The Rise of America's New Enemy

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Sat, 12 Nov 2005 21:27:12 -0800 (PST)

The Rise of America's New Enemy

 

 

 

 

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/111005E.shtml

 

The Rise of America's New Enemy

By John Pilger

t r u t h o u t | Perspective

 

Thursday 10 November 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 un-vanquishable 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 immunized 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 Bolivar,

born in Venezuela, who brought the ideas of the French

Revolution to societies cowed by Spanish absolutism.

 

Bolivar, 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 Nov.,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, un-compliant 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

privatizing 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 labor

and which underwrote the Spanish Empire for three centuries.

 

When the silver was gone, there was tin, and when

the mines were privatized 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 colorful skirts.

No more.

Led by visionaries like Oscar Olivera, the women

in bowler hats and colorful 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 privatization and poverty.

Having driven out President Gonzalo Sanchez 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 program 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 Neighborhood 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, 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 Senior 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 anarchist, 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% 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 Mar 17, the Washington Post reported that Feliz Rodriguez,

" 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 maneuvers 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.

 

 

End