That’s the story as Miguel Rivera tells it. His brother, Marcelo Rivera was the latest victim of the newly organized death squads, formed from what appears to be a triad of power: Pacific Rim (a Canadian multinational), the ARENA party (the political party organized by the death squad killer of Monsignor Romero, Roberto D’Aubuisson) and the “maras” or gang members.

Of course Miguel, who has a deep and even scientific knowledge of his locale, is aware that the myth is just that: a small story that reveals a larger, hidden truth, in this case that a “Gringo” multinational indeed entered the area, but the reason for the deaths was the heavy metal waste from the mining that was poured into the community’s water.

In cultures and states where telling the exact truth can lead to one’s death, it’s always more convenient to wrap the story in myth. Those who unpackage the myths, like Marcelo Rivera, often disappear into thin air — that is, until they’re found, as he was, naked, castrated and murdered after being horribly tortured: his fingernails had all been pulled out; his face had been disfigured so much that his brother could only identify him by his nose; the beatings had broken his skull. Finally, after he had been strangled to death, his body was thrown in a sixty-foot well, covered with chicken manure, dirt, and pieces of meat.

The right wing press did, of course, repeat the official story that Marcelo had fallen in with “mara” gangsters and drank with them, but editors had the integrity to also print a counterpoint that everyone who knew Marcelo had quite clear: that the victim of the unholy triad of moneyed power in El Salvador never drank nor hung out with the maras. His hero was Monsignor Romero and Miguel says the last time he saw his brother he was wearing a t-shirt with the image of that martyr on it.

There’s a significant difference between El Salvador under the FMLN where power in the media is actively being contested, and Honduras where there is a blackout of the opposition perspective. Another difference is that the ARENA party has lost control of the military and has to rely on “maras” to do its dirty work while in Honduras the government hasn’t yet had to consider recruiting “civilian contractors” from the 100,000 or so “maras” operating in Central America. Thus far the military has been quite happy to do the job of eliminating or terrorizing opponents under the “golpista” Honduran government (coup government) of Micheletti. On July 5, for example, the military fired with machine guns on a crowd numbering in the thousands. This is the unofficial story, of course. The papers, including El Heraldo, claimed that the military had fired on the crowd with rubber bullets. Officially, also, only one person died. Protestors say that there were eight or nine victims who died on the way to the hospital, and whose bodies were disappeared. Given the machine gun fire, it’s only surprising that more didn’t die.

The Honduran government of the 1980s found it had no need to replicate the widespread massacres being carried out in El Salvador and Guatemala. It was able to selectively eliminate a couple hundred leaders of the opposition and take care of its problem with the “subversives.” But in order to maintain control over the rest of the population and assure its docility and compliance, like anywhere else, it required a press willing and able to cloak a damning reality in a less threatening myth.

Once again Honduran reporters are being called in to do overtime in psyops. Granted, the press in Honduras under the “golpista” government isn’t any worse than Fox News. That being said, everything having to do with the news around the recent “golpe” (coup) has a quality that ranges from surreal interpretation to black propaganda. It would seem that the journalists of the major papers of Honduras really were frustrated writers of dystopian science fiction.

One Honduran tells me she saw a murder in her neighborhood that was multiplied in the journalistic alchemy of the Honduran press by six the following day. I keep that in mind as I sit here in my hotel room in Tegucigalpa, leafing through what my wife back home would call “the daily pack of lies.”

As I try to discern the Honduran narrative of the “golpe” I recall the copy of the article I left behind in El Salvador, printed in a right wing paper — and, unfortunately, the newspapers are all right wing in El Salvador, with the exception of the Diario Co-Latino, the latter a blessing not bestowed upon Honduras. The Salvadoran article was based on a piece that appeared in Honduras’ El Heraldo. The author claimed to have in possession secret documents that indicated that President Hugo Chavez was working with a large number of “maras” who he was arming and paying, and also infiltrating his own military to do a lightning attack and kill high-ranking officials of the Micheletti government. Supposedly residents have seen armed men in inaccessible regions of the country. Does that sound like the narrative of “Al Qaeda sleeper cells” doped up on the Koran ready to attack Bush’s America? Only the names, places and drugs of choice have changed.

I’m looking here at a full page ad in La Tribuna from Tuesday, the 21st, paid for by “Hondurans for Democracy.” There is a photo, in the top half, of Chavez aiming a gun. Beside the photo is the caption “Chavez calls for violence and wants bloodshed in Honduras.” Beneath that picture is a crowd shot of Hondurans dressed in white (the color of the Conservative Nationalist Party) and holding the blue flags of Honduras. The caption reads, “But Hondurans want peace, unity, democracy and freedom.” Ah, behold the foreign devil who has brought death to our peaceful little country. It’s a variation on the diabolic gringo myth, but in reverse, since Chavez has been a counterforce to the “deadly gringo.”

The following day, (Wednesday, July 22) El Heraldo has an interview with Alejando Peña Esclusa, a right wing Colombian who is president of UnoAmerica, described as “a democracy organization (sic: organización democracia) of Colombia.” The headline reads, “The FARC [Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia), Narcotrafficking and ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas) are all the same thing." The surrealism doesn't end with the title, which makes laughable connections between a program of solidarity created by Venezuela to share its wealth with loans and grants to Latin America to facilitate growth and development, and narcotics trafficking and a guerrilla that, while it taxes the cocaine trade, seems to have fewer connections to the actual trade than does the Uribe government.

Esclusa develops his surreal story in this large-spread article on page 6: He says that the coup "has kept Honduras from falling into the project of Hugo Chavez and saved democracy from the Constitutional coup which Zelaya hoped to undertake." What was the "Constitutional coup" Zelaya was plotting? To bring people more deeply into the political process of the country by asking them if they'd like to write a new constitution. So according to Esclusa, the military coup was a way of saving "democracy" by taking it away. And the project of Chavez, well, ask 60-70% of Venezuelans who support Chavez and they'll tell you that his project is to move the country from "representative to participatory democracy." But the interview with Esclusa gets even wilder: "the principle element of the disturbances in Honduras is not "Mel" Zelaya nor the discussion of whether or not he returns" (this would come as a surprise to the hundreds of thousands of people marching daily in Honduras for the single purpose of having their president return) "but it is Hugo Chavez who finances the dirty campaign, buying minds ("conciencias") so as to disinform about Honduran reality."

Again, the utterly implausible charge that Chavez, and not the golpistas, is behind all the country's problems. For Esclusa, the solution is simple: Isolate Chavez from Honduras and all the problems will be solved.

What's fascinating about this analysis is that there's not even a hint of truth in it. First of all, the marches aren't financed by anyone but the marchers. And secondly, the only Venezuelan I've seen has been an old friend who is a documentary filmmaker--and probably the last Venezuelan journalist in the country since Telesur was chased out. Noticeably absent from the marches is even the slightest mention of Chavez or Venezuela, neither of which appear in any of the chants, placards, discussions, programs, or anything else. There's only one message: "Golpistas Leave! Bring Mel Home."

In this surreal world where Chavez is working with narco gangsters and infiltrating along the coast, paying people to demonstrate, the poor golpistas are also unfairly being persecuted by "the OAS, UN and the international community."

This line was repeated to me the other day in the hotel by the woman behind the desk, who identified herself as a National Party supporter. She almost whined as she told me that "everyone is against us." Does that sound a little paranoid? When a sane person is told that everyone is opposed to what he or she is doing, that person begins to reflect again on his or her actions. Not so Micheletti; not so Mr. Esclusa; not so the National Party and Liberal Party members who went out on the 23rd on the march for "peace, unity, democracy and freedom."

Then the bombshell: According to Mr. Esclusa, the FARC, a guerrilla force of 30,000 with shrinking power, is the force behind all the presidents who are part of ALBA which is, in turn, a project of the FARC and financed by cocaine money.

If this were the ravings of a madman in the street, we could afford to ignore him. But this interview is published in one of Honduras' two major newspapers, with big headlines, a photo of Esclusa, on page 6. And obviously the government is taking this same paranoid siege narrative seriously because on page eight is the story and headline, "Honduras Breaks Diplomatic Relations with Venezuela" and the subhead reads, "Venezuelan officials, in a confrontational attitude, warn they won't leave the country. The [Honduras] Chancellor cancels the consular visa of Iranians for fear of terrorism.”

Now that’s interesting. Honduras breaks relations with Venezuela and it’s Venezuela that is being confrontational. Takes you back to the bad old days of Bush and the Saddam Hussein “menace” doesn’t it? Then there are the Iranians, whose government has never so much as threatened anyone in Latin America, yet who now “feared as terrorist.” Wild rumor, speculation on a fantastic level: Vice Chancellor Marta Lorena Alvarado says that “we’ve confirmed the existence of terrorist Iranian cells in Latin America and considering that there are direct trips from Teheran… to Venezuela and from Venezuela to Nicaragua… there’s concern that there’s been a terrorist incursion into [Honduras].”

Here we’ve definitively returned to the bad old days of Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush with the Amber, Yellow and Orange alerts when supposed “sleeper” cells that were never uncovered or identified were sleepwalking the US.

These are but a few of the jewels from the Honduran press. You could do with it as I did when I first confronted it in the hotel with the woman behind the desk: you could try reasoning with it. You could, as I did, say, isn’t the very definition of a coup when an elected representative is removed from office and, rather than being held and tried and convicted or returned to office, is sent out of the country into exile at gunpoint? But the response is just as wild: “They were trying to prevent bloodshed. If they kept him here, his followers would cause bloodshed.” But we’re to believe that the people who sent the military to the airport on July 5th to machine gun protesters are really concerned about bloodshed? By the look on the woman’s face, a gringo has come to town and poisoned the water.

That’s all behind us now, I thought, as the green leaves and limbs blurred by in the magical landscape on the way into the city of San Salvador from the airport. The FMLN (Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front) evolved from an armed guerilla movement to an electoral party that won the presidency of the country this spring. During my first few days here, I kept being reminded that this is not the 1980s–but the poison from the past is as present as the promise of the future.

On the way into town, my taxi driver and I talked about the coup in Honduras. I admit to having been the one who brought it up. I had told him my own war story and ended by saying,

“I’m sure you have a few war stories yourself.”

He nodded. “Yes, we all do here in El Salvador.”

“Thank god that’s over now,” I said. “But the golpe in Honduras. It’s a return to the ’80s, isn’t it? And what sort of message is it sending out to the world? And to the Salvadoran military?”

“That’s right,” he said. “I worry about that.”

“Because the same military is still there, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Yes, the same ones,” he agreed.

Later in the day I raised the question with Leah Wilson, a North American solidarity activist who has spent a lot of time in El Salvador, following the news and talking it over with astute political friends. Besides being a voracious reader of the news, she knows someone in just about every social movement in the country.

“Yes, I’ve thought about that myself,” she told me over lunch. “President [Mauricio] Funes doesn’t believe it can happen here. He says the military is the only institution that has been thoroughly ‘de-ideologized’ and followed through on the Peace Accords” that brought an end to the brutal civil war that took over 80,000 lives.”

“Do you believe that?” I asked her. She shrugged. “I’m not sure. And I’ve talked to other people who aren’t so sure, either. Either way, it’s a very bad message that they’re sending to the rest of Central America.” I took “they” to mean the coup plotters, then I realized that she was probably also talking about the United States.

Leah mentioned the full page ad ARENA just took out in a national paper. ARENA is El Salvador’s Nationalist Republican Alliance, founded by Archbishop Romero’s murderer Roberto D’Aubuisson, and modeled after the “grand old party” of Bush, Sr. and Jesse Helms. The ad called on President Funes to recognize the “de facto” “president” Micheletti and essentially told him to “look in the mirror.”

Other recent events recall the bad old days of the ’80s, like the death of Marcelo Rivera. His name is on most people’s lips these days here. Marcelo was a good revolutionary, a committed member of the FMLN, something that no longer will get you killed by anyone in the country. But he also went up against corruption in San Isidro, a small town in the department of Cabañas where he lived, and took on the Pacific Rim gold company. Pacific Rim hoped to mine the gold from Marcelo’s region and leave behind the poisonous environmental disaster gold companies are known to create – ask any Californian who has studied the Gold Rush in any detail and multiply that damage by a hundred.

The local prosecutor’s office and the police say Marcelo got killed because he had chosen the wrong drinking partners and fallen in with a gang in Ilobasco – something which people in his community say wasn’t at all like Marcelo. More likely, the word on the street goes, it was a death squad killing, done in collusion with the police and under orders of Pacific Rim and other mining interests.

Recent events in Marcelo’s life gave more credence to the word on the street than to the official story. Marcelo’s brother Miguel told the government-friendly Diario Co Latino that “Marcelo suffered previous death threats from the miners and there was also one failed attempt to run over him in an unidentified vehicle, and constant spying on him by the local police.”

Whatever happened, Marcelo’s body was found several days later in a well. He’d been strangled and his body showed signs of exactly the sort of torture the death squads of the 1980s used on their victims: burn marks, bruises from beatings, and all his fingernails had been torn out.

Twenty-five years ago, the murder would have struck fear in everyone’s heart and made people run for cover. Now there is outrage, and it’s gone public. On Friday, July 17th in the summer afternoon heat that drives most people to the shade trees of the parks, a few hundred people gathered at Plaza Civica in front of the National Palace in downtown San Salvador to celebrate Marcelo’s life and to denounce the murder of a worthy activist.

Ilma Alvarado had come down from San Isidro, Cabañas to join the protest and to “commemorate and celebrate” a man who she said, “always brought everyone together and inspired us to work.” She dismissed the official version of Marcelo’s death.

“He was killed for fighting the mines,” Alvarado said. “That’s why they killed him. He didn’t associate with the “maras” (gang members). He didn’t drink. He was a very healthy person. He headed the casa de cultura (cultural center), he led the marches, and he was the coordinator of the FMLN [in Cabañas]. He was a social leader who headed the casa de cultura but was also at the forefront of the struggle.”

In San Isidro the plaza is empty this Sunday afternoon, except for a full house at the Casa de Cultura which Marcelo and his younger brother, Miguel, founded nearly twenty years ago.

The building, Miguel tells me, served as a makeshift funeral home where the bodies of the victims of the civil war were stored before being shipped out to San Salvador. “You could look in here and see black bags piled to the ceiling sometimes,” Miguel says. Community members remember the Rivera brothers as bright, even brilliant, kids from a family so poor that they often went hungry, but a family with great dignity, known for honesty and commitment to the community.

The community itself could have been described that way, according to Miguel, before Pacific Rim came into the area in the mid 1990s. “We never had crime here, not like other places. People worked hard and lived clean lives.” But then Pacific Rim arrived with lots of money to throw around at officials, and a marginal community, and things changed. After exploration by Pacific Rim revealed that there was, indeed, gold in the area, it’s alleged that they bought their way into mining permits. Marcelo led the local struggle against the mines and things got serious. One community member broke down at a community dinner and confessed that Pacific Rim had paid him $2000 to poison the food. “But I can’t kill anyone,” he told them.

In the January elections the ARENA candidate perpetrated a massive fraud to which Marcelo led protests and successfully had the election annulled – the only election to be annulled in the country. The second election, also under the ARENA government, was called, but this time ARENA brought in 300 gang members who terrorized the community by carrying around shotguns and Molotov cocktails and made threats against FMLN supporters. The “maras” were ironically accompanied by large numbers of National Police, soldiers and the situation was monitored by helicopters of the ARENA government. Busloads of ARENA supporters were brought in, as well as people from Honduras, to vote for the ARENA candidate, and he “won” the election.

The murder of Marcelo was a classic death-squad style murder with the same gruesome forms of torture. What was different about Marcelo’s case is that now the death squads seem to be using the “maras” rather than the police or military (as the government did in the 1980s) and, given this new turn of a situation and ARENA’s use of the gangs, the “maras” themselves present one of the knottiest social issues confronting the new FMLN government. President Funes has suggested sending the military into the streets to control them.

Mario, a student at the University of El Salvador, says the maras are, indeed, the most serious problem. “They’re really violent. They get on buses and murder the man collecting fares and take the money,” Mario said, adding that the maras used to be open and recognizable by tattoos and style but a government crackdown under the conservatives only sent them underground. The estimated 16,000 maras are now indistinguishable from anyone else, making them even more dangerous.

People are looking to President Funes to clean up the national police force, which turned rotten after a brief laundering during the Peace Accords. Hopes are high, and the social movements are more active than ever as they ride on the energy of the FMLN’s electoral victory. They’re determined to maintain an active, visible presence in the country and the government appears to be listening.

“The 1980s were also hard on the military and they don’t really seem to be interested in going back into a civil war,” Leah said. And on the same afternoon that environmentalists and anti-mining and water activists were holding their memorial to Marcelo in front of the National Palace, a demonstration against the coup in Honduras was winding through the streets in another part of town. There was no tear-gassing of demonstrators, much less beatings, imprisonments, or disappearances. The police, it seems, were as civil about it all as the demonstrators.

With their renewed hope, social movement organizations like Coordinadora del Bajo Rio Lempa are even taking on the maras. The Coordinadora encompasses about 64 communities on the banks of El Salvador’s largest river and along the Bay of Jiquilisco in Usulatan. The Coordinadora has many irons in the fire, but one of the more exciting is the youth program in Tierra Blanca community where the Coordinadora has been implementing what one board member called “crime prevention” by educating the community. “When we arrived there were lots of problems here, including assaults and robberies,” one of the board members told us in the air-conditioned office put together by particle board and concrete blocks.

