Leonida Zurita Vargas, a Bolivian coca farmer organizer and alternate Senator, was planning to be in the US right now as part of a three week speaking tour on Bolivian social movements and human rights. This tour would take her to Vermont, Harvard, Stanford and Washington DC. However, upon checking in at the airport in Santa Cruz, Bolivia on February 20th to fly to the US, she was informed her ten year visa had been revoked because of alleged links to terrorist activity.

I woke up this morning in my grandmother’s house in the middle of the farmlands of rural west Texas. I drove alone through miles of cotton fields and watched the men on John Deere tractors harvesting this year’s crop. They carve intricate patterns in the red earth as they strip the white puffs of cotton. Miles of these fields surround the prison where my father is being held. He can see little else beyond the fences and concertina wire, so the planting and harvesting of the fields provide some of the only non-prison activity in view.

In America there are disturbing trends emerging, which highlight the expanding inequality and shrinking class mobility of the country’s people. Poverty has been steadily increasing since the turn of the century. Household income has decreased. Inflation consistently outpaces compensation gains; simultaneously, productivity expectations are increasing. Manufacturing and high tech jobs continue to go overseas and the prison population has reached its highest level in U.S. history.