to behave in this way? The BJP got such an easy ride that it hardly mattered what Modi’s opponents did.

And while Gandhi was the obviously better choice, he wasn’t, necessarily, a convincing one. For years, Gandhi dithered about whether he would join politics, enjoying the unheard of privilege, in India, of deciding if he wanted to apply for a job. When he finally accepted, standing for election in 2004, he positioned himself as a foot soldier. He failed to do anything significant to change the country’s oldest party, his family’s party. The Congress was rotting from the roots upward, its representatives seen as incompetent, corrupt, and out of touch, yet Gandhi appeared to shrug and roll his eyes as though to say, Can you believe these people? He officially took over the party’s leadership in 2017, but it wasn’t until March 2019, less than a fortnight before voting was to commence, that he announced the main plank of his manifesto.

Nowhere was Gandhi’s lackadaisical attitude more obvious than in his own constituency of Amethi, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, which has elected Gandhis since 1980. “How long can a son keep winning on past legacy,” asked an Amethi voter interviewed by the Mint newspaper; the answer came with Rahul’s defeat on home turf in this general election.

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[image error]Sonu Mehta/Hindustan Times via Getty Images Progressive Alliance Chairperson Sonia Gandhi conferring with her son and Congress MP, Rahul Gandhi, at a protest outside the Parliament House Complex, New Delhi, India, July 11, 2019

“Rare is the strongman leader who grows less autocratic the longer he stays in office,” writes James Crabtree in The Billionaire Raj (2018), his acute examination of crony capitalism in India. And this might have been the case with India’s first autocratic prime minister, Indira Gandhi, daughter of the country’s founding father, Jawaharlal Nehru. In the summer of 1975, Gandhi’s advisers drafted an ordinance announcing a state of internal emergency to maintain the “security of India,” which, they falsely declared, was “threatened by internal disturbances.” Gandhi was reacting to a court decision that had invalidated her election, and jeopardized her position as prime minister, for irregularities committed in her own constituency.

“Before the decision was read out, the presiding judge was offered half a million rupees and promised a seat on the Supreme Court,” writes Kapil Komireddi in Malevolent Republic (2018), a searing portrait of the rise of Hindu nationalism in India. Over the next nineteen months, Gandhi’s critics were branded enemies of the state and arrested. The national media was censored and foreign journalists were expelled. Gandhi’s virtues were extolled on billboards, even as her son Sanjay experimented with population control by implementing the world’s largest sterilization program, first by offering incentives, such as cash and food, and then by having vulnerable men—including the rural poor, the urban homeless, and religious minorities—forcibly dragged to operation tents.

Gandhi might have remained in power indefinitely, but for a report by a Delhi think tank that assured her easy victory in democratically held elections. “Re-election would instantly purge the taint of dictatorship attached to her name in the West,” Komireddi writes. But in the elections that she called, Gandhi lost her seat and so did her tyrannical son.

Gandhi’s moment of vulnerability is unlikely to be repeated by Modi. If there’s one thing he would have learned from her experience, it is that indefinite power requires absolute control.

Modi’s election mandate gave him the power to form the government of his choice. And one of his first choices was to make a minister a man who had led the Bajrang Dal, a Hindu militant group that was linked to the murder of an Australian missionary, Graham Staines, and his two young sons in 1999. 

The minister, Pratap Sarangi, was not charged with that crime, but in later years he was arrested for rioting, arson, assault, and damaging government property. Bajrang Dal was also named in a Human Rights Watch report on the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat as one of “the groups most directly responsible for violence.” That same report accused the state’s chief minister, a former activist in the Hindu fascist RSS organization, of “tacitly justifying the attacks.” That minister was Narendra Modi.

Another one of Modi’s new ministers, Amit Shah, was charged with ordering three murders in Gujarat while Modi was chief minister there. One of the victims, India’s foremost investigative agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation, has alleged, was Shah’s partner in an extortion racket.

The opposition might have been expected to keep the ruling party in check, but when it became clear that the job was a thankless one, and that Modi was here to stay, Rahul Gandhi exercised the ultimate privilege: he walked out. In his four-page resignation letter, which became public on July 3, Gandhi took responsibility for his party’s electoral losses. Quitting the position of party president, he promised to remain a “loyal soldier.” But India’s oldest political party doesn’t need more footsoldiers; it needs a leader. As long as Modi is seen as the only viable option to run the country, he will present himself that way.

By abdicating his responsibilities, Gandhi reinforced an impression that he is above the gruelling, tedious business of building an effective opposition. His decision triggered a spate of resignations, the majority of which came from members of his close circle, 

The party is yet to elect a new leader, and the atmosphere of disarray and uncertainty benefits only Modi. The fragile state of the INC was illustrated earlier this month when thirteen of its legislators in the southern state of Karnataka submitted their resignations, boarded a private plane to Mumbai, and holed up in a five-star hotel. Party leaders attempting to dissuade them from switching allegiance to the BJP were made to wait outside the hotel in the rain. The police later escorted one of the men, who had flown in from Karnataka, back to the airport, saying, “They are frightened of you. We cannot allow you to [remain].”

Several more legislators in the state government then resigned, forcing a vote of no-confidence on July 22 that ended with the BJP emerging as the largest party in the state. On the floor of the house, a legislator alleged that he had been offered 5 crore rupees (approximately $725,000) by the BJP to switch party allegiance, a relatively small amount that shows just how cheaply some politicians can be bought. Others had allegedly been offered as much as 50 crore rupees (more than $7 million).

Horse-trading is a familiar component of Indian politics, with some representatives switching parties repeatedly throughout their careers out of self-interest. But the successful attempt to bring down a state government, so soon after winning an absolute majority in Parliament, suggests that Modi cannot abide even the hint of an opposition. With Karnataka in their grasp, the BJP controls sixteen states, while the INC has been reduced to governing just four out of India’s twenty-nine states.

If the allegations of bribery are true, it will reveal the existence of a political class without the moral authority to govern. In the western state of Goa, ten out of fifteen INC legislators also resigned from the party, immediately joining the BJP. The majority of defecting legislators were Christians who were elected to represent the interests of their constituents at a time when incidents of religious hate crime have soared. As much as 90 percent of such crimes since 2009 have occurred since Modi became prime minister. Voted into power as members of a secular party, these people will now promote the agenda of a governing party that seeks to make India a Hindu nation.

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One institution that might have been expected to hold Modi to account is the news media. But journalists critical of Modi face torrents of abuse online, including rape and death threats; they have been manhandled, arrested, and detained, and Modi himself has called them “prostitutes.” These attacks increased in the run-up to the elections, declared Reporters Without Borders. “Hate campaigns against journalists, including incitement to murder, are common on social networks and are fed by troll armies linked to the nationalist right,” the group said.

Last July, one of India’s most widely respected news anchors started to receive complaints from all over the country about his show being blacked out. The host of Master Stroke, Punya Prasun Bajpai, had been highly critical of Modi. His prime-time show, for instance, had embarrassed the government by revealing how a broadcast video-conference between Modi and farmers that was meant to convey growing prosperity in the rural hinterland had been faked. The farmers had said that their incomes had doubled since Modi had come to power. But suspecting otherwise, Bajpai sent reporters to verify this information—and they learned that the farmers were following a script they’d been given.

Bajpai was warned by his boss that news channels critical of Modi “even just 10 percent of the time” were being blacklisted by the BJP. Party spokespersons refused them interviews. After his boss ordered Bajpai to stop using Modi’s name or even his image in any report that was critical of the government, Bajpai quit. The wider media drew the obvious conclusions.

Since Modi’s victory, the majority of journalists have focused on the INC’s problems, rather than the BJP, even though it is no longer a viable opposition. Long-dead Congress leaders, such as Nehru, are regularly criticized. Meanwhile, clearly false reports, such as how the Modi government is “working for (the) welfare of minorities,” are presented as news. The fawning from some quarters is almost a parody of journalism. One weekly national magazine, Open, has featured Modi on the cover ten times, just this year. In his letter to readers, the editor has described the prime minister as the man who “incorporates the entire universe in his own life story.”

Even the judiciary’s independence is in question. Modi’s government has meddled with judicial appointments, instating friendly judges, and rejecting appointments of those who have previously ruled against the party. Then, last January, four Supreme Court justices called an unprecedented news conference. “There are many things which are less than desirable which have happened in the last few months,” one said. “All four of us are convinced,” he continued, “that unless this institution is preserved and it maintains its equanimity, democracy will not survive in this country.”

A compromised media and a judiciary under attack, as well as open meddling in the Election Commission, even at the Reserve Bank and in the military, are all signs of institutional erosion. But Modi’s latest assault is on truth itself. According to his own Ministry of Statistics, Modi’s government has been manipulating economic data to show progress, even as it retrospectively downgrades growth figures under the last Congress-led government. The National Crimes Records Bureau has, for the first time in its history, failed to publish its main reports on crime and prison statistics —a vital resource not only for the public, nonprofit organizations, and journalists, but also for politicians trying to make the government accountable. And a proposed legislation to the popular Right to Information Act will make it more difficult than ever for ordinary citizens to learn the truth.

Meanwhile, the personal information of private citizens is fully accessible to the government through Aadhar, an identification system that has made it virtually compulsory for people to provide biometric data in order to access a raft of services, such as welfare benefits and insurance payouts. More than a billion Indians—almost the entire population, in fact—have enrolled. One prominent economist described the system as “Big Data meets Big Brother.” Knowledge is power, and from now on in India, the information will flow only one way.

There is resistance to Modi. It can be seen in the work of lawyers who refuse to back down despite being harassed as “anti-national,” passed a legal amendment in the lower house of Parliament that will empower the state to designate individuals, not just organizations, as “terrorists”—potentially permitting the government to criminalize a person it chooses to accuse of “promoting terrorism.”

The rot may have set in decades ago, but it has taken Modi only five years to dismantle the idea of India as democratic and secular. The opposition movement is fragmentary and local. It will surely have to be widespread and united—with an equally potent alternate vision of India—if Modi is ever to be defeated. .related_items

Source: Absent Opposition, Modi Makes India His Hindu Nation

Modi Makes India His Hindu Nation, by Sonia Faleiro, is brought to you by Deca.

On a brisk day in March 2016, Stephen Allwine walked into a Wendy’s in Minneapolis. The smell of old fryer grease hung in the air as he searched for a man wearing dark jeans and a blue jacket. Allwine, who worked as an IT support technician, was lean and nerdy, with wire-rim glasses. He was carrying $6,000 in cash, money he’d collected by pawning silver bars and coins to avoid suspicious deductions from his bank account. He found the man he was looking for sitting in a booth.

They had connected on LocalBitcoins, a sort of Craigslist for people who want to buy cryptocurrency near where they live. Allwine opened the app Bitcoin Wallet on his phone and handed over the cash, and the man scanned a QR code displayed on the phone to transfer the bitcoin. The transaction went seamlessly. Then Allwine returned to his car to discover that he had locked his keys inside.

It was his birthday. He was 43. And he was supposed to join a woman named Michelle Woodard for lunch.

Allwine had met Woodard online a few months earlier. The relationship had progressed quickly, and for a while they exchanged dozens of messages a day. Their passion had since faded, but they still slept together from time to time. While he waited for the locksmith to arrive, he texted her that he’d stopped to buy bitcoin and was running late. Once the door was jimmied open, he met up with Woodard at a burger joint called the Blue Door Pub, determined to enjoy the rest of the afternoon.

That evening he gave himself another birthday present. Using the email address dogdaygod@hmamail.com, he wrote to a person he knew only as Yura. “I have the bitcoins now,” he said.

Yura ran a site called Besa Mafia, which operated on the dark web and was accessible only through anonymous browsers like Tor. More important for Allwine’s purposes, Besa Mafia claimed to have ties to the Albanian mob and advertised the services of freelance hit men. The site’s homepage featured a photo of a man with a gun and no-nonsense marketing copy: “If you want to kill someone, or to beat the shit out of him, we are the right guys.”

Yura promised that customers’ money was held by an escrow service and paid out only after a job was completed. But Allwine worried that when he deposited money it would simply end up in someone’s bitcoin wallet. He wanted Yura’s claims to be true, though, so against his better instincts he transferred the bitcoin. “They say that Besa means trust, so please do not break that,” he wrote Yura. “For reasons that are too personal and would give away my identity, I need this bitch dead.”

“This bitch” was Amy Allwine, his wife.

Stephen and Amy Allwine had met 24 years earlier at Ambassador University, a religious school in Big Sandy, Texas. Stephen showed up freshman year with a pack of friends from his church youth group near Spokane, Washington. Amy was from Minnesota and didn’t know many people at the school. She quickly attached herself to the Washington crowd. She was sunny and easygoing, and she and Stephen became regular dance partners—an activity that brought them closer, but not too close. They belonged to the Worldwide Church of God, which observed a strict Saturday Sabbath, rejected holidays with pagan influence like Christmas, and frowned on too much physical contact on the dance floor.

In 1995, while they were still at Ambassador, the United Church of God split off from the Worldwide Church of God. Stephen and Amy joined the new sect, which embraced the internet as a means of spreading the gospel. For Stephen, who had a passion for computer science, it was a logical choice.

After college, the couple married and moved to Minnesota to be close to Amy’s family. Amy could tame even the most unruly animals, and she taught for a few years at a local dog-training school before starting her own business, Active Dog Sports Training. The couple adopted a son, bringing him home when he was just a couple of days old, and in 2011 they moved into a house in Cottage Grove, Minnesota, a centerless enclave of commuters and farmers in the Mississippi River Valley, not far from the Twin Cities. Amy converted a large agricultural shed on the property to a dog-training arena, and their house was soon a homey mess, with fur from the Allwines’ Newfoundland and Australian shepherd covering the upholstery and a trail of unfinished Lego projects on the kitchen center island.

From the outside, nothing seemed amiss. Stephen rose to the rank of elder in the United Church of God, and Amy became a deaconess. The church followed the Jewish calendar, and on Fridays the family had dinner with Amy’s parents, whom Stephen called Mom and Dad. On Saturdays they attended services. Every year they traveled to join in the church’s fall festival, which was held at different sites around the world. As Amy’s business grew, she traveled around the country with friends to attend dog competitions. In their spare time, the Allwines maintained a website called Allwine.net, which included a list of acceptable songs and instructional dance videos showing how to have fun without excessive touching. In one, Amy wears khakis and hiking boots while Stephen is in a polo shirt and baggy jeans, and the two are line dancing to “We Go Together.”

The day after Stephen bought the bitcoin, he uploaded a photo of Amy to Allwine.net. The picture had been taken on a family vacation to Hawaii, and it showed Amy wearing a teal shirt, with a broad smile on her tan and freckled face. About 25 minutes after he posted the image, Stephen logged in to his dogdaygod email account and sent Yura the link. “She is about 5’6″, she looks about 200lbs,” he wrote. The best time to kill her, he continued, would be on an upcoming trip to Moline, Illinois. If the hit man could make her death look like an accident—by, say, ramming her Toyota Sienna minivan on the driver’s side—he would throw in a few more bitcoin.

Yura confirmed the details shortly afterward in awkward English. “He will wait her at the airport, tail her with the stolen car, and when he has the chance will cause a car accident to kill her.” If the car accident didn’t work out, he added, “the hitman will shoot her deadly.” Later he reminded dogdaygod to concoct an alibi: “Please make sure you are sorrounded [sic] by people most of the days, and spend some money to shop things on malls or public places where they have video surveillance.”

On a typical day, Stephen was not surrounded by people. He and Amy lived on 28 acres on a dead-end street. Their house was a simple one-story, double-wide trailer on a basement, but it had four bedrooms, along with a spacious living room and an open kitchen. Stephen had rigged up the roof with solar panels, which he boasted generated so much energy that he was able to feed power back into the grid. He spent much of his time in his basement office, handling glitches in call center technology. Working from home allowed him to hold down two jobs, one with the IT service company Optanix and the other with Cigna, the health insurer. Coworkers often went to him with particularly thorny problems.

The Allwines’ pastor preached about conquering carnal desires, and Stephen himself counseled couples in the congregation who were struggling with marital problems. When he was alone, though, his attention strayed. He ventured onto Naughtydates.com and LonelyMILFs.com. He found an escort on the classified site Backpage and twice drove to Iowa to have sex with her. Through his counseling work, he learned about Ashley Madison, the dating service that caters to married people. It was there he met Michelle Woodard.

On their first date, Stephen accompanied Woodard to a doctor’s appointment. Within a few weeks, she was joining him on work trips. Woodard appreciated Stephen’s extraordinary calm. On one trip their connecting flight out of Philadelphia was canceled. Stephen had an 8 am meeting the next day in Hartford, Connecticut, and without fuss he rented a car and drove them the remaining 210 miles.

A month before Stephen ordered the hit on his wife, he told Woodard that he was going to try to make things work with Amy. In truth, the affair seemed to intensify his desire for a different sort of life.

Disciplined and computer-savvy, Stephen was in theory the perfect criminal for a dark-web crime. He covered his tracks by using anonymous remailers, which strip identifying information off messages, and Tor, which cloaks an IP address by randomly bouncing communications through a network of relays. And he concocted an elaborate backstory: dogdaygod was a rival dog trainer who wanted Amy dead because Amy had slept with her husband. In his dark-web persona, he transferred his own infidelity onto his wife.

Stephen scheduled the murder for the weekend of March 19, when Amy was going to be in Moline for a dog-training competition. But at the end of the weekend, he wrote to Yura, complaining that he hadn’t yet seen any news of Amy’s death. Yura explained that the hit man hadn’t found the right moment to strike: “He needs to be in a position where he can hit her car to the driver door, lateral collisin [sic] to make sure she dies.” The Besa Mafia administrator seemed to sense that it was important to dogdaygod that Amy be taken out while traveling. “We are not interested in the reason for why the people are killed,” he wrote. “But if she is your wife or some family member, we can do it in your city as well,” he said, adding that his client could leave town on the appointed day. He suggested that Amy could be killed at home and agreed that her house could be burned to the ground—for an additional 10 bitcoin, or $4,100.

“Not my wife,” Stephen replied, “but I was thinking the same thing.” The next day he scraped together the money. When he transferred the bitcoin to Besa Mafia, however, his screen refreshed and he didn’t recognize the 34-digit code that popped up. Panicking, he worried that the cryptocurrency he had labored so hard to acquire had now disappeared without a trace. He hastily copied the code and pasted it into a note on his iPhone, then emailed the code to Yura under the subject line “HELP!” Less than a minute later he deleted the note.

Yura wrote back seven hours later, assuring him that the transaction had gone through, but days passed and nothing happened. Over the coming weeks, Stephen’s messages to Yura alternated between terse disappointment and increasingly detailed instructions. “I know her husband has a big tractor, so I suspect that he has gas cans in the garage,” he wrote, adding: “I ask that you only get her and not the dad or kid.” Like a friendly, chatroom-ready Satan, Yura responded promptly with messages reinforcing his client’s basest instincts. “Yes she is really a bitch and she deserve to die,” he wrote. Ninety minutes later he added, “Please notice 80% of our hitman are gang members who do drug dealing, beatings, occasional murder.” For an additional fee, he said, dogdaygod could arrange for a more practiced killer—an ex-military Chechen sniper—to handle the job.

Stephen had spent at least $12,000 on the hit man idea. Instead of giving up or reexamining the sin he was contemplating, he appeared to become more determined. He logged onto Dream Market, a dark-web marketplace best known for selling drugs, where he could explore other methods of killing. Common sense would suggest varying usernames, but he once again appeared as dogdaygod, as if he had become the character he’d created. He would make back his loss; the payout on Amy’s life insurance policy was $700,000.

In April 2016, about two months after Stephen first ordered the hit on his wife, Besa Mafia was hacked and Yura’s messages with clients—including dogdaygod—were dumped in an online pastebin. The data dump revealed that users with names like Killerman and kkkcolsia had paid tens of thousands of dollars in bitcoin to have people killed in Australia, Canada, and Turkey, as well as the United States. The hit orders soon reached the FBI, which directed local field offices across the country to make contact with the intended victims named in the Besa Mafia data dump. FBI special agent Asher Silkey, who worked in the bureau’s Minneapolis field office, learned that someone going by the name dogdaygod wanted Amy Allwine killed. He was tasked with warning her of the threat on her life.

On a cloudy Tuesday afternoon just after Memorial Day, Silkey enlisted the help of Terry Raymond, an officer with the local police force, and they drove to the Allwines’ house. Cottage Grove is a sleepy exurb, but, like police departments around the country, the local cops had been called on to address online threats with increasing frequency. Raymond, a reserved man with angular features accented by a trim beard, had been on the force for 13 years and was the department’s designated computer forensics specialist.

When Silkey and Raymond arrived, Stephen Allwine invited them inside. He told the two law enforcement officers that Amy was out, and they stood around in silence while he called her cell. Stephen struck Raymond as socially awkward, but he didn’t think much of it. He’d dealt with all sorts in his work.

