Those who are exploited are our compatriots all over the world; and the exploiters all over the world are our enemies… Our country is really the whole world, and all the revolutionaries of the world are our brothers.
– President Fidel Castro.¹

The revolutionary [is] the ideological motor force of the revolution…if he forgets his proletarian internationalism, the revolution which he leads will cease to be an inspiring force and he will sink into a comfortable lethargy, which imperialism, our irreconcilable enemy, will utilize well. Proletarian internationalism is a duty, but it is also a revolutionary necessity. So we educate our people.
– Che Guevara²

I think that the governments of Cuba, Bolivia, and Nicaragua let down the entire Tamil population in the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, as well as “proletarian internationalism” and the “exploited”, by extending unconditional support to Sri Lanka’s racist government.

Cuba did so—along with the Bolivian and Nicaraguan governments and members of ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America)—on May 27, 2009 when signing a UN Human Rights Council (HRC) resolution praising the government of Sri Lanka for “the promotion and protection of human rights”, while only condemning for terrorism the Liberation Tigers for Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which fought the government in a civil war since 1983 until their defeat on May 19, 2009.

During the last year of war, the Sri Lankan government illegally and brutally interned nearly half-a-million Tamil civilians; 280,000 of these civilians were entrapped in several “welfare centers” upon the LTTE’s surrender. Half-a-year later, only a few thousand have been released. Their conditions are the opposite of “promotion and protection of human rights”. Hundreds have died and are dying for lack of food, water, basic health care.

Since advocating for and signing the unbalanced HRC resolution, I have found no text or evidence that these progressive-revolutionary-socialist governments of ALBA have criticized Sri Lanka for routinely practicing brutality and neglecting basic life necessities of these illegally interned people. The conduct of Sinhalese-led governments towards Tamils ever since Sri Lanka’s independence from Great Britain, in 1947-8, has always been one of mistreatment and inequality, even genocide.

While ALBA leader Venezuela is not a member of that council, President Hugo Chavez followed suit by applauding Sri Lanka’s victory.³ I hope that these revolutionary leaders will undo that damage by coming to the aid of the interned and all 2.5 million Tamil survivors of this horrible carnage and condemning Sri Lanka for its beastly and racist conduct. Tamils national rights must also be recognized, especially by governments representing other indigenous and once enslaved peoples.

In this first of a five-part series, I begin to lay the case that Sri Lanka’s governments practice genocide. I will also speculate about why the four ALBA countries involved in this matter could have decided to ignore this reality, why they disallowed an investigation into the assertion, and why they support such a cruel, chauvinistic regime. In the forthcoming parts, I will sketch the history of the Sinhalese and Tamils; outline the right and necessity for Tamil nationhood; delineate their struggles for equal rights; and show the geo-political power game being played out between the west and its’ sometimes antagonistic counterpart regimes in China and Iran; and conclude with the present state of affairs for Tamils.

Human Rights Council Resolution S-11/1: Assistance to Sri Lanka in the promotion and protection of human rights

Upon the end of the war, 17 countries on the 47-member Human Rights Council called for an extraordinary session about the Sri Lankan situation. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, spoke for an “independent and credible international investigation” into the reports of violations of human rights and international humanitarian law on both sides of the civil war.

“For its part, the Government reportedly used heavy artillery on the densely populated conflict zone, despite assurances that it would take precautions to protect civilians”… and the “reported shelling of a hospital clinic on several occasions”…”

“These people are in desperate need of food, water, medical help and other forms of basic assistance… there have already been outbreaks of contagious diseases.”

“The images of terrified and emaciated women, men and children fleeing the battle zone… must spur us into action.”

Pillay’s professional, compassionate and balanced proposal was not tabled or even discussed. Instead 17 members—mostly EU countries and Canada, but also Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico and Chile—proposed only that an investigation into these charges of human rights abuse be pursued by the Sri Lankan government itself, that is: the government investigating its brutality, hardly anything radical or effective. This, and the call for “rapid and unhindered access” for humanitarian aid from the UN and International Committee of the Red Cross, was the only significant difference from another resolution proposed by the majority, mostly Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) countries. Chile was the only NAM member to vote against the majority, which wanted no investigation at all. And the “rapid and unhindered access” for humanitarian aid was reduced to: “provide access as may be appropriate”, thereby giving Sri Lanka’s government the power to use food/water/medicine as a weapon against their enemy: the Tamil people and not the now defeated LTTE.

Sri Lanka was present at the HRC sessions as an observer. It had been a member from 2006 to 2008 when it lost reelection as one of the six Asian State members. Poignantly overlooked by most NAM members assembled a year later, it had been severely criticized by Tamils around the world and by internationally respected Nobel Peace Prize winners Desmond Tutu and Adolfo Perez Esquivel.

“The systematic abuses by Sri Lanka government forces are among the most serious imaginable. Torture and extrajudicial killings are widespread [as is] kidnappings of its own people,” said Tutu in May 2008 when opposing its seat on the Human Rights Council.

A year later, the HRC majority unfastidiously praised Sri Lanka for continuing “to uphold its human rights obligations and the norms of international human rights law”. The key promoter of the majority resolution was, to my dismay, Cuba—the homeland of my heart and where I had lived and worked for the government for eight years.

The Cuban ambassador to the Council, Juan Antonio Fernández Palacios—who also spoke on behalf of the NAM—praised Sri Lanka’s governments over the years, and “congratulates” it on “putting an end” to the armed conflict. A key sentence is: “Sri Lanka’s sovereign right to fight terrorism and separatism within its undisputed borders must be respected.” The words “separatism” and “undisputed borders” will be dealt with at length later. But no one familiar with the history of Sinhalese and Tamils for decades since independence and centuries before could have chosen to speak of “undisputed borders”. Tamils had a homeland, two kingdoms, for centuries before the Sinhalese came to the island and for centuries afterwards.

Cuba also acted as a special advocate for Sri Lanka as an “interlocutor”, in addition to Egypt, India and Pakistan. The resolution about Sri Lanka was actually its own draft, which Cuba tabled.⁴

Just before the vote, the Bolivian HRC ambassador, Ms. Angélica Navarro Llames, made it clear she was perturbed by the manner in which many of the 17 countries had presented their resolution and for insisting upon a special meeting just a week before the scheduled one. She objected to “neocolonialist attitudes”. The Bolivian then spoke of LTTE terrorism used against the people and the government and people, and defended its right to fight for its sovereignty.

Resolution S-11/1 adopted by the majority (29 members for, 12 against, 6 abstentions). Here are pertinent excerpts:

Reaffirming the respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, and its sovereign rights to protect its citizens and combat terrorism,

Condemning all attacks that the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) launched on the civilian population and its practice of using civilians as human shields…

Welcoming the conclusion of hostilities and the liberation by the Government of Sri Lanka of tens of thousands of its citizens that were kept by the LTTE against their will as hostages, as well as the efforts by the Government to ensure safety and security for all Sri Lankans and bringing permanent peace to the country…

Emphasizing that after the conclusion of hostilities, the priority in terms of human rights remains the provision of the necessary assistance to ensure relief and rehabilitation of persons affected by the conflict, including internally displaced persons, as well as the reconstruction of the country’s economy and infrastructure,

Encouraged by the provision of basic humanitarian assistance, in particular, safe drinking water, sanitation, food, and medical and health care services to the IDPs [Internally Displaced Persons] by the Government of Sri Lanka with the assistance of the United Nations agencies…

1. Commends the measures taken by the Government of Sri Lanka to address the urgent needs of the Internally Displaced Persons;

2. Welcomes the continued commitment of Sri Lanka to the promotion and protection of all human rights and encourages it to continue to uphold its human rights obligations and the norms of international human rights law;…

5. Acknowledges the commitment of the Government of Sri Lanka to provide access as may be appropriate to international humanitarian agencies in order to ensure humanitarian assistance to the population affected by the conflict, in particular IDPs…

In Favour: Angola, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, China, Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Madagascar, Malaysia, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Africa, Uruguay, Zambia;

Against: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Chile, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland;

Abstaining: Argentina, Gabon, Japan, Mauritius, Republic of Korea, Ukraine.”⁴

I will show in upcoming articles how points 1, 2, and 5 cited here have never been the reality; Sri Lanka has not respected Tamils lives or their rights nor provided them their “urgent needs.”

Terrorism and Genocide

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) was first dubbed a terrorist organization by India, in 1992. Ironically, it wasn’t until 1998 that Sri Lanka’s government so characterized them, and it did so only after the US did, in 1997. On May 30, 2006, the EU placed LTTE on its terrorist list and banned the organization. It made it a terrorist crime to economically or military aid LTTE, and it froze all LTTE bank and financial assets in Europe. The EU appeared to be even-handed by calling upon the Sri Lankan government to end its “culture of impunity” and to “curb violence” in its areas of control. At the time of LTTE’s defeat, 32 countries had defined them as terrorists.

Never having been in Sri Lanka or South Asia, it is difficult for me to know whether LTTE was a decidedly terrorist organization or not—that is, one which seeks to terrorize civilians. After reading many accounts of atrocities, such as killing hundreds of civilian Sinhalese in their homes, on buses and trains, I conclude that this once Marxist revolutionary organization resorted to terrorism.

At the same time, it must not be forgotten that any liberation movement the world’s greatest state terrorist, the United States of America does not agree with is “terrorist” and therefore illegitimate. Other terrorists, such as the government of the separatist state of Kosovo, are no longer considered terrorist although its drug-smuggling paramilitary organization had been so described, even by the US. Superpowers support or oppose autonomy-independence when it suits their interests. This is also the case with Ireland, the Basques in Spain, and the Palestinians.

Furthermore, the US systematically practices terrorism in its permanent war—invading or “intervening” militarily in 66 countries, a total of 159 times since World War Two.

We must lament the unacceptable methods the LTTE used against many people, and do so without ignoring the history of why and how it was born. Nor must we reject out-of-hand the basic rights and needs of the Tamil people. Their plight must not be abandoned, especially by governments and organizations grounded in anti-imperialism and equality amongst peoples.

Sri Lanka’s history since independence is one of conducting genocide against the Tamils. Genocide is defined by the UN, and Sri Lanka ratified its promise to adhere to it on October 12, 1950.The Geneva Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted December 9, 1948 and entered into force, January 12, 1951, states:

Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:
   (a) Killing members of the group;
   (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
   (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
   (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
   (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.⁵

Destroying “in whole or in part” an ethnic group is certainly what Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese governments, as well as Buddhist monks, have been doing to the Tamils for six decades. Evidence will be forthcoming. There is so much evidence that even a former US deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan Administration filed a 12-count indictment against S.L. defense secretary Gotabhaya Rajapakse and army commander Lt. Gen. Sarath Fonseka for “perpetrating genocide against Tamil civilians.”

The suit was filed by Bruce Fein, in February 2009, in the U.S. District Court, Central District of California.

The case can be filed in the US because G. Rajapakse is a naturalized citizen and Fonseka holds a resident green card. They are charged with responsibility for: “3,750 alleged extrajudicial killings, with 10,000 suffering bodily injury and more than 1.3 million displacements,” which, according to Fein, “far exceed displacements in Kosovo which led to genocide counts before the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.”

Fein noted that G. Rajapakse said in a BBC interview that, “if you are not fighting the Tamil Tigers you are a terrorist and we’ll kill you.” The attorney represents Tamils Against Genocide. He believes that G. Rajapakse will be “the best witness of the genocide.”

Why ALBA voted as it did: Some points of contention:

I ask the three ALBA governments, which voted for the above resolution, to take Sri Lanka’s government to account on the serious charge of genocide against the Tamil people. At the very least, ALBA should be able to see that hundreds of thousands of displaced persons are brutally treated, and that routine discrimination and abuse have been the Tamil’s plight at the hands of Sinhalese. This is a dichotomy to ALBA’s ideology of equal rights for all: in language, in religion, in the economy, in all aspects of life. In fact, the very new constitution of Bolivia recognizes itself as a pluri-nation in which all the languages and religions of all the peoples are recognized equally. The same is the case in Venezuela with its new constitution.