The Coordinadora responded by developing youth programs where community members could come to learn to paint, dance and act. Gang members joined a more positive community through the project and, the board President said, “not to glorify ourselves, but the fact is that it worked.” Crime has dropped through a process of popular education and the offering of creative alternatives for youth.

Estela Hernández Rodriguez, the member of the board of directors who was our contact, said that their most recent focus has been on alternative agriculture, combining permaculture with community development. Permaculture, from “permanent agriculture” is a philosophy of agriculture that aims to use the least amount of energy to get the greatest amount of production and, in the process, to use all waste, that is, to produce no waste. To give us a taste of how that’s working out, she arranged for us to stay in one of the communities for the night. It’s called Ciudad Romero (Romero City) and it’s enough to say that it’s named after the martyred Bishop Oscar Romero. Before we drove the few miles to Ciudad Romero, Jose Amilcar, a young man who heads the agricultural program, took us for a short tour around the Coordinadora headquarters. It houses a community radio station (which was playing a muzak version of “Bridge over Troubled Waters”) and a small cashew-nut processing operation with three women using rudimentary, but very effective, equipment. Then we leave to Ciudad Romero.

The red flag of the FMLN flies high over the one corner store at the intersection of two unmarked dirt roads running through the center of what can only mockingly be called a “city.” The scrawny dogs didn’t bother to move for the black Sentra winding its way around the deep potholes and large rocks on the way into the community.

Jose arranged for us to visit Ernesto, whose house is just a couple of blocks away from the Coordinadora’s agricultural center. We walked slowly in the hot afternoon sun, but even so, my t-shirt was soaked from sweat by the time we arrived and move into the shade of the trees around the concrete fish pond where Ernesto, machete always in hand, was feeding his tilapia. The fish swam lazily through the green water and fed on the morsels Ernesto scattered over the surface like a man feeding chickens. After a few minutes of watching the fish eat, we followed Ernesto down a mercifully shaded road to his field. On the way, I asked Ernesto what percentage of the residents of Ciudad Romero did he figure voted for the FMLN. “We all did,” he said immediately, without needing to add, “of course.”

I felt cross-eyed and dangerously close to a heat stroke by the time we went the three or so blocks to the field and walked through the rows of new corn covered with the mulch formed of the plants from the cleared field. My companions recognized this (probably by my white face suddenly turning red) and Jose directed us into the shade at the field’s edge. We talked a little more and then, after the gringo recovered, turned back to “town.”

This community, Jose told us, has been in the process of putting together its common life over the past twenty years since its members returned from exile in Panama after the peace accords were signed in 1990.

They were viewed by the government, and rightly so, as guerrilla sympathizers. Since each returning exile was given a small piece of land, as agreed upon in the peace accords, the government was forced to fulfill its commitment and turn over land to the community. But the land the government gave this particular community was defined, by the government itself, as “uninhabitable” and “unproductive.” Moreover, the land alternately suffered drought and flooding, the latter caused by the indiscriminate release of water by the managers of the hydroelectric dam upriver.

There was no infrastructure for many years, and even now the dirt roads into Ciudad Romero can only be navigated at very slow speeds in our rented car. And ours is the only car we’ve seen in this “city.” Most people walk or ride bicycles. Nevertheless, the community has hung on, thanks in part to international solidarity, but also because of a deep commitment to each other, what one farmer called “compañerismo,” which might be translated into “neighborliness times ten.” Through the last two decades of conservative or far-right governments, the community has also moved forward by organized resistance. To stop the flooding, for instance, the communities that made up the Coordinadora launched protests and other acts of civil disobedience to force the government to stop the flooding of their land.

And finally, the land itself has sustained them. Long fallow and overgrown, it was, nevertheless, far from “uninhabitable” or “unproductive.” One farmer told us that the land once belonged “to the rich people, and they didn’t like the fact that it was now in possession of the guerrillas.” But the land has certainly taken to the “guerrillas,” who are carefully and slowly implementing a permaculture philosophy and ecological, organic methods of fertilization and pest control.

Jose took us to another neighbor’s farm which is really a food forest, a jungle of bananas, coconut palms, mango trees and papayas. The neighbor was away, but we took a stroll through the forest.

“This was all grown up with weeds and very few trees, this whole region. Since the community has arrived we’ve forested the area with fruit trees. None of them were here,” Jose told us as we passed a lime tree. “And this neighbor has a special interest in reforestation, to help bring the temperature of the planet down. It’s something we have to do to stop global warming.”

We returned to the car which I parked on the shoulder of the long road disappearing under a canopy of trees. For a moment I resisted getting back in the car and stood on the shoulder listening to a chorus, a symphony of birds, all unfamiliar to my ear. The trees the community planted have not only brought shade and food to the people struggling to make this area “habitable” and “productive,” but have provided habitat to another, symphonic community. In the end Ciudad Romero, with its slow, steady enrichment of rural community life based on ecological values and “compañerismo” makes up for what it lacks in services that would qualify it as a city.

In a power play between President Zelaya who maneuvered (some say illegally) to push a referendum on the constitution, and a congress that sees their jobs possibly go on the line if there is a new constitution, the military played the decisive role and ousted Zelaya in the early hours of the morning on Sunday, June 28, 2009, preempting the national referendum. After producing a forged letter of resignation, supposedly from President Zelaya, president of the congress Roberto Micheletti was sworn in. From exile in Costa Rica, President Zelaya denounced the forgery and maintained that he continued to be the only legitimate president of Honduras. Meanwhile, back at Micheletti’s solemn swearing-in ceremony, the AP reported, “outside of Congress, a group of about 150 people opposed to Zelaya’s ouster stood well back from police lines and shook their fists, chanting ‘Out with the bourgeoisie!’ and ‘Traitors!’”

Venezuelan-based Telesur, however, gave a distinctly different impression of the scene. It reported at least one hundred times that many people (“at least 15,000” — there were other estimates of 20,000) were gathered in a strike and a leader of the Bloque Sindical Popular (Popular Union Block), Ángel Alvarado, was calling for a general strike the following day. On the evening after the coup, Micheletti’s government put the country under curfew enforced by the military, which also enforced a ban on all news of the golpe. Meanwhile, regional leaders and members of ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas) met in Nicaragua where Chávez recalled the similarities between what happened to him in Venezuela in April 2002 and the events in Honduras. Chávez ended his tale calling on the “golpistas” (those who carried out the coup) to surrender, while Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa demanded that they be tried for treason.

If possibility for support for the “golpistas” looked slim in Latin America, things didn’t look better up north. Indeed, what was most striking about the coup, if The Wall Street Journal can be believed, is that it appears that the new administration of President Obama was opposed to the coup even in the planning stage. Paul Kiernan and Jose de Cordoba report in The Wall Street Journal that, “the Obama administration and members of the Organization of American States had worked for weeks to try to avert any moves to overthrow President Zelaya.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated bluntly that, “The action taken against Honduran President Manuel Zelaya violates the precepts of the Inter-American Democratic Charter, and thus should be condemned by all.”

For those hoping to see a new US policy in the region, this is indeed reason to be guardedly optimistic, even more so since Zelaya is a close ally to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. This will be among the first military coups in fifty-five years of coups throughout the continent that the U.S. wouldn’t have either perpetrated or backed after the fact — the first one being the four-hour-long coup in Ecuador in January 2000, carried out by center-leftists.

The Wall Street Journal article, however, offered a hardly credible reason for the coup: “Voicing the fears that sparked the military’s action, retired Honduran Gen. Daniel López Carballo justified the move against the president, telling CNN en Español that Mr. Zelaya was a stooge for Mr. Chávez. He said that if the military hadn’t acted, Mr. Chávez would eventually be running Honduras by proxy.”

While it’s true that the most reactionary forces in the region see sinister motives behind Chavez’s generosity and do all they can to demonize the Venezuelan leader, the more obvious reason for the coup was the fact that Zelaya had called a referendum on the constitution, an act which has drawn a similar response from reactionaries in other countries in Latin America. The problems are the same: progressive leaders enter power on a wave of popular support only to find their hands bound by constitutions written by their neoliberal predecessors of the 1990s under the tutelage of Washington. The new leaders then face the choice of playing by the very limited rules of the neoliberal constitution or writing up a new charter. Even the proposal of new rules enrages the local oligarchy which, of course, was behind the neoliberal constitution in the first place, and the opposition to constitutions aimed at democratizing power has grown with each successive process.

President Hugo Chavez was the first progressive president of the region to call for a referendum on a nation’s constitution after his election. The Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela was written by thousands across the country and passed in popular referendum by nearly 72% of the people in a popular vote, establishing the “Fifth Republic.” Chavez then ran again for president, was re-elected with an even larger margin than before, and he now had the possibility of carrying out reforms that would have been impossible under the old, 1961 constitution of the Fourth Republic.

While the Venezuelan process was peaceful, when Rafael Correa came to power in Ecuador, his call for a constituent assembly to write the new constitution frightened the old congress, almost cost him his job and led to street battles and the cordoning off of the congress. Eventually that crisis passed, with Correa beating the old congress and a winning a new Constitution, the first in the world to guarantee the rights of Mother Earth and nature.

That mini battle in Ecuador between congressmen and police, however, was nothing compared to what nearly became a civil war in Bolivia over the proposed new constitution. The crisis, which left over 100 dead in the department of Pando, and nearly brought about the succession of the “Media Luna” departments from Bolivia, was eventually resolved and in the process set a new precedent for diplomacy in the region. For the first time in modern history a political crisis in Latin America was resolved not by the U.S. dominated OAS but by the newly formed UNASUR (Union of South American Nations) at a meeting held in Santiago, Chile presided over by the center-left President Michelle Bachelet and the notable absence of the United States, whose representatives were not invited. This was the first test of the newly formed UNASUR which had until then existed largely only on paper, and it was viewed everywhere as a great success, proving that the nations of the South American continent could resolve their own problems more effectively among themselves than under the aegis of the imperial eagle of the north. Evo returned to Bolivia with the full backing of UNASUR and nine countries of the region (including the neoliberal governments of Peru and Colombia) and eventually the “Media Luna” had to submit. The new Constitution was passed in the referendum in January of this year.

While it’s impossible to say how the coup in Honduras will play out, the new president sworn in on the day of the coup, Roberto Micheletti, may fare only a little better than the unfortunate Pedro Carmona, President-for-a-day in Venezuela (April 12-13, 2002) when Chavez was briefly overthrown. Micheletti hasn’t a single ally in Latin America, and even the Empire now seems to be resigned to the fact that military coups are a thing of the past and has turned its back on him. Elections and constitutions aimed at the transformation of nations in Latin America from “representative” to “participatory” democracy seem to be the wave of the future that even well-armed militaries will no longer be able to oppose.

We’re attending the Third Latin American Meeting on Ecological Agriculture at Casa Campestre, a relatively elegant wood resort in Cochabamba, the exact location of a dialogue between the Bolivian government and the opposition. While campesinos, researchers, NGO and social movement activists laugh or chat in the lobby, just beyond the four or five military guards hovering around the doorway (one snoozing in a chair, one text messaging and the other three on full alert) is the large meeting hall where Bolivia’s fate is being decided. No one knows which way it will go. Inside that large meeting hall the government and the opposition are trying to hash out an agreement to keep the country from civil war.

Since taking office in January 2006, President Evo Morales and the Movement to Socialism (MAS) have set about to bring greater political and economic equality to Bolivia’s indigenous majority. Their project has stirred violent opposition and calls for autonomy from the richer, whiter “Media Luna” region that arcs through the eastern part of Bolivia, north to south. At the time of this writing, the nation is enjoying a truce, but it still teeters precariously between peaceful change and civil war.

Most of the country is full of hope for peace, as the Morales government negotiates with a clearly weakened opposition. The dialogue between the Morales government and the opposition is being observed by members of the Organization of American States (OAS), the Union of South American Nations (Unasur), the UN, the European Union, the Catholic church and representatives of other institutions. They say “progress is being made” toward a peace settlement but no one knows how long the truce will hold or what it will bring.

Libertad is sceptical. She’s a young teacher from Cochabamba I met a few days before as she was finishing her cup of coca tea in the market near Plaza San Franciso in La Paz. She shook her head and admitted that she was still convinced that civil war is inevitable. As a member of the Anti-Fascist Youth of Bolivia, and one who has studied her opponent well, Libertad feels she has every reason to believe that the fascists who work for the Media Luna prefects (governors of the departments in opposition) haven’t yet slaked their thirst for blood.

On the other hand, the eighty-five percent, or a sizeable representation of them, have held massive demonstrations in La Paz since the September 11 massacres of their comrades in the department of Pando where a still-unknown number of campesinos, unarmed or armed with sticks, were slaughtered by paramilitaries trained and commanded by the prefect, Leopoldo Fernandez.

“We’re on our way to burn down the U.S. Embassy because it has betrayed us,” Ismael, a union leader from El Alto, told me at a September 15th march which cut off a lane of traffic on the main avenue through La Paz for the better part of the busy Monday morning. For better or for worse, Ismael never fulfilled his objective, but his statement alone demonstrated the rage he and hundreds of thousands of Bolivians feel toward the U.S. government, which they blame for having supported the autonomist movement, and therefore partly responsible for the Sept. 11 massacre.

This atrocity was the culmination of a wave of opposition attacks that included the May 24 assaults on, and humiliation of, indigenous MASistas in the department of Sucre; destruction of government offices; the sacking of the public market Santa Cruz and blockades of the nation’s highways. Most of these attacks have had a specifically racist and classist character, like the May 24 attack of indigenous campesinos in Sucre and the attacks on the market in Santa Cruz, since the public markets are traditionally the places in Latin America where primarily working class people attempt to eke out a living.

The violence has ended in most areas of the Media Luna, but there is still, at the time of this writing, ongoing violence in Pando, including the rape of children as young as 11 and the stalking of MAS members and survivors of the massacre.

In response to the violence perpetrated by the opposition, many leftist social movements staged a relatively peaceful seige of Santa Cruz for nearly two weeks. They made it clear to the area’s residents, known as Cruceños, that they would lift the blockade when government offices were turned back over to the proper authorities.

As is common with Bolivia’s regular road blockades, this siege of Santa Cruz cost South America’s poorest country dearly. Corn and soy crops rotted, awaiting shipment out of Santa Cruz or on the roads awaiting the lifting of the blockades. Chickens, in turn, starved to death, and the price of poultry skyrocketed, almost doubling in a little more than a week. The economic impact on Expocruz, the big fair where Cruceños annually exhibit their goods, has yet to be reckoned.

After the meeting of Unasur in Santiago, Chile, which backed the Morales government and the capture and detention of Leopoldo Fernandez, the Media Luna was forced to negotiate. Nevertheless, negotiations in Cochabamba between the government and opposition are hobbled by what many consider to be the unreasonable demands of the Media Luna. The main sticking points continue to be the issue of autonomy, the proposal for a Direct Hydrocarbon Tax to fund a modest sort of Social Security program, and the proposed reforms to the Constitution.

Israel Quispe, who works in the central government’s Office of Social Movements, says of the Media Luna’s idea of autonomy that, “they want their own army, their own police force and if they get the kind of autonomy they want, we indigenous people will have to get passports and visas to go to Santa Cruz. What they’re really asking for is a separate country, to divide Bolivia — and that’s impossible!”

Writer and long-time observer residing in La Paz, Keith Richards, doesn’t think the Media Luna has much chance acheiving its goals. “Sure, they can declare themselves independent, but the world has already let them know they won’t be recognized. It’s sort of a meaningless act to declare independence when only the U.S. appears to be willing to recognize them, isn’t it?”

It’s commonly held among Morales supporters that the autonomists, in whose regions are found the greatest reserves of natural gas, are fighting the Direct Hydrocarbon Tax because they’re selfish and don’t want any money to go to La Paz. While that may be true, the tax also reflects the autonomist’s sense that they are being “taxed without being represented,” leading them to the conclusion that the Morales government is a tyranny, and they, an oppressed group akin to the fathers of the American Revolution.

Nevertheless, the Media Luna prefects are anything but a ragtag group of colonists fending off a formidable empire: quite the contary, the issue is that the wealthy Media Luna “cambas” (as the easterners are known) don’t want to share with the poorer, altiplano “collas.” And as for not being represented, many would say they have no one to blame but themselves, given their intransigence, their use of boycotts and walk-outs and their unwillingness to negotiate with MASistas who are in the majority. Finally, the violence of the past months have been anything but a tea party.

Nowhere have the counterproductive political strategies of the opposition been more in evidence than in the writing of the Constitution. In September of 2007 the opposition decided to withdraw and boycott the Constituent Assembly (where they were a minor third of the whole) rather than work with the majority (MASistas) to moderate aspects they found contrary to their interests. In addition to further recognizing the indigenous peoples, the constitution would put limits on the amount of land the “latifundistas” (large landholders) could keep and ensure that some of that 80% of the land return to the 70% of the people.

The opposition found these, and other modest reforms, unbearable and so launched protests, which led to riots, ultimately leaving three dead. As a result, the constituent assembly found it necessary to move from Sucre to Oruro in December, 2007 to finish writing what would ultimately become known as the “MASista Constitution.” The opposition withdrew, taking their toys with them, then complained loudly that they hadn’t been included in the game.