The officers drove back to the station, and Amy showed up soon after. They met her in the lobby, which featured an oil painting of the department’s canine, Blitz, and led her to a sparsely furnished interview room. Because the FBI was handling the investigation, Raymond mostly listened as Silkey explained that someone who knew Amy’s travel schedule and her daily routine wanted her dead. Amy was stunned. She was further confused when Silkey mentioned the allegation about Amy sleeping with a dog trainer’s husband. She couldn’t think of anyone who considered her an enemy. “If you have any activity that you find suspicious, give us a call,” Raymond said as she left.

A few weeks later, the Allwines installed a motion-activated video surveillance system at their home, setting up cameras at different entrances. Stephen, meanwhile, purchased a gun—a Springfield XDS 9 mm. He and Amy decided to keep it under her side of the bed. They went on a date to the shooting range.

On July 31, Amy called Silkey, distraught: Over the past week, she had received two anonymous email threats. Silkey drove over to the Allwines’ house, where Stephen printed out the emails and listened while Amy explained to the agents what had happened.

The first message came from an anonymous remailer registered in Austria. It read, in part:

Amy, I still blame you for my life falling apart … I see that you have put up a security system now, and I have been informed by people on the Internet that the police were snooping around my earlier emails. I have been assured that the emails are untraceable and they will not find me, but I cannot attack you directly with them watching.

Here is what is going to happen. Since I cannot get to you, I will come after everything else that you love.

The email went on to list location information for Amy’s family members, based on what the sender said was found on Radaris.com, a site that makes contact information and background reports available to subscribers. The writer also dropped details that only someone closely following Amy could know—the location of the gas meter on the Allwines’ house, the fact that they had moved their RV to a new parking spot, the color of the shirt that their son had worn two days earlier. “Here is how you can save your family,” the email continued. “Commit suicide.” The writer offered various methods by which she could accomplish that end.

A week later the second anonymous message arrived, chiding her for not taking her own life: “Are you so selfish that you will put your families [sic] lives at risk?”

Amy handed over her computer, hopeful that something on it might help the agents track down her potential killer. Stephen gave the agents a laptop and his Samsung Galaxy cell phone. The FBI imaged the devices, creating a copy of their applications, processes, and files, and returned them a day or two later.

Amy gave Silkey the names of people who taught at her arena, animal owners she had worked with, her best friend. The FBI agent interviewed four of them and pulled credit reports for several contacts. Few people stood to profit from Amy’s death, yet dogdaygod had paid out thousands of dollars to kill her, suggesting a personal motive. What’s more, her persecutor had taken care to instruct Yura not to kill Amy’s husband. Investigating a spouse would seem a logical measure. Silkey interviewed Stephen, in addition to imaging the devices, but it is not clear if he did more. The FBI has declined interview requests, and the Cottage Grove police did not have much insight into the bureau’s work. Beyond bringing Raymond into the initial interview and sending him a copy of the threatening emails, the agency did not involve the local police.

Meanwhile, Amy tried to cope with the vicious threats. She enrolled in the police department’s Citizen Academy, explaining on her application that she wanted to “learn about the police department, what it does, and how it works.” Sergeant Gwen Martin, who ran the course, didn’t know about the threats on Amy’s life, nor did Amy tell any of the other participants in the course about her worries as they practiced shooting targets and retrieving fingerprints from a Coke can. Amy asked to be assigned to the K-9 officer for her ride-along, and she was so enthusiastic about exchanging tips on dog obedience and scent training that the officer let her tag along for an extra hour or two. When the program was over, she celebrated with the rest of the group at a small graduation party.

But Amy still felt powerless. The occasional migraines she suffered became more frequent, and she had trouble remembering things. She put on a brave face when she taught class, but inwardly she worried that her aggressor might be among her dog-training crowd.

One summer night she sat outside with her sister, looking up at the stars and wondering who was responsible for the pall that had been cast over her life. Years earlier, when her sister started college, Amy sent her a note every week so she wouldn’t get homesick. Now her sister returned the favor. In each note she quoted scripture.

One Saturday afternoon in November, Stephen and Amy set off for church with their son. The road cut through the floodplain east of the Mississippi River, passing yellowing farm fields, yards filled with auto parts, and wooded ravines barren of leaves. The United Church of God rented space from a local Methodist congregation in a redbrick building. There was something appropriately austere about the setting, as if through architectural restraint alone the devil could be kept at bay.

Inside the chapel, the family sat in a pew, joining men in suit jackets, women with modest hemlines, and children with freshly combed hair. Daylight flooded in through a large skylight as pastor Brian Shaw recited the New Testament’s admonition against “having eyes full of adultery and that cannot cease from sin.” He spoke of Job, who trained his eyes not to look with lust at women. The cost of not following Job’s lead was dear: “When we do not control our sinful natures, they control us.”

On Sunday, Stephen woke up just before 6 am, as usual, and descended to his basement office, where he logged in to the Optanix system to start work. At noon he wandered upstairs to have lunch with Amy and their son. Amy, an avid baker, had part of a pumpkin left over from a dessert she’d made a couple days earlier, and she put it in the slow cooker on the kitchen island to roast. Soon after, she started to get woozy.

Amy’s father showed up to work on a dog door he was installing in the garage. Stephen told him that Amy wasn’t feeling well and was in the bedroom resting. Her father left without seeing her. Five minutes after he started driving home, Stephen called to ask his father-in-law to turn around and pick up his grandson, explaining that he wanted to take Amy to a clinic.

As dusk fell, Stephen drove to get gas, then retrieved the boy from his in-laws’ house and took him to Culver’s, a family-style restaurant chain. It was their Sunday night routine—dinner at Culver’s while Amy led dog-training courses—and they sat in the brightly lit space eating chicken tenders and grilled cheese.

When they returned home, the boy climbed out of the minivan and ran into the house, toward his parents’ bedroom. Amy’s body lay in an unnatural position, blood pooled around her head. The Springfield XDS 9 mm was at her side.

Stephen called 911.

“I think my wife shot herself,” he said. “There’s blood all over.”

Cottage Grove City Hall, where the police department is housed.
Alec Soth

Sergeant Gwen Martin arrived at the house a few minutes after the 911 call. When she saw Amy’s body on the floor, she remembered training her in the Citizen Academy and burst into tears. Another sergeant took over, and Martin retreated to her squad car. Regaining her composure, she turned to the laptop mounted to the dash and ran a search on police calls to the residence. She was astonished to find the report that Terry Raymond had filed about the dark-web threats to Amy’s life. Martin grabbed her phone and dialed Detective Sergeant Randy McAlister, who directed Cottage Grove investigations.

A baby-faced man of 47 who rode a Harley, McAlister often joined in the frequent joking around the department. He drank coffee from a mug that read “Due to the confidentiality of my job I don’t know what I’m doing.” But his chipper demeanor concealed his earnestness. A decade earlier, McAlister had responded to a murder in a nearby town; a couple had been killed in their home by the woman’s former boyfriend, as her children cowered nearby. The woman had previously told police that her jealous ex had contacted her in violation of a court order. Frustrated that the system had failed that woman, McAlister started a program aimed at protecting potential victims from stalking and targeted violence. When Raymond mentioned the dark-web threats Amy had received, he suggested they be compared to a database of threats kept by the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit; it might help them come up with a profile of a potential perpetrator. But he had no authority in the case.

Now he raced to the Allwines’ home. As he entered through the garage, the aroma of roasting pumpkin, still in the slow cooker, hit his nose. This struck him as odd; people don’t typically start cooking right before killing themselves. Other things about the scene were off: There were blood smears on both sides of the bedroom door. And while the mud room floor was covered with dog hair, the floor in the adjacent hall was clean.

As McAlister waited for the medical examiner and state criminal investigators to arrive, an officer drove Stephen and his son to the station. As a colleague sat with the boy in the station’s break room, Raymond escorted Stephen to the same interview room where he and Silkey had met with Amy five months earlier. Raymond pulled on a pair of latex gloves and swabbed Stephen’s cheek for DNA. “Are you going to get that from my in-laws?” Stephen asked.

“No, it should just be you and your son,” Raymond said. He asked Stephen to run through what he had done that day.

Stephen was cooperative, though Raymond thought his demeanor was wooden for a man who had just lost his wife. He reminded the detective that Amy had an FBI file; he said that her computer had been acting strangely. “Being in the IT industry, it’s frustrating because I know how things are supposed to work in a legitimate world,” he said, adding: “I don’t know anything about hacking or anything like that.”

For the next three days, investigators combed the crime scene. State technicians sprayed a chemical called luminol on the floors, then flicked off the lights. Where the luminol hit blood or cleaning solution, it glowed bright blue. The glow showed that the hallway had been cleaned; it also lit up some footprints leading back and forth from the bedroom to the laundry room.

The Cottage Grove police executed a search warrant on the house. McAlister stationed himself at the dining room table, logging evidence. Raymond descended to Stephen’s basement office. Stepping through the door, he saw every surface covered with junk: file folders, tangles of cords, external drives, SD cards, a voice recorder, and a Fitbit. There were hard drives of a type that hadn’t been used in nearly a decade. On Stephen’s desk were three monitors and a MacBook Pro laptop—not the machine he’d given the FBI.

The officers brought their haul upstairs, then one by one handed the items to McAlister to log.

“Holy crap,” he thought as the equipment amassed. Then, “Jeez, no más.” But the devices and drives kept coming. Sixty-six in all.

Because the crime involved a local death, the Cottage Grove police took control of the investigation. Two and a half weeks after Amy died, the FBI sent over her file. When the police opened the documents, McAlister and Raymond saw—for the first time—the full Besa Mafia messages. That was when they learned that the person who wanted Amy dead went by the name dogdaygod.

By this point, Stephen was a suspect, but there was no direct evidence linking him to the murder. That his DNA was on everything was hardly remarkable; it was his house. Video from the Allwines’ security system revealed nothing abnormal, though the records were incomplete. Stephen explained that he and Amy had neglected to activate the camera over the sliding glass door because their dogs were constantly going in and out. McAlister hoped the answers might be inside the devices that Raymond had lugged out of the Allwines’ basement.

From the moment the Besa Mafia files appeared in the pastebin, bloggers had concluded that the site was a scam. One after another, Yura’s clients complained that the hits they’d ordered hadn’t been carried out. But McAlister didn’t want to take anything for granted. He and Detective Jared Landkamer identified 10 other targets of Besa Mafia orders in the United States and contacted the police departments where they lived. They might get leads in their case or perhaps save other lives.

McAlister divvied up the electronic work. He sent the computers to a digital forensics specialist at a neighboring police department. Landkamer subpoenaed the Allwines’ emails—and then spent many long days reading them. Raymond started by extracting data from Stephen’s phones. In a windowless room lined with department-issue monitors, he deployed software that sorted the data—apps here, call logs there—and reconstructed timelines for the devices. On the phone Stephen had given to the FBI to image, Raymond found the apps Orfox and Orbot, which are used to access Tor. He also found text messages containing confirmation codes from LocalBitcoins. The FBI seemed to have either missed them or paid them little mind.

When he scanned Amy’s phone, he could see that, on the day of her death, she seemed to be growing progressively more confused. At 1:48 pm she visited the Wikipedia page for vertigo. At 1:49, she typed “DUY” into Bing. Then, one minute later, “EYE.” Then “DIY VWHH.” It was as if she were desperate to understand why the room was spinning but couldn’t execute a simple search.

In an interview with a state investigator, Stephen had confessed to his affair with Woodard. Raymond found a contact for “Michelle” in Stephen’s phone, and when investigators questioned Woodard, she told them about the birthday lunch, when Stephen messaged that he had locked his keys in the car while buying bitcoin. Stephen’s call history confirmed that he had phoned for roadside assistance that day from a Wendy’s in Minneapolis. The detectives used the text message confirmation codes on Stephen’s phone to find his LocalBitcoins account. That led them to his correspondence with a seller about exchanging $6,000 in cash.

In Stephen’s devices, Landkamer found secondary email addresses that led to usernames he used to access Backpage and LonelyMILFS.com. That wasn’t incriminating on its own, but it did suggest a motive.

While Stephen had cloaked most of his criminal activity, he did not purge his more innocuous internet search history. On February 16, a few minutes before dogdaygod first proposed killing Amy in Moline, Stephen had Googled “moline il” on his MacBook Pro. One day later, he looked up their life insurance policy. In July, shortly before Amy received the first threatening email that included addresses gleaned from Radaris, he visited the Radaris pages for Amy’s family members.

Murder was rare in Cottage Grove, and the detectives, confronted with circumstantial evidence and the slipperiness of the dark web, obsessed over the case. Lying in bed one night after reading Amy’s FBI file, Landkamer searched “dogdaygod” in Google. When he saw the results, he called out to his wife. The search engine had indexed some posts on Dream Market, the dark-web marketplace where drugs were sold.

Landkamer immediately texted McAlister what he’d found. McAlister fired up Tor on his personal laptop and pulled up the full threads on Dream Market. In one thread, dogdaygod asked if anyone sold scopolamine, a powerful prescription drug. McAlister had worked as a paramedic, so he knew that scopolamine was prescribed for motion sickness, but it could also make people pliable and amnesiac, earning it the nickname Devil’s Breath. As he scrolled down, he came to a comment from a user who assumed that dogdaygod wanted to use scopolamine recreationally. “There is a seller,” the person wrote, “but avoid that shit mate. It’s dangerous as fuck and you WILL kill someone.”

Later, Amy’s gastric contents tested positive for scopolamine. But it was a quirk in Apple backups that provided the strongest piece of evidence. The digital forensics specialist from a neighboring department found, archived in Stephen’s MacBook Pro, that a note with a bitcoin wallet address had appeared on Stephen’s iPhone back in March 2016. This was 23 seconds before dogdaygod frantically wrote Yura with the same 34-digit bitcoin wallet code. Forty seconds after dogdaygod messaged Yura, the note was deleted from Stephen’s phone. But deleted files don’t disappear until they’re overwritten by other files. Several months later, when Stephen backed up his phone to iTunes, the crucial history was preserved on his laptop.

McAlister was elated. The detectives had linked Stephen’s offline persona, a church elder concerned with the propriety of dance moves, with his online ones—the philanderer and the aggrieved would-be murderer. The enticing anonymity of the dark web that nurtured Stephen’s crime had given him a sense of omnipotence. He failed to appreciate that this cloak of power didn’t follow him to the clear web and to the real world.

Stephen Allwine is now incarcerated in the Minnesota Correctional Facility, in Oak Park Heights, Minnesota.
Alec Soth

Stephen Allwine’s trial lasted for eight days. County prosecutors paraded a string of colorful witnesses to the stand: the manager of the pawn shop where Stephen sold his silver, the Backpage escort in Iowa, and Woodard. McAlister held up the murder weapon in court, and in one awkward moment that would become the subject of endless jokes at the Cottage Grove police station, Jared Landkamer defined “MILF” for the court.

Prosecutors Fred Fink and Jamie Kreuser used the testimony to outline a theory: Stephen had poisoned Amy with a large dose of scopolamine, either to kill or incapacitate her. Either way, while she grew dazed and light-headed, she didn’t die. So Stephen shot her with their gun in the hallway. Then he moved the body into the bedroom and cleaned up the blood. When he left to get gas and take his son to Culver’s, he was careful to save the receipts.

The jury deliberated for six hours before finding Stephen guilty. On February 2, he appeared in a packed courtroom for sentencing. One by one, friends and family told the judge how much Amy had meant to them. (Amy’s family declined to be interviewed.) Then Stephen rose to plead his case.

Breathlessly, he tried to refute the technical testimony about backup files and bitcoin wallets. Then he shifted to his spiritual gifts. In jail, where he had been held during the trial, he was ministering to drug addicts and child molesters. He had converted at least three nonbelievers, he said.

“Mr. Allwine,” the judge said when he had finished, “my perceptions aren’t going to alter the sentence in this case. But my perception is that you’re an incredible actor. That you can turn tears on and off. That you are a hypocrite and that you are cold.” He sentenced him to life without parole. (The case is headed to appeals court.) From a room adjacent to the courtroom, McAlister watched through a window with Raymond and Landkamer, taking satisfaction as the judge admonished the criminal. But the moment was not without uneasiness. McAlister saw why Stephen might not have triggered alarm bells during the FBI’s dark-web investigation: Stephen and Amy appeared to have a happy relationship, with no history of violence or substance abuse. He knew that hindsight bias could color investigators’ conclusions, but he also had the feeling that Amy’s death might have been prevented. Threat assessment experts use a four-part checklist to determine whether an anonymous harasser is an intimate partner. Amy’s harasser met all four conditions in that test: The person closely tracked her whereabouts, seemed to live nearby, knew her habits and future plans, and spoke of her with contempt or disgust.

In the months following the trial, McAlister was promoted to captain. From time to time, he offers advice to police departments dealing with dark-web crime. There were no other deaths tied back to Besa Mafia customers, but Yura reportedly started other hit-man-for-hire scam sites—Crime Bay, Sicilian Hitmen, Cosa Nostra. It was almost like Yura was the devil watching from a distance, smirking as the seeds he planted germinated and grew into full-blown evil.

First published in Wired.

If You Want to Kill Someone, We Are the Right Guys, by Mara Hvistendahl, is brought to you by Deca.

Last spring, my wife, wanting to change career, was accepted by nursing school, and our family – the two of us, two young boys, a middle-aged dog – suddenly had to move house. We were leaving Seattle, where we had lived for a decade, a city with ample rain, though one within range of volcanoes and earthquakes, for a small town in the mountains of southern Oregon. I put the climate change books I had agreed to write about for this paper in a cardboard box and put the box on top of the others starting to fill our garage, and soon spring turned to endless, destructive summer.

The town we were moving to is called Ashland. It’s beautiful, a surprise cluster of civilisation just north of Oregon’s border with California, where restaurants and shops and stately wooden houses sit at the foot of a forested mountain range called the Siskiyous. It has twenty thousand residents but swells during the academic year with students and in warmer months with tourists, many of them here for the summer-long Oregon Shakespeare Festival. There are flower-filled parks, excellent schools, people riding carbon-fibre mountain bikes, retirees driving luxury cars, travellers with dreadlocks, nice dogs reliably on leashes. Restaurants and real estate agencies line Main Street. People in Ashland are often from somewhere else, and they pay good money to be here. The town’s economy relies, above everything else, on its quality of life.

I first heard about the smoke problem from a publisher of religious and philosophical books who had lived in Ashland for 24 years, raising his three children in a blue, three-bedroom house near the business district. Now they were grown up and publishing was dying and he found he had trouble breathing in the summer months because there were an increasing number of fires in the surrounding hills. The forests here are dense and dry. The valley is shaped like a trough. When wildfires burned, the smoke lingered in the valley for weeks, and he had to stay indoors. It had happened almost every summer for the previous six years: it was the ‘new normal’, people in Ashland said, an effect of climate change. The publisher was moving to Los Angeles, a metropolis once famed for its smog, partly because the air there was sure to be better. When I visited him one rainy May evening during a house-hunting trip – his home was supposedly a steal because it was selling for under half a million dollars – we drank tea at his kitchen table, surrounded by his boxes and furniture and former life, him at the end of something and me at the beginning. The house wasn’t quite right for us. I decided we should rent instead and found a place a few blocks away, across the creek.

Jenny liked the old house we ended up with. We moved her in one June weekend, the boys crawling in and out of the doors of the secret closet in their new bedroom. She would live here alone for the first month, riding her bike to and from the university, eating at the grocery co-op, revelling in the fact that in a small town everything is ten minutes from everything else. The boys and I returned to Seattle, and wrapped up our existence there. ‘We’re going to need new sunglasses for the boys,’ Jenny told me early on. It was always sunny. The air was so crisp. It was so easy to get around. We’d be spending a lot of time outside. Then, a week before we were to drive the nine hours down Interstate 5 and finally join her, bad news: ‘The smoke started,’ she said. ‘It came early this year.’ Although there was little imminent danger of its spreading to Ashland, the nearest fire – the result of a lightning strike near Hells Peak – was just nine miles from our new home.

When a building is burning, firefighters usually try to extinguish every last flame. It’s a fight to the death, over in a matter of hours. When thousands or tens of thousands of acres of forest are burning, the major goal is containment, a kind of negotiated peace with a force greater than man. Wildland firefighters try to halt a blaze’s progress, encircling it with natural or manmade firebreaks. They work to keep the flames away from people and property, hoping to hang on until environmental conditions – humidity, wind speed and direction – change and the autumn rains finally arrive. Many wildfires are left to smoulder, and to smoke, for weeks or months on end, causing little newsworthy damage. Disasters like the conflagration that consumed Paradise, California, in November, killing 81 people – the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in the state’s history – do happen. But the climate disaster facing millions of other residents of the American West is more insidious. In a town like Ashland, the smoke blots out the colour of the houses and the hills, rendering everything in grayscale, a slow-burn diminution of the way life here used to be.