How can it be, then, that these peoples’ governments have fallen in the arms of such an oppressive, racist government? Possible reasons are:

1. Separatism! It is ironic and ideologically insupportable that anti-imperialist progressive and revolutionary leaders in Cuba, Nicaragua and Bolivia—mainly dark-skinned peoples, and many of them, especially in Bolivia, are Original Peoples long abused by many whites and creoles—side with the Sinhalese chauvinist elite in Sri Lanka. Perhaps they have not studied the sordid history of Sri Lanka. But more certainly is it that they do not support separatism or dual nationhood within one land mass. Cuba especially has, from its revolutionary start, argued for unity. What Cuba and the others fail to realize or acknowledge is that the Tamil people had tried for decades to achieve equal rights with the Sinhalese, many of whom assert adherence to Marxism, yet to no avail. Most Sinhalese do not wish to unify equally with the other ethnic group. Once peaceful means are exhausted, armed struggle is the only means to achieve liberation, as was the case with Cuba and other Latin American guerrilla movements.

In the case of Sri Lanka and separatism, ALBA governments could be prompted to side with it because of, in part, the role of China! The threat of separatism, which has been the desire of many Tibetan Buddhists, is an impelling factor for China’s position of one nation in its own region, and may be how it views the situation of Tamils in Sri Lanka. Here, China sides, ironically, with Buddhists against Hindus-Christians-Muslims.

Bolivia and Venezuela, too, are pressed by separatist demands but they come not from an ethnic group but from a rich class of Whites-Creoles, which has no historic ethnic Homeland.

2. Geo-politics! Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese-dominated governments have been supported militarily and economically by many States, some of which are sometimes antagonistic to one another. Some leftist governments and leftist organizations often operate on the notion that the enemy of my enemy is a friend. If that is the way some socialist-communist-revolutionaries view China and Iran, both totalitarian regimes, in regards to US-Europe-Canada-Australia-Japan imperialism when it comes to Sri Lanka they are mistaken. Surely there are economic and geo-political interests on the part of China and Iran in investing and trading with countries in development, including Sri Lanka but also Cuba and all in Latin America. Fortunately most Latin Americans and the majority of their governments have ceased jumping when a US president or general barks, and they are combining in regional alliances and seeking foreign investments and aid from non-traditional partners.

Since China and Iran began extending their interests into Sri Lanka and sided with its brutal treatment of Tamils, many leftists and progressive governments could think in the black-white geo-political manner. The US-EU states, for their own propaganda image, question Sri Lanka for possible abuses of human rights against Tamils. Ah, no one with experience or knowledge about the duplicity of the empire and its allies could side with them so one must back the other side.

But China is no longer socialist, rather its economy is mainly based on government-sponsored private enterprise with exploitation of labor in the extreme: no union protection, long work hours, low wages, child labor, no say on the job or national and international policies. The working class no longer even has access to full education and health care without paying on a capitalist basis. In fact, workers in most capitalist countries in Europe have better access to health care than workers do in China. Millionaire capitalists now sit on leadership bodies of the so-called Communist Party, and make important decisions over the heads of workers and the population. China is interested mainly in accumulating capital in the grand old raw capitalist style, and it owns more of the US economy (8%) than any other government or economic entity. China’s economy is intricately interdependent upon the US’s capitalism and its imperialist wars.

Iran is run by fundamentalist religious fanaticism. Its economy is basically a capitalist one. Its working class, just as the working class in China, is not a decision-maker. Iran is also a warring partner with US imperialism in its illegal war against Iraq, whose troops are a key factor in the violence against millions of Iraqis. Iran supports their co-religious Muslims in the Quisling government under US domination.

Is it possible that the developing countries, which back Sri Lanka against the Tamil population, do so out of economic reasons? China and Iran provide needed investments and technology and thus one must not criticize. Is that possible, and if so is it ethical, is it consistent with our humanitarian principles and socialist ideology? Cannot one be a trading partner without cowing politically?

Another issue is secularism. The ALBA countries and all truly socialist oriented governments are not and cannot be theocracies! How can secular nation states and organizations consider the Sri Lanka state “democratic socialist” when it declares a religion, and only one, as THE national and official religion? Secularism is the only common ground by which all can be united.

Conclusion

I concur with progressive Tamils in the Tamil Nadu state of India, who have for decades supported Cuba and the new ALBA formation. The Latin American Friendship Association there has held many solidarity activities for these countries, and published scores of books by Latin American authors, including Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Upon learning of the HRC resolution, they were appalled. The author of the excerpted letter below is Amarantha Visalakshi. For 25 years, she has translated books about Latin America into Tamil and written some herself.

We here in Tamil Nadu celebrated the 80th birthday of Comrade Fidel by releasing eight books on Cuba’s achievements in various fields… and are in the midst of our preparation for the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the triumph of the Cuban Revolution and evaluation of the consolidation of Latin American countries in ALBA…

We are struck dumb and rendered disheartened and disillusioned by this act [the HRC resolution] by those countries of Latin America on which we have pinned our hopes for the future—Socialism of the 21st century.

Why do these countries wish for wiping out the Tamils from the Sri Lankan soil where they rightfully belong? What are the sources of information for these Latin American countries to decide against the Tamils and in favour of the racist Sri Lankan government in the UN Human Rights Council?… more than any other time we feel the absence of Che Guevara, the true internationalist, who laid down his life for the oppressed people of the world.

I also concur with Australia’s largest left-wing organization, the Democratic Socialist Perspective and Socialist Alliance, which publishes greenleft.org.au.

We need “to undertake work to help convince the revolutionary governments of Latin America, including Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia, to cease support for the Sri Lankan government, and to recognize the national rights of the Tamil people. There is a long-run danger if revolutionary governments, for whatever reason, fail to support genuine movements for national self-determination in Third World countries, and endorse repressive regimes on the basis of a bogus ‘anti-imperialism…’”

1. Fidel told writer-photographer Lee Lockwood: Castro’s Cuba, Cuba’s Fidel, Macmillan, N.Y. 1967.
2. Socialism and man, Marcha, Uruguay, March 12, 1965.
3. “Hugo Chavez praises President Rajapaksa’s leadership in defeating LTTE”, Sri Lanka Daily News, September 4, 2009. In this piece, published by a pro-government newspaper, there is not one quotation by Hugo Chavez, who spoke with Rajapakse when they were in Libya. The piece paraphrases what the anonymous writer asserts Chavez having said; an example: Chavez apparently said that the defeat of LTTE terrorism “is a glowing example to other countries beset with the same problem,” words of the writer. Chavez allegedly praised Rajapakse for his leadership.
4. 1, 2, 3.
5. Source. Although the US signed the 1948 convention, it did not accede to it until November 1988. As of 2008, 140 nation states have acceded.

Bolivian President Evo Morales, the first indigenous leader of any South American country, has been for many years, and remains, head of the federation of coca growers. The Bush administration accused Morales of failing to stem the tide of cocaine production and distribution. In turn, Morales accused the U.S. of meddling in Bolivian affairs and plotting with his political enemies to overthrow his government.

Both countries expelled each other’s ambassadors. The U.S. ended its preferential trade terms with Bolivia, citing the country’s lack of drug enforcement cooperation. In retaliation, Bolivia threw out U.S. government employees of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Peace Corps. Morales and some U.S. officials have expressed a cautious optimism that relations between the two countries may improve in the Obama era. But the Bolivian president has accused the United States of complicity in the Honduras military coup. Emotions remain raw and official relations, tense.

The California group – named the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) – has been doing radical, politically incorrect street theater for twenty-five years. Made up of recovering drug addicts and alcoholics, ex-convicts and formerly homeless men and women, the group voted to name itself with the same initials of the police force with whom many of them had sparred.

LAPD founder and director, John Malpede, wrote the play, Agents & Assets, based on a 1998 hearing transcript of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee. The Committee examined allegations of CIA complicity in the crack cocaine epidemic that ravaged minority communities in California cities. As journalist Gary Webb detailed in an explosive 1996 newspaper series, “Dark Alliance,” the CIA enabled huge shipments of cocaine to enter the United States to raise money for the anti-government forces in Nicaragua, known as the Contras.

The U.S. Congress had denied funding to the Contras. But President Reagan called them freedom fighters and compared them to America’s founding fathers. So Oliver North and the CIA found a way to get money for Contra military actions, though it meant creating a huge new class of crack addicts among America’s ethnic urban poor.

As Malpede told a Bolivian audience after one performance: “We work in the poorest part of Los Angeles, where people come when they have no place else to go and end up living in the streets. LAPD lives and works in an area affected by drugs. It was the anger of Los Angeles citizens – that the CIA might have been involved in smuggling crack cocaine into the country – that sparked these legislative hearings. These hearings are also a metaphor for all things the U.S. government does all around the world that they shouldn’t, instead of taking care of their own people.”

Malpede edited the hearing transcript for length and clarity, but did not change a word of it. Each performance is unique, since the “second act” is a discussion among local expert panelists, the actors and the audience about how the issues raised in the play are relevant to the “here and now” of each production.

Agents & Assets began its long run of performances during the uncertain post-presidential election period of 2000, touring many cities throughout the United States. With different drug reform laws up for votes in various states, the play showed its political potency. Agents & Assets also proved relevant in Europe – in England and Holland and Belgium – which suffer their own intransigent problems with drugs and drug laws. For its South American premiere, the play, titled Agentes y Activos in its Spanish language version, toured a country where much cocaine originates.

As the play shows, in 1998 CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz denied and obfuscated the CIA connection to Contra drug smuggling. Just this month, under pressure from the ACLU, the Agency released a highly redacted CIA Inspector General’s report about CIA torture techniques. Some of the same players were involved in both episodes. Porter Goss, chairman of the dramatized hearing, played down the allegations of CIA malfeasance in the 1980s. Later, as CIA Director under George W. Bush, Goss lobbied for keeping the torture report secret to avoid damaging America’s reputation and CIA morale. The Agency’s history of immoral, illegal acts and its failure to accomplish anything except slime the U.S. reputation is the best argument for its dissolution.

Agents & Assets reveals the hypocrisy of lawmakers who decry illegal drugs, even as they refuse to sanction the CIA for enabling millions of Americans to become cocaine addicts, in order to pay for an illegal war. LAPD actors and others who play the twelve committee members and the CIA inspector general called to testify, are men and women who have been personally affected by illegal drugs and the “war” against them. Some have suffered addiction or incarceration. By speaking the words of lawmakers who permit systemic abuse, the actors bear witness against them.

Bolivian media and government officials expressed interest in a project combining the efforts of Americans and Bolivians. After rehearsals and performances in Cochabamba, the show played Oruro, La Paz, El Alto, Sucre and Santa Cruz. Questions and comments in every city reflected the intense emotions the issues of the play raise about the drug war, notions of justice and international relations.

As Bolivian historian, activist and ex-government official Rafael Puente reminded audiences, though events in the play might seem remote, the same sorts of things were happening here in Bolivia at the same time. In 1980 the CIA enabled the violent narco golpe de estado (drug coup) of General Luis Garcia Meza. As Puente noted, former DEA agent Michael Levine wrote about these events in his book, The Big White Lie.

Ex-Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie emerged from his Bolivian hiding place to oversee the arbitrary arrests, torture and disappearances of the narco dictatorship’s political opponents. Cocaine exports reportedly totaled US$850 million in the 1980-81 period of the García Meza regime, twice the value of official government exports. Puente described the huge CIA cocaine processing plant at Huanchaka, in eastern Bolivia, where the drugs were produced to help finance this repressive regime.

The United States has always maintained a duplicitous drug policy. Officially the United States expresses moral outrage about the manufacture and importation of illicit substances. For thirty years the “war on drugs” has consumed enormous human and financial resources. But the CIA has an even longer history of dealing drugs to finance covert wars around the world the U.S. prefers not to acknowledge publicly. (see The Politics of Heroin by frequent Agents and Assets panelist Alfred McCoy). Most Americans seem unaware of this dark history. But, as one Bolivian audience member put it, “everybody knows the CIA is the biggest drug trafficker in the world.”

