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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.
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