On the afternoon the boys and I arrived the town and the Rogue Valley where it sits were surrounded by nine separate wildfires. The next day, Ashland registered the worst air quality in the United States: 321 on the Air Quality Index. The AQI scale is colour-coded – green-yellow-orange-red-purple-maroon – to denote health risk, and we were well into maroon, or ‘hazardous’. Outside, the air was totally still and the temperature had hit 100°F. It looked like dusk in the middle of the day. Inside, the boys’ upstairs room was like a furnace, but we couldn’t open the skylights for fear of letting the smoke in. We rushed out to buy an air-conditioning unit. At the hardware store down the road, we got the last child-size smoke masks on the shelves, the ones rated N95 for the particulate matter the internet said we really needed to keep out of their lungs. Prepping for the unknown, we ordered a dozen more masks from China on Amazon.

The boys’ first summer camp was in a nature area five minutes from our house. They were meant to spend the whole week outside. Instead they spent it in the cramped quarters of the visitors’ centre, where they sang songs about the forest and built fairy houses out of bark and moss and acorns. Some days, the AQI dropped into the orange zone, and at least once into the yellow, but the smoke always returned when the wind shifted. I tried to walk the dog whenever the air looked best, helped by the AQI app I’d downloaded to my phone, and I grew used to wearing my smoke mask in public, grunting muffled hellos to other pedestrians in masks of their own, fellow travellers in the apocalypse. It began to feel normal. In the café where I went to work on my laptop, I noticed how routine this existence was becoming for others, too. Walk in, take off mask, order coffee. Put mask back on, walk out. In Seattle, I had always taken my rain jacket when I went outside. Here, one had to remember the smoke mask. Your baselines shift. You adapt.

By the end of the week, however, our younger son, then three, had developed a rough cough. I took him to a clinic, and the next day we decided to get him and his brother out of Ashland until the smoke had gone. I loaded up the car again and drove the boys and the dog four hours north-east to the other side of the Cascade Mountains, where my extended family had a cabin. We were climate refugees, I joked, escaping to higher elevations and latitudes in search of a more hospitable environment. The six-year-old asked me what ‘refugee’ meant, and I had to explain, but told him I didn’t really mean it. All we could honestly claim was a new-found feeling of dislocation, of being stuck between lives. I had brought the long neglected box of climate change books with me, and now, safe in the mountain air, I began reading.

*

There were four books in the box. They are very different from one another, but as a whole they represent a generational break with the climate change books before them. This is because not one of them is strictly about the topic at hand. Not one of them bothers to argue that climate change is real. Not one bothers to explain how societies can work to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Not one gets hung up on atmospheric science or computer models or the Paris Agreement. Instead, they simply take for granted that temperatures will rise and that the world as we know it will soon be fundamentally altered. The migration scholar writes about migration and the seed scientist about seeds and the ecosocialist about urban capitalism, but climate change – the biggest, most pervasive ongoing event in the world – is always present in the background. This is by necessity. Climate change is and will be everywhere. It doesn’t stand apart from our daily existence, not any more.

Edward Struzik’s Firestorm is about the coming age of ‘megafires’ – wildfires covering an area of 100,000 acres or more. The phenomenon isn’t new, but megafires now occur with unprecedented frequency, and are uprooting more and more people from their homes. In Canada, the average area affected annually has doubled since global temperatures began their abrupt rise in the 1970s, and it is likely to double again by 2050. Quoting a favourite scientist, Mike Flannigan, Struzik lays out the three simple reasons for this. First, warmer temperatures mean drier forests. Second, warmer temperatures mean more lightning strikes. Third, warmer temperatures mean longer fire seasons. Struzik centres his story on the Horse River Fire, also known as the ‘Beast’, which struck Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada’s tar-sands capital, in 2016. It spread across 1.5 million acres, destroyed 2500 homes and 12,000 vehicles, and forced 88,000 residents to flee. The firestorm was of such ferocity it created its own weather patterns, including lightning strikes that set off smaller fires to herald its approach. The irony of the fire’s location wasn’t lost on Struzik. ‘Behind us glowed the lights of fossil fuel-driven human activity,’ he wrote of a night spent in the burned-out forest not far from the site of the $7.3 billion tar-sands project, ‘emitting greenhouse gases that are warming the climate and triggering atmospheric disturbances, driving wildfire to burn bigger, faster, hotter, and more often.’

Struzik describes how Fort McMurray residents escaped from the Beast while bureaucrats were still fighting over how to respond; dives into the scientific mystery of the fire’s lightning-producing pyrocumulonimbus clouds, or pyroCbs; describes how politics have caused forest managers to retreat from the practice of controlled burning, allowing forests to become choked with unburned fuel; explains how drought and invasive beetles have made trees more susceptible to fire; explores the way people’s encroachment on woodland has made more homes susceptible to fire; and underscores the fact that water supplies which may already be facing climate stress are further threatened through contamination by wildfires. He dedicates an entire chapter – bless him – to the dangers unsuspecting people face from smoke inhalation from distant fires. But when the book concludes with a quiet call for better evacuation planning and more research – in both Canada and the United States federal budgets go overwhelmingly to firefighting rather than fire science – the reader is left with an uncomfortable realisation: it’s too late. From here on it’s triage. Some future fires may be allowed to burn so as to clear out accumulated fuel, and some may be suppressed as they are today, even if this increases the risk of later megafire. Either way, our forests will burn.

This human knack for increasing long-term risk by trying to diminish it in the short term doesn’t apply only to fires. In Extreme Cities, Ashley Dawson, a New York-based activist and scholar of postcolonialism, argues persuasively that cities are becoming ground zero for climate change. They are home to most of the world’s people and the source of most of its emissions. We have built our megacities – 13 of the largest twenty are ports – in sinking river deltas. Half of the world’s population already lives close to the sea, and now more people, fleeing rural drought or poverty, are moving there. ‘Two great tides are converging on the world’s cities,’ Dawson writes. ‘The first of these is a human tide. In 2007, humanity became a predominantly city-dwelling species.’ The second tide, of course, is the literal one: the rising seas, which may be metres higher by the end of the century.

Dawson’s book is about the way responses to climate change are being shaped by the entrenched interests of capital. He takes aim at the comfortable notions of ‘resilience’ and ‘green growth’ pushed by – among others – the former mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg and his cast of visiting Dutch architects, questioning post-Hurricane Sandy projects like the Big U seawall proposed for lower Manhattan: it would attract tourists and protect Wall Street, but displace storm surge waters to surrounding, poorer neighbourhoods. ‘Under present social conditions,’ he writes, such schemes are ‘likely to be employed by elites to create architectures of apartheid and exclusionary zones of refuge’. For Dawson, New York is the ‘extreme city’ problem in microcosm. The affluent invest their money in such places because real estate is where the big returns lie as people move into cities – 60 per cent of global wealth, he claims, is in real estate – and because under capitalism investments must grow in value. City planners are then compelled to protect these growing investments, which gives speculators confidence that the city is a safe harbour for yet more investments, and thus overall risk creeps up with the tides.

The $40 billion, Dutch-built Great Garuda seawall in Jakarta, soon to be the biggest in the world, will displace thousands of shack-dwellers on an existing seawall and put tens of thousands of fishermen out of work – but it will give developers a chance to profit from selling luxury homes on artificial islands. The Eko Atlantic development on a peninsula off the coast of Lagos is patrolled by heavily armed guards and surrounded by shanty towns built on stilts where the chefs and nannies live. ‘Both Eko Atlantic and the Great Garuda,’ Dawson writes, with excusably escalating rhetoric, ‘offer visions of the extreme social injustice of emerging neoliberal urban phantasmagoria in a time of climate change.’ Just as Struzik makes it plain that some forests will just have to burn, Dawson asserts that some cities – Miami, for example – will have to be abandoned. Eventually, taking a page from Naomi Klein’s concept of disaster capitalism, he calls for ‘disaster communism’ in the face of climate change – a radical redistribution of wealth that liberates poor and rich alike from our cult of growth before it literally sinks us.

Before the boys and I had to leave the cabin I had time to read the third book, Cary Fowler’s Seeds on Ice. It is a retelling of the creation of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, commonly known as the ‘doomsday’ seed vault. Built into an Arctic mountainside to safeguard key crops – rice, wheat, sorghum, maize, beans – from climate change or terrorist attack, the vault holds almost 900,000 seed varieties from almost every country in the world. Fowler explains that he and a colleague at the international agricultural research organisation CGIAR became afraid for the world’s seedbanks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He describes his first visit to Svalbard, where he ate polar bear carpaccio in an old hotel in the coal-mining town of Longyearbyen. The island’s political and climatic stability added to its appeal, and the Norwegian government was persuaded to pay for the project. To make the vault impregnable it was decided to tunnel into solid stone and permafrost rather than repurpose an old mining shaft.

Fowler explains why this all matters. ‘Agriculture faces its most severe set of challenges since the Neolithic period,’ he writes. One problem is the need to grow more food for more people with less water and land and phosphorus. The other problem is climate change: warmer average temperatures, warmer extreme temperatures, warmer nights, longer heatwaves, variable rains. ‘We are headed towards climates that our crops have never before experienced. Global warming will give us climates that are pre-rice, pre-wheat, pre-potato, pre-agriculture.’ Even if Germany’s future temperature range becomes like that of Italy today, Italian crops are not guaranteed to grow in German fields. Soil and pests will remain different, and so too will the length of the days. What plant breeders and farmers will need is a stockpile of heat-tolerant traits so they can produce new crop varieties, and this is what the seed vault was designed to be. When I looked up the vault online, however, I found that it had suffered a breach soon after Fowler’s book was published. No seeds were damaged, but a dramatic Arctic warm spell during what had been Earth’s warmest recorded year had brought heavy rain to Svalbard instead of the usual light snow, and the vault’s entrance had been flooded with meltwater. Norway has recently pledged one hundred million kroner – about £10 million – to build a new entrance tunnel and revamp the vault’s emergency power and refrigeration systems: a Plan B for civilisation’s Plan B.

I didn’t do much reading after that one, not for a while. The boys and I had to drive to our next destination – my parents’ house, two hours from the cabin – and as soon as we were halfway settled I had to complete another late writing assignment that might at first seem unrelated to this one, an investigation into immigration enforcement in the age of Trump. Jenny was still stuck in class in Ashland in the smoke. Now she drove an air-conditioned car to and from the university with the windows rolled up, and her bike sat idle. I kept checking my AQI app. Smoke was still choking the Rogue Valley, and haze spread from other fires to the rest of the Pacific Northwest as the summer dragged on. The boys and I stayed away from Ashland until the end of August, when the AQI edged more frequently into the yellow zone and their school year began and I dressed them in smoke masks and new shoes and took them to meet their teachers.

There was no distinct moment when the smoke stopped. But in September it was more often the case that when the wind blew it away, it didn’t get blown right back again. We went outside with sunglasses on. We kept waiting for the hills to disappear again, for our fragile string of yellow and green days to turn orange, but eventually we realised it was over. Now we could assess the damage. That month, regional vineyards got a letter from a major buyer, a California winery, saying that their contracts were cancelled due to ‘smoke taint’. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, engine of the local economy, announced that the smoke had cost it at least $2 million in lost ticket revenue. The knock-on effects on hotels, shops and restaurants amounted to many millions more, and a few businesses closed down. For me, it hadn’t been nearly that bad. I’d lost some savings and some time, but suddenly the air was crisp and the boys were at school and I could sit and type for uninterrupted hours.

I thought I might find a moment to read the last book in my pile during our reunited family’s first trip together, a long weekend in California to attend a friend’s wedding. But the day before we were meant to leave, a wildfire just south of the state border jumped over Interstate 5, the major north-south artery. The news showed images of abandoned trucks, smoke still spiralling up from their blackened shells. To get to the wedding, we took a detour through the mountains on a series of minor roads, driving late into the night behind an endless line of cars and trucks. The drive was long, and the drive back even longer – 12 hours – and I didn’t read a thing.

In early October, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, meeting in South Korea, issued its worst report yet: the consequences of even a 1.5ºC rise in global temperatures, as opposed to the previously studied threshold of 2ºC, would be widespread catastrophe. The worst effects – a mass die-off of coral reefs, coastal flooding, widespread food shortages – could come as soon as 2040, well within the lifetimes of most people living today. The report’s authors stressed that it was still technically possible to avert this through a massive transformation of our energy economy, but even they admitted that this was according to the laws of physics and chemistry, not politics. When I saw the headlines about the IPCC report, I was at a conference in Florida, where Hurricane Michael – one of the strongest storms ever to hit the continental United States, soon to be responsible for dozens of deaths – was bearing down. I headed to the airport to fly home less than 24 hours before Michael made landfall, the sky already dark and the rain battering the windscreen of my taxi and flooding the streets. Back in Ashland, things seemed pretty normal for a week or so, but then residents began catching glimpses of a mountain lion. It was seen near the theatres. It was beside the supermarket. It was by the university. It was roaming outside the library, with two cubs. Biologists suggest that mountain lions may increasingly follow their favourite prey – deer – into urban areas as the hinterlands go dry. While there was nothing definitively to tie this particular cat to climate change, you can forgive me for having my suspicions. It was that kind of year.

*

When I finally turned to Todd Miller’s Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration and Homeland Security, the mid-term elections were approaching and Trump had dispatched US troops to the Mexican border to repel a caravan of hungry asylum-seekers from Central America. In the news, there had been little attempt to explain why farmers from Guatemala and Honduras – two ‘dry corridor’ countries wracked by consecutive years of drought – were trekking to the United States. Miller’s book was a welcome antidote. ‘Just like super-typhoons, rising seas and heatwaves, border build-up and militarisation are by-products of climate change,’ he writes. ‘Just as tidal floods will inundate the streets of Miami and the Arctic ice sheets will melt, if nothing changes we will find ourselves living in an increasingly militarised world of surveillance, razor wire, border walls, armed patrols, detention centres and relocation camps.’

One important revelation in Miller’s book is that climate change science is wholly uncontroversial inside the military and security establishment, even high up in the Trump administration. It’s widely accepted that the warming world will soon see many more refugees – 50 million, 250 million, a billion, nobody can say for sure – even if climate migrants can’t formally be called refugees under present international law. Miller attends security conferences and border-tech exhibitions on two continents, and traces the use of the term ‘threat multiplier’, which has been employed by governments and analysts since 2004 to describe the way climate change adds to the usual array of threats against our financial and political order. He shares Dawson’s concern that we’re hurtling ever more rapidly towards a world of haves and have-nots. ‘More dangerous than climate disruption was the climate migrant. More dangerous than the drought were the people who can’t farm because of the drought. More dangerous than the hurricane were the people displaced by the storm.’

Miller tells the story of Yeb and A.G. Saño, two Filipino brothers whose hometown was largely destroyed by 2013’s Super Typhoon Haiyan and whose home region was arguably destroyed by the police state that rose in the typhoon’s wake. The brothers marched a thousand miles on foot across the Alps to arrive in Paris for the start of the 2015 UN Climate Summit, with Miller joining them for the last few kilometres. But the climate talks took place just weeks after Islamic State’s attack on the Bataclan concert hall, and Paris was in a state of emergency when the marchers entered the city. The brothers – foreign, brown, idealistic – put their arms around each other outside a café for a photo op, and a man came out and yelled at them, thrusting a newspaper with an image commemorating Bataclan in their faces. ‘People here in France are not concerned about climate change,’ he told them. ‘The people of France are concerned about terrorism.’ The next day, Miller walked alongside protesters demanding carbon cuts, running when they were attacked by riot police. It’s a blunt but effective metaphor. ‘As I ran,’ he writes, ‘I realised I had arrived at the true climate summit.’

In Ashland, the mountain lion disappeared from town and the Shakespeare festival laid off a few dozen employees. State and federal fire officials traded barbs in the local newspaper, which started running a countdown clock to the 2019 fire season. A local lawmaker proposed that college students should take a year off to work on tree-thinning projects. The bookstore I frequented was put up for sale, but I overheard two long-time patrons predicting that there would be no serious bids. ‘Ashland’s not what it used to be,’ one said. My younger son learned to ride a bike in the sun in the park just down the block. My older son started playing soccer, and by the pitch one morning another parent told me about a campsite near the Pacific that filled with local families every summer once the smoke began. ‘Maybe we’ll be like Europeans,’ he said. ‘Everyone will just leave every August.’ It almost sounded reasonable.

First published in the London Review of Books

Smoked Out, by McKenzie Funk, is brought to you by Deca.

In the summer of 1893, the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák took his wife and six children to the frontier town of Spillville, Iowa, for a three-month stay. This was not a random choice. Having arrived in America the year before, Dvořák had been living near Gramercy Park in New York City and working as the director of the National Conservatory of Music of America. Though he had managed to compose his Symphony No. 9, From the New World—a grand triumph at its New York Philharmonic premiere and to this day his most popular work—the babble and chaos of the city grated on his nerves.

The composer’s secretary, Josef Kovařik, who had accompanied him to America,  offered a suggestion: Why not take a vacation in Spillville, a prairie town populated almost exclusively by immigrant Czechs? This was where Kovařik’s father lived and worked as a schoolmaster. It was an idyllic place where Dvořák could speak Bohemian on the dirt streets, drink pilsner, play the card game darda with his countrymen, perhaps find some further inspiration for his music.

Upon his arrival there, Dvořák did all of that and more. He took early-morning walks along the Turkey River and found a stump of a white oak on which to sit and listen to songbirds. He played the organ in the loft of St. Wenceslaus Catholic Church during morning Mass and strolled the brick sidewalks in the evening under kerosene lamps. People in town began to call him “the master.” He would later describe the summer as among the happiest of his life.

He wrote in a letter home: “These people—all the poorest of the poor—came about forty years ago, mostly from the neighborhood of Pisek, Tabor, and Budejovice. And after great hardships and struggle, they are very well off here. I like to hear stories about the harshness of the early winters and the building of the railroad.” The residents of nearby frontier towns expressed a grudging admiration for the industriousness of the Bohemians in Spillville but also frowned on their drinking, their ineptitude with English, their Catholicism, and their clannishness. In larger cities such as Chicago, the Czechs picked up an unflattering nickname: bohunks, or hunkies, the likely antecedent of the slur honky.

This past Independence Day weekend, 125 years after that Dvořák summer, I went to Spillville, to a city park not far from the white oak stump upon which the composer had sat. The town has a population of approximately 350—almost exactly what it was in 1893—some of whom are the great-great-grandchildren of those who heard Dvořák play the organ at St. Wenceslaus. Most still have Czech names. Their neighbors no longer consider them suspicious. On the day of my visit, hundreds of people from the region had descended upon the town, spreading blankets on the grassy part of a baseball field, eating ice cream, and watching their children chase each other around the evening shadows, while waiting for the start of what I’d heard was the best fireworks show in northeast Iowa.

It had been an uneasy year in this part of the state, especially when it came to the subject of immigration. After President Trump instituted a policy to separate young children from their asylum-seeking parents at the U.S.-Mexico border, some in Iowa worried that—after a long period of easing tensions—federal agents were going to once again raid meat-processing plants that employed foreign laborers. Anxiety over immigration was also threatening to spill into the upcoming congressional election between the incumbent Rod Blum, a 63-year-old Republican millionaire with roots in the Tea Party, and Abby Finkenauer, the 29-year-old daughter of a union pipefitter and welder and a rising star in the Democratic party.

I drank a beer with Randy Ferrie, a 59-year-old supervisor for a company that makes horse trailers in the nearby town of Cresco, and asked him about the election. He told me he didn’t like the new closed-door attitude of the United States.

“It wasn’t like this when I was younger,” he told me. “A lot of people in this country are indeed very generous, but to be honest, we’ve gotten selfish and stuck up. Now it’s about, ‘If new people coming here doesn’t benefit me, why would I want to help?’ The American Dream is eroding, and it is scary.”

Ferrie said that although business was good, he was having a hard time finding qualified laborers. The answer, he said, was simply to make coming here easier. “If we want to have business or manufacturing, then we need to have bodies.”

The fireworks began, and we paused to watch the red, green, and purple flashes exploding in the summer sky, reflecting off hundreds of upturned faces. A recorded medley of Van Halen, Lee Greenwood, and a Kate Smith imitator singing “God Bless America” boomed from a set of outdoor speakers while the fireworks fizzed off from three battle stations on the lip of a nearby sewer lagoon. A lightbulb display flashed military iconography: a jet, some tanks, clustered soldiers lifting a flag Iwo Jima–style. And the inevitable finale of a multicolored cannonade, which left the air fragrant with sulfur.