Former cocaine addict and current LAPD actor Kevin Michael Key told a Santa Cruz audience, “It’s in the interest of the governments to continue narco-traffic as a means of controlling the people. Criminalization is the American way. Though rehabilitation exists, many drug users are simply locked up in jail. The demand for rehabilitation has to come from the people.”

In answer to a Bolivian man’s question about whether or not Obama will change things, John Malpede opined that, “Changing drug policy is not a high priority for Obama. Changes in drug policy have come from communities or states in defiance of federal law, to reduce penalties and put treatment in place of jail time.” Malpede’s tag line for the show, that “the war of drugs imposes a military solution to a social and public health issue,” was widely printed in the Bolivian press.

Bolivians have their own defective drug war in place, thanks to Law 1008, passed in 1988 under intense pressure from the United States. Anyone accused of drug violations under what one former law school dean calls this “inhumane” law loses basic human rights, such as the presumption of innocence, the safeguards against self-incrimination, the right to a defense, to an impartial judge, to due process or to a speedy trial. Law 1008 expands the definition of ‘trafficking’ to mean ‘to produce, possess, keep, store, transport, deliver, administer or give as a gift.’ Judges routinely hand out harsh sentences, since an accusation is tantamount to a judgment of guilt, and they fear public outrage for giving lesser punishments.

The law rewards denuncias or snitches. These snitches often turn in people for the reward money with whom they have grudges unrelated to drugs. Police routinely resort to torture to extricate confessions from the accused. Such forced confessions are all that is needed for proof of guilt in Bolivian judicial proceedings. In their book, The Weight of Law 1008 (1996), the Andean Information Network compiled heartbreaking narratives of poor, illiterate Bolivians hounded into prison because they could not pay the bribes that were demanded by officials to make their cases disappear. Several of these drug war victims report being tortured under the direction of gringo DEA agents.

On the post-show panel at one of the Oruro performances, two drug officials parried questions from the audience about Bolivia’s war on drugs. Alex Alfaro, Departmental Director of the Special Police Force to Fight Drug Trafficking, said drug production was rising in Oruro. In the year he has worked there, his forces have found seventeen cocaine labs. So far in 2009 the police have confiscated more than a ton of cocaine, as much as in all of 2008.

Alfaro said a kilo of marijuana costs one hundred dollars (U.S.) and a kilo of cocaine, $1200. He handed out anti-drug pamphlets, warning of the dire organic consequences of using marijuana, cocaine, tobacco, alcohol and inhalants. But members of the audience, unaccustomed to access to these usually invisible officials, began to ask penetrating questions.

What did Alfaro, and the public prosecutor appearing with him, Franz Villegas, think of Law 1008? Villegas fudged his opinion, merely describing it as a drug law. Kevin Michael Key asked if the men thought the CIA really was involved in drug trafficking in the 1980s as the play alleged? They did not know. Was it a good or bad for Bolivia that the Morales government had expelled the DEA? Alfaro said it was a national government decision, not his. He said he had worked with the DEA and “they supported us. Now the national government helps us fight drugs…”

A Bolivian woman said: “You are preoccupied with drug consumption and apprehension. Is there any attention being paid to the health aspects of this problem?” The two officials made no attempt to respond. Someone else asked: “Is drug enforcement a form of social control?” The public prosecutor answered that “Drug enforcement involves citizen participation. It’s everyone’s fight. Denuncias are an important part of the system.”

Someone else asked: “What about innocent people caught up and arrested under Law 1008? Like a taxi driver whose passenger might have drugs without the driver’s knowledge?” Most of the personal stories in The Weight of Law 1008 center on and decry false accusations. Villegas said: “We don’t accuse people just to accuse them. I don’t know of a single case where a taxi driver has been unfairly jailed…”

And so it went that night in Oruro, as the drug officials evaded questions and shaded their responses in ways that precisely mirrored the dynamics of Agentes y Activos, in which the CIA Inspector General danced around issues, answered questions he had not been asked or flat out lied about the CIA’s links to the Contra cocaine scandal. The show was not only relevant but was being replayed immediately afterward in an updated, Bolivian mode right out where everyone (except the officials themselves) could see it.

Agentes y Activos played theaters and schools, public plazas and even a prison, helping to show that the real struggle is not between Bolivia, where coca grows, and the United States, where much cocaine is consumed. Rather, the greater problem lies within each country, between each government and its own people.

By declaring war on drugs, the United States and Bolivia have both declared war on their own populations, but only against the small-time users and dealers, not the powerful few who profit most from the ongoing, proliferating traffic in illicit drugs. If all the world’s a stage, then it’s time for a new global act. This “war on drugs” thing isn’t playing well anywhere, in any language.

The piece “Bolivia’s divisive president. The Permanent Campaign” does not even pretend to be ‘even-handed’ or ‘balanced.’ Some of the statements in it are simply unalloyed anti-Morales propaganda. Putting the blame squarely on Evo Morales, for example, for the diplomatic difficulties Bolivia has been having with the US (without informing the readers that Bush unilaterally had ended Bolivia’s export preferential treatment on some exports or that Bolivia expelled US ambassador Mr Phillip Goldberg because he had been actively supporting secessionist efforts in Santa Cruz), and with Peru (without telling readers that Peru gave asylum to Bolivian Cabinet minister indicted for civilian deaths resulting from military repression of protests six years ago during the government of Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada), but explaining them as a deliberate Morales drive to isolate Bolivia because, according to The Economist, “Many in the government dream of an economic autarky, powered by gas.” The article goes even further by quoting government’s opponents in Santa Cruz, who describe Morales as an “indigenous fascist” with The Economist accepting such a highly inflammatory label with no qualification whatsoever. And, if there was any doubt as to where The Economist stands on the Morales government, the piece ends by sympathetically paraphrasing one pundit who says “Bolivia is suffering a classic bout of Latin American populism: personalised politics, mild paranoia, bad economic policy and a weak opposition.” No journalistic objectivity or even the pretension of it.

Venezuelan Ambassador to the United Kingdom, HE Samuel Moncada, responded to the allegation regarding the participation of Venezuelan troops in the suppression of a rebellion in Santa Cruz in 2007, with letter to Michael Reid, The Economist’s Latin American editor, in which he stated that “Unfortunately, dangerous and negative consequences in the region may arise due to this blunder published in your magazine. I would therefore demand a correction of such fallacy”. (The Ambassador’s letter can be found in full here).

Subsequently Ambassador Moncada wrote again to Michael Reid who had responded to the first letter by saying that The Economist stood by their story. In his second letter Ambassador Moncada wrote: “As we believe that the videos in your possession are absolutely false, this matter can only be settled with evidence. Therefore, either you publish your data in order to prove your point, or our request in the first letter stands. Then, you will have no choice but to correct the statement in your article issued on the 18th of July.”

A campaign of letter writing to Michael Reid was initiated so that he published the video material in his possession and proved his story or correct the false statement made about Venezuelan troops having participated in quelling a rebellion in Santa Cruz, Bolivia.

On its July 25, 2009, edition, The Economist did publish a ‘correction’ on its story “Clarification: Bolivia and Venezuela.”

See also the video footage on which the allegation was based.

The full text of the ‘correction’ is:

Clarification: Bolivia and Venezuela
Jul 30th 2009
From The Economist print edition
In our recent story on Bolivia (“The permanent campaign”, July 18th), we stated that “Venezuelan troops helped quell a rebellion centred on the airport at Santa Cruz in the east in 2007”. Both the Venezuelan and Bolivian governments deny this (see Letters), and Venezuela’s government has publicly asked us to retract this assertion. We based our statement on television footage aired at the time which shows a Venezuelan air force plane and uniformed Venezuelan personnel at Santa Cruz airport shortly after it had been seized by the Bolivian government from the local authorities. No official explanation has been given for their presence. However, we are happy to clarify that this footage does not prove Venezuelan troops played an active role in quelling the rebellion. We have placed the television footage on our website.

The explanation, “we are happy to clarify that this footage does not prove Venezuelan troops played an active role in quelling the rebellion”, not only TOTALLY contradicts the assertion made in the July 18 story — defended by Latin American editor, Michael Reid in correspondence with Venezuela’s ambassador — but also shows the type of bias The Economist tends engage in when it comes to covering developments in Venezuela in particular but also in Latin America in general.

The fact is that the assertion “Venezuelan troops helped quell a rebellion centred on the airport at Santa Cruz in the east in 2007” was based on the flimsiest of ‘evidences’ which no serious editor should use to make such a grave assertion. Furthermore, the facts themselves, as presented by The Economist ‘correction’ speak for themselves. The footage which Latin American editor Michael Reid was forced to made public NOWHERE shows anything of any kind whatsoever that could be construed as “Venezuelan troops [having] helped quell a rebellion” in Bolivia in 2007 as affirmed in the July 18 article.

The footage comes from a TV channel which is clearly opposed to President Evo Morales, at a time when the Bolivian government faced a serious destabilisation threat from a radical opposition to the Bolivian government whose epicentre was/is the Department of Santa Cruz and the capital city of the same name. The Half Moon ‘autonomist’ movement in Bolivia has strenuously tried to demonstrate in its propaganda that Morales is a puppet of Hugo Chavez and falsely claim that it is Venezuelan ‘domination’ they have been fighting against.

The Economist ‘explanation’ as to why it had asserted that there had been Venezuelan military participation in the quelling of an anti-government rebellion at the Santa Cruz airport is that the TV “footage aired at the time [...] shows a Venezuelan air force plane and uniformed Venezuelan personnel at Santa Cruz airport shortly after it had been seized by the Bolivian government from the local authorities,” adding, “No official explanation has been given for their presence.” None was asked. Mr Reid, as the Latin American editor, ought to have corroborated the story by requesting confirmation or otherwise from the Bolivian and Venezuelan authorities as to the alleged participation of Venezuelan troops in repressive activities against Bolivian citizens on Bolivian soil. It is just incredible that such grave assertion could have been made on the bases of the video footage published in The Economist and without this elementary safeguard of sound journalism.

Bolivian President Evo Morales just completed a five day hunger strike to push through legislation that allows him to run again in general elections this December. And at this weekend’s Summit of the Americas US President Barack Obama will meet with Latin American presidents who may end up giving some economic advice to their troubled neighbor in the north.

Evo Morales on a Hunger Strike

When opposition party members in Bolivia left a Congress session on April 9, refusing to pass a bill that would allow for general elections in December of this year, Evo Morales began a hunger strike while thousands of government supporters rallied in the streets in support of the bill. Morales began the fast to pressure opponents into passing the legislation, which in addition to enabling elections, would give indigenous communities broader representation in parliament and give Bolivian citizens living abroad the right to vote in the December elections. The opposition blocked the bill in part because they said it would give Morales more power and did not significantly prevent the possibility of electoral fraud. On April 12, opposition members returned to Congress when Morales agreed to changes regarding a new voter registry.

During his hunger strike, Morales slept on a mattress on the floor in the presidential palace and chewed coca leaves to fight off hunger. Morales said that this was the 18th hunger strike he participated in; before becoming president, Morales was a long-time coca farmer, union organizer and congressman. He said the longest hunger strike he had been on lasted 18 days while he was in jail, according to Bloomberg. But Morales wasn’t alone: 3,000 other MAS supporters, activists, workers and union members also participated in the hunger strike, including Bolivians in Spain and Argentina.

Early in the morning on April 14, once it was official that the Senate passed the bill, Morales ended his strike. “Happily, we have accomplished something important,” he told reporters. “The people should not forget that you need to fight for change. We alone can’t guarantee this revolutionary process, but with people power it’s possible.”

This controversy erupted just weeks after Bolivia’s new constitution was approved in a January 25 national referendum. Among other significant changes, the constitution grants unprecedented rights to the country’s indigenous majority and establishes a broader role for the state in the management of the economy and natural resources.

Summit of the Americas: Cuba, Obama and Chavez

On April 17-19 the Summit of the Americas will take place in Trinidad and Tobago. Most of the hemisphere’s presidents will be in attendance. It will also mark the first meeting between Presidents Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez.

