- I was dropped at Paradiso, the last middle-class area
before barrio La Vega, which spills into a ravine as if by the force of
gravity. Storms were forecast, and people were anxious, remembering the
mudslides that took 20,000 lives. "Why are you here?" asked the
man sitting opposite me in the packed jeep-bus that chugged up the hill.
Like so many in Latin America, he appeared old, but wasn't. Without waiting
for my answer, he listed why he supported President Chavez: schools, clinics,
affordable food, "our constitution, our democracy" and "for
the first time, the oil money is going to us." I asked him if he belonged
to the MRV, Chavez's party, "No, I've never been in a political party;
I can only tell you how my life has been changed, as I never dreamt."
-
- It is raw witness like this, which I have heard over
and over again in Venezuela, that smashes the one-way mirror between the
west and a continent that is rising. By rising, I mean the phenomenon of
millions of people stirring once again, "like lions after slumber/In
unvanquishable number", wrote the poet Shelley in The Mask of Anarchy.
This is not romantic; an epic is unfolding in Latin America that demands
our attention beyond the stereotypes and clichï¿s that diminish
whole societies to their degree of exploitation and expendability.
-
- To the man in the bus, and to Beatrice whose children
are being immunised and taught history, art and music for the first time,
and Celedonia, in her seventies, reading and writing for the first time,
and Jose whose life was saved by a doctor in the middle of the night, the
first doctor he had ever seen, Hugo Chavez is neither a "firebrand"
nor an "autocrat" but a humanitarian and a democrat who commands
almost two thirds of the popular vote, accredited by victories in no less
than nine elections. Compare that with the fifth of the British electorate
that re-installed Blair, an authentic autocrat.
-
- Chavez and the rise of popular social movements, from
Colombia down to Argentina, represent bloodless, radical change across
the continent, inspired by the great independence struggles that began
with SimOn Bolï¿var, born in Venezuela, who brought the ideas
of the French Revolution to societies cowed by Spanish absolutism. Bolï¿var,
like Che Guevara in the 1960s and Chavez today, understood the new colonial
master to the north. "The USA," he said in 1819, "appears
destined by fate to plague America with misery in the name of liberty."
-
- At the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001,
George W Bush announced the latest misery in the name of liberty in the
form of a Free Trade Area of the Americas treaty. This would allow the
United States to impose its ideological "market", neo-liberalism,
finally on all of Latin America. It was the natural successor to Bill Clinton's
North American Free Trade Agreement, which has turned Mexico into an American
sweatshop. Bush boasted it would be law by 2005.
-
- On 5 November, Bush arrived at the 2005 summit in Mar
del Plata, Argentina, to be told his FTAA was not even on the agenda. Among
the 34 heads of state were new, uncompliant faces and behind all of them
were populations no longer willing to accept US-backed business tyrannies.
Never before have Latin American governments had to consult their people
on pseudo-agreements of this kind; but now they must.
-
- In Bolivia, in the past five years, social movements
have got rid of governments and foreign corporations alike, such as the
tentacular Bechtel, which sought to impose what people call total locura
capitalista - total capitalist folly - the privatising of almost everything,
especially natural gas and water. Following Pinochet's Chile, Bolivia was
to be a neo-liberal laboratory. The poorest of the poor were charged up
to two-thirds of their pittance-income even for rain-water.
-
- Standing in the bleak, freezing, cobble-stoned streets
of El Alto, 14,000 feet up in the Andes, or sitting in the breeze-block
homes of former miners and campesinos driven off their land, I have had
political discussions of a kind seldom ignited in Britain and the US. They
are direct and eloquent. "Why are we so poor," they say, "when
our country is so rich? Why do governments lie to us and represent outside
powers?" They refer to 500 years of conquest as if it is a living
presence, which it is, tracing a journey from the Spanish plunder of Cerro
Rico, a hill of silver mined by indigenous slave labour and which underwrote
the Spanish Empire for three centuries. When the silver was gone, there
was tin, and when the mines were privatised in the 1970s at the behest
of the IMF, tin collapsed, along with 30,000 jobs. When the coca leaf replaced
it - in Bolivia, chewing it in curbs hunger - the Bolivian army, coerced
by the US, began destroying the coca crops and filling the prisons.
-
- In 2000, open rebellion burst upon the white business
oligarchs and the American embassy whose fortress stands like an Andean
Vatican in the centre of La Paz. There was never anything like it, because
it came from the majority Indian population "to protect our indigenous
soul". Naked racism against indigenous peoples all over Latin America
is the Spanish legacy. They were despised or invisible, or curios for tourists:
the women in their bowler hats and colourful skirts. No more. Led by visionaries
like Oscar Olivera, the women in bowler hats and colourful skirts encircled
and shut down the country's second city, Cochabamba, until their water
was returned to public ownership.