Most people folded their blankets, trashed their ice cream wrappers, and joined the scrum of cars inching for the exit at Highway 325, but about three dozen hardcores stayed to drink more beer inside the Inwood Ballroom, a wood-framed dance hall built in the early 1920s that has been expanded and lovingly restored over the years. Bobby Goldsboro and Louis Armstrong, Glenn Miller and Lawrence Welk all played here on their tours through corn country. Tonight’s act was a band called Yukon, featuring the mayor of Spillville, Mike Klimesh, on lead guitar. He wore his blond hair in a large swoop on top with buzzcut sides and a red plaid button-down over a T-shirt with the legend “I’m a Badass.”

Klimesh is a direct descendant of one of the six Czech families that founded Spillville in the 19th century, and he has a pragmatic view of his mayoral post, which he has held for nearly two decades. “I’m like a plumber,” he told me. “When they flush the toilet, they want to know the shit stays gone.”

Politicians are expected to court favor, eating enough dinners in the reserved back room of the Golden Corral to double their diastolic blood pressure.

Like many who live here, he’s a lifelong Republican. The rural precinct in which Spillville is located came out heavily for Donald Trump in 2016, by a 30-point margin over Hillary Clinton. “They weren’t Trump supporters so much as Republican presidential candidate supporters,” Klimesh explained. “Their tolerance is based on neighborliness. I can be conservative about my guns and the government sticking its nose where it doesn’t belong. But I’m not paranoid about immigrants.”

As the mayor’s band launched into a cover of “Copperhead Road,” I stood next to a farmer with a baseball cap and a Czech last name. He swayed gently back and forth and told me he would vote for the incumbent president even though the recently announced tariffs on soybeans would cost him thousands of dollars.

“It’s going to hurt, but we have to get through it,” he said. “We have to shake things up. We have to make things right again.”

The state that novelist and short-story writer T. C. Boyle once called “the Mesopotamia of the Midwest, the glorious, farinaceous, black-loamed hogbutt of the nation,” is often held up as a bellwether for the collective American mood, and this has a lot to do with Iowa’s outsize role in electing presidents.

Its quadrennial January caucus—conceived in the early 1970s as a way to strip nominating power from party elites—takes place not in the solitude of the voting booth but inside school gymnasiums, living rooms, church basements, anywhere that neighbors can gather, politely talk among themselves, and cast their votes to steer our national destiny in ways that resemble a lithograph of old-style, face-to-face democracy.

Politicians are expected to court favor in the same ponderous way: by buttonholing those of voting age at county fairs or on the street, and eating enough dinners in the reserved back room of the local Golden Corral to double their diastolic blood pressure. As an old local joke goes, a farmer is asked if he’s going to vote for a particular famous presidential candidate. “Don’t know,” he answers. “I haven’t met him yet.”

Wikimedia Commons

The U.S. representative of the district that includes Spillville, Rod Blum, supported Trump’s ban on travel to the United States by residents of seven predominantly Muslim countries. He told me in an emailed statement that although he wants to improve the visa program for farmworkers, “the massive influx in illegal immigration is driving down wages and making jobs less lucrative for those here legally. This must end.”

Finkenauer, his opponent, broke out of a crowded Democratic pack in part with a campaign video in which she held up her father’s welding sweatshirt, covered in burn marks. “I’m running for Congress so families like mine have a champion in D.C.,” she said. But immigration didn’t figure heavily into her message. No statement about her position appeared on her website until deep into the summer, and even then, it largely rested on platitudes.

I went to hear her speak at the opening of a Democratic Party office in the city of Decorah, and the crowd was so big that the event was moved to a larger space next door. After the customary thank yous and warm-up speeches from local office seekers, Finkenauer got up and spoke in the flat-vowel accent particular to the Upper Midwest.

“This does the heart good to see this,” she said. “Folks in Iowa care about others. That’s who we are. We are not a country or a state that grows out of fear and division. We grow out of hope. That’s what’s on the line—hope. The future of our state is on the line here.”

It wasn’t a bad five-minute stump speech, though it was devoid of specifics. I edged out to the sidewalk in hopes of asking her a question on immigration. Several emails to her campaign had previously gone unanswered. When I had visited her Dubuque office, her staff promised me callbacks that I never received.

I introduced myself, and she smiled, but when I mentioned the word “immigration” in connection with the race, an unhappy look crossed her face. “We need commonsense immigration reform that treats everyone fairly,” she muttered, barely above a speaking voice, and moved away quickly down the sidewalk, as if embarrassed.

Her campaign also went mum about a notorious incident on the western side of the district—the arrest of a migrant from Mexico in connection with the murder of 20-year-old college student Mollie Tibbetts. National conservative media jumped all over the story as supposed evidence of an immigrant crime spree. Blum used the incident to rail against “sanctuary cities.” Finkenauer offered prayers to the Tibbetts family over Twitter and said little else.

The house where Antonín Dvořák lived, as it is today; while there, the composer completed his String Quartet, op. 96, commonly known as the American. (Courtesy of the Bily Clocks Museum)

A longtime observer of the Iowa political scene, who could not speak on the record because of his job, told me that the sine qua non of state politics is the quality of neighborliness. Does a politician seem likely to help a stranger out of a jam? To listen to country music and drink a Budweiser with you? To solve a problem in a practical way while looking you in the eye? The last Democrat to have held this seat, Bruce Braley, lost his race for the U.S. Senate in 2014 at least in part because of a public mistake he made when a neighbor’s chickens had strayed onto his vacation property. He threatened legal action—a brazen violation of rural protocol.

Being neighborly, however, can get complicated when the neighbors happen to be new immigrants. Iowa’s conflicted legacy on immigration can be traced back to 1975, when the state’s Republican governor, Robert Ray, bucked elements of his party to accept more than 1,000 refugees from Southeast Asia. In recent years, in addition to immigrants from Mexico and other parts of Latin America, small clusters of Bosnians, Liberians, and Congolese have arrived.

“We’re very cautious about it,” the political observer told me. “It’s the toughest issue anyone faces. The polling numbers are not good. Immigrants save Main Streets, they save these little towns, but there’s so much frenzy around the issue.”

“I was raised in an atmosphere of struggle and endeavor,” Dvořák liked to tell his music students. He was the son of a butcher, and it was expected of him that he would go into his father’s trade. But he was spared the life of the block and the cleaver when his aptitude for music persuaded his father to allow him to pursue it as a career. He learned the violin, then later the piano and the organ, which he played during church services as a teenager, while living with his uncle in the Bohemian town of Zlonice. His rise to international prominence as a composer was gradual, though by the time he arrived in America, he was an eminent figure, admired for his symphonies, concertos, and chamber music. No matter how welcome it must have been, leaving New York for the vast expanses of northeast Iowa must have caused something of a shock.

“It is very strange,” Dvořák wrote to a friend back in Bohemia, describing the open spaces that he found at once intoxicating and alienating. “Few people and a great deal of empty space. A farmer’s nearest neighbor is often four miles off. Especially in the prairies (I call them the Sahara), there are only endless acres of field and meadow and that is all. You are glad to see in the woods and meadows the huge herds of cattle which, summer and winter, are out to pasture in the broad fields. And so it is very ‘wild’ here and sometimes very sad—sad to despair. But habit is everything.”

Spillville is on the edge of the physically lovely Driftless Area, which was spared the flattening impact of the glaciers during the last ice age and is thus characterized by dramatic hills and ridges that can remind the viewer of Provence. Vistas extend across 20 miles of small groves, hayfields, tidy farmhouses, and lonely silos. Corn is the big crop here, almost all of it meant for livestock feed, and it is planted in robotically precise configurations by mechanized planters guided by GPS technology.

Open space between two towns in the Driftless is dominated by an unbroken tableau of broad corn leaves waving in the breeze, but every now and then, a traveler passes a hog barn with big exhaust vents. Somebody has to feed the hogs, change the heat setting, shovel the manure, and move the hogs to processing, and this is the source of a good percentage of Iowa’s subterranean workforce that few want to talk about. The laborers live discreetly, often in basic housing on the farm itself. According to a recent study by three Iowa State University economists, American pig farmers spent more than $837 million on temporary labor in 2012, paying out increasing sums of money for low-status jobs that few Americans will do.

The more visible concentration of immigrants is in the slaughtering facilities of major meatpackers. About 20 miles down the road from Spillville is the larger town of Postville, which has a sign on the edge of U.S. Highway 18 proclaiming it to be the “Hometown to the World.” Not long after that, you pass the reason why: a processing plant called Agri Star Meat and Poultry.

In many ways, Postville is arranged—literally and economically—like a perfect company town in which every dollar flows from the factory gates. Such towns are often brutal, but they have a rawness and honesty about them that the immigrants of Dvořák’s time would have recognized instantly. Loyalty equals survival: loyalty to the bonds of work, company, family, and ethnicity. In this sense, Postville has changed very little, even as its racial demographics have shifted, something its neighbors regard with a mild sense of alarm. Where else in the midwestern Corn Belt will you find, on an ordinary downtown street, African men wearing flowing Islamic robes, black-suited Orthodox Jews with curly peyos, and a Mexican evangelist preaching the risen Christ through a loudspeaker?

The transformation of Postville into an immigrant-heavy Iowa town began in the 1980s with a hunch by a Brooklyn butcher named Aaron Rubashkin, who specialized in custom kosher meat for the borough’s growing population of ultra-Orthodox and Hasidic Jews. But transporting cattle to New York for slaughter under rabbinical supervision was expensive. Could industrial livestock slaughter—a specialty of the Midwest since the days of the 19th-century Chicago feedlots—be married to a regimen of rabbinical oversight? And could a new market be developed among younger Jews who wanted to broaden their religious life by way of the kitchen table? Rubashkin wanted to find out.

According to Stephen G. Bloom in his book Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America, Rubashkin bought Postville’s old HyGrade plant, renamed it Agriprocessors, and persuaded a staff of rabbis to move out to rural Iowa to certify that steers and chickens were killed according to kashrut standards, then developed methods for vacuum sealing and shrink-wrapping that kept the meat fresh for weeks. His business sense proved correct: sales were immediately strong, and annual revenues eventually reached $250 million. But Rubashkin and his son Sholom also developed a reputation in Iowa as bad neighbors who stiffed creditors on their bills, dumped effluent in streams, harassed union organizers, and started arguments among rabbis over what some considered sloppy and unnecessarily cruel practices on the kill floor.

The end of their reign came on May 12, 2008, when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided the plant and arrested 389 people for various immigration-related offenses. Buses took the arrestees to the city of Waterloo, where, inside an improvised federal “courtroom” located in a cattle fairgrounds hall, most were sentenced to five months in prison and later deported. Sholom Rubashkin denied knowledge of the illegal workers, but he was eventually charged with 67 violations of child-labor law. He was found not guilty but received a 27-year federal sentence for financial crimes (President Trump would commute his sentence in 2017). Postville lost a quarter of its population practically overnight, and Agriprocessors went bankrupt within six months.

Pledging to operate a more ethical business, a new set of Jewish owners bought the plant in 2009, renamed it Agri Star Meat & Poultry, repainted the water tower, spent $7.5 million to renovate the decaying plant, and brought in a crew of legalized Somalian refugees who had been living in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Guatemalans and Mexicans also started to come back, and today, the factory is once again paying an average of $9 per hour to approximately 350 workers who kill, disembowel, and partition livestock.

On a bright morning in July, I met Nathan Thompson, a young employee of the Northeast Iowa Resource Conservation and Development office, who took me on a walk around Postville I will never forget.

He first pointed to an old two-story, red-brick hall next to his office. “That’s the Turner Hall,” he said. “There were lots of these in German-American communities all over the Midwest. They were like a gymnasium, an opera hall, and a social service agency all in one. Kind of like a YMCA. The German roots of this place go pretty deep: the Mass at the Lutheran church was said in German up until the 1950s.”

We then crossed Lawler Street and went into a combined restaurant-carnaceria named El Pariente, run by a man in his 50s named Ricardo Garcia. By any measure, he is an American success story. Born in Aguascalientes, Mexico, he crossed the border and took a job in a slaughterhouse in Glendale, Arizona—work he didn’t enjoy. But he was known as a charismatic man with functioning English, Hebrew, and Chinese who could round up a lot of employees on short notice. One day he got a call from the owners of Agriprocessors, who offered him a job as a supervisor on the condition that he bring dozens of Mexican and Central American laborers with him.

Spillville’s school (left) and St. Wenceslaus Catholic Church (right), as shown in a 19th-century photograph. The town’s population is still 350. (Everett Collection)

“I told them that I’d need them to guarantee there would be places for these guys to live,” Garcia said, “some cash deposits on housing, and a little food money before they got their first paychecks. Otherwise, don’t waste your time dealing with me.” The owners came through, and they had their workers within six weeks. The new arrivals soon bore the telltale signs of work in an abattoir: bent fingers, scars on their lower arms.

“I don’t really like being here,” Garcia told me. “But I love the business opportunities.” Too many people in town do drugs, he said, and many of the white residents give subtle and overt snubs to the Latinos. “When I was younger, I fought all the time. Ruined a lot of relationships. Now I just let it go in one ear and out the other. It will one day be a good town. We’re not there yet.”

Thompson and I then went around the corner and found a group of black men in long robes and short rounded caps called taqiyah, sitting in plastic chairs and gossiping in Somali. In a different time in Iowa, in Dvořák’s time, they might have been old German farmers in overalls, cracking jokes and complaining about the weather. Thompson pushed the door into what is now called the Juba Grocery & Halal Market and introduced me to Ibrahim Sharif, a slender man wearing a purple button-down shirt and business slacks. Originally from Somalia, he worked at Agri Star for five years but has since gone into business as a seller of basic household goods and the occasional delicacy of camel meat. He tells me he closes the store three times a day for Muslim prayers. His competitor in North African goods across the street shares a wall with a synagogue, the Congregation Degel Machane Yehuda Stretin, which itself stands near the Iglesia Apostolica de Cristo and a nameless storefront mosque with sheets taped up in the windows.

A few doors down from the Juba grocery is the simply and elegantly named Kosher Market. Racks of tinned borscht, crackers, candy, and other goods with Hebrew labeling stand in front of glass-doored coolers containing beef products bearing the labels Aaron’s Best and Shor Habor—the big national brands used by Agri Star, which is just down the street.

I talked with Yaakov Yitzak, a native of Israel with roots in Argentina, who wears a baseball cap emblazoned with the Brazilian flag. “Around the world, there are problems between Muslims and Jews, for sure,” he said over the counter. “But when somebody is right in front of you, they are your friend. We didn’t create the world, we only live in it, and we have to accept it.”

He was articulating the basic rule of Postville, Iowa, which functions in the classic state of cultural détente known to multiethnic cities such as Beirut, Montreal, Dubai, and Hong Kong, all founded on keeping the peace among different races and religions in the name of a liberal capitalism that accepts anybody willing to work.

Back in Spillville, at the Farr Side bar, a farmer named Jerry, on his third Calvert whiskey sour of the night, held forth on the peril facing the country. “What good do these immigrants do us?” he said to a small crowd gathered near his stool. “All they want is to take our welfare and send it back to their home country to make bombs.”

Sitting next to him was Lisa Costello, a dental assistant who, like the farmer, voted for Trump. She has gotten to know several Mexican migrants and their children through her practice, and she offered some mild pushback. “They are hard workers, Jerry. They are here to make the most for their families. But I agree with you that this has to be straightened out.”

“They don’t know how to work,” Jerry roared back. “It’s against the Constitution. They have to be here the right way.”

Listening to the tumult without getting involved was Mark Kuhn, a member of the county board of supervisors. “Very few cows get milked around here without an immigrant,” he told me in a low voice after Jerry had migrated to another part of the bar. “Your average hog farmer out here? He’s a Trump supporter. But he hires immigrants to shovel the manure.”

“How did this happen?” he wondered, sipping a beer. “When did we become such a closed nation?” It’s a question that even reluctant politicians must address. In November, Abby Finkenauer defeated Rod Blum by a convincing margin of more than 16,000 votes. And even though Finkenauer had hardly made immigration a cornerstone of her campaign, Republicans immediately predicted that she’d be a prime target for unseating in 2020. As a headline on Breitbart put it, on the evening of the election: “Mollie Tibbets’ District: Pro-Amnesty, Pro-Sanctuary City Democrat Wins.”

The Farr Side bar is two blocks from where Dvořák had lived. In the months before he came to Spillville, while living in New York, he had invited several black performers to sing tunes for him that had their origin in the plantations of the South, and he incorporated parts of them in his New World Symphony. Dvořák knew that there could be no consideration of the folk music of America without first paying homage to the Negro spiritual; moreover, he believed that American composers had an obligation to draw from this material, just as he had worked rural Bohemian melodies into his own symphonic and chamber works.

While in Spillville, Dvořák indulged his fascination with America’s indigenous people. He went to see a traveling medicine show put on by the Kickapoo Tribe, who played drums and sang in a way he had never heard—the ensemble included two black Americans who incorporated Native American musical elements into their performances on banjo and guitar. He took a side trip to Minneapolis to see the waterfall mentioned in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Song of Hiawatha.” He later wrote an article for Harper’s that expounded on the specific style of American music he felt was emerging. “It matters little whether the inspiration for the coming folk songs of America is derived from the Negro melodies, the songs of the creoles, the red man’s chant, or the plaintive ditties of the homesick German or Norwegian,” he wrote. “Undoubtedly the germs of the best in music lie hidden among all the races that are commingled in this great country.”

Within a week of his arrival in Spillville, Dvořák finished the first sketches for his String Quartet in F Major, op. 96, now known as the American. “Thank God!” he wrote at the bottom of the score. “I am content. It was fast.” It received its first performance in private, at the home of Jan Kovařik, the town schoolmaster and father of Dvořák’s secretary.

Music critics have since read all manner of native sounds into the American Quartet. Dvořák was a notoriously democratic sampler, and he never made it clear whether the third movement was supposed to channel a songbird, or if the second movement did indeed incorporate one of the African-American spiritual hymns that he loved. Others have discerned within it the rumble of the Chicago Express train that took him to the Midwest, or the delighted laughter of friends mingling in a country tavern, or a Stephen Foster melody, or the ritual drums of the Kickapoo Tribe. It all blends together without a firm answer. This American Quartet yields whatever its listeners want to hear within it.

Source: No Harmony in the Heartland

No Harmony in the Heartland, by Tom Zoellner, is brought to you by Deca.

In May 2017, a trove of hundreds of thousands of emails was leaked to the press from an organization belonging to the Gupta family. Originally from India, the Guptas—three brothers named Atul, Ajay, and Rajesh—arrived in South Africa in the 1990s, ­shortly after the fall of the apartheid regime. Businessmen with an ­interest in every sector of the economy, the brothers began ­arrogating themselves into the homes and offices of the new ruling class. Their luck tracked closely with that of Jacob Zuma, who, before ­becoming ­president in 2009, weathered a dismissal from government, a rape trial, and 783 corruption charges. For years, journalists reported that the Guptas, along with members of Zuma’s family, ran a syndicate that siphoned hundreds of millions of dollars from government institutions into ­offshore shells. An opposition leader devised the word “Zupta” to describe the union between the two clans.

Like the Panama and Paradise Papers, the leaked emails offered a ­kaleidoscopic view of the universe inhabited by the super rich, who live by a bespoke set of financial rules all but unimaginable to the rest of us. Corruption had been a feature of governance in South Africa since colonial times, but the looting and influence peddling on display were nonetheless impressive. ­According to the emails, the brothers paid for a lavish wedding for their niece in 2013 with $8 million taken from a state-backed dairy scheme meant for impoverished farmers. KPMG, an auditing firm based in the United Kingdom, helped the family write off the party as a business expense and has admitted to ignoring red flags about the source of the wedding funds. Last September, KPMG ­announced the resignations of eight top executives in its South Africa office. ­Several other multinationals financially linked to the Guptas have been either badly ­tainted or destroyed by the fallout of the leaks. In October, in the British House of Lords, peer Peter Hain condemned megabanks, including HSBC and Standard Chartered, for overlooking their own suspicious transactions related to Gupta-owned businesses.

But long before the emails leaked, the brothers were already infamous for their outsized influence over Zuma—a process now referred to as “state capture.” Their niece’s opulent nuptials generated headlines across the world, mostly because the Guptas managed to get permission to use a military base as a landing site for hundreds of wedding guests, bypassing the usual immigration controls. The media attention had immediate and important legal implications: it rendered the ­Guptas “politically exposed,” a term used to describe entities with a potentially corrupting influence over government officials. Political exposure typically sets off alarm bells in banks, auditing firms, and other financial institutions—it should have rendered the Guptas toxic. Yet that never happened.