It was then that the struggle of the Media Luna for autonomy began again in earnest, culminating in their defeat in the August, 2008 referendum on Morales’ (and the prefects’) rule and their violent response to his victory which resulted in the blockades and, finally the massacre in Pando.

The social movements responded: the miners, workers from an array of unions (and now including the recently reintegrated Bolivian Worker’s Central (COB) a relatively powerful Trotskyist union which returned to the MAS fold on September 17th), women’s organizations, squatters, indigenous and campesino organizations marched on Santa Cruz, the heart of the Media Luna and as many as 20,000 laid seige to the town, demanding that the prefects turn back over government offices and allow the Constitution to come up for a vote. Some organizations say that if the opposition doesn’t allow the vote on the Constitution, they will again lay seige to Santa Cruz.

This would be a real danger, especially since a seige of Santa Cruz and marches into the city by MASistas could spark more and greater violence, such as more attacks by the Union of Cruceña Youth (UJC), a racist organization that grew out of the Bolivian Black Shirts, organized by Croatian Nazis in the 1960s.

Libertad says a member of her organization infiltrated the UJC and reported that the organization is in possession of machine guns, grenades and other arms. The MASista protesters, when armed, are often armed only with sticks and, in some cases, shotguns and rifles.

In a worst case scenario, a violent confrontation between the social movements aligned with MAS and the UJC could bring in the Santa Cruz police on the side of the UJC. This would be ironic, but not impossible, given that the Santa Cruz police took a beating at the hands of the UJC and the “civic movement” of the autonomous opposition forces two weeks ago. Nevertheless, Daniel, a youth from Santa Cruz and now living in La Paz, thinks this is likely. “The police may not like the UJC but after it’s all over, they’re going to have to live in that community. And I think they’re also very frightened of the MASistas,” he told me.

Such a confrontation could lead to another state of emergency in Santa Cruz, similar to the one declared in Pando just after the September 11 massacre, and that would involve the Bolivian Armed Forces. Residents of nearby Plan Three Thousand, an enormous city next to Santa Cruz composed mostly of former residents of Cochabamba and La Paz and referred to by some as the “MAS bubble in Santa Cruz,” would also likely get involved in the confrontation. Eighteen truckloads of armed UJC recently entered the municipality and were driven back by the mostly unarmed residents. Since then there have been sporadic battles between the UJC and MASistas, who continue to conduct armed community watch in the city.

To add to the overall confusion, this massive city beside Santa Cruz has just declared autonomy from the autonomist Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz can take that as a message that the residents of the neighboring city of Plan Three Thousand are either opposed to the Media Luna or, at the very least, want to be left out of the dispute with the national government.

Bolivians I have spoken with, with very few exceptions, hope none of this plays out. They’re banking on the dialogue, but tempers on all sides are still running hot, and any spark of violence could potentially bring that dialogue to an end.

This is probably the reason social movement leaders hoped to turn their movements’ attention from a seige of Santa Cruz to a blockade of the Congress in La Paz. That possibility was to be discussed in a meeting on Saturday, September 27, by the National Coordinator for Change (Conalcam) in Cochabamba. Leading up to the meeting, President Morales was reported to have said in the daily, La Razon, “…if the prefects don’t guarantee an agreement there will again be movilizations until the prefects understand this loud demand of the Bolivian people for the refounding of Bolivia with a new constitution.” Julio Salazar, leader of the cocaleros, said, “Personally, I think that it would be better to pressure Congress so as to avoid confrontations between Bolivians with a seige on Santa Cruz.”

On September 27, the day of the meeting, Conalcam had good news for the peace-loving people of Bolivia. After a day-long meeting with President Morales and Vice President Alvaro García Linera, Conalcam issued a statement that it would beseige the congress “until obtaining approval of a law to convoke a referendum for the approval of the new CPE (Political Constitution of the State).”

This is good news for several reasons. First, the seige of the national legislature minimizes confrontations between MASistas of the social movements on one hand, and the Media Luna paramilitaries, fascist UJC and the “civic unionists” on the other. Secondly, it would more clearly direct the power of the social movements toward the political struggle in the congress where the old neoliberal parties and sectors in support of the oligarchy and the Media Luna are putting their focus. Finally, it would bring the MASista social movements back to where they have their greatest support from the community of La Paz and from the legitimate government of President Morales. From that vantage point they could launch a struggle that might help settle the current conflict — and without a civil war.

Postscript:

Four of the five opposition prefects and political parties of the opposition suspended talks with the government on October 1st as a result of the detention of Jose Vaca, an opposition activist accused of blowing up a natural gas viaduct that provided gas to Brazil. MASistas are planning to lay siege to the Congress in two weeks and well-known campesino leader and MASista, Isaac Avalos, promised more protests against the opposition prefects, although it isn’t yet clear what that might imply.

1. According to the National Security Encyclopedia, approximately 30% of the population in Bolivia controls 80% of the wealth.

First of all, some in our family might ask who am I to address myself to North American “Christians” (which Carroll and people like him claim to be) and why do I put “Christian” in quotes? After all, it’s been years since I used the label “Christian” or wanted to have anything to do with “Christianity.” The first question I can answer quickly: I was, indeed, one of you “Christians” for many years and I have no other basis for addressing myself to you than that and because I remain part of a family that is largely Baptist and Pentecostal Holiness. Why I put “Christians” in quotes is a bit more complicated, but let me have a few minutes of your time and I’ll try to explain or at least, if I don’t explain, maybe you’ll get the idea by the end of this letter.

First, let me deal with the letter from Mr. Carroll. First it needs to be said that the piece is so full of lies, distortions and half-truths that he has in this short missive given evidence that he is no real follower of Jesus nor of the Ten Commandments which exhort us to not “bear false witness against your neighbor.” The premise of the piece is false, making everything that follows simply nonsensical: Obama is no Muslim (though it should be no obstacle to considering a person for the presidency of a nation that professes separation of church and state), and this is the false assumption of the writer, who sees in Obama a “Manchurian candidate” for a presumed Muslim conspiracy which hopes to take over the U.S.. Let me quote just a part of this poisonous piece of propaganda:

“Find a candidate with close Ties to The Nation of Islam and the violent Muslim overthrow in
Africa , a candidate who is educated among white infidel Americans but Hides his bitterness and anger behind a superficial toothy smile. Find a candidate who changes his American name of Barry to the Muslim Name of Barak Hussein Obama, and dares anyone to question his true Ties under the banner of ‘racism’. Nurture this candidate in an Atmosphere of anti-white American teaching and surround him with Islamic teachers. Provide him with a bitter, racist, anti-white,
Anti-American wife, and supply him with Muslim Middle East connections and Islamic monies. Allow him to be clever enough to get away with his Anti-white rhetoric and proclaim he will give $834 billion taxpayer dollars to the Muslim controlled United Nations for use in Africa…” and so on. The writer goes on to attempt character assassination-by-association by stringing together supposed Obama links to Nation of Islam, “socialists and communists” (the latter two labels which, in general terms, would best describe the followers of Jesus from the second chapter of the book of Acts on to the present), Hamas and other red button labels in the U.S. lexicon. The idiotic, baseless, and unsubstantiated charges pour forth all the way to the end (such as that “Islam slaughters non Muslims daily in 44 countries around the globe”). The author goes on to refer to a “terrorism we can see, smell and fear” but exactly WHERE have do we “see, smell” this terrorism? I’m trying to recall a terrorist attack by a Muslim against an innocent citizen of the U.S. in our nation since 911 and for the life of me I can’t think of ONE. Perhaps Mr. Carroll can enlighten us with some examples… Along with this statement (in the same sentence, in fact) Mr. Carroll mentions the “terror invading The United States in the form of Sharia law…” I’m also unaware of Sharia being imposed in any state or even small town in the U.S. Perhaps Mr. Carroll could locate that town, or even farm district, on a map for me. After a reference to “left wing Democrats” (which REALLY is off the wall, if you ask any genuine leftist, like me) Mr. Carroll informs us that the objective of this Islamic conspiracy is “the placement of an anti-American President in our nation’s White House.” He concludes with a rhetorical question, in caps, no less, just should the reader miss the subtlety of his argument, and without the appropriate punctuation: “COULD IT BE THE REASON OUR COUNTRY HAS N OT BEEN UNDER ATTACK SINCE 9-11 BECAUSE THE MUSLIMS HAVE AN AGENDA TO TAKE OVER OUR GOVERNMENT BY PLACING A MUSLIM IN THE PRESIDENCY.”

My dear cousin, I admit to having been so angry when I received this forwarded email from you that at first I didn’t bother to read the whole thing. I talked about this piece by Mr. Carroll with my sister, Kathy, who really IS a Christian — and she also fears for her country as I do, but because of so-called Christians like Mr. Carroll, and Mr. Bush and Ms. Palin and Mr. McCain, who all pretend to be Christians, too. She told me, because she’s in that Christian circuit, that she gets three of these kinds of emails a week and she has taken to deleting them without reading them, presumably because, like me, she likes to keep her blood pressure down.

That was the short, and easy, part, the letter from Mr. Carroll. Now comes the harder part, explaining to you why I am so angry at Mr. Carroll and why I put “Christian” in quotes.

I’m writing to you from La Paz, Bolivia where the indigenous people elected an indigenous president a little more than two years ago. I arrived a week ago in the wake of major disturbances which included a massacre of 25 people, the same number of wounded and over a hundred disappeared. No, the government of President Evo Morales wasn’t responsible; this crime was carried out by paramilitary forces, trained, financed and directed by a governor of one of the five states in rebellion against the central government. There are a number of reasons the five of the nine states are in rebellion against the government of President Evo Morales (who recently called a referendum on his government and was re-elected with over 2/3 of the vote — try to imagine that happening in the U.S., Bush calling for a referendum on his government and then getting 2/3 of the vote in favor of him… Not on your life!!). What it comes down to, however, is that these five states don’t like an “Indian” ruling over them; they don’t like the idea of paying taxes on gas (most of the country’s natural gas is found in these regions, and Bolivia has the second largest reserve of natural gas in South America) to support elderly people and give them about $100 or so per month to live on after having worked hard all their lives. And, incidentally, Bolivians work very, very hard to get almost nothing in pay, which is why Morales, who emerged as a leader from utter poverty, has the support of the majority who are poor: he understands what problems they face just trying to survive in this, South America’s poorest country.

Bolivia, South America’s poorest country, possessor of the second largest reserve of natural gas. That is called “irony.”

But there is another reason that these five departments (or states) are rebelling against Morales: The U.S. Ambassador, who was formerly the ambassador in Yugoslavia and helped dismember and destroy that country, has been working with them on this strategy of “divide and conquer.” Let me explain that.

Empires and mini-empires (some as small as a dictatorial workplace such as the capitalist system admire, love, create and perpetuate) long ago realized that if they wanted to control other peoples, other nations, tribes, communities, they had to divide them in order to gain that control. That is, if the people ever got together, they would figure it all out.

Rome did that very effectively, dividing the different countries up and the first great revolutionary in history, the first great anti-imperialist fighter we recognize for his brilliance, clarity and innovation, realized this and responded by inviting everyone into his struggle, making his tribe the entire, oppressed world, and defining his followers only the commitment to love (”this is how they shall know you are my disciples: that you love one another”).

Of course we can’t go into all empires and all history, but this is a basic rule of successful empires, to divide and conquer. The same was true back in 1676, yes, one hundred years before our independence, when the rulers of what would become our country figured this out during Bacon’s rebellion when white and black slaves and serfs and servants got together in a rebellion against their common oppression. The rulers at the time began to privilege one group against the other (whites against blacks) and by doing so divide them.

Have you seen that in the workplace before, where one group (managers) have privileges in exchange for controlling another group (the lower paid workers). Really, the managers and the employees are in the same situation: a manager as well as the janitor can either be fired by the boss in a moment’s notice and be eating out of the same garbage can tomorrow. But by keeping them divided, the boss keeps them under control and becomes rich.

You could also look at Iraq today where the U.S. has implemented this same strategy to control the country: recall that before the U.S. invaded there had never been problems between the Shi’ite and the Sunni Muslims; there had never been a suicide or a car bomb in the country. But in order to control the country, the U.S. organized death squads for the people privileged by winning the election in 2005. The U.S. implemented a strategy of control as it had implemented in other “colonies,” whether they were called that or not, like El Salvador, Guatemala, and elsewhere in the 1960s-1980s, training local armies in torture techniques, and organizing the army into after-hour death squads (ask Robert White, former U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, who left his post denouncing the CIA involvement in torture training and organization of death squads, largely responsible for the 75,000 people killed from 1979-1991). Do you think this ended in the 1980s? Look at Colombia today where we are currently defoliating and poisoning the land, pumping billions of dollars into a narco-government closely connected to paramilitary death squads. Returning to Iraq before returning to Bolivia which is where I am at the moment, it’s clear the U.S. is following this same strategy since it chose to put John Negroponte into action in Iraq as ambassador, making this criminal who got his start in Operation Phoenix (you might find it interesting how the U.S. murdered thousands of Vietnamese in this program to keep them from gaining their independence, also the connections between Operation Phoenix and what is currently going on in Iraq, see this article: and also this one on Negroponte: their choice as to design the divisions to conquer Iraq. Yes, he is a criminal, in addition to being the mastermind of thousands of murders, and he’s currently Deputy Secretary of State under Condoleeza Rice.

Speaking of Ambassadors and the kind of people the U.S. chooses for those roles, former Ambassador Philip Goldberg is “former” ambassador because he was finally kicked out of the country just over a week ago. Mr. Goldberg, it seems, had been working to get all the information he could by recruiting spies, and then working with the opposition governors to try to develop “autonomy” and “independence” from the Morales government. Divide and conquer.

This fits perfectly with the big picture. In this big picture, the U.S. wants to keep South America divided so it can continue to drain it of all its wealth. The myth, my dear cousin, is that we give so much aid to South America. But the fact is that for every dollar we give to Latin America, we take out 12. That was the statistic in the 1980s and I’m sure it has only gotten worse.

This strategy of divide and conquer is the reason that President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is so hated by the U.S. government today. And with that I recommend my movie, which I think you can see over at my mother’s house, or you can get it through Netflix, “Venezuela: Revolution from the Inside Out,” if you want to see what good Chavez has been doing and how beloved he is by the poor people of his country (and also the problems in that entire process). Forgive the shameless self-promotion, but it really is one of the few movies available to show what’s going on in Venezuela now, and by extension, other countries in the region that are trying to build the socialism of the 21st century, using the values and teachings of Jesus and other great socialists, as a guide.

Now back to why I am so angry with the majority of my fellow North Americans and why I put “Christian” in quotes. Let me do it in the form of a story: I returned from Nicaragua in 1984 with a number of photos I’d taken of Sandinistas who were working in the coffee harvest. There was one outstanding thing about these particular Sandinistas (I won’t go into who the Sandinistas were in those years, but suffice to say that they were trying to build a country that would help the poor people, after they overthrew an over forty-year-long U.S. backed dictatorship, the brutal and bloody Somoza dynasty in 1979). The thing about the people in my photos, like a majority of the Sandinista supporters of those years, was that they were all Christians. Yes, I’d visited a group of Christian Sandinista coffee pickers and took a roll of photos of them – we didn’t have digital cameras back then.

I brought those photos back to Oklahoma when I visited my parents and I tried to show them to all the Christians I knew. The reason for that was that the U.S. was already involved in a terrorist war against Nicaragua (the World Court convicted the U.S. in 1987 for “terrorism” against Nicaragua — yes, my dear cousin, you live in a nation that has been convicted of terrorism, a terrorist, not a Christian, nation, in fact and according to the World Court). I thought, naively, I now see, that if U.S. Christians saw their brothers and sisters in Jesus who were in danger of being murdered by terrorists, contracted and trained by the CIA, that they would become so angry they might do something to stop it.

Well, I was naive. No one wanted to see my pictures and I was even told, by members of my family, who shall go unnamed, that I had been brainwashed. They didn’t want to know what was really going on in Nicaragua then, about the 30,000 people who would die, perhaps including some in my photos, as a result of that U.S. terrorism: the women and children who had been killed in health clinics, the unarmed farmers who, like so many in our family, only wanted to be left alone to work the land.

That was when I began to wonder if there were really any Christians in the U.S.. Did anyone read the Bible? If they did, how could they support the slaughter of so many innocent people? Did they forget that Jesus had been killed as an anti-imperialist who claimed power of his own country against the empire of his time? But I’m not talking about history. I’m talking about now, the Christians who don’t want to see that Jesus is now with the Muslims as the “Christian” empire seeks to impose its will and occupy the nations of the followers of the prophet Mohammed. Jesus now is being crucified with the bullets of U.S. backed death squads in Iraq, bombed from a cowardly distance by U.S. and NATO jets or slaughtered here in Bolivia by racists with the tacit backing of the U.S.