-
- Every year since, people have fought a water or gas war:
essentially a war against privatisation and poverty. Having driven out
President Gonzalo Sï¿nchez de Lozada in 2003, Bolivians voted
in a referendum for real democracy. Through the social movements they demanded
a constituent assembly similar to that which founded ChAvez's Bolivarian
revolution in Venezuela, together with the rejection of the FTAA and all
the other "free trade" agreements, the expulsion of the transnational
water companies and a 50 per cent tax on the exploitation of all energy
resources.
-
- When the replacement president, Carlos Mesa, refused
to implement the programme he was forced to resign. Next month, there will
be presidential elections and the opposition Movement to Socialism (MAS)
may well turn out the old order. The leader is an indigenous former coca
farmer, Evo Morales, whom the American ambassador has likened to Osama
Bin Laden. In fact, he is a social democrat who, for many of those who
sealed off Cochabamba and marched down the mountain from El Alto, moderates
too much.
-
- "This is not going to be easy," Abel Mamani,
the indigenous president of the El Alto Neighbourhood Committees, told
me. "The elections won't be a solution even if we win. What we need
to guarantee is the constituent assembly, from which we build a democracy
based not on what the US wants, but on social justice." The writer
Pablo Solon, son of the great political muralist Walter Solon, said, "The
story of Bolivia is the story of the government behind the government.
The US can create a financial crisis; but really for them it is ideological;
they say they will not accept another Chavez."
-
- The people, however, will not accept another Washington
quisling. The lesson is Ecuador, where a helicopter saved Lucio GutiErrez
as he fled the presidential palace last April. Having won power in alliance
with the indigenous Pachakutik movement, he was the "Ecuadorian Chavez",
until he drowned in a corruption scandal. For ordinary Latin Americans,
corruption on high is no longer forgivable. That is one of two reasons
the Workers' Party government of Lula is barely marking time in Brazil;
the other is the priority he has given to an IMF economic agenda, rather
than his own people. In Argentina, social movements saw off five pro-Washington
presidents in 2001 and 2002. Across the water in Uruguay, the Frente Amplio,
socialist heirs to the Tupamaros, the guerrillas of the 1970s who fought
one of the CIA's most vicious terror campaigns, formed a popular government
last year.
-
- The social movements are now a decisive force in every
Latin American country - even in the state of fear that is the Colombia
of Alvaro Uribe Velez, Bush's most loyal vassal. Last month, indigenous
movements marched through every one of Colombia's 32 provinces demanding
an end to "an evil as great at the gun": neo-liberalism. All
over Latin America, Hugo Chavez is the modern Bolivar. People admire his
political imagination and his courage. Only he has had the guts to describe
the United States as a source of terrorism and Bush as Senor Peligro (Mr
Danger). He is very different from Fidel Castro, whom he respects. Venezuela
is an extraordinarily open society with an unfettered opposition - that
is rich and still powerful. On the left, there are those who oppose the
state, in principle, believe its reforms have reached their limit, and
want power to flow directly from the community. They say so vigorously,
yet they support Chavez. A fluent young arnarchist, Marcel, showed me the
clinic where the two Cuban doctors may have saved his girlfriend. (In a
barter arrangement, Venezuela gives Cuba oil in exchange for doctors).
-
- At the entrance to every barrio there is a state supermarket,
where everything from staple food to washing up liquid costs 40 per cent
less than in commercial stores. Despite specious accusations that the government
has instituted censorship, most of the media remains violently anti-Chavez:
a large part of it in the hands of Gustavo Cisneros, Latin America's Murdoch,
who backed the failed attempt to depose Chavez. What is striking is the
proliferation of lively community radio stations, which played a critical
part in Chavez's rescue in the coup of April 2002 by calling on people
to march on Caracas.
-
- While the world looks to Iran and Syria for the next
Bush attack, Venezuelans know they may well be next. On 17 March, the Washington
Post reported that Feliz Rodrïguez, "a former CIA operative well-connected
to the Bush family" had taken part in the planning of the assassination
of the President of Venezuela. On 16 September, Chavez said, "I have
evidence that there are plans to invade Venezuela. Furthermore, we have
documentation: how many bombers will over-fly Venezuela on the day of the
invasion... the US is carrying out manoeuvres on Curacao Island. It is
called Operation Balboa." Since then, leaked internal Pentagon documents
have identified Venezuela as a "post-Iraq threat" requiring "full
spectrum" planning.
-
- The old-young man in the jeep, Beatrice and her healthy
children and Celedonia with her "new esteem", are indeed a threat
- the threat of an alternative, decent world that some lament is no longer
possible. Well, it is, and it deserves our support.
-
- First published in the New Statesman - www.newstatesman.co.uk
-
- The story can be found at the excellent web site 'Information
Clearing House' -
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- http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10943.htm
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