Indeed, their money was especially welcome in two Canadian corporate headquarters, one in Montreal, the other in Ottawa. In a lengthy email thread strung out over the course of 2014, it was revealed that Bombardier had negotiated the sale of a luxury jet to a subsidiary of the ­Guptas’ umbrella firm, Oakbay Investments. The new aircraft came outfitted with dark wood panelling, a gold swoosh along the ­fuselage, and a $52 million price tag. For anyone with even a cursory interest in corporate news, Bombardier’s involvement with the Guptas would not have come as a surprise. In recent years, the struggling Montreal-based plane and train company has been accused of sacrificing due diligence in the haste to make a sale. What might have been surprising was this: $41 million of the jet’s financing was provided directly to the Guptas by Export Development Canada, a Crown corporation owned by, well, you.

EDC’s mandate is simple and ostensibly unobjectionable. Since its establishment in 1944, it has served as an export credit agency that uses federal money to ­facilitate trade deals abroad deemed in the ­national interest. (It recently opened an office in London, England, to help Canadian companies shore up exports ahead of the UK brexiting the European Union.) In other words, it is a ­public institution that provides financing to the private sector and plays matchmaker for Canadian manufacturers looking for business relationships in other countries. Often, this means loaning foreign customers money to buy Canadian goods, hence the Gupta deal. Around 7,100 companies benefited from EDC’s largesse in 2016. In theory, there is nothing unusual about EDC—almost every country with a functioning economy has an equivalent.

But EDC is hardly ordinary. For one thing, the agency is massive—its transactions in 2016 amounted to more than $100 ­billion, almost twenty times as much as its American counterpart, the Export–Import Bank. Depending on the year, it ranks as the second or third largest such institution in the world, some distance behind China’s export credit agency but neck in neck with Japan’s. According to its own estimates, EDC—traditionally a major backer of the mining and oil-and-gas industries—helps generate about 5 percent of Canada’s gross domestic product, ­making it a significant, if not an indispensable, player in the national economy.

The jet deal, however, serves as an example of how EDC can inhabit a grey zone between facilitating Canadian ­businesses and financing corruption. Before the ­Guptas began negotiating with EDC, they had been turned down for loans from two big multinational lenders. EDC was far more eager to help the Guptas, but it still planned on sending one or two investigators to South Africa prior to locking in the loan. Whether or not it dispatched a team remains unclear, but it seems impossible that any investigators would have missed signs of the ­Guptas’ political exposure, either on the ground in Johannesburg or on Google in Ottawa. ­According to its published list of regulations, EDC must assess profiles of companies or individuals who present risks for reasons including “being named on ­official lists, such as terrorism, corruption, or sanctions lists, being identified as politically exposed, being investigated, charged or convicted for illegal activities, being subject to allegations of wrongdoing or being subject to adverse media.” In late 2014, the Guptas qualified on at least three counts.

EDC has never taken an official position regarding the Gupta revelations in the leaks, other than to say that all transactions undergo a rigorous vetting process. But the agency’s silence and inaction were not shared by the global banking sector. As of this writing, South Africa’s big four banks have dumped the Guptas as clients, ­Standard Chartered stopped dealing with them in Dubai, and HSBC shut down accounts held by front companies associated with the brothers. India’s Bank of Baroda is attempting to shutter their accounts, while the Johannesburg Stock Exchange successfully pushed Oakbay to delist itself.

“Canadian values” are not legally defined concepts, but rather abstractions that can mean different things to different CEOs.

But the Guptas are not EDC’s only controversial clients. The agency’s client list is studded with some of the most ­scandal-ridden multinationals on the planet, including Kinross Gold—its West ­African mining operations were, as of 2016, under investigation by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission for bribery and corruption. Despite ­being backstopped by the government, EDC has consistently rebuffed any requests to reveal details on its lending practices. And while the Gupta deal suggests there is almost no entity that EDC won’t bank, its activities are protected by disclosure protocols that are entirely opaque. EDC is effectively a black box, with the result that few in ­Canada—including the minister presiding over it—seem to know the full details about what the agency does, who it finances, and why. With EDC’s mandate up for review in 2018, it seems like a good time to examine the considerable reputational risks the agency often takes. Do Canadians want to be shareholders in a government agency that puts profit ahead of accountability?

Export Development Canada inhabits an eighteen-storey building in the heart of downtown Ottawa. The headquarters is an amalgam of marble and glass, a design best described as ­ostentatiously inconspicuous. During a recent stroll through the atrium, a salon of flat screens played corporate videos profiling an array of EDC clients: high-end bicycle manufacturer Argon 18, Cirque du Soleil–style equestrian troop Cavalia.

One late summer day this past August, I met with an EDC spokesperson named Phil Taylor at a Starbucks a few paces from company headquarters. Still on holiday, Taylor arrived in a T-shirt, board shorts, and sandals. Several weeks before our meeting, I’d contacted the agency to understand how their due diligence procedures failed to red flag the Gupta loan.

“I ­appreciate that you would have preferred that we be able to make comment about the ­specific transaction,” Taylor had written, “and that you were frustrated that the law does not allow EDC to disclose third party information without the consent of the obligor.”

Put plainly, without the Guptas consenting to the disclosure, EDC was legally prohibited from discussing the transaction. While EDC has been subject to the ­Access to Information Act since 2007, there is an exemption in the Export Development Act—the piece of legislation under which the agency is mandated—that basically treats any information pertaining to a client, and any documentation that may have been filed during or after the due diligence process, as confidential. The reason for this is simple: it’s good for business. In 2006, Rob Wright, at the time president and CEO of EDC, spoke to a legislative committee about the agency’s need for confidentiality. “It’s essential,” he said, that EDC “protect commercially confidential client information from release.” Wright argued that EDC’s partnerships abroad would be endangered if the agency couldn’t guarantee that sensitive financial information would be kept under wraps. “In fact,” he continued, “we are regularly asked to sign non-disclosure agreements and to confirm that the information is not subject to the Access to Information Act.” The loophole in the law that today exempts EDC and its clients from meaningful outside scrutiny was now protecting one of the most politically exposed families on earth.

This Möbius strip logic is what activists have long complained about when it comes to EDC. “Their transparency policy is just eighteen pages that spends more time explaining what they can’t disclose than what they can,” Claire Woodside, the director of the NGO Publish What You Pay, told me. Woodside’s organization is the Canadian branch of an international network that has been trying to increase the rate of corporate disclosure, which is why they’ve been drawn into EDC’s orbit. In 2009, EDC used loopholes in the Access to Information Act to hide details about its possible role in a controversial mega-dam scheme in Chile. In 2006, a consortium of Canadian investors purchased Transelec, Chile’s major transmission utility. Their plan was to connect five remote dams to thousands of high-voltage towers that would cut across a vast swath of environmentally fragile land, including national parks and protected reserves. When Probe ­International, a Canadian environmental advocacy group, requested details about EDC’s involvement in Transelec—according to the agency’s documents, they ­financed the utility company at least twice in 2007—only thirty-four out of 2,500 pages were released by EDC. Those documents were so heavily redacted that, according to Probe International executive director Patricia Adams, they left “nothing useful to inform the public about EDC’s use of the Crown’s credit card in ways that could harm Chile’s environment.” (Because of dwindling public support, Chile decided to rescind the project’s permits in 2014.)

Shouldn’t full transparency be the price of cheap, abundant capital from a government-mandated lender? The consortium that EDC helped finance, for instance, ­included the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, which meant that nearly every working Canadian was linked to a venture a Chilean environmentalist called “an aberration.” At a time when Canadians are increasingly demanding ethical mutual funds and other responsible investment vehicles, how should they react to news that a government agency could be supporting the very companies and sectors they may have excommunicated from their portfolios?

No one I spoke with at EDC or in the Canadian government was willing to confront this question. In explaining how a credit agency that handles $100 billion a year in transactions decides whether to support a deal, Taylor’s email to me amounted to eight bullet points composed of 212 words. Face to face, Taylor found it more pressing to set the record straight on what EDC isn’t rather than what it is or does. “One thing that upsets me,” he said, “and upsets our CEO, is when we’re called taxpayer funded. We’re not.”

EDC describes itself as “a self-­financing, Crown corporation that operates at arm’s length from the Government.” This, as the agency is careful to point out, is a critical distinction—taxpayer money does not flow into EDC coffers, in no small part because it doesn’t need to. At the present moment, EDC is sitting on nearly $10 ­billion worth of capital, generates a net income of more than a billion a year, and has a ­sterling AAA credit rating. Perhaps on account of this success, the agency has fallen prey to mission creep. In 2014, it muscled out a number of private insurers and loaned $500 million of federal money to India’s largest publicly traded company, Reliance Industries. At that point, it was EDC’s biggest deal in Asia and one that had no direct correlation with boosting Canadian exporters. The reason for the loan is obvious: revenue. If nothing else, EDC is aggressive about its bottom line, and this allows it no small measure of ­political leverage. “As it happens, we pay dividends,” Taylor said. “The Canadian government actually makes money off us.” In 2016, the country reaped $786 million from this arrangement.

The agency falls under the ambit of the minister of international trade, currently François-Philippe Champagne. Long-time banking executive Benoit Daignault has served as CEO and president of EDC since 2014, and he reports to a chair and board of directors drawn largely from the private sector. But be that as it may, EDC remains a government agency, a designation which comes with a number of implications, the most important being that Canadians insure EDC’s corporate behavior. Every dollar it loans is implicitly ­taxpayer guaranteed. While EDC is currently uncrashable, so was Lehman Brothers before it ­cratered, bringing the global economy down with it. That is an extreme example, but it illustrates the potential knock-on effects of an EDC failure: bailouts to the agency and its insurers, perhaps in the tens of billions. It’s something Canadians should be aware of, considering they’d be stuck with the tab.

Until recently, EDC’s focus has been on Canada’s extractive sector—in 2014 alone, it extended $28 billion in financial services to mining and oil-and-gas ventures. The emphasis has changed over the past several years. “Right now, transportation is probably one of our biggest sectors,” said Taylor. In EDC’s case, transportation tends to translate as Bombardier.

Founded in 1942, Bombardier Inc. has a global workforce of 66,000, with about 16,500 of those employees based in Quebec. It’s impossible to imagine the company existing without corporate welfare. Since 1966, it has received nearly $4 billion in bailout money from both provincial and federal governments. This includes the $1 billion that the Quebec government recently paid for 49.5 ­percent stake in the company’s C Series single-aisle passenger jet program and the $372.5 million the federal government extended it in early 2017. (In ­October, Bombardier handed over half of the flailing C Series program to Airbus for free, massively diluting the worth of the Quebec government’s investment.) More significantly, since the beginning of the decade, the company has become embroiled in corruption scandals in South Korea, Sweden, Azerbaijan, and Russia. The malfeasance appears so systemic that when Thomas Forsberg, the senior prosecutor at Sweden’s National ­Anti-Corruption Unit, was asked why he had not named those who had co-conspired in a bribery case with the main defendant, a Bombardier employee, he replied, “Because there are so many of them.”

One of Bombardier’s biggest backers is EDC. In 2014—the year the Gupta letter of offer was issued by EDC—Bombardier received as much as $5 billion in agency support. In its business relationship with Bombardier, EDC appears willing to ignore quite a lot. Take, for example, the flap concerning the Gautrain, a high-speed commuter project constructed in the lead-up to the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South ­Africa. In order to secure the contract, Bombardier paid out between $35 million and $54 ­million in “facilitation fees” to a ­Tunisian fixer named Youssef Zarrouk. The story broke in 2012. That alone might have served as a red flag regarding EDC’s continued support of Bombardier.

Apparently not. In March 2014, ­Bombardier’s transportation division in South ­Africa secured a locomotive deal worth about $1.2 billion with Transnet, the ­state-owned freight enterprise. With its well-documented history of alleged kickback payments, Transnet has perhaps the worst reputation of any state-owned entity in South Africa. EDC was undeterred and provided $450 million in financing to nail down the deal.

Was the contract worth the risk, ­especially for a credit agency that reports directly to the minister of international trade and has a logo proudly emblazoned with a red maple leaf? More to the point, didn’t Bombardier flirting so ­determinedly with suspect foreign entities come dangerously close to flouting the Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act and thus ­Canada’s ­legally binding ­obligations under the United ­Nations Convention against Corruption? I reached out to Global ­Affairs Canada, which speaks for the minister of international trade, and asked whether it was time to ramp up scrutiny of EDC’s lending policy and to consider terminating its exemption to the Access to Information Act. A spokesperson replied that “EDC conducts its own assessments and due diligence on each transaction ­independently of the Government, and makes its own decision on each proposed transaction. It would therefore not be appropriate for the government of Canada to comment on the services it provides to specific businesses.”

Taylor remained calm throughout our conversation. “Nothing ever fits into a box tidily,” he said of EDC’s continued involvement with Bombardier and the Guptas. “We rely on third-party experts ­specific to either a sector or a place. Different countries treat different things in different ways, and when it comes to ­Bombardier and these accusations, you really need to look for proof. If you get to the point where there is a lot of noise but the contract was secure, well . . . ” he shrugged.

I asked Taylor how despite the steady stream of Gupta scandals reported since 2010, EDC appeared to have found everything in ­order. “EDC has to do the work itself,” he said. “You have to rely on people who are unbiased, and we’re unbiased. It can’t just be media reports. It’s not enough.”

As for the EDC loan to the Guptas, it turned out the money was just as peripatetic as the aircraft itself. According to leaked emails, after EDC financed the Guptas’ purchase of the Bombardier jet, the family immediately flipped the plane to an Irish shell company—thereby avoiding duties and tariffs—and began leasing it to themselves in order to generate expenses they could write off against their profits. The jet become known by its tail registration—ZS-OAK—and the leaks disclosed how it ferried the Guptas and local politicians on mystery trips to Switzerland, Japan, India, and other far-flung destinations.

A day after my visit to EDC, I meet with an activist named Karyn Keenan. A lawyer who began her career by working on social-justice issues with South American Indigenous communities affected by mining, Keenan is now the director at a small NGO called Above Ground. Its bailiwick is to ensure that Canadian companies receiving public financing meet their legal duty to respect human and ­environmental rights both at home and abroad. Along the way, and not coincidentally, they have ­become experts on EDC.

Keenan first heard of the agency in the late nineties when, as a law student ­investigating a massive cyanide spill into Guyana’s main waterway following a dam failure, she learned EDC had financed the Canadian-run company, Omai Gold Mines, that was responsible for the rupture. “There is a tendency for the mining and oil sectors to become associated with human rights and environmental problems,” Keenan says. “That’s certainly the case with EDC clients. We’ve seen companies qualify for finance, sometimes repeat loans, when their operations are being seriously questioned by activists.” Even after the disaster caused by Omai Gold Mines, EDC continued to insure Cambior Inc., a Quebec company and majority owner of the mine.

Such institutions can serve as tools of corruption—smaller loans, dispensed with little due diligence, tracked with slack oversight.

Above Ground also monitors EDC’s support for transnationals implicated in corruption on a scale the Guptas could only aspire to. Keenan directed my attention to the Brazilian state-owned oil-and-gas corporation Petrobras. In 2013, EDC gave Petrobras between $250 and $500 ­million to procure Canadian goods and services. The following year, Petrobras became mired in what has been described as the biggest corruption scandal in modern history. The investigation, still ongoing, codenamed Lavo Jato, or Car Wash, uncovered a multi-billion dollar scam that involved high-ranking Brazilian politicians who took bribes in exchange for inflated contracts, and street-level money dealers who laundered the payoff money out of a gas station. The scheme, which brought down then-president Dilma Rousseff, politically wounded her supposedly incorruptible predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and has left the current president, Michel Temer, facing charges of corruption, racketeering, and obstruction of justice. Millions of people have taken to the streets; the economy has all but tanked; Brazilian democracy is in crisis.

As Petrobas’s market value plunged, investors almost immediately tried to recoup their losses. In 2015, a 173-page class action suit was filed against Petrobas for its alleged complicity in the corruption scheme. And what did EDC—a corporation that insists it doesn’t do business with clients who demonstrate “legal, regulatory and reputational risks”—do when it discovered that it had extended a massive sum to a company that was now blowing up an entire country? On May 11, 2015, the day before Rousseff’s suspension and with Brazil in chaos, Keenan sent CEO Benoit Daignault a series of questions regarding the agency’s transactions with Petrobras. What methods did EDC use to evaluate anti-bribery procedures prior to the approval of financing? And did EDC ever investigate if the company used the financing for criminal purposes? Keenan received a letter from Signi Schneider, then EDC’s vice-president of corporate social responsibility. The law, she reminded Keenan, prohibited her from commenting.

EDC devotes four floors of its headquarters to its corporate social responsibility (CSR) department. This is where every entity that receives a financial instrument from the EDC must be cleared.

Like any Canadian corporation with a CSR division, EDC takes many of its cues from a set of government guidelines promulgated in the 2014 document “Doing Business the Canadian Way: A Strategy to Advance Corporate Social Responsibility in Canada’s Extractive Sector Abroad.” For companies operating in regulatory or legal quagmires abroad, “the Government of Canada encourages them to find ways to reflect Canadian values.” If that isn’t possible, “companies may wish to reconsider their investment.”

As critics of Canada’s CSR strategy have long complained, there is a snag with its guidelines: “Canadian values” are not legally defined concepts, but abstractions that can mean different things to different CEOs. Absent actual legislation, following CSR rules becomes a free-associative performance of responsibility. What is the outcome for corporations, Crown or otherwise, that flout these guidelines? Not much. The office of the CSR counsellor—whose mandate is to “advise” Canadian corporations on best practices—will deliver a light hectoring, gently reminding companies “of the importance of responsible business practices and human rights.”

How EDC squares with “Canadian values” is more than a conceptual question. The Export Development Act clearly identifies EDC as an agent of the government, which means that if EDC is somehow held accountable for any breach of international human rights law, Canada is on the hook. In a highly connected global financial system, this becomes much bigger than a Canadian problem. All states are responsible under international law for the behaviour of their export credit agencies. But because no states appear to be interested in censuring the behaviour of their export development agencies and by virtue of the fact that no governments reign in their own or other export development agencies, nothing is ever done to curtail the reach and influence of these institutions.

This vast, geopolitical Mexican standoff, in which agencies such as EDC operate with de facto impunity, is what Cephas Lumina, a UN expert on the effects of foreign debt on human rights, was referring to in his 2011 annual report to the United Nations General Assembly. “A significant number of the projects supported by export credit agencies,” he wrote, “particularly large dams, oil pipelines, greenhouse gas-emitting coal and nuclear power plants, chemical facilities, mining projects and forestry and plantation schemes, have severe environmental, social and human rights impacts.” Without more policing and transparency, insisted Lumina, export credit agencies will continue to spirit billions of untraceable, unaccountable dollars through the global economy every year.

That impunity is actually encoded into our parliamentary oversight. The Auditor General looks at EDC at least once every ten years, but the auditing process is largely comparative: Is EDC operating the same way as other export credit agencies around the world? “So it’s a relative assessment,” says Keenan, “not an absolute assessment.” EDC’s environmental and social impact and human rights policies are compared to other credit agencies also financing companies credibly associated with similar abuse and harm. Every ten years, EDC is declared 100 percent kosher, and parliamentarians are none the wiser.

Far from being reigned in, EDC is about to take a bold leap forward. In May, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ­announced the government’s intention to establish a new development finance institution. Roughly as widespread as export credit agencies, DFIs have become the first forays into otherwise inhospitable investment zones. They provide targeted financing for locations that have trouble attracting capital, such as Afghanistan, or the most poverty-stricken regions of countries including Brazil and China. DFI loans tend to be smaller than those extended by export credit agencies, but if the gamble is successful, larger investment ­usually ­follows. In 2013, developing economies absorbed nearly $1 trillion in DFI money.

It doesn’t take much imagination to conceive of how such institutions can serve as highly honed tools of corruption—smaller loans, dispensed with little due diligence, tracked with slack oversight. Nonetheless, the Canadian government was bullish. “According to some estimates, $1 invested by a DFI can leverage an additional $12 in private sector investments,” read the initial statement. Canada’s version would be a brand new Crown corporation housed within EDC and functioning as a subsidiary—not unlike the art-film wing of a Hollywood studio. The government wants it operational by January 2018 and has fielded repeated warnings by human rights advocates that effective transparency and accountability rules need to be built into the heart of the program.

Keenan, however, isn’t optimistic. “It’s going to be housed at an institution that has no real track record for assessing development, human rights, and social impacts?” she asked. There is, of course, room for a DFI that is part of a transparent export credit agency that dispenses financing for clean Canadian companies—EDC has thousands on its roster—and one that withdraws support at the merest whiff of impropriety. But, for Keenan, until EDC becomes a known and discussed entity, and becomes ­entirely transparent about its dealings, that reality is impossible. “Few know that it exists,” she reminded me. “And if you do know it exists, you don’t necessarily understand the intricacies of how it works.”

