Venezuela
And The Bolivarian Dream
By Tariq Ali
02 December, 2006
Counterpunch
In
the Muslim world religious groups that are militarily effective, but
politically limited dominate resistance to the American Empire. Asia
is infatuated with capital. Europe lies buried deep in neo-liberal torpor,
and the Left and social movements in the EU (Italy is the most recent
example) are in an advanced state of decomposition. But in South America
an axis of hope has emerged that challenges imperial domination on every
level. Democracy, hollowed-out and offering no alternatives in the North,
is being used to revive hope in the South.
The likely re-election of
Hugo Chavez this weekend in Venezuela will mark a new stage in the process.
His opponent, Manuel Rosales, described in the Financial Times (November
30) as a "centre-left" candidate was heavily implicated in
the defeated coup attempt to topple Chavez in 2004. Rosales claims that
"I will not sit on anyone's lap" but it is hardly a secret
that he is firmly attached to the White House.
The wave of revolts and social
movements spreading unevenly across the South American continent today
are the inevitable result of the Washington Consensus, the economic
enslavement of the world. Latin America was the first laboratory for
the Hayekian experiments that finally produced the Consensus. The Chicago
boys led by the late Milton Friedman, who pioneered neo-liberal economics,
used Chile after the Pinochet coup of 1973 as a laboratory. It was a
good situation for them. The Chilean working class and its two principal
parties had been crushed, their leading cadres killed or "disappeared".
Six years later, the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua was crushed
by a US-backed Contra counter-revolution.
Earlier this month, the Sandinista
leader, Daniel Ortega won the Presidency in his country. Blessed by
the church, flanked by a former Contra as his vice-president and still
loathed by the US ambassador, Ortega 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?
There was even better recent
news from Quito. The substantial electoral triumph of Rafael Correa,
a dynamic, young, US-educated economist and former finance minister,
who pledged in his election campaign to reverse Ecuador's participation
in the US-backed free trade area for the Americas, to ask the US military
to vacate its base at Manta, and to join Opec and the growing Bolivarian
movement that seeks to unite South America against imperialism.
Correa'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 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 organized to protest against the misuse and corruption of the
army. In 1992 the radical officers organised a rebellion against those
who had authorized 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
program, which is unacceptable to the supporters of the Washington Consensus.
The key to a serious Latin
American challenge to the US lies in regional cohesion. This is crucial.
When the cable channel Telesur was launched in Caracas nearly two years
ago, one of their first programs revealed a shocking level of ignorance
amongst South Americans. In virtually every capital city vox pop interviews
revealed that people knew the name of their own capital and that of
the United States. Very few could name even two or three capital cities
in their own continent!
So regional unity---the Bolivarian
Federation of sovereign states of which Chavez speaks incessantly----is
necessary to move forward. Washington will do everything to prevent
this since its own interests dictate dealing with countries unilaterally
rather than as regional entities (this is even true of the European
Union). Regional unity in South America could have a surprising impact
in el Norte as well where the Hispanic population of the United States
is growing rapidly to the great consternation of state ideologues like
Samuel Huntington.
Tariq Ali's new book,
Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope, is published by
Verso
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