This is the meaning, for me, of the resurrection, my dear cousin. Jesus isn’t somewhere in the clouds, but here on earth, still hunted down by empires because he seeks to unite the oppressed who are divided and slaughtered or exploited mercilessly until the last cent is extracted from their land or their blood. Oh, and by the way, that isn’t a poetic image. Our dictator in Nicaragua, Anastacio Somoza, was known to torture to death his opponents, then drain their blood which he sold on the open market. I say “our” dictator referring to the statement of President Roosevelt who said of Somoza that he was “a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”

So where does this leave us? It leaves me saying I left the “Christianity” followed in the U.S. initially because it seemed, and still seems, to be the essence of all that Jesus opposed: imperialism, genocide of native peoples, domination, fear, repression of healthy human impulses, and self-righteous Phariseeism of biblical proportions. Now I’m quite aware that many of these “Christians” are good people, as your grandmother, my aunt, was, but that’s beside the point. I suspect you could also find some good “Christians” in the German army under Hitler, or in the U.S. army under virtually every president we’ve had for over two hundred years as it’s perpetrated genocide after slaughter after massacre after invasion after occupation…. But as a whole, you couldn’t exactly call the German army “Christian soldiers” anymore than you can now call the U.S. army “Christian” as they hide away in the green zone and safe on bases after they destroyed the nation of Iraq and created a civil war there, the combination of which has taken over a million mostly innocent lives. But your grandmother and grandfather, the latter having fought in World War Two, to their credit, found all these acts of Bush the work of Satan, so they were probably closer to being real followers of Jesus than most who call themselves “Christian” these days, especially those of the variety of Mr. Carroll.

Are you a Christian? Are you willing to die in a struggle against empire, as Jesus did, that is, are you willing to “take up your cross and follow him”? Are you willing to “sell all you have and give to the poor and follow him”? Are you willing to live as the first, unadulterated Christians of the book of Acts (which you presumably revere as the “word of God,” when “all that believed had all things in common and sold all their possessions and divided them among them so that none had need.”? You know, don’t you, that the dictionary definition of both “socialism” and “communism” is based on this very passage in the Bible. It is incomprehensible to me that “Christians” who identify themselves by the Pentecost don’t consider that the very next thing those disciples of Jesus did after speaking in tongues was to create a communist society of the most authoritarian variety (those, like Annanias and Saphira, if my memory serves me well – I have no Bible at hand here in Bolivia — refused to communize and were immediately struck dead by the Holy Ghost). Most importantly, are you willing to love your enemies and end the killing of them? In the case of the Muslim Iraqis and Afghanis, they have proven themselves superior to you “Christians” since they never invaded your country, killed your civilians with massive bombings, tortured you in their Abu Ghraibs or Guantanamos, humiliated you with an occupation, divided you among yourselves so you would kill each other off while they fled to the safety that cowards seek on their military bases and Green zones… In short, they never thought of you as enemies and never feared conspiracies in which you would take over their country until, in fact, the butcher George W. Bush, son of the butcher George H.W. Bush, who oversaw the slaughter of the innocents in Nicaragua and organized and oversaw the torture and murder of Salvadorans and Guatemalans and colluded with the dictatorships of South America from whence I write, nations which are only now beginning to recover from those years, but which will be facing more of this strategy of “divide and conquer” organized, facilitated and planned from the safety of embassies. Is this the work of a “Christian” country? If so, then I in fact hope that a Muslim becomes president in place of either a “Christian” McCain or Obama. And if that is heresy, then may I burn in hell with Jesus.

The running of the bulls is a sport which some might find quite disagreeable, even when no one is killed and the bull only gets little more than an unusual amount of exercise. But as a sport there are sometimes winners and sometimes losers and sometimes a win or a loss can have far reaching implications.

Over the past few weeks in Bolivia something reminiscent of this strange annual running of the bulls has taken place. The five departments rebelled against the great bull of Evo Morale´s government, with the support of two thirds of the country, including the core of the well-organized indigenous movement. They challenged and antagonized the government which has until now been quite patient with the Media Luna (Half Moon), as the combined opposition departmental governments are called. Morales and his supporters patiently endured the racist rhetoric, the insults and even the ransacking of government offices by the lighter skinned citizens of the opposition. But when, on September 11th, the opposition in El Porvenir and Filadelfia in the department of Pando drew blood, slaughtering an unknown number of campesinos (farmers), the bull of the Bolivian state transformed from Fernando to a powerful force that embodied the return of Tupac Katari.

First, President Morales declared a state of emergency, sent in the army to quell the violence and asked the U.S. ambassador to leave ( Note: you’ve surely heard the joke that goes: Why doesn’t the U.S. have a coup d’etat? Because it doesn’t have a U.S. embassy…). Then Morales began to marshall his support internationally.

President Hugo Chavez was the first to leap to the defense of President Evo Morales, and he did so in the strongest of terms. After all, he had been experiencing something very similar in Venezuela’s own version of the running of the bulls. On the day before the massacre in Bolivia, another coup plot against Chavez was uncovered. Feeling the wounds personally, the following day Chavez showed his solidarity with Bolivia by expelling the U.S. ambassador, Patrick Duddy and made a reference to the “Yankee shits,” going well beyond his usual colorful rhetoric.

Just as a charging bull is often unaware of a sword hidden beneath the bullfighter’s cape, Chavez then charged into near disaster. He began to criticize the Bolivian military, in particular the Chief of the Armed Forces, General Luis Trigo, who Chavez accused of not doing enough and he threatened to come to come to President Morale’s defense.

Chavez’s comments were a diplomatic disaster in Bolivia for two obvious reasons. First, his criticism of a fellow military officer of another nation, and an ally at that, was viewed by many as an injury to the pride of the Bolivian armed forces and the people of Bolivia. Secondly, the comments were viewed as an intervention into the internal affairs of the Bolivian state which also precluded any possibility of Chavez playing a role as neutral mediator.

The implications for power alignments in South America became clear in the meeting, a few days later, of UNASUR, the recently formed Union of South American Nations, taking place in Santiago, Chile, and hosted by President Michel Bachelet. Chavez, as a result of his diplomatic blunder, was no longer the powerful bull in the ring at this event. Brazil, the up and coming powerhouse running on Bolivian natural gas, was front and center stage and there was no one to challenge Lula’s clear authority in the context. Chavez was sidelined, or ignored, when he attempted to get the organization to make a statement of opposition to U.S. interventionism. Instead, the UNASUR simply put out a clear statement of support for Morales and brought all hopes of the opposition in Bolivia for independence to a definitive end.

The implications of the first meeting of UNASUR are enormous: For now, the “moderates” have won the day and most analysts see that as a positive development for Bolivia. Morales returned to his country greatly strengthened, especially as the prefect (governor) of Pando was arrested for violating the state of emergency and now faces terrorism and genocide charges. Mario Cossío, representing the opposition departments, signed an agreement with Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera to begin negotiations with the government in Cochabamba, viewed as neutral territory by both sides of the conflict. As a result, opposition forces began to relinquish control of government offices and return them to the authorities in Santa Cruz and Tarija. The young boys on testosterone now felt the adrenaline and began a quick retreat, especially in the face of a highly organized, and increasingly more angry, social movement backing Morales began to march on the opposition.

Initially the social movements organized demonstrations of support for Morales and as a call for the arrest of Leopoldo Fernandez, the Pando prefect who many see as having masterminded the massacre of September 11. These demonstrations, while massive, were localized in La Paz. However, even as Morales was meeting with UNASUR, campesinos began to organize armed marches into the opposition strongholds.

At the moment, even as the opposition is lifting its blockades of the highways, thousands of campesinos are converging on opposition centers and putting into place their own blockades, enforced by massive numbers (there are at the moment, for instance, five thousand MASista campesinos sealing off routes to Santa Cruz) and also by force of arms. Campesinos are beginning training in arms and shotguns used for hunting are being brought down from the walls to ensure that no further massacres take place in protests against the racist attacks, civil coup attempts and massacres perpetrated by the opposition.

The running of the bulls gets mighty interesting when you hand the bull a gun.

Sunday, September 14

In the border town of Villazon, Bolivia, you’d never know that the country was on the verge of civil war. On a Sunday afternoon only the wind seems to be active here, moving red dust from one side of the city to the other in small pink whirlwinds, dancing like dervishes across the cobblestone streets. But there’s only one bus to La Paz tonight, and, because of the highway blockades created by the opposition, it has to take an eight hour detour over some of the roughest dirt roads in South America before it turns onto a paved two-lane in Potosí and heads on into La Paz. By the time we reach La Paz, surprisingly only half an hour behind schedule due to our determined bus driver who endured the seventeen hours drive only running onto the shoulder the last few kilometers, we arrive covered in dust and our luggage is now also red as the dirt roads we left behind.

Monday, September 15

Very few tourists are willing to suffer eight hours of breathing the road dust and arranging travel by uncertain bus schedules, or brave airports, often occupied by armed groups, to visit one of South America’s poorest countries where armed gangs of fascist thugs are ransacking government offices and killing civilians. As a result, tourism has dropped off in the past two weeks, impacting Bolivia’s economy, heavily dependent on the trade. In addition, the blockades have created havoc in the daily life of Bolivians. In La Paz the prices of meat and other products originating in the Media Luna (Half Moon) opposition regions have skyrocketed, in some cases doubling. But the economy, while the most immediate concern of most Bolivians, is overshadowed by a conflict that has the potential of exploding into full-fledged civil war.

The conflict between the five opposition states demanding autonomy and the central government under President Evo Morales and his party, Movimiento Al Socialismo (MAS) was perhaps inevitable from the moment the indigenous leader took power in early 2006. The five opposition states of Beni, Pando, Tarija, Chuquisaca and Santa Cruz which make up the Media Luna are dominated politically, for the most part, by “white” or people of mixed race who not only distinguish themselves from the indigenous Aymara and Quechua of the Altiplano, but who also consider themselves superior to their indigenous compatriots. Not surprisingly, the European and mestizo populations occupy the the most fertile and energy-rich areas of the nation and they would prefer to keep that wealth to themselves rather than to share it with the poor, indigenous majority. Specifically, the Direct Hydrocarbon Tax (IDH) which the Morales government has imposed to raise money to provide a minimal pension for the nation’s poorest elders, has been a great source of resentment on the part of those departments of the Media Luna rich in natural gas.

President Morales has expelled the U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia, Philip Goldberg, accusing him of instigating much of the civil strife. While nothing other than circumstantial evidence has yet been presented (such as evidence that he has met with opposition leaders), the charge is reasonable and likely true given Goldberg’s past work in the U.S. State department in Bosnia and Kosovo during the periods of intense separatist strife. In solidarity with Bolivia, Hugo Chavez expelled the U.S. ambassador to Venezuela, calling him and his staff “Yankees de mierda” or “Yankee shits.” As might be expected, the U.S. responded in kind, expelling the Bolivian and Venezuelan ambassadors.

Tuesday, September 16

La Paz is living a hopeful, but turbulent, moment. For the past two days there have been so many demonstrations that they blurred into one massive protest aimed at the Half Moon, but particularly at Pando, to the north of La Paz, where the massacre of campesinos (farmers) was carried out last week by fascist paramilitary groups evidently under the command of the prefect (governor) of the region, Leopoldo Fernandez. The 25 persons confirmed dead at this moment include children, in some cases killed execution style, men and women who, as autopsies reveal, were sometimes tortured to death, or machine gunned as they leapt into a nearby river, hoping to escape the three gangs of paramilitaries attacking the unarmed campesinos. The number of dead is certain to rise, given that there are 106 campesinos missing or disappeared and twenty five wounded, some seriously.

While Vice President Alvaro García Linera negotiates with the prefect of Tarija, Mario Cossío, who represents the Half Moon National Democratic Council (Conalde), the Morales government has made clear that the massacre is not up for negotiatiion and that the perpetrators will be punished.

The army was sent into Pando over the weekend to bring the city of Cobija and El Porvenir, where the massacre took place, back under control. An arrest warrant was also issued for the prefect of the department, Leopoldo Fernandez, named “the butcher of Pando” by Presidential Minister Juan Ramón Quintana. The demonstrations which have convulsed La Paz have been in support of the MAS government’s decision to prosecute Fernandez on charges of genocide, charges which would carry a thirty year sentence.

Fernandez told El Diario of La Paz that he was innocent of the massacre and that the massacre “has been orchestrated by the [Morales] Government. They needed deaths to call a state of seige and create a beach head in Cobija.”

Virtually no one takes that charge seriously. But most find the charges that the paramilitaries who committed the massacre of El Porvenir and Filadelfia had trained on Fernandez’s land and were under direct orders of the prefect, to be quite convincing. The Morales government is furthermore alleging that Fernandez has ties, through those same paramilitary organizations with narcotics traffickers.

Leopoldo Fernandez is a recent convert to the idea of “autonomy.” Until he became prefect of Pando he spent his life serving the central government in several roles, including national senator. While he had no qualms serving in the very centralized government of the right wing dictator Colonel Hugo Banzer, who ruled Bolivia with an iron hand for seven years, Fernandez apparently became a convert to U.S. style democracy, which included a passion for regional autonomy, only when he took power as prefect and Evo Morales became president of Bolivia.
Leopoldo Fernandez was captured this morning and within a short time indigenous elders marched into downtown La Paz where they blockaded Plaza Murillo, effectively bringing most government activity to an end for most of the morning. They were calling for justice for the murdered campesinos and the imprisonment of Fernandez. That demonstration was followed a few hours later by another, larger demonstration of as many as twenty thousand students, workers, indigenous, in fact, a whole cross-section of Bolivian society. These two protests followed the four massive demonstrations yesterday which marched on the U.S. embassy and were led by groups from El Alto and Las Yungas and included the FEJUVE (Federacion de Juntas Vecinales) of El Alto and numerous religious and union organizations.

Meanwhile, MAS supporters in Cochabamba have decided to blockade the blockaders of Santa Cruz until they turn back to the government the offices they have taken over and ransacked. This could negatively impact Expocruz 2008 Fair now under way and damage the Santa Cruz economy.

Another hopeful sign for the Morales government and the majority of Bolivians, has been unprecedented international solidarity. For the first time in history, the Union of South American Nations, UNASUR, founded this past May 23 in Brasilia, has convened to help Morales resolve this crisis. As President Morales put it during his press conference after the meeting, “For the first time in South American history, the countries of the region have decided among ourselves to resolve the problems of South America” without including the United States in the process.
UNASUR made the most unequivocal statements of support for the Morales government, saying they “wouldn’t recognize any situation that implied an attempted civil coup, the rupture of the institutional order or the compromise of the territorial integrity of the Republic of Bolivia.” The newly-formed UNASUR also resolved to send three separate committees to Bolivia to help investigate the massacre of El Porvenir and help resolve the conflict.

Statements of support for Morales have come from all sides, some of them quite emphatic. President Lula, known for cautious diplomacy, stated in uncharateristically strong terms that Brazil wouldn’t “tolerate” an institutional rupture in Bolivia and said he was “profoundly worried” about the situation in the country that supplies half of Brazil’s natural gas.

The Group of Rio, representing 23 Latin American nations and with its rotating seat now in Mexico, sent out a message of support for the Morales government which spoke of the need to “reach a solution to conflict in the framework of the state of law and the Bolivian institutional order” and it went on to condemn the attacks on the institutions of the government.

Nevertheless, not all statements of solidarity were as well received or as diplomatically stated. President Hugo Chavez’s hint that Venezuelan military might intervene if the situation worsened and his criticism of the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of Bolivia, General Luis Trigo, for not acting more aggressively, caused some outrage in Bolivia, even among MASistas who have always looked up to the Venezuelan leader. General Trigo spoke for many who felt Chavez’s comments were inappropriate and counterproductive when he responded by saying that “we won’t allow any foreign intervention, no matter where it comes from.” Minister of Defense Walker San Miguel responded to Chavez saying, “We Bolivians resolve our own problems. We don’t need foreign intervention.” An editorial in today’s edition of La Razon headlined “Why doesn’t someone Shut Chavez Up?” recalling the words of the King of Spain to Chavez a few months ago. The editorial ended: “Enough, Mr. Chavez. With Bolivia you’ve gone too far.”

In any case, the impact of the solidarity of all Latin America and much of the world with the Morales government has solidified Evo’s standing in Bolivia where he recently won two thirds of the vote in a referendum on his rule. The message of the world to the Media Luna couldn’t be more clear: it’s time to work out a deal with your president because you’ll get no recognition from anywhere as an independent or “autonomous” force outside of the institution of the Bolivian government.

Tonight, on the way back to my $4 per night penthouse room in downtown La Paz, I stopped at a store a few doors down from my hotel. A young woman who looked indigenous was watching the news. I asked for a liter of water and she went behind the counter and brought out a large bottle of Villa Santa.

“Terrible situation,” I said, referring to images of the recent riots in Santa Cruz then flickering on the tv screen. “I hope the problem can be solved.”

“We have to solve it. We have no alternative. Look.”

She glanced up and down the alley where all the tourist shops were beginning to close for the night. There wasn’t a tourist in sight.

“See? The tourists have stopped coming. They’re afraid of the violence. We have to bring all this to an end.”

“How?”

“We have to stop the racists who killed all the campesinos. We have to stop those fascists.”
“How can you do that?” I asked. “They’re educated people, those fascist racists. How do you educate people who think they already know? You have to know you’re ignorant to be able to learn anything, and they don’t know that. How do you change what’s in their hearts?”
She nodded and stacked my change on the counter next to my large bottle of water.
“We need to deepen this revolution. We need to deepen our love,” she said. I nodded and swept the change off the counter into my pocket. Then I turned to leave.

“Chao, amigo,” she said.

“Chao, amiga,” I replied.

Epilogue, Wednesday morning, September 17

The morning news offers the most concrete hope so far: The representatives of the two sides of the conflict have agreed to end the blockades, freeze the IDH and halt movement toward the new Constitutiion so as to begin dialogue in Cochabamba, viewed as a neutral location by both the MAS and Media Luna governments.