Toward the end of my meeting with Taylor, I asked him what “corruption” meant in the lexicon of the organization he spoke for. He barely hesitated: “anything that distorts the market,” he said. But EDC and its contemporaries do more than distort. The concern is not that they accidentally support corruption, it is that they end up serving as its primary funders—first-stop lenders for the most troubling corporate entities on earth. Morally, to say nothing of financially, Canadians are on the hook for EDC’s behaviour. The Guptas may be a South African scourge, but thanks to EDC, they are Canadian beneficiaries.

As for the jet we paid for, according to the tracking site FlightAware, ZS-OAK currently sits on the tarmac in Dubai. What the Gupta brothers are doing in the desert is anyone’s guess.

Source: How a Federal Agency Helps Finance Some of the World’s Most Corrupt Regimes

How a Federal Agency Helps Finance Some of the World’s Most Corrupt Regimes, by Richard Poplak, is brought to you by Deca.

In 2015, when Lazarus Liu moved home to China after studying logistics in the United Kingdom for three years, he quickly noticed that something had changed: Everyone paid for everything with their phones. At McDonald’s, the convenience store, even at mom-and-pop restaurants, his friends in Shanghai used mobile payments. Cash, Liu could see, had been largely replaced by two smartphone apps: Alipay and WeChat Pay. One day, at a vegetable market, he watched a woman his mother’s age pull out her phone to pay for her groceries. He decided to sign up.

To get an Alipay ID, Liu had to enter his cell phone number and scan his national ID card. He did so reflexively. Alipay had built a reputation for reliability, and compared to going to a bank managed with slothlike indifference and zero attention to customer service, signing up for Alipay was almost fun. With just a few clicks he was in. Alipay’s slogan summed up the experience: “Trust makes it simple.”

Alipay turned out to be so convenient that Liu began using it multiple times a day, starting first thing in the morning, when he ordered breakfast through a food delivery app. He realized that he could pay for parking through Alipay’s My Car feature, so he added his driver’s license and license plate numbers, as well as the engine number of his Audi. He started making his car insurance payments with the app. He booked doctors’ appointments there, skipping the chaotic lines for which Chinese hospitals are famous. He added friends in Alipay’s built-in social network. When Liu went on vacation with his fiancée (now his wife) to Thailand, they paid at restaurants and bought trinkets with Alipay. He stored whatever money was left over, which wasn’t much once the vacation and car were paid for, in an Alipay money market account. He could have paid his electricity, gas, and internet bills in Alipay’s City Service section. Like many young Chinese who had become enamored of the mobile payment services offered by Alipay and WeChat, Liu stopped bringing his wallet when he left the house.

If you live in the United States, you are by now accustomed to relinquishing your data to corporations. Credit card companies know when you run up bar tabs or buy sex toys. Facebook knows if you like Tasty cooking videos or Breitbart News. Uber knows where you go and how you behave en route. But Alipay knows all of these things about its users and more. Owned by Ant Financial, an affiliate of the massive Alibaba corporation, Alipay is sometimes called a super app. Its main competitor, WeChat, belongs to the social and gaming giant Tencent. Alipay and WeChat are less like individual apps than entire ecosystems. Whenever Liu opened Alipay on his phone, he saw a neat grid of icons that vaguely resembled the home screen on his Samsung. Some of the icons were themselves full-blown third-party apps. If he wanted to, he could access Airbnb, Uber, or Uber’s Chinese rival Didi, entirely from inside Alipay. It was as if Amazon had swallowed eBay, Apple News, Groupon, American Express, Citibank, and YouTube—and could siphon up data from all of them.

One day a new icon appeared on Liu’s Alipay home screen. It was labeled Zhima Credit (or Sesame Credit). The name, like that of Alipay’s parent company, evoked the story of Ali Baba and the 40 thieves, in which the words open sesame magically unseal a cave full of treasure. When Liu touched the icon, he was greeted by an image of the Earth. “Zhima Credit is the embodiment of personal credit,” the text underneath read. “It uses big data to conduct an objective assessment. The higher the score, the better your credit.” Further down was a button that read, in clean white characters, “Start my credit journey.” He tapped.

In 1956 an electrical engineer named Bill Fair and a mathematician named Earl Isaac started a small tech company out of a San Francisco apartment. They named it Fair, Isaac and Co., but the business eventually came to be known, for short, as FICO. Their chief innovation was using computer­-driven statistical ­analysis to translate people’s personal details and financial history into a simple score, predicting how likely they were to pay back loans. Before FICO, credit bureaus relied in part on gossip culled from people’s landlords, neighbors, and local grocers. Applicants’ race could be counted against them, as could messiness, poor morals, and “effeminate gestures.” Algorithmic scoring, Fair and Isaac argued, was a more equitable, scientific alternative to this unfair reality. FICO’s approach eventually caught on among the credit bureaus—TransUnion, Experian, and Equifax—and in 1989 FICO introduced the credit score we know today, enabling millions of Americans to take out mortgages and rack up credit card bills.

During the past 30 years, by contrast, China has grown to become the world’s second largest economy without much of a functioning credit system at all. The People’s Bank of China, the country’s central banking regulator, maintains records on millions of consumers, but they often contain little or no information. Until recently, it was difficult to get a credit card with any bank other than your own. Consumers mainly used cash. As housing prices spiked, this became increasingly untenable. “Now you need two suitcases to buy a house, not just one,” says Zennon Kapron, who heads the financial tech consultancy Kapronasia. Still, efforts to establish a reliable credit system foundered because China lacked a third-party credit scoring entity. What it did have by the end of 2011 were 356 million smartphone users.

On the screen was a button that read, “Start my credit journey.” Liu tapped.

That year, Ant Financial launched a version of Alipay with a built-in scanner for reading QR codes—square, machine-readable labels that can hold over 100 times more information than a standard bar code. (WeChat Pay, which launched in 2013, has a similar built-in scanner.) Scanning a QR code can bring you to a website, or pull up an app, or connect you to a person’s social media profile. Codes started showing up on graves (scan to learn more about the deceased) and the shirts of waiters (scan to tip). Beggars printed out QR codes and set them out on the street. The codes linked the online and offline realms on a scale not seen anywhere else in the world. That first year with the QR scanner, Alipay mobile payments reached nearly $70 billion.

In 2013, Ant Financial executives retreated to the mountains outside Hangzhou to discuss creating a slew of new products; one of them was Zhima Credit. The executives realized that they could use the data-collecting powers of Alipay to calculate a credit score based on an individual’s activities. “It was a very natural process,” says You Xi, a Chinese business reporter who detailed this pivotal meeting in a recent book, Ant Financial. “If you have payment data, you can assess the credit of a person.” And so the tech company began the process of creating a score that would be “credit for everything in your life,” as You explains it.

Ant Financial wasn’t the only entity keen on using data to measure people’s worth. Coincidentally or not, in 2014 the Chinese government announced it was developing what it called a system of “social credit.” In 2014, the State Council, China’s governing cabinet, publicly called for the establishment of a nationwide tracking system to rate the reputations of individuals, businesses, and even government officials. The aim is for every Chinese citizen to be trailed by a file compiling data from public and private sources by 2020, and for those files to be searchable by fingerprints and other biometric characteristics. The State Council calls it a “credit system that covers the whole society.”

For the Chinese Communist Party, social credit is an attempt at a softer, more invisible authoritarianism. The goal is to nudge people toward behaviors ranging from energy conservation to obedience to the Party. Samantha Hoffman, a consultant with the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London who is researching social credit, says that the government wants to preempt instability that might threaten the Party. “That’s why social credit ideally requires both coercive aspects and nicer aspects, like providing social services and solving real problems. It’s all under the same Orwellian umbrella.”

In 2015 Ant Financial was one of eight tech companies granted approval from the People’s Bank of China to develop their own private credit scoring platforms. Zhima Credit appeared in the Alipay app shortly after that. The service tracks your behavior on the app to arrive at a score between 350 and 950, and offers perks and rewards to those with good scores. Zhima Credit’s algorithm considers not only whether you repay your bills but also what you buy, what degrees you hold, and the scores of your friends. Like Fair and Isaac decades earlier, Ant Financial executives talked publicly about how a data-driven approach would open up the financial system to people who had been locked out, like students and rural Chinese. For the more than 200 million Alipay users who have opted in to Zhima Credit, the sell is clear: Your data will magically open doors for you.

Participating in Zhima Credit is voluntary, and it’s unclear whether or how signing up for it could affect an individual’s rating in the government system. Ant Financial declined to let me interview anyone from the company, but did provide a statement from Hu Tao, the general manager of Zhima Credit. “Zhima Credit is dedicated to creating trust in a commercial setting and independent of any government-initiated social credit system,” the statement reads. “Zhima Credit does not share user scores or underlying data with any third party including the government without the user’s prior consent.”

The service “will ensure that the bad people in society don’t have a place to go.”

Ant Financial did state, however, in a 2015 press release that the company plans “to help build a social integrity system.” And the company has already cooperated with the Chinese government in one important way: It has integrated a blacklist of more than 6 million people who have defaulted on court fines into Zhima Credit’s database. According to Xinhua, the state news agency, this union of big tech and big government has helped courts punish more than 1.21 million defaulters, who opened their Zhima Credit one day to find their scores plunging.

The State Council has signaled that under the national social credit system people will be penalized for the crime of spreading online rumors, among other offenses, and that those deemed “seriously untrustworthy” can expect to receive substandard services. Ant Financial appears to be aiming for a society divided along moral lines as well. As Lucy Peng, the company’s chief executive, was quoted as saying in Ant Financial, Zhima Credit “will ensure that the bad people in society don’t have a place to go, while good people can move freely and without obstruction.”

I lived in China for the better part of a decade but left in 2014, before mobile payments had fully taken hold. Today $5.5 trillion in mobile payments are made every year in China. (In contrast, the US mobile payments market in 2016 was worth roughly $112 billion.) When I returned for a visit in August, I was determined to be a part of the new cashless China. So I signed up for Alipay and Zhima Credit a few hours after emerging bleary-eyed from the plane. Because I lacked a transaction history, I immediately faced what felt like an embarrassing judgment: a score of 550.

On my first day in Shanghai, I opened Zhima Credit to scan a yellow bike that I found parked at an angle on the sidewalk. China’s bike-sharing culture had, like mobile payments, emerged out of nowhere, and Shanghai’s streets were littered with brightly colored bikes, deposited wherever the riders pleased. A scan of a bike’s QR code revealed a four-digit number that unlocked the back wheel, and a ride across town cost roughly 15 cents. Because of my middling score, however, I had to pay a $30 deposit before I could scan my first bike. Nor could I get deposit-free hotel stays or GoPro rentals, or free umbrella rentals. I belonged to the digital underclass.

In China, anxiety about pianzi, or swindlers, runs deep. How do I know you’re not a pianzi? is a question people often ask when salespeople call on the phone or repairmen show up at the door. While my score likely didn’t put me in the ranks of pianzi, one promise of Zhima Credit was identifying those who were. Companies can buy risk assessments for users that detail whether they have paid their rent or utilities or appear on the court blacklist. For businesses, such products are billed as time-savers. On the site Tencent Video, I stumbled across an ad for Zhima Credit in which a businessman scrutinizes strangers as he rides the subway. “Everybody looks like a pianzi,” he despairs. His employees, trying to guard against shady customers, cover the office conference room walls with photos of lowlifes and criminals. But then—tada!—the boss discovers Zhima Credit, and all of their problems are solved. The staff celebrate by tearing the photos off the wall.

“If your friends are all high-score people, it’s good for you. If you have some bad-credit people as friends, it’s not nice.”

For those with good behavior, Zhima Credit offers perks through cooperation agreements that Ant Financial has signed with hundreds of companies and institutions. Shenzhou Zuche, a car rental company, allows people with credit scores over 650 to rent a car without a deposit. In exchange for this vetting, Shenzhou Zuche shares data, so that if a Zhima Credit user crashes one of the rental company’s cars and refuses to pay up, that detail is fed back into his or her credit score. For a while people with scores over 750 could even skip the security check line at Beijing Capital Airport.

Two years after signing up for Zhima Credit, Lazarus Liu was trending up to that number. I met Liu, who is 27 and works at a large corporation, one Saturday afternoon at a mall in central Shanghai, outside a Forever 21. He wore a black shirt, black sneakers, and black Air Jordan shorts, and his face was framed by a fresh fade, with a jolt of black hair that flopped to one side. We walked to a Starbucks filled with young people hunched over their phones, sipping peach iced teas and green tea Frappuccinos. Liu claimed the last open table.

Liu told me that he chose his English name, Lazarus, after converting to Catholicism three years ago, but that his religion was mostly a private affair. He saw his Zhima Credit score the same way; it revealed something about him, but he kept those insights mostly to himself. He rarely checked his score—it just lurked in the background of the Alipay app on his Samsung—and because it was good, he didn’t have to. After starting at 600 out of a possible 950 points, he had reached 722, a score that entitled him to favorable terms on loans and apartment rentals, as well as showcasing on several dating apps should he and his wife ever split up. With a few dozen more points, he could get a streamlined visa to Luxembourg, not that he was planning such a trip.

As Liu amassed a favorable transaction and payment history on Alipay, his score naturally improved. But it could go down if he neglected to pay a traffic fine, for example. And the privileges that come with a high score might someday be revoked for behaviors that have nothing to do with consumer etiquette. In June 2015, as 9.4 million Chinese teenagers took the grueling national college entrance examination, Hu Tao, the Zhima Credit general manager, told reporters that Ant Financial hoped to obtain a list of students who cheated, so that the fraud could become a blight on their Zhima Credit records. “There should be consequences for dishonest behavior,” she avowed. The good were moving without obstruction. A threat hung over the rest.

Alipay knows that at 1 pm on the afternoon of August 26, I rented an Ofo brand bike outside Shanghai’s former French Concession and rode north, parking it across from Jing’an Temple. It knows that at 1:24 pm I bought a snack in the mall next to the temple. It knows that afterward I got in a Didi car bound for a neighborhood to the northwest. It knows that at 3:11 pm I disembarked and entered a supermarket, and it knows (because Alibaba owns the supermarket, which accepts only Alipay at checkout) that at 3:36 pm I bought bananas, cheese, and crackers. It knows that I then got in a taxi, and that I arrived at my destination at 4:01 pm. It knows the identification number of the taxi that drove me there. It knows that at 4:19 pm I paid $8 for an Amazon delivery. For three sweet hours—one of which I spent in the swimming pool—it does not know my whereabouts. Then it knows that I rented another Ofo bike outside a hotel in central Shanghai, cycled 10 minutes, and at 7:11 pm parked it outside a popular restaurant. Because Ant Financial is a strategic investor in Ofo, Alipay might know the route I took.

The algorithm behind my Zhima Credit score is a corporate secret. Ant Financial officially lists five broad categories of information that feed into the score, but the company provides only the barest of details about how these ingredients are cooked together. Like any conventional credit scoring system, Zhima Credit monitors my spending history and whether I have repaid my loans. But elsewhere the algorithm veers into voodoo, or worse. A category called Connections considers the credit of my contacts in Alipay’s social network. Characteristics takes into consideration what kind of car I drive, where I work, and where I went to school. A category called Behavior, meanwhile, scrutinizes the nuances of my consumer life, zeroing in on actions that purportedly correlate with good credit. Shortly after Zhima Credit’s launch, the company’s technology director, Li Yingyun, told the Chinese magazine Caixin that spending behavior like buying diapers, say, could boost one’s score, while playing videogames for hours on end could lower it. Online speculation held that donating to charity, presumably through Alipay’s built-in donation service, was good. But I’m not sure whether the $3 I gave for feeding brown bear cubs qualifies me as a philanthropist or a cheapskate.

I began to check my score obsessively, but because scores are only reevaluated monthly, the number didn’t budge. Each time I opened the app, I encountered an alarming orange screen. In the foreground was a gauge in the shape of a half-circle, with a dial showing that I had reached only a quarter of my potential. An article on the portal Sohu.com explained that my score put me in the category of “common folk.” The page read: “Cultural level is not high. Retired or nearly retired.” In China, where many elderly lost out on years of education during the Cultural Revolution, this was not a compliment. According to Sohu, only 5 percent of the population had scores worse than mine.

To see if I could do anything to pull my score up, I took a taxi one morning to a chic open-air shopping center outside Shanghai’s city center to meet with Chen Chen, a 30-year-old illustrator. Chen told a mutual friend on WeChat that she had an “excellent” rating on Zhima Credit, and I wanted to ask her counsel. We bought coffee and walked to an outdoor seating area. Chen wore a button-down shirt open over a white T-shirt and skinny jeans. Her hair was bleached to a straw yellow, and a line of sparkly eye shadow was swept under each eye. On Zhima Credit she clocked in at 710, and her background color was a calming sky blue.

She explained how to boost my score. “They will check what kind of friends you have,” she said. “If your friends are all high-score people, it’s good for you. If you have some bad-credit people as friends, it’s not nice.” After signing up for Alipay, I sent friend requests to all of my phone contacts. Only six people accepted. One of my new Alipay friends was a man I used to tutor in English and probably my wealthiest friend in Shanghai. He owned several businesses, a fleet of cars, and a spacious villa in a posh neighborhood. But another was my old tailor, who lived with her family in a single room in a dilapidated house, with piles of cloth obscuring the thin windows. Did the tailor’s impact on my score cancel out the businessman’s? And was I dragging both of them down?

Chen said she knew the scores of her close friends but not those of acquaintances or work colleagues. There are chat rooms where people with decent scores seek out other high scorers, presumably to boost their ratings. But in general, people simply make assumptions about which contacts have good credit and which are better left unfriended. Users like Chen hadn’t yet taken the step of shutting low scorers like me out of their network, she assured me. Zhima Credit was still fairly new, and an acquaintance’s low score might still be charitably explained, she said: “Maybe they just haven’t used it long enough.”

To understand the allure that social engineering holds for Chinese leaders, you have to go back decades, to long before apps and big data. In the years after the 1949 Communist Revolution, the government assigned everyone to local work units, which became the locus of surveillance and control. Individuals spied on their neighbors while also doing everything they could to avoid black marks on their own dang’an, or government files. But maintaining the system required massive state effort and oversight. As economic reforms in the 1980s led millions of people to leave their villages and migrate to cities, the work unit system fell apart. Migration also had a secondary effect: Cities filled up with strangers and pianzi.

It didn’t take long for the central government to start thinking about gamifying good behavior. Leaders realized that “if we are going to have a market system that is supposed to be self-guiding, we also need to have self-guiding credit systems,” says Rogier Creemers, a scholar of Chinese law at the Leiden Institute for Area Studies in the Netherlands. In the late 1990s, a working group at a Chinese Academy of Sciences institute developed the basic concepts behind the social credit system. But the technology wasn’t advanced enough to support the Communist Party’s broader political designs.

Nearly a decade ago, I spent a few weeks in Suining, a mostly rural county in Jiangsu province, near Shanghai. Back then, local governance was not subtle. When officials decided to clamp down on people running red lights, they urged citizens to take pictures of offenders, whose images would later be featured on the local television channel.

Then, in 2010, Suining became one of the first areas in China to pilot a social credit system. Officials there began assessing residents on a range of criteria, including education level, online behavior, and how well they followed traffic laws. Each of Suining’s 1.1 million citizens older than 14 started out with 1,000 points, and points were added or deducted based on behavior. Taking care of elderly family members earned you 50 points. Helping the poor merited 10 points. Helping the poor in a way that was reported by the media: 15. A drunk driving conviction meant the loss of 50 points, as did bribing an official. After the points were tallied up, citizens were assigned grades of A, B, C, or D. Grade A citizens would be given priority for school admissions and employment, while D citizens would be denied licenses, permits, and access to some social services.

The Suining system was rudimentary, and it briefly sparked a national debate over what criteria should be included in a social credit score. But it provided a testing ground for what could work nationally. And however crude the letter grades were, they were less crude than what they replaced. Social credit in Suining was accompanied by a shift to subtler government messaging.

Since the Suining pilot, dozens of cities have developed their own systems. The power of technology had caught up. Eventually, these systems will be integrated into the nationwide government social credit system, which entails a significant logistical headache. To aid in the task, the government has enlisted Baidu, a big tech company, to help develop the social credit database by the 2020 deadline.

The Chinese tech companies have, in their way, helped to shift the Party’s attitude toward digital technologies. When the internet first came to China, bursting into people’s lives in the form of blogs and chat rooms, the Party saw it as a threat. Here was a place where people might speak their minds, join together, dissent. Leaders responded to these impulses through censorship and other aggressive tactics. But companies like Ant Financial have shown just how useful digital technologies can be in gathering and deploying information. Instead of merely reacting to content by banning search terms or shutting down websites, the government now collaborates with the private sector on facial and voice recognition technologies, along with artificial intelligence research.

