by John Pilger; November 10, 2005
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 clichés 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.
Chávez 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
Bolívar, born in Venezuela, who brought the ideas of the French
Revolution to societies cowed by Spanish absolutism. Bolívar, 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 Sánchez 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 Rodríguez, "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
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 clichés 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.
Chávez 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
Bolívar, born in Venezuela, who brought the ideas of the French
Revolution to societies cowed by Spanish absolutism. Bolívar, 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 Sánchez 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 Rodríguez, "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
