And the So, I'd like to welcome my friend and colleague and comrade Thomas Becker who is an activist attorney and academic who has worked on human rights issues in Bolivia for over 15 years.

He has also spent much of the 2019 and 2020 in Bolivia investigating abuses for Harvard Law School, which some of our listeners and

viewers may know as kind of the critical years of the coup. Thomas and I met in

Bolivia actually last October for an indigenous peoples gathering.

We were there with, you know, Ruth Buffalo, who's a representative in North Dakota,

but Thomas has quite an extensive curriculum vitae, so I'll let him, I'll let you introduce yourself and some of the work that you've done and kind of like what brought you to Bolivia.

Great. Well, first, thanks for let me chat with you.

It's going to be fun.

Yeah, so, you know, as you mentioned, I'm a human rights lawyer.

I won't bore you too much with the work I do, but I've spent,

I'm realizing actually it's been substantially more than 15 years in Bolivia now working on on human rights,

but I've also worked, you know, for

spent many years working with the sappathistas in Mexico, I work with Sahrawis in

Western Sahara, Aravasis in India, so kind of generally work with left to social movements

indigenous struggles and I kind of work as a human rights lawyer I like to think

with myself more as an activist that has a toolbox and occasionally pulls out the tool of law.

I think it is problematic at times the law, but sometimes it can be used to bring social change.

So I've kind of worked, permissibly with like anti-colonialist movements all over but

principally in Bolivia. I spent a lot of years working and we may kind of talk

about this as we move on with the victims of the 2003 Black October massacres here in Bolivia.

It was really kind of the turning point that really opened the door for Abel Morales to come to power,

the first indigenous president in the country. but at the time the then president known as

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