Before the larger Summit begins, a Summit for the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas (ALBA) will take place in Venezuela from April 14-15. Those planning to attend this gathering include President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, Evo Morales, Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo, and others. Chavez announced that this ALBA meeting will take place with the objective of formulating common positions to bring to Trinidad and Tobago, including plans regarding the formation of a regional currency, called the Sucre. These leaders are also likely to lead the push for an end to the blockade against Cuba.

Chavez said that if the US wants to come to the Summit “with the same excluding discourse of the empire – on the blockade – then the result will be that nothing has changed. Everything will stay the same… Cuba is a point of honor for the peoples of Latin America. We cannot accept that the United States should continue trampling over the nations of our America.”

In a recent column, Fidel Castro noted that Obama planned to lift travel and remittance restrictions to Cuba, but that that wouldn’t be enough — the blockade still needs to be lifted. “[N]ot a word was said about the harshest of measures: the blockade,” Castro wrote. “This is the way a truly genocidal measure is piously called, one whose damage cannot be calculated only on the basis of its economic effects, for it constantly takes human lives and brings painful suffering to our people. Numerous diagnostic equipment and crucial medicines — made in Europe, Japan or any other country — are not available to our patients if they carry U.S. components or software.”

The blockade against Cuba will likely be a hot topic of debate at this weekend’s Summit, and will be partly fueled by tension between Obama and Chavez. Explaining the failure of the Bush administration in the region, Obama once said, it is “No wonder, then, that demagogues like Hugo Chavez have stepped into this vacuum. His predictable yet perilous mix of anti-American rhetoric, authoritarian government, and checkbook diplomacy offers the same false promise as the tried and failed ideologies of the past.”

Yet a closer look at the region will show that the rise of leaders like Chavez is a result of more than just neglect on the part of the empire – it has to do with the disastrous impact of neoliberalism in the region, and a desire among Latin Americans to seek out alternatives. Considering the current economic crisis in the US, Obama could learn a thing or two from the policies of leaders like Chavez, who is incredibly popular in Venezuela, works in solidarity with many of the region’s leaders, and has developed successful economic policies in his country. At the upcoming Summit, Obama should put into action something he said when meeting with the G20: “We exercise our leadership best when we are listening.”

Latin America Changes

Those expecting an end to the same old Cold War tactics toward Latin America from Washington may be surprised when Obama continues to treat the region as a backyard. Yet whether or not the perspective from Washington changes, Latin America is certainly a different place than it was 30 years ago.

I asked Greg Grandin, a professor of history at New York University, and the author, most recently, of Empire’s Workshop, if another US-backed coup such as the one that happened against socialist Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973 would be possible in today’s Latin America. He said, “I don’t think it would be possible. There isn’t a constituency for a coup. In the 1970s, US policy was getting a lot more traction because people were afraid of the rise of the left, and they were interested in an economic alliance with the US. Now, the [Latin American] middle class could still go with the US, common crime could be a wedge issue that could drive Latin America away from the left. But US policy is so destructive that it has really eviscerated the middle class. Now, there is no domestic constituency that the US could latch onto. The US did have a broader base of support in the 1970s, but neoliberalism undermined it.”

Grandin explained that in the 1960s and 1970s, security agencies in Latin America built up their relationship with Washington to “subordinate their interests to the US’s cold war crusade.” There was a willingness among the Latin American middle class to do this, Grandin explained, and the US was also interested in building the infrastructure and networks to ensure that the region’s new dictators’ fanaticism could be led by anti-communism. “Now in South America, there has been a wide rejection to subordinate their military to the US,” Grandin explained. “In a 2005 defense meeting in Quito, Ecuador [former US Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld attempted to elevate the war on terror in the region [as a military priority], and it was roundly rejected. . . . As of now, I don’t think there has been a willingness for Latin America to serve as an outpost of this unified war [on terror].”

Grandin wrote in a 2006 article that the Pentagon has tried to “ratchet up a sense of ideological urgency” in the war on terror in Latin America. but these pleas have fallen on deaf ears. “The cause of terrorism,” said Brazil’s Vice President José Alencar, “is not just fundamentalism, but misery and hunger.”

However, the Latin America Obama will visit this weekend is already significantly different than the one Rumsfeld tried to convince in 2005. Obama’s counterparts in the south are generally more independent and leftist than they were even four years ago. But all that can change, and at least some of it depends on how Obama works with — or ignores — the region.

Outside of Obama’s influence, one question remains: will changes made by leftist leaders in Latin America be irrevocable, even if the right regains power in the region in the next five years? Not according to political analyst Laura Carlsen of the Americas Program in Mexico City, “In order for that to happen it would take more than just a change in the government, and I find it unlikely for anything like that to happen in the short term. It took years for the left in power to build up these social movements and the development of alternatives. It was the result of that process that brought these governments into power, and to reverse it you would have to silence or repress these movements.”

I asked Grandin the same question. “It depends,” he said, “the changes seemed pretty irrevocable in the 1970s and with Reaganism and militarism . . . The failure of neoliberalism is certain, but it’s hard to say what the response will be in the long term.”

This weekend’s summit, where Obama and Chavez will shake hands for the first time, might offer some glimpses into the region’s future.

The new documentary Beyond Elections: Redefining Democracy in the Americas proves that democracy can and should be more than casting a ballot every four years. This empowering film gives hopeful and concrete examples from around the Americas of people taking back the reigns of power and governing their own communities. Beyond Elections is a road map for social change, drawing from communal councils in Venezuela and social movements in Bolivia to participatory budgeting in Brazil and worker cooperatives in Argentina. The film gracefully succeeds in demonstrating that these grassroots examples of people’s power can be applied anywhere. Particularly as activists in the US face the challenges of an Obama administration and an economic crisis, this timely documentary shows that the revolution can start today right in your own living room or neighborhood.

In this interview, Michael Fox, Co-Producer of Beyond Elections, talks about how the film was created, what its aims were and what the films impact has had among viewers in the US.

Benjamin Dangl: How did you decide on the focus and message of Beyond Elections?

Michael Fox: I’ve been living and working in Latin America for many years, studying and reporting on, above all else, the experiences in participatory democracy- cooperatives, communal councils, participatory budgeting, social movements, community radio, etc… Sílvia (my wife, who grew up in Southern Brazil, and who is also Co-director of the film) and I were living in Venezuela in 2006 when the communal councils law was passed, and local communities all across the country began to come together and take on this new form of organizing. You could see how it was empowering people on an individual and local level.

In March of 2007, Sílvia and I found ourselves in Porto Alegre, Brazil — where we now live — at the same time that the 2007 Participatory Budgeting cycle was about to begin. We realized that although there have been many local videos on the experiences of participatory budgeting, cooperatives, social movements and even some on the recently-formed communal councils, there was no documentary film that tried to give both the big and local picture of these new participatory concepts of democracy across the hemisphere.

This concept is almost completely absent in the United States, and yet, it is absolutely necessarily for people to understand what is going on across Latin America, and also extremely important for activists and people in the United States to understand the failures of our own system and the lack of participation and input from everyday citizens.

We originally planned the film to focus only on participatory democracy, but quickly realized that the only people who would want to see it would be activists that are already doing this type of work. We needed to open it up to the very concept of democracy itself.

This was important to us, because time and again in the United States, pundits, elected officials, everyday folks and even journalists use the word “democracy” as an excuse to de-legitimize extremely democratic groups and governments. They say, “Venezuela is threatening democracy in the region”, and yet depending on your definition, Venezuela is perhaps the most democratic country in the region — much more so than the United States. But these realities are very subtle, and if you have never been to Venezuela, or Brazil or Bolivia or Ecuador (or if you go and only stay at the resorts and the upper-class part of town), then you’re never going to know what to believe because the mainstream media is quick to repeat the manipulations.

There are some mainstream media that actually call Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez a dictator, despite the fact that during his ten years in office there have been more than a dozen free and fair elections in Venezuela legitimately-recognized by international observers from around the world, and that he has always respected the Venezuelan Constitution and the laws. He may be a very charismatic, domineering, and powerful figure, but he’s not a dictator.

Then the real question is, “What is democracy?” And that’s where we wanted to focus our attention – giving people the space to tell their stories across the Hemisphere.

As the Portuguese Sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos says, (and you can find the link to more of his work on our website, www.beyondelections.com), the United States has created a monopoly on the definition of democracy — U.S. style hegemonic representative politics.

But Sousa Santos points out that in reality, democracy is a work in progress. As he says, “democracy without end.”

His colleague, Leonardo Avritzer, professor from Brazilian Federal University of Minas Gerais, points out in our film, “What we’ve tried to stress, is the idea that democracy is an open concept and the frontiers of democracy are always imprecise. For instance, in the 19th century you could say that it’s democratic to expand suffrage. And that’s true. It was democratic at the end of the 19th century to expand suffrage to women. Or at the beginning of the 20th century it could appear democratic to expand democracy to the countries of the global South. So the question today in the Southern countries is how to think about the democratization of things like the budget, health policies, education policies, urban policies, the democratization of life where you live.”

Of course, it’s not always easy. Especially when you are trying to make a film for not one audience, but audiences in various languages all across the Hemisphere. But that’s what we set out to do, and I think we succeeded.

BD: Could you talk a bit about the process of making your documentary?

MF: This is very important, because we wanted the making of the film to reflect as much as possible the “democracy” that we are trying to portray. We used very little narration- only about two and a half minutes worth — because we wanted people to tell the stories in their own words. We tried not to change the scenery where we were filming. We only used music from local musicians, and tried to only use it when it was part of the scene. It is also a testament to what two people can do without any external resources or really expensive equipment.

The entire budget came out of our own pockets and Silvia and I filmed nearly the entire film with our Panasonic 3CCD handycam, and edited it all on our aging G4 Powerbook.

Of course, we had more than a half a dozen individuals and groups that supported with b-roll, and either shot for us, or allowed us to use footage they had already filmed in areas that we couldn’t make it to like Ecuador, Bolivia, and the Bay Area.

The SF-based musician and sound editor, Ben Bernstein, donated his time to post-produce our audio, which came out great. The Venezuela-based film group, Panafilms was a huge support, as were hundreds of folks all across the region.

BD: What was the response among viewers during your tour in the US?

MF: We did our tour last fall from mid September straight through till two days before the 2008 Presidential elections. We drove from the East Coast to the West Coast and back, covering our costs with donations from the nearly two-dozen showings all across the U.S.. It was an amazing experience. Of course, we were organizing the tour ourselves, so our audiences varied from a couple hundred people at some Universities all the way down to a living room showing with a few people in Oklahoma City. But really, the response was the best we could have hoped for, and both Silvia and I were impressed with the diversity of opinions. Some viewers were struck by the amount of local democracy and participation in Venezuela specifically, especially with the negative press that it gets in the United States. Many viewers were impressed with the democratic experiences, and the fact that people all across the region are all participating in similar ways. Others were shocked because so little of this is happening in the U.S. Others felt the movie really put things in to a perspective that they had rarely seen or heard of before. This was the case of one gentleman in the Lower 9th Ward in New Orleans where we showed Beyond Elections with a projector on the side of a building. He said, “Wow, I’ve always known all of this, but I had never understood that everything was connected. I feel like I have a new perspective on things.”

Without a doubt, the biggest and only major critique was that it was, and remains, a long documentary- just under two hours, which we’ll keep in mind for our next documentary. The DVD version of the movie is divided in to chapters, which can each stand alone, so it can easily be used in university and high school classrooms according to theme. The right hand side of the website, www.beyondelections.com has dozens of links to additional information, all also sorted according to the chapter and the theme.

We tried to build the film in order to give people an understanding of the realities, and also leave them with a sense of hope. Because these experiences anywhere; be it in Latin America or the United States, in the local government, the community, the office, the school or the home can only happen if we take the steps to open the democratic spaces of participation. This is the exciting thing about the film and I believe that people could feel it. The film gave people an idea about some of the things that are being done, and some of the things that they can also do. As Sílvia often said in our after-film discussions, “the best thing you can do to support these democratic experiences abroad is to make change in your own communities, attempt to open democracy in your own community.” As a Brazilian, she knows the affect that this can have.