In 2015, a few months after Zhima Credit debuted, Alibaba founder Jack Ma and 14 other executives traveled to the US with President Xi ­Jinping for his first state visit. Ma, along with leaders at Tencent and Baidu, also sits on the board of the Internet Society of China, a quasi-­governmental organization under the direction of the Party.

This strategic nexus is a delicate one, though. In recent months Chinese regulators have taken steps to exert more control over tech companies. Last August, the People’s Bank of China ordered mobile and online payment companies to connect to a central government clearinghouse, giving regulators access to transaction data. Two months later, The Wall Street Journal reported that Chinese internet regulators were considering taking a 1 percent stake in the major tech companies.

The dial showed that I had reached only a quarter of my potential. My score put me in the category of “Common Folk.”

One possible scenario for a social credit partnership is that the central bank will oversee the development of a broader metric, like a FICO score, while letting companies like Ant Financial collect data to feed into that score. Whatever its eventual structure, the larger social credit system “will definitely be under the government’s control,” says You Xi, the reporter who wrote the book about Ant Financial. “The government doesn’t want this very important infrastructure of the people’s credit in one big company’s hands.”

Chinese people who have been branded untrustworthy are getting the first glimpse of what a unified system might mean. One day last May, Liu Hu, a 42-year-old journalist, opened a travel app to book a flight. But when he entered his name and national ID number, the app informed him that the transaction wouldn’t go through because he was on the Supreme People’s Court blacklist. This list—literally, the List of Dishonest People—is the same one that is integrated into Zhima Credit. In 2015 Liu had been sued for defamation by the subject of a story he’d written, and a court had ordered him to pay $1,350. He paid the fine, and even photographed the bank transfer slip and messaged the photo to the judge in the case. Perplexed as to why he was still on the list, he contacted the judge and learned that, while transferring his fine, he had entered the wrong account number. He hurried to transfer the money again, following up to make sure the court had received it. This time the judge did not reply.

Although Liu hadn’t signed up for Zhima Credit, the blacklist caught up with him in other ways. He became, effectively, a second-class citizen. He was banned from most forms of travel; he could only book the lowest classes of seat on the slowest trains. He could not buy certain consumer goods or stay at luxury hotels, and he was ineligible for large bank loans. Worse still, the blacklist was public. Liu had already spent a year in jail once before on charges of “fabricating and spreading rumors” after reporting on the shady dealings of a vice-mayor of Chong­qing. The memory of imprisonment left him stoic about this new, more invisible punishment. At least he was still with his wife and daughter.

Still, Liu took to his blog to stir up sympathy and convince the judge to take him off the list. As of October he was still on it. “There is almost no oversight of the court executors” who maintain the blacklist, he told me. “There are many mistakes in implementation that go uncorrected.” If Liu had a Zhima Credit score, his troubles would have been compounded by other worries. The way Zhima Credit is designed, being blacklisted sends you on a rapid downward spiral. First your score drops. Then your friends hear you are on the blacklist and, fearful that their scores might be affected, quietly drop you as a contact. The algorithm notices, and your score plummets further.

Soon after I returned to the US from my visit to China, Equifax, the US credit­-reporting agency, announced that it had been hacked. The breach exposed the credit records of some 145 million people. Like many Americans, I got a quick and hard lesson. My credit card number had been stolen a few weeks earlier, but because I had been traveling overseas I hadn’t bothered to freeze my credit. When I tried to do so after the hack, I found that an already difficult process had become nearly impossible. Equifax’s site was only partly operational, and its phone lines were jammed. Desperate, I signed up for a credit-monitoring service called Credit Karma, which, in exchange for the very same information that I was trying to protect, showed me my score with two of the three major bureaus.

These numbers were communicated to me through a credit gauge similar to Zhima Credit’s, down to the color coding of scores. I learned that my credit score had dipped by a few dozen points. There were four or five attempts to take out credit in my name that I didn’t recognize.

Most Americans have dozens of scores, and most of them are held by companies that give us no chance to opt out.

Now I had two tracking systems scoring me, on opposite sides of the globe. But these were only the scores that I knew about. Most Americans have dozens of scores, many of them drawn from behavioral and demographic metrics similar to those used by Zhima Credit, and most of them held by companies that give us no chance to opt out. Others we enter into voluntarily. The US government can’t legally compel me to participate in some massive data-driven social experiment, but I give up my data to private companies every day. I trust these corporations enough to participate in their vast scoring experiments. I post my thoughts and feelings on Facebook and leave long trails of purchases on Amazon and eBay. I rate others in Airbnb and Uber and care a little too much about how others rate me. There is not yet a great American super app, and the scores compiled by data brokers are mainly used to better target ads, not to exert social control. But through a process called identity resolution, data aggregators can use the clues I leave behind to merge my data from various sources.

Do you take antidepressants? Frequently return clothes to retailers? Write your name in all caps when filling out online forms? Data brokers collect all of this information and more. As in China, you may even be penalized for who your friends are. In 2012, Facebook patented a method of credit assessment that could consider the credit scores of people in your network. The patent describes a tool that arrives at an average credit score for your friends and rejects a loan application if that average is below a certain minimum. The company has since revised its platform policies to prohibit outside lenders from using Facebook data to determine credit eligibility. The company could still decide to get into the credit business itself, though. (“We often seek patents for technology we never implement, and patents should not be taken as an indication of future plans,” a Facebook spokesperson said in response to questions about the credit patent.) “You could imagine a future where people are watching to see if their friends’ credit is dropping and then dropping their friends if that affects them,” says Frank Pasquale, a big-data expert at University of Maryland Carey School of Law. “That’s terrifying.”

Often, data brokers are flat-out wrong. The data broker Acxiom, which provides some information about what it collects on a site called AboutTheData.com, has me pegged as a single woman with a high school education and a “likely Las Vegas gambler,” when in fact I’m married, have a master’s degree, and have never even bought a lottery ticket. But it is impossible to challenge these assessments, since we’re never told that they exist. I know more about Zhima Credit’s algorithm than I do about how US data brokers rate me. This is, as Pasquale points out in his book The Black Box Society, essentially a “one-way mirror.”

After I left China, I checked back in with Lazarus Liu on WeChat. He sent me a screenshot of his Zhima Credit score, which had increased by eight points since we met. His screen read “Fantastic,” and the font had shifted to soft italics.

We talked about a new facial recognition feature called Smile to Pay that Ant Financial had introduced at a concept restaurant in Hangzhou owned by KFC. The walls of the restaurant were adorned with gigantic white phones. To order, you simply tapped a picture of what you wanted and then showed the phone your face, typing in your cell phone number to confirm payment. First smartphones had eliminated the need for a wallet; now Smile to Pay eliminated the need for a phone. All you needed was your face.

Liu wasn’t eager to try Smile to Pay. The “government affairs” page on Zhima Credit’s website suggests that Ant Financial partners with local governments throughout China to use its facial recognition capabilities, but that wasn’t what made Liu uneasy. While studying abroad, he had played around with Android’s Face Unlock feature. His roommate, who shared his square jaw, had been able to unlock his phone a few times. “I feel that it could be unsafe,” he messaged me. “I would want to see that it’s the real thing.” He wrote real thing in English, for emphasis.

While chatting with Liu, I, too, had opened up Zhima Credit. My score had increased by four points. “You still have room to improve,” the app informed me delicately. But next to my new score, 554, was a small green arrow. I was on my way up.

Inside China’s Vast New Experiment in Social Ranking, by Mara Hvistendahl, is brought to you by Deca.

The Virgin Australia flight bound for Papua New Guinea departs from Brisbane bearing a full load: gigantic sun-cured men in golf shirts; neckless security hacks scribbled over by tattoo artists; inscrutable, terrifying power suits. Over a muggy sweep of brine, the plane arcs toward a nation that occupies the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and a farrago of smaller islands scattered across Melanesia. Australians, its colonial overlords between 1905 and 1975, don’t pay PNG much mind any longer—the country is little more than a volcanic absence lurking 150 kilometres north of mainland Oz, a shadow in the dead of the South Pacific.

But PNG is a global player—just ask an accountant for any major transnational mining corporation. Take the mist-shrouded valley of Porgera. Located 600 kilometres northwest of the capital, Port Moresby, it stands at the very end of the road, with the muddy mountain hamlet of Mongolop acting as a final milestone. Comprising corrugated iron shacks, graffiti-tagged outbuildings, and a clearing where kids play rugby, the community sits atop a hill whose highest point opens onto a Catholic mission’s jungle garden, immaculately maintained by the resident Filipino priest. A blank-eyed wooden statue of Christ stares out at the reigning deity around these parts: the yawning pit of a mega-mine, a slice of Canadian real estate in the middle of the middle of nowhere.

The pit itself resembles a signature geological event, a seismic suicide attempt. It tumbles down the face of Mount Peruk in a series of terraces, as if scooped out by an army of orcs. In the late 1980s, a Vancouver-based mining house called Placer Dome made a deal with the national government, the northern province of Enga, and a cabal of local landowners—the representatives of at least eleven official Porgeran clans—who continued to live inside the boundaries of the site. The so-called Porgera Joint Venture (PJV) was inaugurated in 1990, and when Barrick Gold acquired Placer in a blockbuster deal in 2006, it had already metastasized into one of the most productive gold mines on the planet.

Barrick was founded in 1983 by Peter Munk, a Holocaust survivor, technology executive, and successful hotelier who had returned to Toronto from the South Pacific in 1979 to seek commodities glory. Barrick was not a mining company but a company that bought mining companies. In 1984, it purchased a stake in Renabie, based in central Ontario; shortly after, it bought Camflo Mining, which operated at the time in Quebec and Nevada. Nevada’s Goldstrike mine entered the fold in 1987, and with gold on an extended bull run, it wasn’t long before Barrick barged into Canada’s corporate pantheon.

Barrick has a lengthy rap sheet, one that includes allegations of worker mistreatment and waterway pollution. For environmentalists and anti-mining activists, the company has long been the ne plus ultra of capitalist wrongdoing. While it conducts 75 percent of its business in North America, Barrick’s sites are located across at least four different continents and employ more than 14,000 people in countries as far-flung as Argentina, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Saudi Arabia, and Zambia, often in the face of violent opposition from locals. The recent commodities price crash has been cruel to the company, which made some ill-advised expansion forays, especially into copper mining. An asset dump and corporate shake-up ensued. While the majority of PJV itself is no longer owned by Barrick, which sold 50 percent of the mine’s Niugini holding company to China’s Zijin Mining Group last year, it still manages the operations.

At least $20 billion worth of bullion has been pulled from PJV in the mine’s lifetime; between 1990 and 2009, Barrick estimates that the mine accounted for an astonishing 12 percent of PNG’s total exports. While this has thrilled the country’s political establishment, not every local landowner considers it a square deal. That’s why, for much of the mine’s existence, the pit has been overrun by thousands of what Barrick and the PNG government consider “illegal miners.” Every level of the vertiginous pit has been occupied by locals, sometimes working at the equivalent of thirty storeys without safety equipment. Even today, a few torches can be seen at dusk, trapped in the darkness of the pit wall, hundreds of metres above the haulage trucks beeping below.

Even in the best of circumstances, PNG is not renowned for law and order. But this was a gold rush, and in the absence of state enforcement, Placer/Barrick tried to curtail incursions with a combined corps of police and hired guards. The illegal miners would not be so easily curtailed. And so the locals and PJV’s security apparatus went to war.

Caught up in this violence was a woman named Marawanda Wakapu. In the 1960s, when Wakapu was still a girl living in Mongolop, Australians and New Guineans panned the Strickland River for gold. Their activities were part of the transition from rough-and-tumble small-claims digging to the grim professionalism of mega-mining. Following more than 40,000 years of near isolation from the outside world, New Guineans were, nearly a century ago, introduced to global commerce by way of the digger’s pickaxe. Locals suddenly had access to a cash economy, which ushered in alcohol, electronics, roads, and modernity—an insta-future exploded across the region. There was copper to be mined, as well as zinc, oil, and gas. But mostly there was gold. Three of the world’s richest gold mines are now located in the region: Lihir, on Lihir Island; Grasberg, next door in West Papua; and, of course, the PJV.

Wakapu grew up and grew old with the mine. Today, she appears as if whittled from a hardwood sprig, and speaks Porgeran at a runaway clip. When younger, she would forage for food in the bush or pan the waters of the Strickland for bits of gold. Then came the Canadians, and with them the pit, the benefits of which stubbornly refused to trickle down. After lengthy and contested negotiations with the Porgera Landowners Association (PLOA), local royalties were pegged at 2 percent of net sales, which works out to more than $10 million a year. Half of that goes to the provincial authorities, and half goes directly to the landowners through the PLOA, which is meant to be in charge of community projects such as the construction and maintenance of health and education facilities.

But the PLOA operates without transparent accounting processes, and it has never been audited. As far as Wakapu was concerned, nothing tangible—which is to say, money—was forthcoming. She found herself living in squalor in the midst of an active gold-mining operation. Unable to subsistence farm—an activity on which most islanders depend for their livelihood—she went out onto the mine dump searching for waste gold. In March 2003, while panning in the Strickland, Wakapu was approached by a security officer who wore a uniform that identified him as a Placer Dome employee. According to testimony that Wakapu would later give to human-rights organizations, the guard guided her into the bushes, grabbed her by the throat, and ripped off her clothes. Then he raped her. A year after that first assault, she was raped again, this time in a prison cell by a drunk guard.

“The pain now,” she told me through a translator as we sat sipping Cokes in a cramped conference room, “is that I know that I’m a landowner. Why am I going through this?”

In 2005, rumours of countless rapes, many of which bore similarities to the events described in Wakapu’s testimony, started to emerge from the valley. At first Barrick treated them as “furphies,” Australian slang for canards. “[T]o our knowledge,” the company responded in 2011, “there have been no cases of sexual assault reported to mine management involving PJV security personnel while on duty, since Barrick acquired its interest in the mine in 2006.”

Yet reports disputing Barrick’s conclusions were being collected by NGOs in the valley, most notably Ottawa-based MiningWatch, which was in this case represented by an experienced anti-mining activist named Catherine Coumans. Human Rights Watch mounted its own investigation and eventually released a report in 2011 entitled “Gold’s Costly Dividend: Human Rights Impacts of Papua New Guinea’s Porgera Gold Mine.” The rape allegations—which ballooned from eight to a number well into the hundreds—were never tested to Canadian legal standards of admissibility: there were no rape kits, and in some cases, no eyewitness reports. But in a context such as this one, where exclusion from PNG’s conservative society can be worse than assault itself, lawyers working on the victims’ behalf determined that false reporting was unlikely. “We conducted interviews with women from different clans who didn’t know each other but shared similarities—and bizarre, sadistic details,” a human-rights lawyer told me. By 2014, when all the evidence had been compiled and all the testimony collated, it appeared that acts of sexual violence had been perpetrated on an industrial scale.

How was it possible for a Canadian company to have been implicated in such heinous activities without triggering more official scrutiny? The behaviour of private and public law-enforcement personnel in the Porgera Valley between 2000 and 2010 says much about what has gone sideways in the global Canadian extractive industry over the past half-century. Mining is “the family business,” former foreign minister John Manley has said, one that, according to the Mining Association of Canada, contributed $57 billion (or 3.1 percent of GDP) to the Canadian economy in 2014. But it’s also a business that often involves Canadian companies in conflicts with communities abroad,in countries with few human-rights laws or meaningful legal protections.

The scale of the violence in the Porgera Valley, however, appears to have at last pushed Canada’s transnational diggers to adopt a new, more progressive mindset. Last June, for the first time in its history, Barrick was presented with the 2016 General Counsel Award for Corporate Social Responsibility, given annually to a company whose policies exemplify ethical business practices. But have Barrick’s tribulations in PNG really crafted a better future for the extractive industry and the people directly exposed to it? Or are we living in a time of more sophisticated human-rights washing—an age of better, slicker spin?

Tim Andambo, manager of PJV’s community-affairs department, is a short, powerfully built slab of a man. A scar on his forehead is a remnant of a forgotten tribal war, and he keeps his scalp shaved close—like a post–cage match UFC fighter. Andambo is a local “big man”—or leader—from a tribe called the Ipili, and he rose through the ranks to serve as perhaps the most important element of PJV’s socially responsible new era.

Out there in the community, Andambo is the face of the mine. As I drove around with him, hunched men in tattered winter coats approached his Toyota Land Cruiser and asked him for favours, for work, for handouts. Time and again, they opened the door insistently, and just as insistently, Andambo pulled it closed. “They don’t understand—I can’t just give everyone work,” he said. This new form of community relations was startlingly intimate and no longer ran parallel with, or ancillary to, security operations—it was security operations. In April, a huge chunk of mountain slid into the access road, wiping away an informal settlement. Barrick and the community, using the mining company’s equipment and expertise, cleared it up together—an example of communalism that would have been unheard of even a few years ago. The glad-handing extended to Barrick’s open-door policy regarding visiting journalists, including this one: complimentary flights up to the site, a bunk, a meal or three, and access to every last person in the valley, enemy or friend.

For all its newfound bonhomie, PJV is by no means a laid-back environment. Bags are searched after landing at the nearby Kairik Airstrip. In a perverse variation on the South Pacific conch-shell greeting, blowing into a breathalyzer constitutes a welcoming ritual. For employees, booze and drugs are verboten; downloading or streaming pornography results in immediate termination. Life here is simple: breakfast, work, dinner, sleep.

A good indication of the extent to which a mining operation is accepted in the community is whether vehicles can travel safely through it. Andambo drove a Barrick SUV with grills protecting the windows, the cabin rendered claustrophobic, at a speed below forty kilometres per hour. A year ago, Andambo told me, locals would throw rocks at mining vehicles. “The violence toward us has quieted down,” he said.

Nevertheless, as we wound through the dirt roads that crossed the single paved main drag, he became distressed. “Nobody’s in charge,” he said, pointing to the poorly maintained rugby field, then to the shuttered Porgera Market, a wretched impromptu bazaar stretching the length of the city. Cloud-covered peaks rose up to our right, while on our left, betel-nut sellers lined the streets, peddling the mild narcotic that is the national poison. Sewage ran down the sluices, and when we opened a window, the thin mountain air reeked of human waste. Many of the community initiatives we visited had received start-up cash and maintenance funds from the mine. “And yet the people complain that the company doesn’t do enough,” said Andambo.

Part of the job of the community-affairs manager is to highlight the social-responsibility initiatives that Barrick has put in place and link them with the needs of the community. The problem is that the community needs everything. Andambo’s gripe struck at the heart of the transnational mining paradox: Barrick, for all its wealth and community immersion, isn’t duty-bound to govern Porgera. PNG’s government is. Where is the evidence of its involvement? When I asked, Andambo just laughed bitterly.

“The royalty money should go a long way, but it doesn’t,” Ila Temu, Barrick’s executive country director, told me. This is just one of the reasons why, as is the case with almost all of the major mines in developing nations, there is little in the vicinity of the site that an economist would term “diversification”—no factories down the value chain that would suggest economic rather than social or environmental transformation. There are provincial corporations such as Mineral Resources Enga; community-owned haulage and catering collectives that serve the mine; and the PLOA, which is meant to disburse royalties to legitimate landowners. These initiatives have, for the most part, served only to expose the discord in the valley. Local or otherwise, corruption defines governance in PNG.

The upshot of all this? PJV is, according to operations director Gregory Walker, “the de facto government in the area.” If the mine were simply to disappear, Porgera would slide immediately into the Dark Ages. Nothing that has occurred here in the past twenty-six years could be considered sustainable; even the millions of tonnes of tailings dumped into the Strickland would eventually be washed away with time.

As a result, PNG remains mired in resource-related dysfunction. The recent commodities super-cycle, an extended period of high prices for raw materials, driven largely by growth in China, bumped up the country’s GDP over 8 percent a year from around 2010, making it one of the fastest-growing economies in the world until 2014. And yet, in 2015, the United Nations Human Development Index ranked PNG 158 out of the 188 countries on the list. (Australia is ranked second, Canada ninth.) Two-thirds of citizens live below the poverty line, while only 40 percent of the population has access to clean water, and 45 percent to sanitation. In rural areas, just 2 percent of households use anything Canadians would recognize as a toilet.

It was a typical Monday morning, and Andambo and his colleagues had learned that, in nearby Yaparepe village, one person had been killed and another badly injured in tribal violence during the night. At dawn, sixty illegal miners tried to make it into the pit but were chased off by local villagers—a raid that anywhere else would have been considered a full-blown assault, but that in PJV was brushed off as business as usual.

Andambo steered his Land Cruiser into town, and we found that the bank had closed because the generator was out of fuel, which meant the hospital couldn’t withdraw the 350,000 kina—or roughly $144,000—it had received to buy diesel, leaving the region and its estimated 50,000 inhabitants without a functioning health-care facility. In faraway Port Moresby, news reports warned there was a chance that Prime Minister Peter O’Neill was about to be arrested along with his police commissioner—if that happened, cops would be called to the capital in order to prevent, or perhaps to perpetrate, chaos.