The question on everyone’s mind, however, is whether or not the social movements on one hand will end their counterblockades and demonstrations to protest the September 11 massacre, and, perhaps more importantly, whether the armed paramilitaries and fascist groups like the Cruceña Youth Union will respect the dialogue now that they’ve had the taste of blood.

P-MAS is one of Latin America’s newest Socialist parties — it’s barely two years old, and the average age of its members is 25 — but it has already hit the radar screen of those following the political processes of Latin America. “Conociendo al P-MAS,” a book of interviews with founding members of the party, was published earlier this year in Paraguay, edited by Marta Harnecker and Federico Fuentes of the Francisco Miranda Center of Venezuela. More importantly, P-MAS has become a force to be reckoned with on the political stage of Paraguay. Party militants there have been hard at work, particularly in the cities, building support at the base.

If much of the socialism of the twentieth century was characterized by ideological splits, doctrinaire, internecine struggles, P-MAS hopes the “socialism of the twenty-first century” in Paraguay will be characterized by left unity in diversity with flexible, pluralistic ideologies formed out of practical experience, in the spirit of Karl Marx himself. And so it’s no surprise that members of P-MAS have in common an impatience with dogmatic, “black and white” thinking which has too often characterized segments of the left – not to mention the right. P-MAS seems to dance where angels fear to tread; it’s a party that takes risks even when it urges people to use caution.

Evidence for this latter is posted in the enormous party dining hall. Three posters in a window tell the story of a recent struggle led by the gays and lesbians of the party. One poster shows two men holding hands and, in Spanish, “I’m Happy! I’m Gay!” in large letters. Beneath, in smaller type, the explanation: “To be gay is normal; To be gay is a blessing; To be gay is natural; To be gay is to love and be free. If you’re gay, be happy!”

This was part of the gay and lesbian members’ recent campaign, called “Paragay: Campaign against Homophobia in Paraguay.” Beneath that poster is another, with multicolored condoms and the heading “They’re also arms against Capital” and the other poster with multicolored condoms reads “Taking care of yourself is also Revolutionary.”

“That was intense,” Aldo says as he notices me taking a photo of the posters. “Here in Paraguay, one of the most conservative countries in Latin America, people told us we were crazy to take that on. But we did because we thought we had to and it turned out great.”

More “reasonable” people have advised P-MAS to do all sorts of things they didn’t do, and they were also mostly wrong. For example, in the last election the older “wiser” left told P-MAS to tone down the socialist language as they entered the final laps of the electoral process. Aldo says that Tekojoja, the organization that became the party platform for Fernando Lugo to win the presidency, began to push aside other smaller parties of the Alianza Patriotica por el Cambio in the final sprint to the finish line and one way that it did that was by insisting that P-MAS turn down the volume. But Aldo maintains that they were wrong, especially in telling P-MAS to tone down the socialist rhetoric. “Like left parties often do here in Latin America, especially here in Paraguay, they tried to compete with the right by outspending them. One of those left parties spent two million dollars and got only 10,000 votes. We spent one tenth of that and came out with nearly 20,000 votes.” And, Aldo points out, that’s more than double what P-MAS got two years before in previous elections when they received 8,000 votes. “That proves,” he concludes, “that people like the language of the left. They agree with it. They want it.”

The socialist discourse isn’t the only criticism made of P-MAS. Ironically, they’ve also been accused of being too cozy with the right wing and receiving financing from US government agencies, in particular, USAID. These rumors are mostly raised by political parties in decline who see the P-MAS’s youthful energy and agressive work in the communities as a threat to their own power base. In an interview, one member of the Paraguayan Communist Party, who preferred to remain anonymous, made the accusation that P-MAS was funded by the CIA, but could offer no evidence nor refer to credible sources for his information. “I’ve heard that. That’s the rumor,” was all he could say, shrugging his shoulders.

In “Conociendo al P-MAS” Marta Harnecker raises the question of USAID funding with party members who acknowledge that the NGO out of which P-MAS emerged, Casa de Juventud (CJ, Youth House), like most NGOs in Paraguay, received some funding from USAID and a multitude of other international governmental and aid organizations. But in its earlier formation as the Revolutionary Socialist Nucleus (NRS), P-MAS separated from CJ and while P-MAS has maintained friendly relations with CJ and other NGOs funded by USAID and other international agencies, the party refuses such funding. P-MAS is funded by a combination of sales of its literature, t-shirts and such, contributions from its militant members, including elected officials who donate portions of their salaries, and money received from the electoral commission of the Paraguayan government, which disburses funds to all political parties that meet the minimal percentage of popular support to qualify.

Still others have criticized the class origins of members of P-MAS, saying its youthful members are “kids from the middle class who know nothing of poverty” (in the words of one angry member of an opposing political party in the Frente Social y Popular).

Juan de Dios laughs when he hears this criticism. He lives in the Republicano zone of the city, in the area known as “Bañado Sur” (”Bathed South”) so named for the fact that this low lying zone of the city has traditionally become a floodplain with the spring rains.

Juan’s house, like most houses in the flatlands around the dump, is home-made, but certainly a step up from the shacks made of cardboard and other recycled materials in which the dump workers live. Juan’s house is made chiefly of brick and mud with veins of gray cement in critical areas. Still, it’s by no standards “middle-class”: There’s no indoor plumbing and the open sewer runs along the street beside his house. As he shows me around the small, two-bedroom house in some stage of construction, he asks, “Does this look like the house of a petit-bourgeoisie?”

Walking up the alleyways near his house we have to zig-zag around the sewer stream and it’s only luck that today he’s upwind from the dump, visible from his house. Juan points to other houses in his neighborhood of “Bañado Sur” where other party members live before we take a walk to the dump to talk with the workers.

As we walk from the dump to Juan’s house where we’ll have lunch, we pass open pools of brown water Juan reminisces about the nearby lake which he describes as having been “crystalline” years ago when he was growing up. “People used to fish there and go swimming. It was a beautiful lake.”

It still is a beautiful lake, with ducks and cows wading in the water to graze on some of the plants rising out of the lake. But it’s no longer “crystalline” and certainly not a place where anyone would want to go swimming.

I ask if dengue has been a problem in the neighborhood and Juan chuckles. “No, that’s one advantage of all the pollution. Dengue mosquitos only breed in clean water. The water here is too polluted for them to grow in.”

Juan calls the workers on his cell phone as we approach the dump, an enormous mesa in a fenced area with a guard at the gate. “They’ve fenced in the dump since the city privatized it. We used to be able to go right up into the dump before it was privatized,” Juan explains. “Now they don’t let us in. We have to call the workers to meet outside the dump.”

In recent years the enormous garbage dump, located five or six blocks from Juan’s house, has been seen as a blessing: it has acted as a dike and prevented the flooding at the same time that it has also provided some 850 workers with employment, sifting through the dump in search of recyclable materials that they can sell. Juan de Dios is the general coordinator of the P-MAS in the neighborhood and he’s been “accompanying” the recyclers who, even while unionized, work in conditions their counterparts in Argentina call “inhuman.”

Now even that work is in danger since the dump has been privatized, leading to even more precarious conditions for the workers. The new company has argued that the dump is full and for the past month has been sending its trucks to dump at clandestine locations around the city. More than a third of the workers have quit going to work, preferring to stay home in their shacks, pieced together by lumber, sheetmetal, fiberglass and even cardboard rescued from the dump. Now the situation for all the workers has gone from “inhuman” to desperate. As Juan talks to the workers in a strange mix of Guaraní and Spanish, one of the workers describes his situation.

“He says his daughter asked him for money so she can buy lunch at school today. But he has four children and he hasn’t been able to give them anything for several days now,” Juan translates for me. The man’s brow is furrowed with worry as he continues the conversation in Guaraní and he and Juan discuss what options are available to the workers. If the situation doesn’t improve, the two or more thousands people, the recyclers and their families, will face starvation. Juan, as part of his mission of “accompanying” the workers in their struggle, will attend the meeting of the city council the following day to find out why the garbage trucks have stopped going to the dump.

Juan’s work with the recyclers is one of dozens of community projects in which the P-MAS works. As Aldo explains, “Most other parties only make the rounds in the neighborhoods once every four years, at election time. We live here in the neighborhoods and believe we have to maintain a constant presence to build a new society.” Thanks to this presence, Aldo said, P-MAS has grown exponentially while other parties have declined.

Back in the center of Asuncion, Aldo takes me to visit an important landmark in the development of the P-MAS, the Casa de Juventud (CJ), where Camilo Soares and others began to organize the party. It continues to serve as a youth center with its own radio station, Radio Rebelde, and it also is home to the Germinal Labor Studies Center. While P-MAS ended formal relations with the Casa over five years ago, they remain organizations working in close collaboration.

In the entryway of the CJ is a bronze plaque dedicated to General Stroessner in 1982. Beneath that plaque is a poster for the current educational campaign, “Campaign Against Oblivion and Silence.” Around the poster are images of the disappeared and tortured political prisoners of the Stroessner regime. A young woman who meets us in the hallway explains that this is a campaign the Casa is bringing into the schools all around the country.

“You have to understand that 70% of Paraguay is under thirty. Most of the country doesn’t even remember Stroessner. And if they ask their parents, their parents often won’t talk about it.”

Unlike other countries that participated in Plan Condor from the 1960s on, like Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile, where those responsible for crimes against humanity are now being tried, Paraguay has done nothing toward bringing the torturers and murderers to justice. “They continue in power. Many of those who designed the program are still in the government to this day, in positions of authority.”

Officially, 4,000 were disappeared, but Aldo says that number is far from accurate.

“When they disappeared someone, they often disappeared their whole family. In fact they sometimes disappeared whole communities. There are towns where everyone was disappeared, and no witnesses remain.”

The Campaign against Oblivion and Silence is a small step toward keeping alive the issue of the disappeared, but it is at least a step. As Aldo shows me around the Casa he continues talking about the dictatorship.

“People think that the dictatorship ended in 1989 when a coup drove Stroessner from power but that isn’t the case. The Colorado Party, Stroessner’s party, remained in power…”

“Until last month,” I said, finishing his statement, and referring to the August 15th inauguration of Fernando Lugo as president, who brought the more than six decade long rule of the military and the Colorado party to an end.

Aldo nodded. “Yes, the dictatorship remained in power in the executive until last week. But it still remains in power in the legislative and judicial branches.”

In this context, Lugo’s supporters realize that they’re racing against the clock. The P-MAS continues its work, building support for the new government in the poorest neighborhoods of the cities of Paraguay. Given recent events in the country, especially Lugo’s Sept. 2 revelations of a coup plot against him, the new president could do worse than to take a cue from the P-MAS as he picks his way through the minefields of Paraguayan society. He could up the ante, turn up the rhetoric and back his words up with clear actions aimed at getting the country back into the hands of his people. With soy and cattle oligarchies, organized crime and a suspicious U.S. government prepared to join forces against any change, this new priest-turned-president may also need a miracle or two along the way if he decides to take a turn to the left — but he’ll be able to count on the P-MAS to watch his back.

Fernando Lugo became a priest in 1977 and the following year went off to Ecuador where he worked among the indigenous people in the province of Bolívar under the renowned liberation theologian, Bishop Leonidas Proaño Villalba. Lugo returned to his native Paraguay in 1982 and eventually became bishop of San Pedro, the poorest department of Paraguay. He received special permission to leave that post as bishop in order to run for the presidency, which he won on April 20th of this year.

I got my first inkling of what Lugo’s election would mean for the people of Paraguay when I arrived at the border on the morning of the inauguration. My friends and I ended up separating at the border so I crossed alone. I handed my passport to the woman behind the large plate glass and she opened it and thumbed through it, stopping at the last page before she handed it back.

“Where’s your visa?” she asked.

“Visa?”I responded. “I thought you got a visa at the border.”

She shook her head. “No. Your government requires you to get a visa in advance. You have to go back to the Paraguayan Consulate to get a visa.”

Then she noticed my t-shirt. I was wearing a t-shirt with a drawing by my friend, Diego Rios, of the Cuban patriot and martyr, Jose Martí.

“Why do you want to go to Paraguay?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

“I had planned to go to the inauguration of President Lugo,” I responded, my voice dropping as I spoke.

By now two other officials had gathered around her window, a young man who was seated at the desk beside her and who now leaned over to her window, and another, taller woman, entering from the other office, who appeared to be their superior. The three of them exchanged a few words and then the taller woman waved me to the door and told me to come into the office.

“Jose Martí,” she said as I walked in. “What do you think of him?”

I told her I admired him for his struggle for Cuban independence and that I hoped one day all of Latin America would be free and united. And that was why I thought it was so important to be present for the inauguration of President Lugo. She smiled, nodded approvingly and invited me into the office.

In the office the three of them began discussing my situation.

“He needs a visa,” the first woman said.

“Yes,” said the taller woman,” but we can’t give him one here.”

“Well, we could just let him in,” the young man said.

The taller woman dismissed the idea with the wave of her hand. “No. He could get in trouble when he arrived. And he’d certainly get in trouble when he left Paraguay.”

It went on like this for a moment until the woman at the desk suggested giving me a transit visa. The tall woman nodded and they set to work, looking through the stamps until they found the right one.

While they processed me, I watched Lugo on television which was on in the office, the image moving about on the screen from a distracted camera person, shooting from too great a distance from the stage where Lugo was speaking.

The taller woman noticed I was watching and she pointed at Lugo, his image dancing back and forth as the camera tried to find his focus.

“We love our president,” she said, and then she handed me my passport.

I took a cab the twenty or so miles into Asunción. I asked the driver what he thought of the new president. “Well, we’ll have to see, won’t we? But he has promised to give his presidential salary to the poor. That’s a first for this country. Maybe they’ll rob less than all the others.” He shrugged and turned back to focus on his driving.

We couldn’t get near the Plaza de Independencia so I got out seven or eight blocks away and walked to the plaza, passing blocks and blocks of soldiers filling the outlying streets. It looked more like a military coup than an inauguration.

I found myself walking beside a woman and her daughter who were also unfamiliar with Asunción and who had come in just for the celebrations. We were both lost so we stopped to ask a soldier. Her subservient posture, and the slight bow she made as she asked directions to the Plaza de Independencia, revealed that Paraguayans still haven’t fully recovered from their fear of the police and military who terrorized the country under the Stroessner dictatorship and over sixty years of one-party rule.

“Soldiers will never again be sent out to kill campesinos,” Lugo promised, but the uniformed men who passed through the crowds nevertheless drew quiet, suspicious looks. Their olive green uniforms still in some sense symbolized the forty-year-long Stroessner dictatorship.

By the time we arrived in the Plaza the inauguration had ended and a few minutes later the new President rode by, followed by guards on horseback.

Lugo had broken all protocol by dressing in sandals and a typical Paraguayan shirt, an aopo’i, and he began his speech in Guarani, the indigenous language spoken by over 95% of the people of Paraguay.

The leaders of the “Pink Tide” arrived in force, most notably Presidents Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, Rafael Correa, Michelle Bachelet, Tabaré Vázquez, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. In addition, two elders of Liberation Theology, Gustavo Gutierrez and Leonardo Boff appeared, along with Fr. Ernesto Cardenal. Eduardo Galeano also made an appearance.

But more importantly, the plaza was full of tens of thousands of the people who had brought Fernando Lugo to power: the indigenous and campesinos from distant parts of the country as well as the slum dwellers who had ventured into the Plaza from their shacks made of cardboard, wood from pallets and roofed with corrugated fiberglass or sheetmetal held down by stones, old boards, rusting bicycle frames. These structures line dirt roads that twist down toward Rio Paraguana and house a large number of the quarter or so Paraguayans who live on something like one US dollar per day.

In the shade of the trees in the plaza people sat, sharing their maté tea, talking and laughing. I’d missed the elation of Lugo’s speech, but the crowd was still wearing smiles everywhere and people were posing for pictures they could carry away to remember the historic moment of transition when the Colorado Party fell from power after 61 years of rule.

Nevertheless, the sense of hope was anything but drunken or delirious. The people I met and with whom I spoke mentioned that they were indeed optimistic, but also cautious in their optimism, much like the taxi driver who had delivered me as close as he could to the plaza. “I’m hopeful that we’ll see changes here,” a young woman told me,”but we’ll have to see, won’t we?”

The crowd was composed of a broad mix of people from tribal indigenous to mestizo; well-heeled urbanites and campesinos in traditional sandals; businessmen in suits and street vendors in rags; young kids with piercings and tatoos and elders walking with the aid of their middle-aged children. Lugo’s support clearly crosses all lines drawn across Paraguayan society and he seems to have inspired a cautious optimism even among members of the Colorado Party.

I joined the crowd leaving the Plaza and by chance I ended up in a demonstration led by, and almost wholly composed of, members of the P-MAS Socialist Party (Movement toward Socialism Party). I was on my way to find a hotel at the time, so I was glad for the company. The young people who form the core of the P-MAS are among the most enthusiastic of Lugo’s supporters. Their party was founded two years ago to promote the Socialism of the 21st Century and it has grown dramatically, especially among the youth. Although they won no seats in the parliament (which the party attributed to fraud), several members won relatively high posts in the new government, including Camilo Soares, who was named Minister of National Emergencies, and two other members named as vice-ministers of culture and of youth.

That night I went to the free concert in front of the National Palace. The high point was the arrival of Chavez and Lugo, who took seats in the audience and eventually took the stage, not with speeches, but with poetry recitals and songs.