In our discussions after nearly all of our showings, we tried to stress this point; how we can open up these democratic experiences in our own lives. After numerous requests, we actually developed a “Beyond Elections Democracy Discussion Guide,” which attempts to help people to do just that, Bring Democracy Home. It is also available to download halfway down the right-hand side of our website, under “Beyond Elections Materials.”

And that is our job now — to spread the word about the film, and open up the space for democracy where wherever you are. As we wrote shortly after the 2008 US Presidential elections, “We can no longer leave important local, regional or national decisions in the hands of our elected representatives alone. They should be held accountable, not to their campaign contributors, but to the citizens who they are supposed to represent.” (See this link)

Please let us know if you are interested in supporting Beyond Elections, finding out more, or setting up a showing in your own community. We would love to be able to support your local efforts.

A sign of these times is a phrase from Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, who refers to himself as a feminist: “True socialism is feminist.” Progressive Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa named “gender justice” — the end to discrimination against women — as part of his vision for 21st century socialism. And at the recent World Social Forum in Brazil, the Assembly of Social Movements issued the following declaration:

“The social emancipation process carried by the feminist, environmentalist and socialist movements in the 21st century aims at liberating society from capitalist domination of the means of production, communication and services, achieved by supporting forms of ownership that favor the social interest: small family freehold, public, cooperative, communal and collective property.

“Such an alternative will necessarily be feminist since it is impossible to build a society based on social justice and equality of rights when half of humankind is oppressed and exploited.”

This article revolves around the question: to what extent have conditions for women changed as a result of the left trend in Latin American politics?

The U.S. has had interests in Latin America throughout the 1800s (the acquisition of much of Mexico being one of them), but Yankee domination throughout the region began in earnest with the Spanish-American war in 1898. It continued, despite Cuba’s breakaway in 1959, for a full century, but is now declining as progressive countries assert their independence. In the process have come economic and social reforms, a number of which have benefited the women of Latin America.

In 1998, leftist Hugo Chavez won his first term as democratically elected president. Brazil elected Worker Party founder Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2002. In Bolivia, the poorest republic in South America, unionist Evo Morales was elected in 2005 after mass rebellions forced out three presidents in two years. Daniel Ortega, who led the Nicaraguan Sandinista revolution in the 1970s and ’80s, was democratically voted back into office in 2006. Progressive governments have been voted into office in Ecuador, Paraguay, Chile and Argentina. Chile, the country once ruled by the fascist regime of Augusto Pinochet, is now headed by a female Socialist Party member, Michele Bachelet. The government of Argentina is also headed by a woman, Cristina Fernanedez de Kirchner.

Women in all regions of the world suffer subordination to men, in economic, political and social life and in the home. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which is composed of the advanced capitalist democracies, Latin American women suffer less total gender discrimination — in ownership rights, civil liberties, family codes and physical integrity — than other regions of the world except for the OECD states. This isn’t to suggest women have achieved equality in Latin America (or in the OECD states), but they enjoy certain rights denied their sisters, particularly in portions of Africa and Asia.

OECD data also show that there is an important correlation between social institutions and the economic role of women. Female participation in the workforce is low in areas where discrimination is high, for example. Women who are denied ownership rights can’t start their own businesses. Social inequality is also pronounced in countries with low female literacy rates. Infant and maternal mortality rates are a measure of health care available for women.

Women constitute 40% of the Latin American workforce, but many of the economies cannot absorb all the women seeking work, especially the poorest. Also, many women who want to work in the economy are hampered by child care and housework responsibilities. In addition, many women work in the informal sectors or at home and have no access to worker safety nets. Women’s average wages are 60%-70% of men’s, averaging 64% as of 2007. (In the U.S women earn 77 cents to the male dollar.)

Most Latin American states have passed laws guaranteeing property rights for women, but because men often have more resources, women’s holdings are likely to be smaller.

Nearly 90% of adults in Latin America and the Caribbean can read and write, but many are at a low level of literacy due to inadequate educational systems. Yet Latin America has made more progress in literacy than many other developing regions.

Reproductive rights are a key indication of women’s rights. In most of the region, largely because of the influence of the Roman Catholic Church, abortions are a crime. But the abortion rate is far higher than in Western Europe or the United States with more than four million abortions each year and tens of thousands of resulting deaths. Only in Cuba is abortion legal on demand. A few other countries permit it for extreme circumstances. In the most recent abridgement of women’s rights, Nicaragua last year outlawed abortion without exception, including to save the life of the mother, the only exception formerly allowed.

Many Latin American women are agitating for legalizing abortion in all or some circumstances. The recent lifting of Washington’s global ban on abortions in health facilities funded by the U.S. may help move this forward.

Divorce is now legal throughout Latin America. The last country in the region to legalize it was Chile, in December 2004. (Now only two countries in the world ban divorce — the Philippines and Malta.

Violence against women is a serious problem in Latin America, as it is in most of the rest of the world. Approximately one in three women in Latin America and the Caribbean has been a victim of sexual, physical, or psychological violence at the hands of intimate partners, according to survey data collected by the Pan American Health Organization in 2006.

Since the 1990s, a majority of the countries in Latin America have taken some action to outlaw violence against women. However, conservative courts often choose not to rule for women, especially in cases of domestic violence. The region’s women and their allies have given a name to the worst crime of violence against women: femicide. This is defined as the murder of women by men because they are women.

The existence of an active women’s movement is an important factor in winning rights for women. Within the region, there have been active struggles for women’s rights throughout the 20th Century to the present, even under the most oppressive regimes. Women have been formidable opponents of tyrannical governments, such as the dictatorships in Chile and Argentina. The indigenous women’s movement played an important part in Bolivia’s progressive gains. Women voted in large number for Venezuela’s Chavez, and supported the revolution in Cuba.

There are some tensions within the Latin American women’s movement as there are in such movements around the world. Women’s movements are often separated by social class. They have different goals, different needs, a different orientation, and they can’t always unite on gender. In cases of economic hardship, poor women’s struggles are more likely to unite brothers and sisters of the same class than they are to unite sisters across class lines. Similarly, there is often disunity between movements of indigenous women and European-descended women.

Where the interests of class, race and gender do intersect, there are different orientations about what to fight for. Very broadly, one polarity sees the fight for equality with men as meaning that focusing on traditional women’s work (child care, housework) will lock them into these gender roles. The other polarity begins by fighting where women are now (mothers, housewives) and wants rights and benefits right now for this women’s work: paid maternity leave, stipends and social security for housework, free and readily available daycare. The benefits women have won to date are in both realms.

Movements of indigenous women are helping to transform the politics of the region. Women account for nearly 60% of the 50 million indigenous people in Latin America and the Caribbean, and they face triple discrimination as women, as indigenous and as poor. Also, much of the ecological devastation of Latin America is taking place on indigenous land, and women are in the forefront of the battle for natural resources.

Here is more detail on a few specific countries:

CUBA: Literacy is 100% for women and men, and women are 65% of university graduates; pay equity is embedded in law; nearly 40% of women are in the labor force, constituting 46% of all workers and half of all doctors; some 43% of deputies in the National Assembly are women, the highest percentage in Latin America and among the highest in the world; maternal mortality, at 34 per 100,000 is extremely low; infant mortality of six per thousand births is the lowest in Latin America. Abortion is free, as is all health care.

The Cuban constitution grants women equal economic, political, cultural, social and familial rights with men and prohibits discrimination based on race, skin color, sex, national origin, and religious belief. These rights are further supported by provisions in various laws, including the Family Code (1975), which requires men to participate equally in domestic labor, guarantees equal rights to women and men in marriage and divorce, and equal parental rights; and 1979 and 1984 revisions to the Penal Code, which provide additional penalties for violations of sexual equality.

The women’s movement has been important in furthering women’s gains. Women took part in the revolution, including in leadership roles. The Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), a non-governmental organization with close ties to the government, is the national agency responsible for the advancement of women and is involved in every facet of society in promoting equality. Crimes of violence against women, especially rape and sexual assault, are severely punished in Cuba. The Federation of Cuban Women travels the country to find out if there is hidden violence and to set up mechanisms for reporting and for community intervention.

VENEZUELA: Women, especially poor women, have been a very large part of President Chavez’s base in elections, in the street to oppose the U.S.-backed coup, in the recall referendum in 2004, and in supporting his programs. With a majority of people living in poverty and 65% of households run by single women, Chavez’s social welfare programs are widely supported. These include adult education, free health and dental treatment, and care for women who have suffered domestic violence. There is also a high level of participation at the organizational and community level. But Venezuela also has its share of right-wing women, primarily from the middle class, who constitute the majority of demonstrators in opposition to Chavez.

The 1999 Venezuelan constitution guarantees total social, political and economic rights to all citizens. It clearly states that women are entitled to full citizenship, and it addresses discrimination, sexual harassment, and domestic violence. In addition to guaranteeing full equality between men and women in employment, it is the only constitution in Latin America that recognizes housework as an economically productive activity, thus entitling housewives to social security benefits.

In 2000, Chávez established the National Institute for Women by a presidential mandate, in accordance with the Law of Equal Opportunities for Women. The institute educates women to defend and expand the political, social and cultural rights they have achieved. It serves as a watchdog on the government and as a strategy for educating women about their rights, including how to report domestic violence.

Venezuela has set up Banmujer, the Women’s Development Bank of Venezuela. The only national financial institution of its kind, Banmujer gives small, low-interest loans to women in order to help them form business ventures. The economic and social needs of women are also being met by a set of development programs called “social missions” that began operating in 2003 using oil revenues. These include a nutrition and food distribution program, adult literacy and education, and free healthcare clinics primarily in economically depressed areas. Such programs have helped to raise the standard of living significantly, contributing to a 27.6% drop in poverty rates since the missions began.

BOLIVIA: When Evo Morales was elected president in Bolivia in December 2005, 70% of the population of just under nine million was living below the poverty line. Morales’s incoming cabinet consisted largely of indigenous people, trade unionists, and women. His cabinet also included the first woman to head the interior ministry — in charge of intelligence, the police, migration issues and the fight against drugs. Women were also at the head of the Ministries of Economic Development and of Health. All of these appointees have progressive pro-woman programs.

The just-ratified new constitution contains provisions that strengthen women’s rights. It prohibits discrimination based on sex, gender identity, or sexual orientation, as well as familial and gendered violence. It guarantees equal pay for men and women with the same job. It also requires equal participation of women and men in Bolivia’s Congress.

However, reproductive rights are not available to most women in Bolivia. Abortion is illegal except for victims of sexual assault or to prevent a life-threatening pregnancy. In fact, Bolivia has one of the highest abortion rates in the world — up to 80,000 procedures annually in a small-sized country, according to the UN. Many are relatively safe procedures performed in more than a dozen clinics around the country. But the average $150 fee is prohibitive to most women, driving many to seek alternative methods, resulting in at least one death a day.

CHILE: Under the Pinochet dictatorship, from 1973 to the 1990s, grassroots women’s movements sprang up, partly in response to extreme poverty and to survive economically. Women formed buying and craft cooperatives and communal kitchens. They also created organizations to reclaim women’s rights and basic human rights, and to search for the disappeared. This organizing transformed women into social activists.

Chilean women are well represented in government and political life. They also have advanced social benefits. When elected, Michele Bachelet named a cabinet with an unprecedented equal number of men and women – making good on a campaign promise. Bachelet administers a program of limited social democracy but with a good record on women’s rights, particularly in the areas of welfare, public pension benefits for women over 65, free childcare for working mothers, anti-discrimination legislation, and affirmative action to increase political representation. Starting in July 2009, all women 65 or older will receive a pension bonus for each living child they have. Women without a history of paid employment will receive public pensions.

Abortion is illegal in all circumstances and is the nation’s highest cause of maternal deaths. But the Bachelet administration did institute a program of expanded access to contraception. One of these measures was a policy to distribute the morning after pill free in public health clinics. The country’s high court outlawed this policy last April. Following this ruling, 10,000 people marched in the streets and hundreds engaged in a mass “apostasy,” renouncing their membership in the Catholic Church.

