A
Beacon Of Hope For The Rebirth Of Bolívar's Dream
By Tariq Ali
11 November, 2006
The Guardian
Daniel Ortega, blessed by the
church, flanked by a former Contra as his vice-president and still loathed
by the US ambassador, may be a sickly shadow of his former self, but
his victory undoubtedly reflects the desire of Nicaraguans for change.
Will Managua follow the radically redistributive policies of anti-imperialist
Caracas or confine itself to rhetoric and remain a client of the International
Monetary Fund?
Ortega's victory comes at
a time when Latin America is on the march again. There have been some
spectacular demonstrations of the popular will in Porto Alegre, Caracas,
Buenos Aires, Cochabamba and Cuzco, to name but a few cities. This has
offered a new hope to a world either deep in neoliberal torpor (the
EU, the US, the Far East) or suffering from the military and economic
depredations of the new order (Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan,
south Asia).
The noises emanating from
the governments of Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba, and from the giant social
movements from below in Mexico, Argentina, Ecuador, Peru and Brazil,
are obviously not welcomed by the global elite or its media apologists.
The struggle spearheaded by the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela against
the Washington consensus has attracted the fury of the White House.
Three attempts (including a military coup backed by the US and the EU)
were made to topple Hugo Chávez.
Chávez was first elected
president of Venezuela in February 1999, 10 years after a popular insurrection
against the IMF readjustment programme had been brutally crushed by
Carlos Andrés Peréz, whose party was once the largest
affiliate of the Socialist International. In his election campaign Peréz
had denounced the economists on the World Bank's payroll as "genocide
workers in the pay of economic totalitarianism" and the IMF as
"a neutron bomb that killed people, but left buildings standing".
Afterwards he caved in to
the demands of both institutions, suspended the constitution, declared
a state of emergency and ordered the army to mow down the protesters.
More than 2,000 poor people were shot dead by troops. This was the founding
moment of the Bolivarian upheaval in Venezuela.
Chávez and other junior
officers organised to protest against the misuse and corruption of the
army. In 1992 the radical officers organised a rebellion against those
who had authorised the butchery. It failed because it was soon after
the traumas of 1989, but people did not forget. That is how the new
Bolivarians came to power and began to slowly and cautiously implement
social-democratic reforms, reminiscent of Roosevelt's New Deal and the
policies of the 1945 Labour government. In a world dominated by the
Washington consensus this was unacceptable. Hence the drive to topple
him. Hence the demand by Pat Robertson, the leader of political Christianity
in the US, that Washington should organise the immediate assassination
of Chávez. Venezuela, till now an obscure country as far as the
rest of the world was concerned, suddenly became a beacon.
The majority of the people
who elected Chávez were angry and determined. They had felt unrepresented
for 10 years; they had been betrayed by the traditional parties; they
disapproved of the neoliberal policies then in force, which consisted
of an assault on the poor in order to shore up a parasitical oligarchy
and a corrupt civilian and trade-union bureaucracy. They disapproved
of the use that was made of the country's oil reserves. They disapproved
of the arrogance of the Venezuelan elite, which utilised wealth and
a lighter skin colour to sustain itself at the expense of the dark-skinned
and poor majority. Electing Chávez was their revenge.
When it became clear that
Chávez was determined to make modest changes to the country's
social structure, Washington sounded the tocsin. Nowhere has the embittered
bigotry emanating from this quarter been more evident than in its actions
and propaganda against Venezuela, with the Financial Times and the Economist
in the forefront of a massive disinformation campaign.
They are united by their
prejudices against Chávez, whose advent to power was viewed as
an insane aberration because the social reforms funded by oil revenues
- free health, education and housing for the poor - were regarded as
a regression to the bad old days, a first step on the road to totalitarianism.
Chávez never concealed
his politics. The two 18th-century Simóns - Bolívar and
Rodríguez - had taught him a simple lesson: do not serve the
interests of others; make your own political and economic revolution;
and unite South America against all empires. This was the core of his
programme.
In a speech in Havana in
1994, Chávez stated: "Bolivar once said that 'Political
gangrene cannot be cured with palliatives', and Venezuela is totally
and utterly infected with gangrene ... There is no way the system can
cure itself ... 60% of Venezuelans live in poverty ... in 20 years more
than $200bn just evaporated. So where is the money, President Castro
asked me? In the foreign bank accounts of almost everyone who has been
in power in Venezuela ... the coming century, in our opinion, is a century
of hope; it is our century, it is the century when the Bolivarian dream
will be reborn."
Tariq Ali's new book, Pirates
of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope, is published by Verso.
Guardian Unlimited ©
Guardian News and Media Limited 2006
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