Chavez, of course, went first, reciting a long poem to Bolivar, “Por aquí pasa,” by Venezuelan Alberto Torrealba. Chavez was accompanied by the quintet of Venezuelan singer and member of parliament, Cristóbal Jiménez. Later, Chavez returned with President Lugo to sing a reggae version of Mercedes Sosa’s song, “Todo Cambia,” arranged by Lugo’s head of Security, Marcial Congo, a long-haired, bearded man who looked to be pushing sixty. The group accompanying them was led by rock musician Rolando Chaparro who had begun his set with a soulful rock guitar version of Paraguay’s National Anthem,

I started leaving after the set with Lugo and Chavez, thinking that the event had reached its high point, when I ran into Elena, AN older woman from P-MAS who I’d met earlier in the day.

I asked her about the party and she confessed that she was involved because her daughter was a member. I admitted to being surprised that any party claiming to be “socialist” could find members at this juncture in history, so soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the turn of China toward capitalism.

“We’ve organized on issues that are relevant to people, especially the poor people of Paraguay, who are the majority. That is, Paraguay is a poor country. I mean it’s rich in the sense that you can drop a seed anywhere and it will grow, but the people here are very poor,” she explained.

Angel, the white haired Uruguayan who runs the hotel where I was staying, had put it this way: “Here in Paraguay there are only two classes of people: Those with shoes, and those without. That’s it. There’s no middle class. And the poor are the poorest in the world.”

Elena elaborated on the situation of the country. “Of six million Paraguayans, a million and a half live outside the country, working in Argentina or Spain or elsewhere. The Colorado Party (which governed Paraguay for over sixty years) is a genocidal party because under their rule ten children per day died as a result of preventable illnesses. We have 45,000 children suffering from malnutrition. They’re malnourished from the womb on so that they aren’t able to develop intellectually. [The poor] live on a dollar [4,000 guaranís] a day. If milk costs $.75 [3,000 guaranís], how can they live on that? How are they supposed to provide milk for their children? Meanwhile, the rich keep getting richer. You go to their neighborhoods and it looks like something out of Hollywood. They have three or four cars and trucks.

“That’s why we formed an alliance, “Patriotic Alliance for Change” [Alianza Patriotica por el Cambio] to get Lugo elected, and within that alliance is the Party of the Movement to Socialism, P-MAS.”

“I’m the mother of one of the founders of that party. The parents and grandparents of the youth who founded this party are involved because this is going to be a hard struggle. Very difficult, indeed. Because the struggle against capital isn’t easy. But we have to fight so that everyone is able to live well and eat well every day. ”

“What we want is work and dignity for the people of Paraguay. That’s what we’re fighting for.”

“And so today we’re celebrating. This is a celebration of the people of Paraguay because we won, not with guns, but with votes, a battle against a party of genocide.”

Elena continued. “I’ll give you an example. A friend of mine is in the hospital today with her malnourished child. It’s a hospital with everything you could ask for. But the baby is allergic to wheat and requires a special kind of milk. The milk costs 80,000 guaranís ($20) a liter. Where is she going to get that kind of money? We’re hoping that tomorrow President Lugo is going to do what he really has to do…”

“We’re all going to be with him in this struggle because we don’t want any more of this suffering.”

I ask Elena how it was that they managed to found a socialist party just two years ago, nearly fifteen years after the collapse of the USSR and the “end of history.” She said “it was the young people [who founded the party]. All very young people. And they believe in socialism. We’re big and we’re growing. There are 6,000 militants in Asunción, but we’re a national presence and have chapters all over the country.”

As I ask again how the party was founded, she referred to the “villas miserias” (lit. “miserable villages”). “Look at the houses. They’re made out of cardboard and things rescued from the garbage. That’s why there’s so much sickness like dengue, borne from the dirty water in the marginal neighborhoods. And you know, for them, dengue [fever] is deadly. They die from dengue. And they die from tuberculosis because tuberculosis is a disease from poverty, you know. They’re undernourished and susceptible to such diseases which kill them. And so we’re working against all this and we want to make Paraguay an example [to the world].”

The party, Elena explains, started organizing around school bus tickets because the poor couldn’t afford transport to school. They’ve since been organizing for university bus tickets, as well as for community kitchens and cultural events in the poor neighborhoods.

“Each neighborhood has a nucleus of the party, but we organize in popular assemblies around the needs that the local people have. That’s how we hope to build the socialism of the 21st century.”

Earlier in the day, Fernando Lugo summed up the sentiment of Elena and all those who had supported him to become president. “I refuse to live in a country where some can’t sleep because of fear and others can’t sleep because they’re hungry.”

Two of Lugo’s economic advisors are Leonardo Boff, the liberation theologian, and Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize winning economist. While Boff has stressed the need for small family and community-based agriculture to provide local sustanance and a move away from the export model of agriculture, Stiglitz has suggested an intensification of export agriculture with a focus on organic production (currently, Paraguay leads the world in the export of organic sugar), tropical fruits and taxation of those exports to fund “social investments” like education and healthcare. It’s likely that Lugo will take this apparently contradictory advice and implement both models to guarantee Paraguay’s food security as well as bring tax money into the treasury to pay for much needed social programs.

Policies like these will be popular and deepen the nation’s trust in their president who has come to power with the great good will of his people. In order to retain that trust and good will, Lugo will have to bring the project of the kingdom of God down to earth with practical proposals that will activate the enormous mass of people, still terrified of the military and suffering from all the ill effects of hunger and neglect.

As one local writer put it, “The party is over and it’s time to get to work. Today hope has won. May it continue for a long time to come.”

As we eat, Armando continues to guide me through Ecuador as he talks about the reforms taking place under President Rafael Correa with his “Citizen’s Revolution.” He explains this “revolution” (a word we would both put in quotes) by contrasting it, as I will discover is his habit, with the indigenous cosmovision. Armando, like a growing number of Ecuadorans, has come to believe that the only way “forward” is into the “past.” “You see, in the Andean cosmovision, the past is in front of us and the future is behind us.” It’s a conception I still can’t quite grasp intellectually, but I can deeply appreciate Armando’s integration of that cosmovision with a libertarian left ideology. While left politics is generally expressed in terms of ideology, the Andean cosmovision is generally offered in the form of fables and stories, as in Armando’s response to my question about democracy in Ecuador.

Armando tells me that there was a town near Otavalos, a couple of hours east of Quito, where, many years ago, the people decided to build a road. Everyone in the town agreed that the road was to go from here to there,” he says, indicating an imaginary line through the park with his free hand. “Everyone, that is, but an old man. They all went to him hear why he disagreed and he told them that in one direction was a well (ojo de agua) and if they made a road over it, there would be no water for future generations.” Armando finished by offering the moral of the fable. “So the indigenous way is not majority rule, because that isn’t democracy. Democracy is consensus.”

Building consensus in a country like Ecuador might seem a utopian endeavor, given the struggle between an oligarchy determined to maintain control of the country, and indigenous and social movements equally determined to wrest the country from its clutches, a phenomenon currently reflected in the fight over the new Constitution. Between these two forces stands Correa and his supporters, largely drawn from the educated middle class and the former “Forajidos” who overthrew Lucio Gutierrez in 2005. For now, the more radical left has joined forces with the middle class, small business and other center-left reformist sectors that make up the core of Alianza País and that large block is likely to win the support of the majority in voting through the new Constitution this September.

Luis Angel Saavedra, president of INREDH (Fundación Regional de Asesoría en Derechos Humanos), a human rights organization in Quito, offers Armando and me a brief analysis of the social conflicts that have rocked Ecuador in recent years. “For the past thirty years in Ecuador, we’ve seen the consolidation of political parties linked to powerful economic interests,” Luis explained one day in his office. “Each powerful economic group has had two modes of expression: A political party and the media. And so the social movements have had alternatives because the political parties and the media were completely controlled by those powerful economic interests. The only means of expression for social movements was the power of revocation by means of demonstrations, demonstrations aimed at the overthrow of presidents.” Luis went on to explain that the presidents during this period were elected for their leftist discourse, but were overthrown for not following through on it.

Ecuadorans suffer neither fools nor liars. In this Andean culture, the three rules of conduct as preached and practiced by the Incans to the present, are still taken as seriously as, and arguably more so than, the Ten Commandments in Alabama: Don’t lie, don’t steal and don’t be lazy. So far Rafael Correa and the Constituent Assembly he convoked last year to write a new constitution, have passed the first tests of conduct. But greater tests of a more pragmatic nature lie before those proposing a new course for the nation which Correa calls the “Citizen’s Revolution.”

The Ecuadoran constitution, born into public life less than a month ago, already has a group of sworn enemies determined to defeat it when it goes up for a nationwide vote on September 28th of this year. The class lines in this struggle couldn’t be more clear: the Constitution, drawn up by the Constituent Assembly, voted into power last year, has spent its life drafting this document which is broadly supported by social movements and popular opinion. However, the Guayaquil, Quito and other oligarchies, along with the Catholic Bishops and Evangelical Christians, are determined to defeat the new Constitution. This divide between the oligarchy, backed by reactionary Christians, on one hand, and the social movements, the majority of the country’s poor, indigenous, campesino and Afro-descendents, on the other hand, is symbolic of a long struggle that is reaching a new stage in the refounding of the nation through the new Constitution.

Evidently the good bishops of the Church feel that a constitutional protection of human life “from conception” isn’t strong enough to defend a fetus from the wiles of already-born humanity. The bishops, the right wing media (owned by the sectors of the oligarchy) and the evangelicals claim that the Constitution, in the words of the good minister Francisco Loor, is “pro-abortion, pro-homosexual and has taken the name of God in vain so as to get more votes.” But the “No” forces are few even while vocal and their arguments, on a par with the right wing in the U.S., are not likely to convince many.

Still, the fight over the constitution has gotten dirty and, while most of the lies and manipulation have predictably come from an oligarchy terrified of losing control of the country, President Rafael Correa has thrown his share of mud — not only at the “pelucones” (“wig-wearers,” a term referring to colonial oligarchs who wore wigs) but also at his presumptive allies on the left. In his weekly show, Dialogue with the President, a show similar to Hugo Chavez’s Hello President, in which the two national leaders address their respective publics, Chavez on Sunday, and Correa on Saturday, Correa continued his minor tirade, begun the day before in his talk before the National Assembly as he received the Constitution from their hands.

What is little understood outside of Ecuador, is that, despite Correa’s rhetoric of the “Socialism of the 21st Century” for Ecuador, the president seems to be committed to a capitalist dependency model of development for the country. As Daniel Denvir puts it, only outside Ecuador is Correa viewed as a “leftist,” while inside Ecuador itself “conflicts between Correa and the social movement Left—the indigenous movement, environmentalists and unions, among others—have become increasingly heated” (I recommend the full article).

Speaking from Chongón, in the province of Guaya, the day after accepting the new Constitution from the Assembly, Correa again castigated the “infantile leftists” and “infantile environmentalists” and “infantile indigenous” without being more specific about what made them “infantile” and why they caused him so much ire. After all, he’d gotten what he wanted: his people had “edited” the entire Constitution prior to the final vote by the Constituent Assembly, some argued so as to make it more amenable to his “reformed-capitalist extractionist policies” and also to strengthen his own presidential powers. Because his party, Alianza País (Country Alliance) was the majority, all the “infantile” sectors had to choose between approving the illicitly redacted document or voting against it and allying themselves with the oligarchy and its religious lackeys.

These shenanigans on the part of Correa’s people, however, didn’t go unnoticed and Ecuanuri, the largest indigenous organization within CONAIE, called for an “extraordinary assembly” on the following Tuesday, July 29, to consult on whether or not to accept the document as edited.

The theater of the National Museum was filled by the time the meeting began, opening with part of a short film on the mobilizations of indigenous people in 1990 which began a nearly twenty year process culminating in Rafael Correa’s rise to power, the founding of the Constituent Assembly and the writing of the Constitution. The film, although low budget and poor quality, was extremely moving, filled with images of indigenous people rising up at last to claim their rights as humans, disinherited in their own lands.

After the film, several of the members of the Constituent Assembly spoke of the Constitution as having been called into being by those very demonstrations and, indeed, the new social contract describes Ecuador as “plurinational” and “intercultural” and recognizes the rights to communal land and territory and recognizing not only individual rights, but the rights of “communities, peoples, nationalities and collectives.”

It is the first constitution in the world to grant rights to “Pachamama,” or “Mother Earth” and it also grants rights to the indigenous to carry out justice as they see fit in their communities, within the limits of national and international standards of justice. The document emphasizes that “Ecuador is a territory of peace. The establishment of foreign military bases nor foreign installations with military objectives will not be allowed.”

Advocating “quality of life” (from Kichwa, “sumaj kawsay,” el buen vivir), the document guarantees the right to water in an article against privatization of that resource, and it guarantees the “right to secure and permanent access to healthy, adequate and nutritious food, preferably produced at the local level.” This chapter two, article 13 was changed by Correa’s people at the last minute, where “guarantees” became “promote:” “The Ecuadoran state will promote food sovereignty.” Nevertheless, even the redacted constitution has the fingerprints of the indigenous movement, environmentalists and leftist values all over it, especially in the articles guaranteeing free healthcare and education, right to “adequate housing” and social security for all, regardless of whether or not one has paid into it.

Even though many Assembly members expressed outrage over the last-minute changes to fifty articles of the Constitution that Correa’s people made to the final draft, the overwhelming majority of the speakers urged the gathering, mostly indigenous members of CONAIE, to vote “Yes” in the referendum on the Constitution. Among the “infantile left” who spoke was Dr. Albert Acosta, president of the Constituent Assembly until just a few weeks before when he resigned at the urging of Correa and by vote of the assembly because he wanted to prolong the proceedings so that more voices could be heard.

Without a note of bitterness, but rather with an enthusiasm that inspired a prolonged applause, Acosta began by agreeing that the Constitution wasn’t perfect, but that it should be approved with “a ‘yes’ and a thousand times ‘yes.’” He reminded people that the approval on September 28th would be only the beginning of the new Social Contract in which it would be “an instrument for struggle” which represents “a new stage of that struggle.”

The struggle will be sharpest between the uneasy coalition of Correa’s centrist party, Alianza País and the left, comprised mainly of those Correa calls “infantile”: the indigenous, environmental and social movements, all favoring the Constitution, and the Catholic hierarchy, the Evangelical churches and the oligarchy, opposed to the Constitution.

Correa would be wise to recall that all those people, groups and organizations he has categorized as “infantile” and accused of “infiltrating” his Alianza, are his allies in a struggle against the right. He’ll need their help to pass the new Constitution, but also to govern the country afterwards if he wants to continue the gains of what he calls the “Citizen’s Revolution.” Rather than his customary approach to governing by power politics and decree, many believe Correa needs to look at the way the indigenous see democracy as the building of consensus and unanimity. Correa, some would say, is prone to tantrums, and his outbursts against his allies have already alienated many on the left, leading one powerful indigenous leader to say, “We support ‘yes’ on the Constitution, but we no longer support Correa.” Increasing numbers of people from diverse sectors in the social movements would say the same thing, and they are the very ones who have overthrown an entire crop of presidents leading up to Correa. If Correa continues to blur the distinction between his allies and his enemies, he may no longer find himself to be the exception.

In the evenings the streets fill up with strollers window shopping on their way home from work and no one seems to be in a rush. They stop and chat with acquaintances in this city where, despite a growing population, everyone seems to know each other. In fact, there is little to distinguish Pasto, Nariño, except for its governor, Antonio Navarro Wolf, a former guerrilla leader of the M-19.

Wolf is a folk hero to many on the left in Colombia. Running on the platform of “Zero corruption,” he was elected mayor of the city of Pasto where he served until he ran for the national senate. He won his bid for the senate to represent the federal district of Santa Fé de Bogotá with the largest percentage of the votes ever tallied for a single senator in Colombia and only narrowly missed taking the leadership of president of Colombia’s left party, the Democratic Left Pole (PDI), the position being won by former president Carlos Gaviria. His influence on the writing of the Constitution of 1991 was significant and led to the inclusion of many progressive elements that today haunt Colombia’s right-wing president, Alvaro Uribe.

Wolf has been governor of Nariño for just over six months, and while the changes may not yet be visible outside of the government building housing his offices, within the building there are young faces, several of whom, in strategic places such as the Ministry of Agriculture and the Office of Community Development, are indigenous. Nubia del Rocío Tatamues, Sub-secretary of Community Development, and Minister of Agriculture Javier Cuaical Alpala represent the Nariño government’s attempts to deepen democracy and focus on what Wolf calls “ethnodevelopment.”

Recently, Navarro Wolf granted me an exclusive interview in his office where we talked for over an hour about his life in politics, what he hopes to accomplish as governor of Nariño, and his views on the current situation in Colombia.

The government building housing Wolf’s office is somewhat elegant with sparkling hardwood floors and a courtyard with an enormous chessboard that could easily represent the governor’s approach to politics with a national government reputed to be the most right wing in today’s Latin America.

Wolf’s office is clean and neat and the man sitting behind the desk doesn’t look like someone who spent years underground in the cities and the jungle. He’s properly dressed and looks like any other higher government functionary, but one might guess that these neat clothes and business-like manner are also disguises for a man determined to help turn his country upside down. I wonder this to myself as I sit down: how much of the revolutionary is left in this man who hides his age better than his wounds from a failed-assassination attempt? The limp from the missing leg is noticeable, but the speech problems are more so.