Violence against women in Chile reflects what is going on in the rest of the region. Last fall Chile’s Chamber of Deputies passed a bill that would recognize femicide as an official crime and increase punishments for violators. The bill also calls for new safe houses to be constructed for women who are victimized by domestic violence. This is now waiting for Senate approval.

MEXICO: Women in Mexico have won some important victories. Probably the most ground-breaking legislation was passed by Mexico City lawmakers (though not in the rest of the country) in April 2007, legalizing abortion during the first trimester. This was upheld by Mexico’s supreme court. Since the law was passed, 5,845 women have had legal abortions in the capital city. Mexico City has also implemented a policy aimed at reducing sexual harassment of women in public transport by placing women-only buses on the street. Still in the works is a law that will make it easier to prosecute those found harassing women in public spaces. Other important measures include the granting of paternity leave, which will not only promote gender equality, but will also aid in raising awareness of the need for men to participate in child care.

At the same time, in Ciudad Juarez there is an epidemic of rape and murder of young women – more than 600 since 1993. Domestic violence claims the lives of 14 women a day in Mexico, but the law in eight states does not consider domestic violence a crime and 12 do not penalize rape in marriage.

We can’t discuss women in Latin America without mentioning migration. Because of the vastly unequal trade arrangements between the U.S. and Mexico, for example, workers are driven off the land to the cities to find work. Many others are forced to try their luck in the U.S., leaving families behind to depend on remittances and on the low salaries of peasant and poor women. In other cases, couples or families migrate together. Not only do they suffer poverty but also poor working conditions, pesticide poisoning, violence and death.

As we asked in the beginning: are women’s conditions changing as a result of the left trend in Latin America? The answer is yes, but there is still a long way to go, as in most of the world. In Latin America we’ve seen a striking transformation of many political, legal and economic rights. Social rights and changes in mind-set and culture will take longer. But the left trend — from social democracy to the movements toward socialism — has made significant progress so far and there will likely be more to come.

According to the UN website, ministers and top anti-drug officials from the CND Member States will be meeting to discuss issues ranging from preventing drug abuse to adopting a plan of action to “counter the world drug problem.” But for former coca farmer Morales and other coca leaf activists, the problem lies with the UN’s decisions — particularly the one that put the coca leaf on the UN’s list of the most strongly controlled illicit substances.

For years, activists have been trying to to remove coca from the top UN list of illegal substances and change the international perception of coca as being synonymous with cocaine. President Morales himself sent an official letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon exactly one year ago, announcing he would try to take the coca leaf off the UN’s list.

But the list of controlled substances can only be changed by the 53 governments of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, “taking into account the recommendation made by the World Health Organization, based on a scientific review of a substance,” says Beate Hammond, Drug Control Officer of the Secretariat of the International Narcotics Control Board.

Hammond claims that in 1993, the WHO Expert Committee confirmed that the coca leaf belongs in the top list because “cocaine is readily extractable from the leaf.” She adds, “We are not aware of any facts that have come to light to justify a reversal of the scheduling status of coca leaf.”

But some are saying the reason those facts have not come to light has little to do with facts, and a lot to do with faulty studies — and a bit of blackmailing.

Yanking the Problem by the UN’s Roots

The roots of this thorny issue go back to 1961, when governments signed the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs to establish a single apparatus for international drug control. Another goal of the 1961 Convention was to “phase out the traditional consumption of drugs” like coca throughout the next 25 years, says a source from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

“Everyone who signed and ratified it is bound by it,” affirms the UNODC source. According to Article 3 of that convention, controlled substances are not only those substances that can be abused, but also the substances that can be converted into a drug, explains Hammond.

While Hammond says the original 1961 Convention included the coca leaf on the list based on “the views on this matter expressed by the World Health Organization,” Sdenka Silva, co-founder of the Coca Museum in La Paz, says the original WHO study that is the basis was merely “based on observations.”

The most recent WHO study was legitimate, but it was ignored, says Dr. Jorge Hurtado, director of the Bolivian branch of the International Coca Research Institute. He says that in the 90s, studies by the WHO denied the addictive nature of the leaf and reaffirmed the coca leaf’s healthy attributes, including the leaf’s ability to allow the absorption of oxygen into the brain.

But this time the UN didn’t care about what the WHO had to say, because the US didn’t like it. Minutes from the 48th World Health Assembly in May 1995 cite the US government’s disapproval of the WHO study’s most recent findings about the coca leaf. The report cites US government representative Mr. Boyer warning that “if WHO activities relating to drugs failed to reinforce proven drug control approaches, funds for the relevant programs should be curtailed.” He then “asked for an assurance that WHO would dissociate itself from the conclusions of the study.”

Mario Argandoña, a Bolivian psychiatrist from the WHO Programme on Substance Abuse, participated in the study and wrote a report describing the study’s positive findings about the coca leaf. He says a few days after the 48th World Health Assembly meeting, the US embassy representative for the WHO, Dr. Ken Bernard, visited him in his Geneva office “to tell me that his government was investigating to see whether the WHO study had received financial support from Bolivian drug traffickers.” Dr. Bernard added that US scientists had proof that the traditional use of the coca leaf had led to brain atrophy in 14,000 Indigenous Andeans. “My answer was that the funding for the study came from Italy and the USA,” recalls Argandoña. “Regarding the scientific study about brain atrophy, I told him that the ethical thing to do would be to publish such a study.” Their meeting ended there.

Even Better Than the Real Thing

Dr. Jorge Hurtado tries to dispel ideas that coca is bad for the brain and any other part of the body. He affirms that as early as the 70s, research from Harvard University showed that the Bolivian coca leaf contains more vitamin A than any fruit and has more calcium than milk.

But most Bolivians know this just from experience. Bolivian miners survive hunger and sleep deprivation for long hours in the depth of the mines by chewing on coca leaves.

Coca is not only sacred for miners — but for Bolivians of all ages and walks of life. From the age of 11, Canedo amassed coca leaves into a protruding ball in one cheek to suck their juices out — an activity called ‘acullicar.’ Both his parents’ families are ‘acullicadoras.’ When Canedo visits his piece of land in the tropical Yungas region, he cultivates coca along with his family and neighbors. Back in La Paz, he often buys a bag of coca leaves at the market to share with his family. He chews on coca leaves at local bars and pubs and especially when he’s up late studying for exams or volunteering at the annual Coca and Sovereignty Fair, where everything from coca creams to coca pancakes is sold.

“Coca is part of us, it’s part of our identity, of our ideas, of our history,” says Jeannette Rojas, director of Comunidad Sagrada Coca, a local women’s music collective that seeks to honour Bolivia’s Indigenous heritage. “That’s why we call ourselves Sacred Coca Community,” she says.

“Coca is a symbol that has resisted and persisted for centuries. It’s the only thing that we’ve managed to preserve from European and Spanish destruction.”

Coca is present “in all the celebrations you can imagine: baptisms, marriages, village festivals, fertility, thanksgiving rituals” and important meetings, adds Silva.

Bolivians aren’t the only ones who know this. “Bolivia has produced coca leaf for traditional uses for centuries,” affirms a March 2007 International Narcotic Strategy Report released by US Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs.

“Bolivians actually chew on the coca leaf for medicinal purposes,” acknowledges US Drug Enforcement Administration spokesperson Michael Sanders. He recalls arriving at the El Alto airport, at more than 12,000 feet above the ground. “Because of altitude, a lot of people, including us, would get altitude sickness. They found one of the things that would curb the nausea and the altitude sickness was coca tea,” he says. “It wouldn’t get you high or anything like that, it would just assist with the symptoms of altitude sickness.”

Dr. Hurtado adds that the leaf contains two molecules that prevent addiction. And not only can the leaf prevent addiction, it can cure it, he says. Since 1984, he says he has been treating cocaine addiction with the coca leaf.

Cutting Supply Isn’t Enough

Whether curative or nutritional, what’s crystal clear is that coca leaves are not synonymous with cocaine. “Coca does not contain cocaine in its natural state,” explains Dr. Hurtado. Cocaine can only be derived from it through a specific chemical extraction process, he says, and a lengthy process is needed to transform the green leaves into the white powder.

Dionisio Nuñez, a Bolivian deputy and co-founder of the Coca and Sovereignty campaign thinks the cocaine problem in Bolivia is the direct consequence of cocaine consumption in the US and its inability to eradicate that problem domestically.

Even the DEA spokesperson agrees. “Do you like chocolate?” Sanders asked. “What if you said I’m not going to eat chocolate anymore? If everyone in the country said okay, I’m not going to eat chocolate, then there would be no such thing as Swiss chocolate because nobody would be buying it,” said Sanders.

“It’s the same thing with illegal drugs. Until the demand is gone, you’re always going to have that supply.”

Dr. Hurtado also blames the US for protecting the monopoly of multinational companies to access coca, referring to a special deal that the soft drink company had with the DEA to export coca. Article 27 of the 1961 UN convention clearly provides a loophole for Coca Cola to take advantage of, says Dr. Hurtado, adding that the UN protects the Coca Cola monopoly because “the UN is controlled by the US.”

Yet Hammond laughs about the idea of Coca Cola being allowed preferential treatment by the UN. “The 1961 Convention may permit the use and export of coca leaves for the preparation of a flavouring agent, which does not contain any (cocaine) alkaloids,” explained Hammond. “It is only under these limited conditions that these leaves may be exported,” but the alkaloids do not have to be removed prior to export.

Meanwhile, the Bolivian government struggles to find legal markets to export the coca leaf — to ensure less coca goes to drug trafficking and more goes to eating, soothing, washing and curing. If travelers like Morales want to bring coca teas, creams or candies as souvenirs to promote their local economy and heritage when they go on trips abroad, the coca leaf will need to be taken off the UN’s list by the CND.

Bolivian President Evo Morales will make his speech during the opening session of the CND March 11th. It starts at 10am at the Vienna International Centre and is open to the media.

I’ve said all along that whatever good changes might occur in regard to non-foreign policy issues, such as what’s already taken place concerning the environment and abortion, the Obama administration will not produce any significantly worthwhile change in US foreign policy; little done in this area will reduce the level of misery that the American Empire regularly brings down upon humanity. And to the extent that Barack Obama is willing to clearly reveal what he believes about anything controversial, he appears to believe in the empire.

The Obamania bubble should already have begun to lose some air with the multiple US bombings of Pakistan within the first few days following the inauguration. The Pentagon briefed the White House of its plans, and the White House had no objection. So bombs away — Barack Obama’s first war crime. The dozens of victims were, of course, all bad people, including all the women and children. As with all these bombings, we’ll never know the names of all the victims — It’s doubtful that even Pakistan knows — or what crimes they had committed to deserve the death penalty. Some poor Pakistani probably earned a nice fee for telling the authorities that so-and-so bad guy lived in that house over there; too bad for all the others who happened to live with the bad guy, assuming of course that the bad guy himself actually lived in that house over there.

The new White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, declined to answer questions about the first airstrikes, saying, “I’m not going to get into these matters.”¹ Where have we heard that before?

After many of these bombings in recent years, a spokesperson for the United States or NATO has solemnly declared: “We regret the loss of life.” These are the same words used by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) on a number of occasions, but their actions were typically called “terrorist”.

I wish I could be an Obamaniac. I envy their enthusiasm. Here, in the form of an open letter to President Obama, are some of the “changes we can believe in” in foreign policy that would have to occur to win over the non-believers like me.

Iran

Just leave them alone. There is no “Iranian problem.” They are a threat to no one. Iran hasn’t invaded any other country in centuries. No, President Ahmadinejad did not threaten Israel with any violence. Stop patrolling the waters surrounding Iran with American warships. Stop halting Iranian ships to check for arms shipments to Hamas. (That’s generally regarded as an act of war.) Stop using Iranian dissident groups to carry out terrorist attacks inside Iran. Stop kidnapping Iranian diplomats. Stop the continual spying and recruiting within Iran. And yet, with all that, you can still bring yourself to say: “If countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us.”²

Iran has as much right to arm Hamas as the US has to arm Israel. And there is no international law that says that the United States, the UK, Russia, China, Israel, France, Pakistan, and India are entitled to nuclear weapons, but Iran is not. Iran has every reason to feel threatened. Will you continue to provide nuclear technology to India, which has not signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, while threatening Iran, an NPT signatory, with sanctions and warfare?