About those cops: In the early 2000s, when Placer/Barrick’s guards were in almost constant conflict with the community, the small local force of police officers was effectively useless. Barrick assembled a contingent of nearly 450 private security personnel to staff its Asset Protection Department. “We employ our own security, but we also have government police on the ground helping us operate within the valley. So they look after the law-and-order situation,” Temu told me.

But that was only partially true. When it came to the issue of who would be financially responsible for the top-up in policing, along with a recent call-out for the army, Barrick opted to bankroll the bulk of the costs, which included paying for training and the building of a new barracks, all of which would be deducted from its tax bill—a compensation mechanism that shifted the burden of police oversight from Port Moresby to PJV. Did this mean that the cops were in the area to keep the general peace, or were they Barrick’s boys, there to protect the mine, with no intention of serving the locals?

Regardless of the answer, Placer/Barrick has thrown in its lot with a policing culture that, in 2013, featured cops with bush knives slashing the ankles of seventy-four men in retribution for a street brawl. “Papua New Guineans face violence at every turn, including from the police, who should be protecting them,” wrote Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch, in a statement.

Because of the massive influx of law enforcement, and thanks to new community-outreach policies, violence in the valley was somewhat quelled. But as far as Andambo was concerned, violent or not, a community without governance would keep sliding into the abyss. “I see this place going backwards,” he said, yanking the Land Cruiser’s steering wheel toward the main drag. “There’s no leadership here.”

The headquarters of Porgera Joint Venture is a series of two-storey blocks fashioned from concrete, glass, and aluminum, and has a distinct NGO-schoolhouse-in-Uganda sensibility to it. Scattered around the offices are laminated maps that depict the mining operation and the areas on its periphery.

The most important map features a satellite image dominated by the scratched-out pit and its various dumps along the banks of the Strickland River, rendered as more of a muddy swamp due to the mine’s pollution. A series of yellow lines criss-crosses the photo, dividing the area into hundreds of small segments, each representing a territory belonging to a clan or sub-clan. If PJV had a defining problem, it was the illegal raiding of the pit by local clan members who existed within the Special Mining Lease (SML), the area on which Barrick is allowed to operate. Along twisted roads that reveal a botanical mash-up of the Caribbean and the Andes, 3,000 Porgerans negotiated a grim existence within sight of a refinery from which 19 million ounces of melted gold had been poured.

It was a problem that Placer Dome should have seen coming. “Placer was born in this country,” Greg Anderson, executive director of the PNG Chamber of Mines, told me. “It was a penny-stock company that came in the 1920s.” The company won the right to work a large alluvial deposit in the Bulolo region, which produced 1.3 million ounces of gold before closing in 1965. When Placer returned in the 1980s to make a play for Porgera, it negotiated as an old hand, not as an outsider.

But negotiated with whom? At no point in their history have Papua New Guineans constituted a single tribe or culture. Though their land is less than half the size of Ontario, with just 7 million inhabitants, it nevertheless features one of the most decentralized political systems on Earth. There are 854 recognized languages here (twelve of which are spoken only by ghosts), and an additional 3,000 dialects—Babel in the jungle.

Each tribal unit is referred to as a “society,” and has a distinctive language, culture, history, jurisprudence, and land policy. Although all PNG tribes have faced the same pressures—colonialism, the resource curse, climate change, the breakdown of old ways—there is nothing to be found here that resembles an esprit de corps. One thing all Papua New Guineans can agree on, however, is that wealth and social cohesion are determined by the possession of land, women, and pigs.

Fighting for resources is a way of life here. And when the PJV gold rush kicked in, everyone demanded a piece. The valley’s population increased from 6,000 to 50,000 in just a decade. The SML, which had been occupied by no more than a few hundred people during exploration, was, according to Barrick’s estimates, suddenly home to around 3,000. These people are referred to by the Ipili, one of the largest tribes in the region, as epo atene, or “those who have come”—hardly a term of endearment. At war with one another, at war with the mine: volatility defined the valley.

The main question that Placer, and later Barrick, had to answer was, who among the people of the valley was owed how much? Loosely speaking, Porgeran social organization adheres to a “cognatic” system, by which inheritance rights can be accrued through both matrilineal and patrilineal affiliations, while kinship must be achieved and maintained either by verbal or physical suasion. Confused? So was a massive Canadian mining company, which goes some way toward explaining why Placer Dome allowed the clans to continue living on the SML, an area that, in a more standard international leasing arrangement, would have been declared an exclusion zone. Consequently, because of intersecting clan allegiances, it’s been nearly impossible for Barrick to determine who “belongs” on the site.

In the twenty-six years since industrial mining began, none of these issues has been resolved—in fact, they have become only more convoluted. At PJV headquarters and out in the community, an ambitious “land-resettlement program” is the current obsession. Managed by a social scientist named Richard Savage, and undertaken with the buy-in of the PLOA, pilot projects have been implemented to determine how to move the clans off the SML, and where in the crowded valley to move them. The anticipated costs of the venture could run into the tens of millions.

Complicating all this is the fact that PNG is one of the more dangerous, if not the most dangerous, countries in the world in which to be female. According to the most recent UNICEF report, released in 2012, “the Maternal Mortality Ratio (MMR) of 733 per 100,000 live births is the second highest in the world,” and only 57 percent of women consider themselves literate. These inequities are the symptoms of a culture that sees shocking levels of violence committed against women and girls. One study found that two out of three women had been beaten by their husbands, while another reported that the first sexual encounter for one in five women was rape. According to a study of 3,000 victims that was conducted by Médecins Sans Frontières and shared with the Huffington Post, “Over half of the survivors were children. One in six were under the age of 5.”

Yet even within this environment of normalized sexual violence, what was happening on the PJV was unusual. There has been disagreement about how many women were harmed, but the stories were everywhere—they had become part of the narrative fabric of the valley. The head of the Family Violence Unit told me that he once came across a naked eight-year-old girl who had been assaulted on the banks of the Strickland; he had to take her, bloodied and weeping, to the clinic. A human-rights worker told me of a woman who had been attacked while carrying her baby. As the mother was being gang-raped, the infant fell into a shallow pool and drowned. Engan customary law obliged her to compensate her husband and his family for the loss of the child.

And then there was this incident, which occurred in January 2009. As told to Human Rights Watch:

I was also trying to run away but I tripped on a stone and I fell down. Six security [personnel] held me. Their reaction was not to take me to jail but they were trying to rape me and holding on to my skirt and pulling it like they wanted to take it off. I bent down holding my skirt and one security kicked me in the face. I lost my five bottom teeth and three top teeth. After that, these security raped me.

By 2009, Porgera Valley resembled an alt-horror version of the Wild West. Scowling men stalked the streets of Porgera and nearby Paiam with bush knives dangling from their belts, while women scurrying home with their babies made sure they were indoors before dark. In order to quiet the insecurity, the PNG government, after a report was sent by the mine, sent four units of their dreaded mobile squad of police to maintain law and order.

If the mess in the valley had a locus, it was, according to PJV security guards, a small village called Wuangima, located in the SML. Barrick personnel say the village was the staging ground for mining raids on the pit. “Every night, you could hear the rapes,” a high-ranking security operative told me. “Do you have any idea what that sounds like?” In April of that year, a fire reduced Wuangima to a series of ashy circles. The flames were clearly visible from PJV headquarters. An Amnesty International report suggested that Barrick was guilty of using police to force evictions by way of arson—an allegation the company forcefully denied. “Virtually every ‘fact’ recited by [Amnesty] was either without foundation or unfairly painted a picture of this action by PNG police and Barrick that is fundamentally misleading,” read Barrick’s official statement.

Whoever was responsible, the tactics worked. The valley’s murder rate plummeted, the open pit experienced a decline in illegal mining activities, and local women felt safer on the streets. But Wuangima would turn out to be just one of the PR problems Barrick faced in 2009. By this point, the stories about systematic sexual abuse had leaked into the press. Enter a trifecta of NGOs, all of which had been monitoring the behaviour of mining companies for at least a decade.

Perhaps the most prominent at the time was a research team, led by a legal scholar named Sarah Knuckey, that was associated with the human-rights centres of Harvard, Columbia, and New York University’s law schools. In Porgera, it had no trouble finding victims. The team submitted evidence of eight rapes and two other acts of sexual violence to the Canadian government, and the testimony was laced with gruesome details. “The story starts with Barrick not doing due diligence in hiring security,” Knuckey told me. “It continued with the company’s lack of attention to what people were alleging.”

Barrick isn’t alone. Other Canadian mining companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange have been associated with child labour, slavery, environmental damage, mass sexual assault, and mass murder. Despite all of this, the relationship between the mining industry and Ottawa remains entangled. Former prime minister Brian Mulroney serves as the chairman of Barrick’s international advisory board—his previous position, as senior advisor, earned him over $2.5 million in 2012. When John Baird, former foreign minister under Stephen Harper, abruptly quit his post in 2015, he practically walked from his office in Parliament to a seat on Barrick’s advisory board. And Canadian diggers don’t restrict their recruiting to outgoing Canadian politicians. Former United States president George H.W. Bush served as an honorary senior adviser to Barrick’s international board, while former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich was tapped for a seat.

Given the links between Big Mining and its government benefactors, it’s perhaps no surprise that free-trade agreements—through which Ottawa conducts policy beyond its borders—help inoculate locally registered corporations against prosecution outside Canada. As Anna Vogt, a policy analyst for the Latin American and Caribbean region, noted in a blog entry, “Laws and regulations currently in place favour the activities of Canadian companies abroad above all other considerations.”

Canadian mining houses pumped $71 billion worth of taxes and royalties into our economy in the decade leading up to 2012, and billions more into nations—many with poor human-rights records—that have lacked the capital and the skills to access their own resources. Much of that money flows back to Bay Street, which likely helps explain why the Export Development Canada, along with the Canadian Pension Plan, provides an estimated $20 billion in financing and insurance sweeteners to the industry every year. Big Mining has engaged in a series of shotgun weddings: small players are being bought up by increasingly consolidated transnational corporations that wield immense lobbying power. Perhaps nothing exemplifies this phenomenon better than Barrick itself; the company acquired Placer Dome for $10.4 billion in late 2006. The combined assets of this Canadian power couple made it the biggest gold-mining company at the time.

Shortly after the Placer/Barrick marriage was consummated, a series of consultations took place in Ottawa, culminating in the 2007 National Roundtables on Corporate Social Responsibility and the Canadian Extractive Industry in Developing Countries. The sessions were, according to a report published that year, “organized by a Steering Committee of Government of Canada officials working closely with an Advisory Group comprising persons drawn from industry, labour, the socially responsible investment community, civil society and academia.” This supergroup’s stated aim was to devise a “Canadian CSR framework”—a policy outline that would encourage members of the Canadian extractive sector to behave like responsible global citizens.

Such a policy was in the industry’s own interests. The enmity between miners and anti-mining activists aside, restive operation sites and mass-murder allegations are not good for business. For at least two decades, the extractive sector and other multinational industries had been trying to figure out how best to regulate themselves in countries with scant government oversight and little, if any, rule of law. Since the 1970s, Big Mining has been developing ethical best practices that have led to overarching, and entirely voluntary, frameworks. These policy outlines influenced how miners spoke about values, even if they didn’t always change outcomes.

In order to manage what it described as “security and human rights related risks” at its mines, Barrick in 2007 adopted the latest of these frameworks, termed the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights (VPSHR). As always, the principles were not binding. In Barrick’s case, even the “compulsory” biannual site audits were not made public but were instead “utilized strictly for internal purposes.”

Barrick then doubled down and became one of the first multinationals to sign on to the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs)—a super-charged version of the VHSPR, enacted in 2011. Notably, in the case of PJV, the UNGPs insisted that there should be “access to remedy for victims of business-related abuses.” But in the face of what were potentially hundreds of cases of gang rape, the UN’s demands seemed feeble.

The 2007 roundtable coincided with the rollout of these larger multilateral initiatives. But a central question remained: In an international trade environment that protected transnational companies from any real liability in foreign territories, didn’t the federal government have an obligation to police corporations registered in Canada or listed on its stock exchange? Human-rights advocates were clear in this regard, but agency more often than not lay with the sovereign national governments that invited Canadian miners into their countries. “How do you operate in such an environment as PNG?” a local commentator and politician named Alan Bird asked me. “You can’t blame the miners. It’s pure capitalism.”

Be that as it may, something had to give. The roundtable’s recommendations suggested that ministries of foreign affairs or industrial trade, through the office of an independent ombudsperson, should investigate complaints emerging from developing nations. The ombudsperson would have the ability “to provide advisory services, fact finding and reporting regarding complaints with respect to the operations in developing countries of Canadian extractive companies.” If a mining house failed to meet the CSR framework’s standards, noted the report, “government support for the company should be withdrawn.”

As tough as that might have sounded, the roundtable didn’t call for criminal charges to be laid against law-breaking executives. It also naively asked for the Canadian government to “help” developing nations form better governance institutions, as if Manila or Moscow were waiting for Ottawa’s advice on how best to police their extractive sectors. Despite these shortcomings, the roundtable did provide the guidelines that led to Bill C-300, also known as the Responsible Mining Act, which was drafted in 2009 and tabled a year later by John McKay, a Liberal MP representing Toronto’s Guildwood–Scarborough riding. The legislation was defeated 140 to 134 in the House of Commons in October 2010, largely because members of parliament faced unrelenting pressure from lobbyists, including former Liberal international trade minister Jim Peterson.

The defeat of Bill C-300 was seen as a major setback in responsible-mining circles, in no small part because of the events that had transpired at PJV. As the first of the roundtables was taking place, a community outfit called the Akali Tange Association released a report called “The Shooting Fields of Porgera Joint Venture: Now a Case to Compensate and Justice to Prevail.” The report alleged that private PJV security guards had shot and killed at least nine locals between 1996 and 2005, and had murdered several others by either smashing them with rocks or flinging them into the open pit. A number of these cases were impossible to verify, but on the eve of its nuptials with Barrick in November 2005, Placer publicly acknowledged eight deaths, although it held that its security forces had acted in self-defence. In a footnote, the report also cited something that would end up serving as a precedent: an agreement, signed between the families of one of the victims and PJV, that provided compensation in exchange for the preclusion of any further legal action.

Five years after purchasing Placer, Barrick faced its own human-rights nightmare. When the rapes became impossible to ignore, the fallout was relatively swift. There were firings, and testimony was handed over to the PNG police for investigation. (Barrick steadfastly refused to investigate the assaults, leaving that to local police. So far there have been no successful prosecutions.) Barrick turned to a man named Patrick Bindon for assistance. An unflappable Australian who answers the phone with a deep Queensland “G’day, mate,” Bindon has a long history in the industry, and he was now employed by Porgera as an all-purpose communications fixer.

In 2012, Bindon set out to provide Barrick with a process that would define what a corporation could offer in the face of human-rights violations—but would avoid any admission of liability and, more crucially, eliminate the possibility of further legal action. The program is called Olgeta Meri Igat Raits—pidgin for “All Women Have Rights.” In many respects, it was a game changer. “It was launched to a lot of fanfare,” Knuckey told me. “What was unique about it was that it came out right after the UNGPs, which stated that if human rights are violated, the company needs to provide a remedy. Barrick appeared to be a company finally taking responsibility for its actions and offering compensation.”

The first step required a claimant to go to an office in Porgera Station and make a statement that would be assessed through a Complaints Assessment Team (CAT). (There were problems: in a valley rife with gossip, the simple act of making a claim outed a woman as a rape victim, and thus often exacerbated her problems rather than ending them.) The CAT went over the testimony and passed its assessment on to an independent expert, who prepared a decision. Claimants could appeal adverse findings, and they also had the right to engage an independent legal adviser, a local lawyer who dispensed free advice on a case-by-case basis. If the claimant accepted the remedy package, she would sign away her right to bring another case against Barrick or its affiliates.

The remedy packages offered a combination of cash, rape counselling, and business education. But because these packages were never appropriately explained to claimants, many of whom were illiterate, there was often confusion about the terms. By June 2015, 253 claims had been lodged, of which 119 have been paid out. To some human-rights groups, this didn’t seem like nearly enough. An American outfit called Earth Rights—which first touched down in Porgera in January 2013—set up a shadow remedial framework whose staff hoped to sue Barrick for larger compensation packages. It found thirty-six women willing to participate in the process, one of whom was Marawanda Wakapu. Earth Rights prepared to file a suit not in PNG, nor in Canada, but in Nevada, where Barrick has operated since the mid-’80s, and where courts tend to be less tolerant of white-collar crime. In 2014, Barrick settled, and eleven women, including Wakapu, won compensation substantially higher than what Barrick had offered—a result that led to the company revising its packages upward.

This was not, however, the watershed moment in Canadian corporate history many had hoped it would be. “At the time of the creation of the mechanism, there was zero direct consultation with the victims. It was designed without putting at the centre of it the people who were going to use it,” Knuckey told me. Her team had wanted a mechanism that would redress all of the crimes committed in the name of the mine, not just sexual assaults. “If you were beaten in the face, or were a man who was butchered, you couldn’t access the packages,” she said. Activists were looking for something fairer, something more encompassing—and something created alongside those most affected by the operations.

But Barrick took another view. “These organizations are external entities with nothing on the ground,” Temu told me. “They messed up our structure that we had in place. They don’t live here. They have no interest in the lives of the women, who have probably spent the money and are back to square one.”

Marawanda Wakapu was among those who found themselves back at the start. When we met in a Barrick boardroom, the money—the terms of the Earth Rights settlement required that the amount not be disclosed—was already gone. She had bought a bus in order to start a business. It sat on blocks. “I have nothing,” she told me, weeping. “What will I do now?”

If this was corporate social responsibility, then it wasn’t working. At a Tanzanian mine called North Mara, which had seen enormous rates of community violence when it was owned and operated by Barrick Africa between 2006 and 2010, a similar framework had been put in place, but the company had again negotiated a waiver inhibiting further legal action in exchange for compensation. While in Canadian and other Western legal systems this sort of process is de rigueur, such compensation frameworks end up bring poorly understood, and communities—fairly or unfairly—often demand more.

Had Barrick’s considerable efforts led to a fairer, more reasonable transnational corporate-governance framework? Few people seemed to think so, and the problem of the mean ungreen multinational did not seem to have been solved. Even The Economist, a reliable cheerleader for transnational companies, recently published a story titled “In Praise of Small Miners,” in which it celebrated the economics of “artisanal mining.” As with artisanal charcuterie or knitwear, the smaller-is-better trend is predicated on a localized economic model that provides benefits to the lowest rungs of society, rather than to the highest. But without stringent top-down governance, and a functioning and policed set of regulatory frameworks, does it matter whether mining is big or small?

The PNG government, of course, can run the country however it sees fit. “MiningWatch would say, ‘Stop the mining,’” Temu told me. “But what would we do as a country? Resource extraction was a deliberate decision by a sovereign country to use its resources to fund its development. Who the hell are they to tell us what to do?” Still, Port Moresby has signed on to the Extractive Industries Transparency Alliance and taken some small steps toward cleaning itself up. (That said, students protesting O’Neill’s corruption were recently met with gunfire, and seventeen were injured.) Meanwhile, new allegations have emerged in the valley: three men, one of whom was HIV-positive, claimed to have been forced by PJV guards into having sex with each other. “We have received WhatsApp messages of some new cases,” Knuckey told me. “We went back in December, and we reported some of these new cases to Barrick and to the police commissioners in Port Moresby and to the ombudsman office. We haven’t heard back from Barrick.”

That might be because Barrick has tried to move on from the assault narrative and is staking the future of the PJV and its people on the land-resettlement program. During my visit it was deeply involved in a delicate series of consultations with the community, with an eye to rebuilding a whole world for the clans moving off the SML. “You’re worried about where they’re going, the livelihood restoration, economic ability, water, sanitation—all those sorts of things,” Richard Savage explained. This was nothing short of nation building for 3,000 people—a vast CSR intervention that would profoundly alter the region’s social makeup. But there are no guarantees that resettlement would end the almost three decades of violence that have defined PJV’s life in the valley, and the timeline for implementation remains murky.

Looming over all this is a final question: As far as Big Mining is concerned, are problems like these really problems at all? Despite the misery, blood, and treasure expended at Porgera, Barrick claims the lowest cost of extraction per ounce of gold in the mega-mining industry. The Economist’s assertions aside, bigger works best. Because the company can spread operating costs, sophisticated mine-management processes, and, most important, risk across its disparate territories, it’s able to spend much less to mine gold than does the competition: almost $130 less per ounce than the median. This translates into bigger margins, as well as larger dividends for shareholders. Run a cost–benefit analysis, and the trouble in the valley becomes barely a rounding error on a spreadsheet.