“I was a guerrilla for 16 years in the M-19 movement, from 1974 to 1990. In 1990 we signed a peace agreement with the national government and we began our eighteen years of what you could call our legal political activity. So I’ve been doing political work now for thirty four years,” he tells me.

I ask him why he became a guerrilla in the first place. “There were a number of reasons at the time,” he said. “First, there had been an electoral fraud (in Colombia), taking place on April 19 of 1970, hence our name, the Movement of the 19 of April. It was also a time of the guerrilla all over Latin America. A that point the Sandinistas were still fighting in Nicaragua, as well as [the FMLN in] El Salvador, in addition to all the older guerrillas from the 1950s. And so, at that time, it seemed possible to bring about reforms by the use of arms, especially when the electoral [route to change] seemed closed.”

Wolf had been a student activist when he entered the movement. He recounts this dramatic part of his life quickly, as if it were a brief and minor incident and not a sixteen-year saga during which time he “was involved in everything.”

“I fought in the mountains, was captured, tortured, freed and then almost murdered, lost a leg… and then negotiated a peace agreement with the government, which we signed a year later in 1990. Why did we sign [the peace accord]? Simply because we saw that armed struggle was going nowhere and we would never win — even if we weren’t going to lose.”

Those conditions, which led the M-19 to negotiate a peace, included the rise of the paramilitary organizations and the backing the government received from the U.S., combined with the fact that Colombians, who for a few years had supported the guerrillas, in their majority, now opposed the armed struggle for power.

“In the mountains you can easily lose perspective for what you’re doing,” Wolf says. “But we noticed that the conditions in Colombian society were changing. It was no longer the rural society of the 60s and 70s, but an increasingly urban society. And without the support of the majority of society, we weren’t going to win. We weren’t going to lose; we could have maintained our positions, but there wasn’t enough support nor social conditions for a victory, either, and we knew conditions would simply deteriorate with time. Armed struggle is a method to achieve political victory, and that method would no longer work to achieve a political victory, so we signed the peace agreement and entered the legal political struggle.”

The M-19 began an internal discussion about a negotiated settlement in 1979 and then made their first unsuccessful attempts to negotiate peace in 1984. In that sense, the M-19 were what Wolf called the “precursors” of those guerrilla groups that negotiated peace agreements. They were followed by the FMLN in El Salvador in the wake of the collapse of the USSR, and other smaller guerrilla groups in Colombia, like the EPL (Popular Liberation Army), the Armed Indigenous Movement.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN), however, thought they could achieve a military victory and refused to negotiate. “They still believe that, even though conditions continue to deteriorate for them,” says Wolf. “Ten years ago, 1998, was their high point in terms of military strength, capacity and results. That’s when they should have made peace. It may be that they won’t be defeated, but their time for possible victory is completely gone now.”

Needless to say, Wolf feels that the FARC/ELN made a big mistake by not seizing the opportunity to move from armed to legal political struggle when it arose.

“If we had all signed peace agreements at the same time, I feel sure we would be in a situation like El Salvador, with a strong left on the point of political victory.”

The fact that guerrilla groups have signed different agreements at different times has weakened the left in Colombia, even though Wolf also feels that there is still great potential for a strong left party in the country. Nevertheless, the presence of the FARC/ELN as an armed, left guerrilla movement, has not only tended to limit support for legal left political organizations, like the Democratic Left Pole (PDI), but has also helped, more than anything else, to strengthen the right wing in Colombia.

“We [the legal left] continue paying the bill because their [FARC/ELN] presence and activities continue to hurt the left working in electoral politics by affecting uninformed public opinion since the right wing continues to associate us with the FARC. And today, the only way to transform society is through the electoral process.”

Could it be that the FARC doesn’t want to sign a peace accord because it fears a repeat of the massacres of the 1980s into the 1990s of the Patriotic Union (UP) when FARC members attempted to take the electoral route and between two and five thousand members were murdered by paramilitaries? And how did the M-19 escape a similar fate?

“We signed the peace accord in spite of that [slaughter of the UP] because we felt that by making a complete commitment to separate ourselves from armed struggle we would have some sort of guarantees. Of course, some of our members were killed, but we weren’t entirely eliminated, nor were even the majority of us killed. In general, we were respected. The situation of the UP was quite different; they had an element against them. The guerrilla continued to be armed while people connected to that guerrilla tried to do electoral political work, the simultaneous combination of two forms of struggle. This is similar to other situations, like ETA and Batasuna in Spain or the IRA and Seinn Fein, at one time, in Ireland. On the other hand, we made a public commitment to legal process with zero connection to the armed struggle.”

In 1990, the M-19 ran their former military commander for president of Colombia, Carlos Pizzaro, who was murdered before the elections. His funeral brought out massive numbers of people into the streets and Wolf took his place in the elections, coming in third place with 12.7 percent of the vote. The outpouring of support shown for Pizarro at the funeral, Wolf believes, protected other members of the M-19 from a similar fate. Thus began the legal, political struggle of Antonio Navarro Wolf and the M-19.

How has that legal struggle been? “Difficult. Difficult. But we won great support after the death of Carlos Pizzaro and were about a third of the National Assembly, playing a decisive role in the writing of the Constitution. And so that year, 1990-1991, was a year of great hope. But then it became very difficult. We had nothing. We had no money, nor experience in electoral politics. But the later development of the PDI came as the result of getting more experience and we’re all there [in the PDI]: the demobilized M-19, the ex- Communist Party, the Maoist left, people from all sectors of the left, we’re all there.”

The PDI is working in coalition with smaller centrist parties under the umbrella organization of the Alternative Democratic Pole (PDA). I ask Wolf if the PDA is going to go the route of the Frente Amplio of Uruguay or the Worker’s Party of Brazil which, by including the center, became a peculiarly “left” version of capitalism. The so-called “Pink Tide,” with perhaps the exception of Venezuela, and certainly of Cuba, hasn’t demonstrated a predilection for anything socialist but the rhetoric associated with it. Most would argue that the economies of the so-called “pink” nations of Latin America have continued to be thoroughly dependent capitalist economies.

Wolf, by contrast, doesn’t seem to like the rhetoric associated with “socialism,” especially given his Colombian context, so he uses the language of “democracy,” “opportunity,” “justice,” and “equality.” The inclusion of the centrist parties in the PDA has created a party which, “it seems to me, is too far to the right.” This year, he says, “we’ll be dealing with this issue [about whether or not to include the centrist parties in the PDA]. I think what we’ll end up with will be three distinct choices: a right wing with Uribe; a center; and a left alternative.

I raise the question of his proposal, in 2006, of government subsidies for housing in which he proposed giving the poor of his country $100 per month to help with housing. He dismisses the proposal immediately.

“I proposed that at one moment without considering the consequences of how it would be paid, of the intermediaries and so forth. These direct subsidies have many problems. They feed into the clientelism you see all over the world. Along with that comes the deterioration of ideas, proposals and political lines. In the end, you have poor people just voting for the subsidies [and not candidates]. And finally, all this public assistance is ultimately unsustainable. And so here we’ve decided to do no subsidies. None. Here, if we’re going to subsidize anything, it would be done in such a way that would require a commitment on the part of the people to contribute to, and support the project themselves.

“Nearly all of Latin America is pulling back from the idea of welfare programs. We want to see people take part in their own lives and take initiative. We don’t want to make the people into beggars, conceptual beggars, waiting for manna from heaven. And so we’re happy to finance productive enterprises with credits. But they’re credits that have to be repaid. And so they have to put in their part and make an effort. Everyone puts something in. People may be very poor but they have to put something in. We’ll feed you lunch, but you have to work for it. And so they have to make an effort, insofar as they’re able.”

I ask Wolf about the Socialism of the 21st Century. “Yes, so we’re talking about democratic socialism. I prefer social democracy, political democracy, social democracy which implies the power of the majorities, the option for the majority. Not that I oppose socialism per se, but my formation was in the M-19 and we were motivated by the power of democracy and we defined ourselves from the beginning by economic and political democracy, social justice, social democracy and national sovereignty. That was the vision of the M-19 that, because of the electoral fraud, we organized around the concept of democracy and that meant a deep, participatory democracy.

“Here [in Nariño], for instance, we’re doing a sort of participatory budget, working on developing communitarian enterprises, and supporting rural workers (campesinos), indigenous and Afro-Colombian groups. And when there are struggles for land, we side with the campesinos because we believe they have a right to land. From my point of view, the concept of ‘democracy’ includes all this and it’s also more clear and direct.”

In all these struggles, Wolf says, the state plays a key role.

“In the economy, the state needs to offer support to the weak against the strong. And, even though it’s a bit out of style, the state needs to work toward the redistribution of the means of production. And so in this Department [Nariño], 70 percent of the campesinos have land, an exceptional situation in Colombia. But the problem is they’re very weak, and their parcels of land are small, one hectare, or half a hectare. And so we’ve attempted to strengthen them by financial credits, technical assistance and connecting them with other campesinos. And all this is encompassed in the concept of democracy. Clearly what’s needed is agrarian reform, and this is also part of democracy.”

Nevertheless, Wolf maintains, it’s important to be realistic in approaching agrarian reform. “We want to see land given directly to the campesinos, and not to cooperatives and associations. What seems to work is technical assistance, helping the campesino sell his or her products directly and without intermediaries but ensuring that the campesino is owner of his or her own piece of land. Because cooperatives might work well with the indigenous campesinos and even, more or less, with the Afro-Colombians, because there is a tradition of collective work among them but not with the other mestizo campesinos. There it’s important for each family to have its own piece of land.”

But how can the campesino compete with the flood of cheap, subsidized food produced by agribusiness and shipped from the U.S. under the Free Trade agreements? Navarro Wolf is working on that problem.

“We’re selling organic and fair trade products to Europe, where there’s a big market for this sort of thing. This is a great opportunity, and especially now, with the price of oil being so high, to move toward organic methods of agriculture. We’ve been developing those methods, for example, in the cultivation of coffee where we’re using both organic and commercial fertilizers. After all, this is a slow process, this transition. But we’re working on that: organic methods and fair trade.”

The new Secretary of Agriculture and the Environment, Javier Cuaical, has been working with indigenous groups in “shagras,” which, Wolf explains, is an integrated farm which has its own economy, produces its own food and medicines, all based on a return to the indigenous cosmovision. “All of this is oriented toward the establishment of food security. But this is program, what we call ‘ethnodevelopment,’ is new, only developed in the past six months. Before then none of this existed.”

I ask Wolf if his government has had any difficulty with Uribe’s right-wing government and he says not up to the present. “Well, they’re not very happy about this new governor here, but neither have they opposed us. So far we’ve maintained a constructive relationship based on an attitude of mutual respect, working as best we can on the problems before us.

“For instance, right now in two municipalities our [Department of Nariño] government is proposing to stop the aerial spraying of coca and voluntary substitution programs in two municipalities. We’re proposing this to the national government as an experiment in which we would accompany and assist the two municipalities over a period of ten years. We’re doing this because the spraying as a strategy has completely failed.” Wolf points out that after years of spraying, over 284,000 hectares in Nariño alone, the areas under coca cultivation has actually increased from 13,000 in 2002 to over 20,000 in 2007. That’s why Navarro Wolf is hoping to get a hearing from Uribe and possibly getting funding for his pilot project of voluntary crop substitution for coca cultivation. “The spraying is certainly cheaper than what I intend to propose, but it has produced no results. We’ll see if they listen, but I’m sure that we’ll get better results than the spraying has done. And besides, my plan doesn’t poison the earth.”

This plan is part of a proposal Wolf calls “Life and Peace,” in which he hopes to bring an end to the violence in his corner of Colombia which results from drug production and trafficking.

“In municipalities where there is no coca production, murders are at 20 per hundred thousand people — and there are 21 municipalities where that number drops to zero. Where there is coca production, that number rises to over 80, that is, four times the number of homicides — and more.” Through voluntary crop substitution and a prioritization of social investment and spending, the governor of Nariño hopes to make his department a model for peace and human development.

Wolf has to get back to work but he’s willing to answer one last question so I ask him about the role the social movements will play in his government. “They’re everything,” he says. “They’re the people.”

* First published in Upside Down World.

I was trying to catch a bus to Tabay, just a half hour outside of Merida, and I didn’t want to carry the Sunday tomes the other papers offered with glossy mags and advertisements stuffed inside what is essentially a fluffy journalistic taco. Diario Vea is dependably lightweight on Sundays as it carries no advertising other than the lackluster government ads that seem to be the paper’s major source of income. Vea, as it’s known, is a left paper run by Guillermo García Ponce, rumored to be an old Communist who has lined up behind Chavez. Indeed, Vea is the only pro-government paper available in Venezuela, and that was the real reason I wanted to read Diario Vea today. Experience has taught me that US media shows and government lies broadcast as gospel have a life of maximum one week before reality bleeds through the cell doors where it’s locked away and tortured by those same media conglomerates and lying government. Keep in mind that five or so corporations control 90% of all we hear, see, read and, ultimately, therefore, think. Those five corporations form our opinions for that crucial first week after a story, which is about when the alternative media, like Diario Vea, have a chance to pick up the real story and get at the truth concealed by the “facts.”

Such has been the case this week in the wake of the “dramatic rescue” of Ingrid Betancourt, the three U.S. mercenaries and ten or so soldiers and police flown by helicopter into Bogotá while U.S. presidential candidate John McCain coincidentally toured the country. The whole event, even as broadcast here in Venezuela on government television stations, had the look and feel of an event staged for the screen and today’s Diario Vea points out that the reason was because it was, indeed, an event staged for the screen and the “facts,” which remain unacknowledged by the mainstream press in the U.S. and Colombia, tell a very different story from the media’s fairy tale version of the event.

The story entitled “There was no such rescue but a media ’show’” that appeared in today’s Diario Vea was drawn from the work of Bolivarian Press Agency writer Narciso Isa Conde and the Popular News Agency of Venezuela. According to the article the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) had agreed to turn over Ingrid Betancourt and the other hostages to Swiss and French negotiators who agreed to arrange to pick up the hostages from various locations in two helicopters. The Colombian military got wind of the upcoming release and took control of the helicopters. The collusion of the U.S. in the media spin, while yet to be proven, is quite likely, especially since McCain just “happened” to be in the neighborhood and would be able to take the spotlight in a crassly opportunistic attempt to boost his pathetic presidential campaign.

And so the “rescue” ironically turned out to be a hostage taking in reverse in which the FARC’s goodwill gesture was blindsided for the glorification the paramilitary, drug-dealing President Uribe and his friend, John McCain, as the armed forces of Colombia seized two civilian helicopters full of prisoners, who had, in fact, been released, and not “rescued.” But presidential vanity wasn’t the only thing behind this media show. The mainstream media leaked what may have been the major motives. In the July 5 edition of the Houston Chronicle, Bennett Roth writes, in a story entitled “Hostage rescue (sic) will likely reinforce U.S. ties” that the media show, which Roth calls a “commando operation,” will “strengthen . . . security ties with the United States” with Colombia. The article quotes Riordan Roett of Johns Hopkins as saying that the non-event of the “rescue” “validates to a great degree Plan Colombia.”

In an AP story on the same page, a headline announces that “Chavez [is] left on the sideline” by the “bold rescue,” and that the Venezuelan leader “could do little more than phone congratulations to President Uribe,” as if Chavez’s role as a world leader consisted only in his work to free FARC hostages. The article ends with a statement by Betancourt, that with “the help of our neighbors” the FARC could be shown “that there’s room in Latin America to win power the democratic way.”

So much for the lessons about this “bold rescue” from the perspective of the U.S. press and Ms. Betancourt. Colombians who have suffered terror and worse at the hands of the narco-government of Alvaro Uribe with his media shows and many other Latin Americans who have watched the civil war in Colombia for many years know otherwise. In this same issue of today’s Diario Vea there is an exclusive interview with Nicolás Rodríguez Bautista, “Gabino,” the commander of the National Liberation Army, Colombia’s other major guerrilla, composed of revolutionary Christians, Marxists and workers from the oil fields and others. He reminds readers of Diario Vea that the last time leftists lay down their arms and took up legal paths of political struggle, the Colombian state and oligarchy murdered six thousand militants, beheading the legal left of Colombia. For Gabino, Chavez can play a much greater role in the conflict as mediator, despite his recent calls for the Colombian guerrilla to what appears to be an unconditional surrender. “His declarations are no obstacle to his being a facilitator for peace in Colombia. His essential role as ruler and his status as leader on the continent hasn’t changed.”

So far the U.S. press, unfortunately including much of the alternative media, have largely gone along with the “official” version of events in Colombia, a story in which a “terrorist” guerrilla insurgency has plagued the country with irrational kidnappings, drug dealing and massive violence which can only be defeated by the combined forces of the U.S. and its faithful sidekick, the Colombian government.

Nevertheless, Diario Vea presents a very different picture of the country. As the interview with Gabino highlights, it is the paramilitaries, allied with the government and oligarchy of Colombia, that have been most involved in the drug trade and the violence, including kidnappings. Since Uribe has been in power, over four hundred union activists have been killed by those same forces. In defiance of international law, the Colombian military has bombed Ecuador to kill members of the FARC and the government still offers no guarantees of protection to a legal left. Hopefully in the future media in the U.S. will follow suit with Diario Vea and Venezuelan news agencies and do a more critical analysis of the joint fabrications of the U.S. and Colombian governments.