Russia

Stop surrounding the country with new NATO members. Stop looking to instigate new “color” revolutions in former Soviet republics and satellites. Stop arming and supporting Georgia in its attempts to block the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhasia, the breakaway regions on the border of Russia. And stop the placement of anti-missile systems in Russia’s neighbors, the Czech Republic and Poland, on the absurd grounds that it’s to ward off an Iranian missile attack. It was Czechoslovakia and Poland that the Germans also used to defend their imperialist ambitions — The two countries were being invaded on the grounds that Germans there were being maltreated. The world was told.

“The U.S. government made a big mistake from the breakup of the Soviet Union,” said former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev last year. “At that time the Russian people were really euphoric about America and the U.S. was really number one in the minds of many Russians.” But, he added, the United States moved aggressively to expand NATO and appeared gleeful at Russia’s weakness.³

Cuba

Making it easier to travel there and send remittances is very nice (if, as expected, you do that), but these things are dwarfed by the need to end the US embargo. In 1999, Cuba filed a suit against the United States for $181.1 billion in compensation for economic losses and loss of life during the almost forty years of this aggression. The suit held Washington responsible for the death of 3,478 Cubans and the wounding and disabling of 2,099 others. We can now add ten more years to all three figures. The negative, often crippling, effects of the embargo extend into every aspect of Cuban life.

In addition to closing Guantanamo prison, the adjacent US military base established in 1903 by American military force should be closed and the land returned to Cuba.

The Cuban Five, held prisoner in the United States for over 10 years, guilty only of trying to prevent American-based terrorism against Cuba, should be released. Actually there were 10 Cubans arrested; five knew that they could expect no justice in an American court and pled guilty to get shorter sentences.

Iraq

Freeing the Iraqi people to death … Nothing short of a complete withdrawal of all US forces, military and contracted, and the closure of all US military bases and detention and torture centers, can promise a genuine end to US involvement and the beginning of meaningful Iraqi sovereignty. To begin immediately. Anything less is just politics and imperialism as usual. In six years of war, the Iraqi people have lost everything of value in their lives. As the Washington Post reported in 2007: “It is a common refrain among war-weary Iraqis that things were better before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.”⁴ The good news is that the Iraqi people have 5,000 years experience in crafting a society to live in. They should be given the opportunity.

Saudi Arabia

Demand before the world that this government enter the 21st century (or at least the 20th), or the United States has to stop pretending that it gives a damn about human rights, women, homosexuals, religious liberty, and civil liberties. The Bush family had long-standing financial ties to members of the Saudi ruling class. What will be your explanation if you maintain the status quo?

Haiti

Reinstate the exiled Jean Bertrand Aristide to the presidency, which he lost when the United States overthrew him in 2004. To seek forgiveness for our sins, give the people of Haiti lots and lots of money and assistance.

Colombia

Stop giving major military support to a government that for years has been intimately tied to death squads, torture, and drug trafficking; in no other country in the world have so many progressive candidates for public office, unionists, and human-rights activists been murdered. Are you concerned that this is the closest ally the United States has in all of Latin America?

Venezuela

Hugo Chavez may talk too much but he’s no threat except to the capitalist system of Venezuela and, by inspiration, elsewhere in Latin America. He has every good historical reason to bad-mouth American foreign policy, including Washington’s role in the coup that overthrew him in 2002. If you can’t understand why Chavez is not in love with what the United States does all over the world, I can give you a long reading list.

Put an end to support for Chavez’s opposition by the Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy, and other US government agencies. US diplomats should not be meeting with Venezuelans plotting coups against Chavez, nor should they be interfering in elections.

Send Luis Posada from Florida to Venezuela, which has asked for his extradition for his masterminding the bombing of a Cuban airline in 1976, taking 73 lives. Extradite the man, or try him in the US, or stop talking about the war on terrorism.

And please try not to repeat the nonsense about Venezuela being a dictatorship. It’s a freer society than the United States. It has, for example, a genuine opposition daily media, non-existent in the United States. If you doubt that, try naming a single American daily newspaper or TV network that was unequivocally against the US invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Panama, Grenada, and Vietnam. Or even against two of them? How about one? Is there a single one that supports Hamas and/or Hezbollah? A few weeks ago, the New York Times published a story concerning a possible Israeli attack upon Iran, and stated: “Several details of the covert effort have been omitted from this account, at the request of senior United States intelligence and administration officials, to avoid harming continuing operations.”⁵

Alas, Mr. President, among other disparaging remarks, you’ve already accused Chavez of being “a force that has interrupted progress in the region.”⁶ This is a statement so contrary to the facts, even to plain common sense, so hypocritical given Washington’s history in Latin America, that I despair of you ever freeing yourself from the ideological shackles that have bound every American president of the past century. It may as well be inscribed in their oath of office — that a president must be antagonistic toward any country that has expressly rejected Washington as the world’s savior. You made this remark in an interview with Univision, Venezuela’s leading, implacable media critic of the Chavez government. What regional progress could you be referring to, the police state of Colombia?

Bolivia

Stop American diplomats, Peace Corps volunteers, Fulbright scholars, and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, from spying and fomenting subversion inside Bolivia. As the first black president of the United States, you could try to cultivate empathy toward, and from, the first indigenous president of Bolivia. Congratulate Bolivian president Evo Morales on winning a decisive victory on a recent referendum to approve a new constitution which enshrines the rights of the indigenous people and, for the first time, institutes separation of church and state.

Afghanistan

Perhaps the most miserable people on the planet, with no hope in sight as long as the world’s powers continue to bomb, invade, overthrow, occupy, and slaughter in their land. The US Army is planning on throwing 30,000 more young American bodies into the killing fields and is currently building eight new major bases in southern Afghanistan. Is that not insane? If it makes sense to you I suggest that you start the practice of the president accompanying the military people when they inform American parents that their child has died in a place called Afghanistan.

If you pull out from this nightmare, you could also stop bombing Pakistan. Leave even if it results in the awful Taliban returning to power. They at least offer security to the country’s wretched, and indications are that the current Taliban are not all fundamentalists.

But first, close Bagram prison and other detention camps, which are worse than Guantanamo.

And stop pretending that the United States gives a damn about the Afghan people and not oil and gas pipelines which can bypass Russia and Iran. The US has been endeavoring to fill the power vacuum in Central Asia created by the Soviet Union’s dissolution in order to assert Washington’s domination over a region containing the second largest proven reserves of petroleum and natural gas in the world. Is Afghanistan going to be your Iraq?

Israel

The most difficult task for you, but the one that would earn for you the most points. To declare that Israel is no longer the 51st state of the union would bring down upon your head the wrath of the most powerful lobby in the world and its many wealthy followers, as well as the Christian-fundamentalist Right and much of the media. But if you really want to see peace between Israel and Palestine you must cut off all military aid to Israel, in any form: hardware, software, personnel, money. And stop telling Hamas it has to recognize Israel and renounce violence until you tell Israel that it has to recognize Hamas and renounce violence.

North Korea

Bush called the country part of “the axis of evil”, and Kim Jong Il a “pygmy” and “a spoiled child at a dinner table.”⁷ But you might try to understand where Kim Jong Il is coming from. He sees that UN agencies went into Iraq and disarmed it, and then the United States invaded. The logical conclusion is not to disarm, but to go nuclear.
Central America

Stop interfering in the elections of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, year after year. The Cold War has ended. And though you can’t undo the horror perpetrated by the United States in the region in the 1980s, you can at least be kind to the immigrants in the US who came here trying to escape the long-term consequences of that terrible decade.
Vietnam

In your inauguration speech you spoke proudly of those “who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom … For us, they fought and died, in places like … Khe Sanh.” So it is your studied and sincere opinion that the 58,000 American sevicemembers who died in Vietnam, while helping to kill over a million Vietnamese, gave their life for our prosperity and freedom? Would you care to defend that proposition without resort to any platitudes?

You might also consider this: In all the years since the Vietnam War ended, the three million Vietnamese suffering from diseases and deformities caused by US sprayings of the deadly chemical “Agent Orange” have received from the United States no medical attention, no environmental remediation, no compensation, and no official apology.

Kosovo

Stop supporting the most gangster government in the world, which has specialized in kidnaping, removing human body parts for sale, heavy trafficking in drugs, trafficking in women, various acts of terrorism, and ethnic cleansing of Serbs. This government would not be in power if the Bush administration had not seen them as America’s natural allies. Do you share that view? UN Resolution 1244, adopted in 1999, reaffirmed the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to which Serbia is now the recognized successor state, and established that Kosovo was to remain part of Serbia. Why do we have a huge and permanent military base in that tiny self-declared country?

NATO

From protecting Europe against a [mythical] Soviet invasion to becoming an occupation army in Afghanistan. Put an end to this historical anachronism, what Russian leader Vladimir called “the stinking corpse of the cold war.”⁸ You can accomplish this simply by leaving the organization. Without the United States and its never-ending military actions and officially-designated enemies, the organization would not even have the pretense of a purpose, which is all it has left. Members have had to be bullied, threatened and bribed to send armed forces to Afghanistan.

School of the Americas

Latin American countries almost never engage in war with each other, or any other countries. So for what kind of warfare are its military officers being trained by the United States? To suppress their own people. Close this school (the name has now been changed to protect the guilty) at Ft. Benning, Georgia that the United States has used to prepare two generations of Latin American military officers for careers in overthrowing progressive governments, death squads, torture, holding down dissent, and other charming activities. The British are fond of saying that the Empire was won on the playing fields of Eton. Americans can say that the road to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and Bagram began in the classrooms of the School of the Americas.

Torture

Your executive orders concerning this matter of utmost importance are great to see, but they still leave something to be desired. They state that the new standards ostensibly putting an end to torture apply to any “armed conflict”. But what if your administration chooses to view future counterterrorism and other operations as not part of an “armed conflict”? And no mention is made of “rendition” — kidnaping a man off the street, throwing him in a car, throwing a hood over his head, stripping off his clothes, placing him in a diaper, shackling him from every angle, and flying him to a foreign torture dungeon. Why can’t you just say that this and all other American use of proxy torturers is banned? Forever.

It’s not enough to say that you’re against torture or that the United States “does not torture” or “will not torture”. George W. Bush said the same on a regular basis. To show that you’re not George W. Bush you need to investigate those responsible for the use of torture, even if this means prosecuting a small army of Bush administration war criminals.

You aren’t off to a good start by appointing former CIA official John O. Brennan as your top adviser on counterterrorism. Brennan has called “rendition” a “vital tool” and praised the CIA’s interrogation techniques for providing “lifesaving” intelligence.⁹ Whatever were you thinking, Barack?

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi

Free this Libyan man from his prison in Scotland, where he is serving a life sentence after being framed by the United States for the bombing of PanAm flight 103 in December 1988, which took the lives of 270 people over Scotland. Iran was actually behind the bombing — as revenge for the US shooting down an Iranian passenger plane in July, killing 290 — not Libya, which the US accused for political reasons. Nations do not behave any more cynical than that. Megrahi lies in prison now dying of cancer, but still the US and the UK will not free him. It would be too embarrassing to admit to 20 years of shameless lying.

Mr. President, there’s a lot more to be undone in our foreign policy if you wish to be taken seriously as a moral leader like Martin Luther King, Jr.: banning the use of depleted uranium, cluster bombs, and other dreadful weapons; joining the International Criminal Court instead of trying to sabotage it; making a number of other long-overdue apologies in addition to the one mentioned re Vietnam; and much more. You’ve got your work cut out for you if you really want to bring some happiness to this sad old world, make America credible and beloved again, stop creating armies of anti-American terrorists, and win over people like me.

And do you realize that you can eliminate all state and federal budget deficits in the United States, provide free health care and free university education to every American, pay for an unending array of worthwhile social and cultural programs, all just by ending our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not starting any new ones, and closing down the Pentagon’s 700+ military bases? Think of it as the peace dividend Americans were promised when the Cold War would end some day, but never received. How about you delivering it, Mr. President? It’s not too late.

