She’s in good company. Last year Global Exchange alone took about 2,500 travelers on two-week jaunts to global political hot spots. Other advocacy, educational and religious organizations stage similar politically oriented trips. Over the past year and a half, such groups report a huge rise in interest. Global Exchange leads small groups of about 15 through troubled regions in Israel and the Palestinian territories, Haiti, Cuba, Ireland, Iran and South Africa. They meet with leaders of organizations fighting poverty or promoting peace, and visit cooperatives, medical clinics and schools. When they return, they get an “activist kit” with tips on how to help the people they’ve met.
Such tour groups tend to promote a liberal agenda. “Our goal is to make U.S. foreign policy more humane, more moral,” says Malia Everette de la Campa, reality-tours program director for Global Exchange, an outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy. “We want to open people’s minds and hearts and consciousness.” Generally, they are preaching to the choir. Witness for Peace, for example, aims to expose how U.S. policy exacerbates foreign conflicts, mainly in Latin America. One recent delegation went to Colombia to learn about the drug war. Clad in bright blue witness for peace T shirts, the group spent 10 grueling days traveling around the country, meeting economists and sociologists in Bogota, military officials in Medellin and priests working with farmers in the coca-growing region. In January another group provided support for demonstrators in the southern province of Putumayo who were protesting the right-wing paramilitary’s reported assassinations of civilians.
Political tourism first took off in the 1980s, when activists angry at the United States for propping up Central American dictators began flocking to countries like Nicaragua and Honduras to see the results for themselves. Groups such as the London-based Nicaragua Solidarity Network were only too happy to accommodate them. After returning home, activist tourists tended to take like-minded compatriots back to the region to express solidarity with a movement, act as international observers or simply educate foreigners on the consequences of cold-war policies.
Sometimes political tourists end up feeling conflicted about their mission. A two-week trip to help the less fortunate usually costs about $1,500, plus airfare. “We stayed in these really nice hotels,” says Erin Abbott, 27, who traveled to India from Memphis, Tennessee, in December on a Global Exchange tour. “And there are people out on the street starving. We’re taking showers with high-pressure water coming out and there’s a drought going on outside.”
Still, these travelers almost uniformly describe the experience as “transformational.” They are deeply inspired by the struggles of the people they meet. Many return home to give lectures and slide shows, or to write op-eds for their local papers. Others form a lifelong bond with the country they visit. Frank Braun, 75, a retired University of Minnesota political-science professor who visited Chiapas with the Center for Global Education, has returned to Mexico five times in the past three years. “The idea of indigenous people becoming empowered to transform their lives, based on respect for their own culture and traditions–that’s what particularly impressed me about Chiapas,” he says. “It’s never left me.” Just as he, in a way, now won’t leave them.