All along the way, we’ve passed through numerous alcabalas, or checkpoints. These checkpoints, manned by the National Guard and state police, are a new phenomenon, but I didn’t think to ask Franco about them. Franco, who has been driving my co-director on a new movie, Ari Krawitz, and me around in his Chevy Blazer, has a method for getting through the checkpoint without being stopped and it’s worked well all but once: we roll the tinted windows of his Chevy Blazer down and smile at the guardsmen and, when they see our innocent expressions, we pass through without a problem. The one time we were stopped the guardsman merely checked Franco’s papers, Ari’s and my passports and visas, and then waved us on when he saw we had nothing in the vehicle but suitcases and cameras.

I assumed that the checkpoints were part of new security measures in Venezuela, and in a sense they are, but they date back, as Franco tells me, to August of last year (2007). The subject of the checkpoints comes up incidentally as we pass by La Pastora Sugar Mill in the state of Lara, just across the border from Trujillo.

La Pastora is one of the bigger sugar companies in Venezuela and it’s dead center in one of the largest extensions of sugar cane fields I’ve seen, an area that reminds one of Nebraska with its endless cornfields.

As we drive past the sugar mill belching a large plume of grey smoke, Franco waves his hand out the window at the miles of sugar cane extending in every direction. “How is it possible that we had a shortage of sugar here?” he asks with more than a slight tinge of anger in his voice.

I shrug. “You had a shortage of sugar?”

He looked at me with alarm. “Don’t tell me you didn’t hear about it,” he said, “yes, sugar — and milk and oil. And even, for a time, coffee, believe it or not. All this went to Colombia, and then we had to buy it all back.”

I ask him to explain.

“It happened last year just before the referendum. Polar, Alfonso Rivas y Compañia, Cargill and some other companies related to Purina and others, were sending all this stuff out of the country to be sold at market prices in Colombia. You see, the prices were being controlled here in Venezuela to make food available and affordable to working people. So what happened was these companies sent all this out, truckload after truckload: caravans of all this food, into Colombia. And we had to buy it all back.”

We pass through another alcabala where there is a National Guard truck with an x-ray machine and a conveyor belt attached. We dutifully roll down the tinted windows and turn off the air conditioner. We’re hit with a blast of dry air as we smile at the guards, who smile back, and then wave us through.

The overriding reason the corporations shipped food to Colombia was, of course, profiteering: a liter of milk sold in a transitional socialist economy won’t command the same price as the same liter sold in Colombia’s “free trade” capitalist markets. But there was also a political reason, and that was the referendum of December 2, Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution’s first electoral defeat. The shortages, engineered by the very same opposition which decried them, then blamed them on Chávez, ironically boosted dissatisfaction sufficiently to defeat the initiatives for the further socialization of the economy. The referendum lost by less than one percentage point.

Franco waves his hand in front of him again. “Chavez is a plainsman and he has a long vision. He’s a great chess player who turns defeats into victories. And so he set up these checkpoints to stop what was really highway robbery by the big corporations, and then he began to nationalize the food industries.”

We stop for a cup of espresso at a roadside restaurant, Las Sabanetas, between Carora and Barquisimeto. I recognize the massive hallway of food shops that offer snacks, the typical Venezuelan food, arepas, guava paste candy, exotic fruit juices, and everything else, including statues of Maria Lionza, the Venezuelan goddess, and the local Chaplinesque doctor/saint with a little mustache and dressed in an odd black suit with tie and hat, Jose Gregorio Hernandez. This is the same mall in the middle of nowhere which the all-night Caracas to Merida bus visits at one in the morning, just in time to wake passengers up for a midnight coffee or a snack.

Franco orders a small black espresso and a small espresso with milk, a café marrón. He dumps a packet of sugar in each of the two little plastic cups, the sizes of large thimbles. I ask him if there are still shortages. He laughs.

“Not any more. Not since Chavez started nationalizing the food companies. Lacteos Los Andes, which represents over forty percent of the market in milk and milk products, is now state owned. He also created Pedeval, a PDVSA (Venezuela Petroleum Company) project which buys food from overseas and sells it here in Venezuela at very low prices. Then, to give a little to the capitalists, he also raised the maximum price for milk and suddenly there was milk everywhere. So he used the carrot with one hand, and the stick with the other.”

We slam down our coffees, stop by the bathroom to recycle the previous cups, and then we hit the road again. It’s a race against time as the sky darkens and still Barquisimeto seems so far away. We’d hoped to arrive by six but have been slowed down on the highway by a caravan of trucks loaded with green plantains. Franco puts his foot on the gas and we barrel along into the twilight.

“The bottom line is that you’ve got to be a masochist to be a businessman in the opposition,” he says as we drive into Barquisimeto. It’s nearly dark and Franco has notoriously bad night vision. That, combined with a pair of weak headlights, has me on edge as we weave into town. He tries to stay in his lane and look for our hotel at the same time, and then he sees the big cement factory. A car, which has nearly rear-ended us, convinces Franco to put on his emergency blinkers as we drive along the service road of the highway. Franco mutters something in Italian and then points to the cement factory we just passed.

“Look at that. Smart business people know they can do good business with Chavez,” he says. Someone honks at us and quickly passes, the roar of an engine temporarily drowning out Franco’s words. “If they push too hard and disrupt the country with another attempt at a golpe (coup) then he nationalizes them. Otherwise, if they cooperate with the new socialist economy, they win and make their money. Either way he has stopped them at the checkpoints.”

“That may be true, Franco, but then, what makes this a “socialist” economy?” I ask.

To my dismay, Franco takes his eyes off the road to look at me. “Making food, housing and education accessible to all as a top priority. Profit has to be a second priority,” he replies.

Check, mate.

I had a chance to reflect on this curious situation en route to Venezuela when, on a twelve hour lay over, I left the moderately warm, air-conditioned Miami airport for the steamy outdoors and waited for a ride to my hotel room. When the shuttle arrived, I boarded with two other men, who turned out to be Spaniards, deeply engaged in a conversation about Latin America. The younger man, perhaps twenty years younger than I, was coming from Brazil and the elder man, perhaps fifteen years my senior, although he looked twenty years older, was coming from Nicaragua. During a brief lull in the conversation I asked the elder man, in Spanish, how things were going in Nicaragua. He glanced down his nose at me to size me up and, in that moment, I don’t think he noticed the image of Sandino on my t-shirt. “Very well,” he replied, in his native tongue,” especially since no one suffers hunger any more.”

“Oh really?” I asked, incredulously, “I didn’t think Nicaragua had ever been free of hunger.”

No really, the man insisted, things were great in Nicaragua. I nodded. “It’s not like in Venezuela with that pinche Chavez, who’s ruined his country.”

While not overly eager to attack Daniel Ortega, even while I’m never hesitant to hide my disgust for the former revolutionary-turned-pro-life-neoliberal, I couldn’t let this pass.

“I suppose that’s a matter of opinion,” I said. Both men glared at me. I think the younger man now noticed my t-shirt. The elder man’s face turned slightly red.

“No. It’s not a matter of opinion. I’ve had two friends whose businesses were ruined by that Chávez. His policies are ruining the country.”

“I suppose there are winners and losers in every process, and most of my friends who are at the bottom seem better off,” I said.

The old man continued for a few minutes as the shuttle made its way to the airport and then, as I ceased to respond, the old man turned his attention back to the young man and began talking about what good things Lula had done for Brazil.

“It’s all about education, preparation of the people. With an apolitical education. That’s the problem. Like in Venezuela, where the education is all politicized,” the old man said. The young man readily agreed.

I thought of pointing out that all education is politicized; that what these two dinosaurs of the Spanish Empire seemed to find objectionable would be the education that enables students to see that their neoliberal agendas only work for the empire, be it Spanish or U.S.; I considered pointing out that the neoliberal “left” of Spain might be better off moving into the twenty-first century and reexamining its admiration for Daniel Ortega, who former Sandinista Minister of Culture Ernesto Cardenal called a “dictator,” the repentant revolutionary, now neoliberal president heading a party (Sandinista) which recently criminalized abortion and cut a deal with the corrupt Arnoldo Alemán of the Liberal Party so as to return to power in Nicaragua. But instead I just let it go, dropped out of the conversation and slid inconspicuously back into my seat.

As the two Spaniards continued their conversation, I mused on the UPI story once again, mystified by how a supposedly “left” government in Spain, and people who support it, could be so anti-Chavista. But after visiting Spain in 2006 and touring the three main cities of the Basque country, a few of the smaller towns and witnessing how the “progressive” Zapatero government treated the Basques who lived in a terror reminiscent of Central America in the 1980s, I came to believe that “progressive” doesn’t always imply “anti-imperialist.”

I remember clearly that morning in the Basque city of Vitoria, when I got into a conversation in the main library with the very kind librarian, working solo at the main desk. He whispered, as he looked around him to make sure no one was listening, about the measures the Spanish government had taken to repress any discussion about Basque independence. When I mentioned that I’d like to interview someone in Batasuna, he shook his head, his eyes filled with alarm. “It’s illegal to meet with Batasuna party members. You can be imprisoned even for being in the same room with them, if you know they’re Batasuna,” he told me. Batasuna is the peaceful wing of the Basque independence movement, but it, too was, and is, outlawed under Zapatero’s government. Someone at Askapena, a Basque solidarity organization which defends imprisoned independentistas, explained it this way: “When the Spanish police pick you up on suspicion of being an independentista, they torture you. That’s routine and universal. After they torture you, if you denounce the torture, you are, de facto, part of ETA (the illegal armed wing of the Basque independence movement) because ETA has a policy of denouncing all torture. And, according to the Spanish legal system, anyone who advocates any ETA policy is de facto a member of ETA. And so there are people imprisoned in Spain as ETA ‘terrorists’ simply because they were picked up, tortured and denounced the torture.”

I thought this imperial “zero tolerance” for dissent from the subjects of Spain, specifically, from the Basques, might explain the widespread hatred for Chavez in that country. Perhaps he’s seen as a “difficult child” by the Spanish government, one who talks back at the King when told to shut up. But Marc Villá, the Venezuelan documentary filmmaker, had another take on the situation.

“During the Franco dictatorship, the Acción Democrática (AD) supported the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE),” he explained to me one afternoon as we drove around Barinas last summer. The AD, for all practical purposes, a now-defunct political party which ruled Venezuela for fifty years, trading power from election to election with the Christian Democrat COPEI (also now practically defunct). AD was, and is, a member of the Socialist International, and it was one of the few “socialist” parties the U.S. tolerated in Latin America through those Cold War years, perhaps because it bore very little resemblance to socialism — much like the PSOE and most European “socialist” parties today.
Nevertheless, AD threw money at the arts and subverted leftist intellectuals in Venezuela and the world with generous gifts and grants handed out freely to the likes of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the PSOE.

“The PSOE incurred a great moral debt to Venezuela’s AD which it continues to pay off to this day in its media as it continues to look for any opportunity to slam Chavez and align itself with the AD, now in the U.S. backed Venezuelan opposition. Really, the Spaniards know very little of what’s happening here but they’re like so many Venezuelan “leftists” who oppose Chavez and the Bolivarian Process: they’ve lost out and a new left has come to power. People like Teodoro Petkoff (editor of the weekly newspaper Tal Cual) and others, who were communists or socialists and who actually benefited under the AD governments and were left alone under the COPEI governments, no longer have the prestige and positions they once had under the AD. And they can’t stand it.”

The old “New Left” that limped through the collapse of the USSR and watched China gleefully celebrate an eternal capitalist Christmas even while guided by the Chinese Communist Party, seems to continue its life in the geriatric arms of the PSOE and the European neoliberal left. It may even find life in the neoliberal liberalism of Obama in the U.S. (unless it finds its backbone and, indeed, becomes a “left”), but Venezuela is continuing to define itself along new lines, directly challenging capitalism and experimenting with new models of socialism. Chávez and his in-your-face anti-imperialism, no matter what Spaniards may think, continues to be a household name in a world that can’t quite remember who Zapatero is or what, if anything, he stands for. Perhaps that’s what the Spaniards in my shuttle hated the most about “politicized education.”

The inexperienced soldier thinks everything lost when he is once defeated because he hasn’t yet learned from experience that courage, ability and perseverance correct bad luck.

– Simon Bolívar, Cartagena Manifesto

With the defeat of the Constitutional reforms at the polls on December 2, the Bolivarian Revolution has undeniably lost a battle in its long struggle to create a more just and humane society, but it has also proven that democracy is alive and well in Venezuela. Chavez’s upbeat and ready acceptance of the results and his congratulations toward those who had waged an undeniably dirty campaign against the reforms, earned him an unexpected compliment from CNN commentators who referred to his “magnanimous” acceptance of the results. More to the point, despite outright lies and fabrications of the capitalist mass media in Venezuela and internationally, psyops brewed in the labs of the CIA and U.S. State Department, Chavez has managed to maintain and protect a pluralistic democracy, in itself a refutation of the “democratic” pretensions as well as the charges made by the opposition that he’s a dictator and there is no freedom or democracy in Venezuela.

Indeed, the lies and black propaganda reached absurd levels, with some ads proclaiming that the reform would “take children away from their parents” and expropriate homes from their rightful owners. (The reform, in fact, would have guaranteed precisely the opposite, making it more difficult for people to lose their homes in case of bankruptcy.) However, the most universal mischaracterization of the reforms was the constantly repeated lie that they would “make Chavez president-for-life.” Once again, in the US and Venezuelan opposition press, we were led to believe, falsely, of course, that this reform was all about Chavez and not the Venezuelan people. This fiction was repeated so often and so forcefully that the other 69 articles of reform in the two slates proposed, one by Chavez himself, and one by the National Assembly, got little or no coverage. Those much-neglected articles included guaranteeing social security for workers in the informal economy; lowering the voting age from 18 to 16; lowering the work week from 44 to 36 hours; prohibiting discrimination based on disability or sexual preference and requiring gender parity in political parties; giving five percent of tax revenues disbursed to the states directly to the community councils; guaranteeing free education to all Venezuelans through the university (yes, that would include PhD’s), and making organic agriculture the “strategic basis of integral rural development.” Because the media reduced the entire Reform to this one issue, they presented the defeat of the Reforms as a “defeat for Chavez” rather than a temporary setback for greater democracy, social justice and the struggle of the working people and middle class of Venezuela who stood to gain from the reform. After all, Chavez still has five years left in office, a National Assembly and, according to polls, a majority of the people on his side.

Even the President of the National Electoral Council, Tibisay Lucena, acknowledged that the media was weighted against Chavez and the reforms when she pointed out that, in the month of November, the media dedicated 59 percent of its coverage to the opposition and 41 percent to supporters of the Reforms. This fact has led intellectuals like Jose Sant Roz, Professor of the University of the Andes and author of over 20 books on Venezuelan politics, to call for the creation of a national revolutionary daily since the only pro-government daily paper, Diario Vea, is of relatively small size and circulation compared to the half-dozen or so newspapers of the opposition.

The defeat of the Reforms has raised other issues and prompted much critical internal reflection already among Chavistas. The commentaries flood in by the hour at www.aporrea.org, and reveal the insight and profound reevaluation that the referendum has induced.

First, some have criticized the management and organization of the referendum on the reforms, asking why the Electoral Battalion Units (UBEs) that were so successful in the 2004 referendum on the Presidency of Chavez had been disbanded after that political moment and not, rather, extended, empowered and built upon.

Others, like Venezuelan writer and analyst at Vheadline.com, Franco Munini, have argued that “we put all our eggs in one basket” with all 69 articles in two slates rather than having the option available to vote article by article. It’s likely, contrary to the views expressed in the opposition/imperial press, that term limits on the presidency would have been eliminated, and some of the other popular measures would also have passed if such an approach to the vote on the Reforms had been allowed.

There have also been criticisms within the Bolivarian movement that not enough has been done to push the social agenda forward. Dr. Steve Ellner of the Universidad de Oriente of Venezuela writes today that there had been “the lack of sufficient attention to concrete, tangible problems and an overemphasis on lofty ideals. I’m referring to issues that range from garbage collection and shortages of staples to corruption.” Related to this has been a common criticism that not enough has been done to weed out corruption, especially within the Chavez movement and the government itself.

In the end, the defeat was ambiguous as a “defeat.” While it appears that it might slow down Chavez’ momentum (unlikely), it may have only reflected a slowdown on the part of the activists at the base, given the very low turnout. Last year 70 percent of the voters turned out with a majority voting to re-elect Chavez. By contrast, only 56 percent turned out yesterday for the referendum. This is certainly one of the most distressing aspects of the December 2nd referendum on the Constitution: that a revolution priding itself on its pilgrimage from “bourgeois representative democracy to participatory, protagonistic democracy” seems to be backsliding. This fact should motivate activists in the party to think carefully about what they will need to do in the future to push forward and reactivate the enthusiasm and commitment that has brought Venezuela so far so quickly and it appears that Chavez is already considering this to be the crucial lesson here. This referendum, moreover, may have the effect of finally convincing some in the opposition that the Bolivarian Process is what it always claimed to be: Democratic and liberatory. As Venezuelan political analyst Franco Munini sees it, “(Bolivarians) won in the end because the opposition said, in voting down the reforms, that it didn’t want any changes to the constitution that we wrote in 1999. Which is to say they’re finally coming around to where we were seven years ago.”