But you are committed to the empire; and the empire is committed to war. Too bad.

1. Washington Post, January 24, 2009.
2. Interview with al Arabiya TV, January 27, 2009.
3. Gorbachev speaking in Florida, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, April 17, 2008.
4. Washington Post, May 5, 2007, p.1.
5. New York Times, January 11, 2009.
6. Washington Post, January 19, 2009.
7. Newsweek, May 27, 2002.
8. Press Trust of India (news agency), December 21, 2007.
9. Washington Post, November 26, 2008.

Ecuador

First, to deal with the nation that had first vanquished the secessionists, Ecuador . Alianza PAIS (Proud and Sovereign Fatherland Alliance), the ruling party of President Rafael Correa, had lead a movement against neo-liberalism and for a new, progressive constitution. After his initial election and two subsequent electoral victories, the stage was set for the final referendum in late September 2008 to approve or reject the product of several years of struggle. It would open up new avenues for reversing the ravages of neo-liberalism and further popular participation in the administration of state power; a critical step for the most cautious nation in the Bolivarian camp.

In opposition, including the ever present puritanical voice of the Catholic Church, were the secessionists in the important province of Guayas, led by the mayor of Guayaquil (host city of the 2006 CONFILAR gathering), Jaime Nebot. Thanks to a vibrant array of social movements, the right-wing opposition was defeated overwhelmingly, with 64% of the voters favoring the new constitution nationally and 51% in Guayas.

Since this victory, the secessionists have been largely silent. With less initial support than their Venezuelan and Bolivian counterparts, it seems that the elites have apparently decided to pursue different tactics to derail the changes sweeping Ecuador, which may very well include co-opting Correa’s “Citizen’s Revolution.” New contradictions have risen during the rule of the transitional regime that holds caretaker power until the April elections, which has brought the government into conflict with one of the most important social movements in the nation, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE).

The dispute centers over the rights to mine Ecuador’s vast natural resources. The government has signed a deal with a multinational corporation based in Canada which APAIS argues that it will help the economy and increase government control, but others are uneasy about the multinational’s presence, with CONAIE in large part against any mining at all. Several large, militant demonstrations and blockades were held, which were met by police repression.¹ This friction, in addition to disputes over the minimum wage, is making it very apparent that Correa will soon be made to choose between yielding to the national bourgeois elements of the revolution or utilize the new constitution to advance in an explicitly socialist direction.

Venezuela

In Venezuela , the revolution led by Hugo Chavez is leading the charge towards the Bolivarian Socialist ideal: a united Latin America whose future is not contingent on Washington, Wall Street, or their lackeys, but the will of the people, with whom power exclusively resides. As the trajectory of Chavez and PSUV (the United Socialist Party of Venezuela) grew ever more radical in the face of the international crisis facing capitalism, contradictions reached new heights in the run-up to the November 2008 regional elections, especially in the state of Zulia, rich in oil and under the control of CONFILAR-affiliated governor Manual Rosales (recently replaced by his hand-picked successor Pablo Perez Alvarez)

Violence perpetrated on behalf of the capitalist class was the defining facet of the opposition’s strategy to build momentum after the Bolivarian forces were defeated in late 2007. Groups of quasi-political, petty-bourgeois thugs like the M13 (March 13th Movement) incited violence as they had been doing so for quite some time, but the anti-democratic forces went much further. Involving owners of some of the biggest news outlets in Venezuela and several rightist officers, a coup was planned and was apparently very close to being executed when it was uncovered on September 11th of last year. Having closed this especially viscous avenue, the election proceeded relatively normally (as normal as an election could considering the sheer quantity of US meddling), and on November 23rd, there were no major disturbances. The interpretation of the results varies widely.

First, let’s get the facts straight.² The last time Venezuela had municipal elections pro-Chavez forces won 21 of 23 governorships. However, as the socialist orientation of the Bolivarian revolution became more apparent, several parties showed their true, counter-revolutionary colors and joined the opposition. When the elections were held, PSUV and its allies controlled 16 of the governorships; after the election, they controlled 17. Roughly 60% of votes went for pro-Chavez candidates, which is the level of support the Bolivarians have consistently received throughout the course of the revolution. 4 of 5 mayoral elections went in favor of the PSUV-led Patriotic Alliance.

There are some unnerving aspects of the results. The five elections that PSUV lost were in some of the most heavily populated states, and therefore only 57% of Venezuelans have socialist governors. This is especially troubling as it suggests that the urban proletariat’s support for the revolution is dwindling, for the most part due to the government’s inability to deal with high crime rates. As for Zulia, PSUV was defeated and Rosales and his allies retained power. However, with the defeat of secessionism in Bolivia and Ecuador, there has been almost no secessionist rhetoric, perhaps due to the overall socialist victory in the elections.

The Bolivarian forces experienced a critical success in the municipal elections. On the other hand, it showed the worrying possibility of stagnation in revolutionary fervor; the only remedy for which is a deepening of people’s power. Essential to this ongoing struggle is the leadership of Hugo Chavez, whose absence would create a possibly fatal power vacuum that could be filled by the “Endogenous Right” (the small but dangerous national bourgeois tendency within PSUV).

The victory of November 23rd can only be solidified with a victory on February 15th, the date of the referendum to abolish term limits.

Bolivia

In Bolivia , the greatest battle between the Bolivarians (Evo Morales’ Movement for Socialism, MAS) and the secessionists took place. The magnitude of this confrontation was greatly exacerbated by the complex ethnic makeup of the nation, with the largely white Media Luna (Crescent Moon) region, filled with natural resources, in antagonism with the densely populated indigenous Andean areas. The first bold political moves by the mostly white oligarchy took place on May 4th, when a referendum on autonomy was held in Santa Cruz province, tainted with violence carried out by the Santa Cruz Youth Union,³ a group of fascist-inspired thugs. Seeking to strike back and assert the popularity of the leftist central government, a referendum was called on August 10th which would confirm or recall the head of state and the prefects of all nine departments in Bolivia. This turned out to be a stunning success for MAS, with two-thirds of voters preferring to retain Morales as President and recalling two secessionist prefects. This set the stage for the civil coup.

Defeated overwhelmingly in an internationally-observed, democratic referendum, the secessionist capitalists tried to violently overrule the people. Shutting down daily life, attacking important infrastructure, and massacring those in their way, a “Civil Coup,” as it came to be known, occurred in early September of last year. The people, well organized by the nation’s robust social movements, were quick to strike back. Backed up by UNASUR and eventually the Bolivian Army, massive protests threatened to lay siege to the Media Luna. Giving up some ground in negotiations (mostly having to do with term limits), the crisis ended and the referendum was scheduled for January 25th.

The campaign for the referendum was not especially dramatic widely expected to go in MAS’ favor. Most polls showed support at around 65% percent, and the only real opposition came from the private media, which launched a disinformation campaign in the tradition of their notoriously deceptive Venezuelan counterparts.⁴ In the end, over 61% voted in favor of the constitution.⁵

While this was a great victory for the oppressed people of Bolivia , the results,⁶ when looked at through a regional and demographical lens, also revealed some troubling blind spots. The Media Luna largely rejected the constitution. For example, in Santa Cruz , whose governor is the de facto leader of the secessionists, “No” won 65-35. It also became clear that MAS has been so far unable to overcome the contradiction between town and country and unite workers in both the countryside and the cities. In rural areas, the constitution was approved by over 80% of the population. This is important as it will provide a serious hindrance to secession, with the rural provinces eating away at the otherwise large portion of Bolivia within the Media Luna. However, only 52% of the urban population voted “Yes”, highlighting the need for MAS to truly become a multi-ethnic vanguard and reach out to the industrial proletariat that may not be of indigenous heritage. If it does not, then the mantle of secessionism could be taken up once again by the oligarchy.

Hasta la Victoria Siempre

The CONFILAR secessionists have, for the most part, been neutralized. This is by no means the end of the revolutionary road Latin America (and especially these three nations) has been traveling on; rather, this victory has simply opened up new avenues. All three nations must take this opportunity to radicalize: Venezuela needs to break with capitalism on a fundamental level, Morales’ must proudly proclaim his socialist beliefs, and Correa must break out of the constrictive mold of social democracy. The bold rebellions against neo-liberalism have yet again been successfully defended, and the people must ceaselessly fight for the complete annihilation of capitalism and its resulting social ills, the only way to guarantee sovereignty and democracy.

1. http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1659/1/
2. http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/3990
3. http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1270/31/
4. Tinyurl
5. www.cne.org.bo/ResultadosRNC2009/
6. Tinyurl

Polls conducted by Televisión Boliviana announced that the document passed with 61.97% support from some 3.8 million voters. According the poll, 36.52% of voters voted against the constitution, and 1.51% cast blank and null votes. The departments where the constitution passed included La Paz, Cochabamba, Oruro, Potosí, Tarija, and Pando. It was rejected in Santa Cruz, Beni, and Chuquisaca.

The constitution, which was written in a constituent assembly that first convened in August of 2006, grants unprecedented rights to Bolivia’s indigenous majority, establishes broader access to basic services, education and healthcare and expands the role of the state in the management of natural resources and the economy.

When the news spread throughout La Paz that the constitution had been passed in the referendum, fireworks, cheers and horns sounded off sporadically. By 8:30, thousands had already gathered in the Plaza Murillo. The crowd cheered “Evo! Evo! Evo!” until Morales, Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera and other leading figures in the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) government, crowded out onto the balcony of the presidential palace.

“I would like to take this opportunity to recognize all of the brothers and sisters of Bolivia, all of the compañeros and compañeras, all of the citizens that through their vote, through their democratic participation, decide to refound Bolivia,” Morales said. “From 2005 to 2009 we have gone from triumph to triumph, while the neoliberals, the traitors have been constantly broken down thanks to the consciousness of the Bolivian people.”

He shook his fist in the air, the applause died down. “And I want you to know something, the colonial state ends here. Internal colonialism and external colonialism ends here. Sisters and brothers, neoliberalism ends here too.”

At various points in the speech Morales, and others on the balcony, held up copies of the new constitution. Morales continued, “And now, thanks to the consciousness of the Bolivian people, the natural resources are recuperated for life, and no government, no new president can…give our natural resources away to transnational companies.”

A Weakened Right

Though news reports and analysts have suggested that the passage of the new constitution will exacerbate divisions in the country, some of the political tension may be directed into the electoral realm as general elections are now scheduled to take place in December of this year. In addition, the constitution’s passage is another sign of the weakness of the Bolivian right, and their lack of a clear political agenda and mandate to confront the MAS’s popularity. The recent passage of the constitution is likely to divide and further debilitate the right.

Even Manfred Reyes Villa, an opponent of Morales and ex-governor of Cochabamba, told Joshua Partlow of the Washington Post that, “Today, there is not a serious opposition in the country.” When the right-wing led violence in the department of Pando in September of 2008 left some 20 people dead and many others wounded, the right lost much of its legitimacy and support. “With Pando, the regional opposition just collapsed,” George Gray Molina, an ex-United Nations official in Bolivia, and a current research fellow at Oxford University, told Partlow. “I think they lost authority and legitimacy even among their own grass roots.”

Celebrations

Fireworks shot off at the end of Morales’ speech in the Plaza Murillo, sending pigeons flying scared. Live folk music played on stage as the crowd danced and the TV crews packed up and left. The wind blew around giant balloon figures of hands the color of the Bolivian flag holding the new constitution.

As the night wore on, more people began dancing to the bands in the street than to those on the stage. At midnight, when the police asked the thousands gathered to leave the plaza, the crowd took off marching down the street, taking the fiesta to central La Paz, cheering nearly every Latin American revolutionary cheer, pounding drums and sharing beer. After marching down a number of blocks on the empty streets, the crowd hunkered down for a street party at the base of a statue of the Latin American liberator, Simón Bolívar. The celebration, which included Bolivians, Argentines, Brazilians, French, British, North Americans and more, went on into the early hours of the morning.

Oscar Rocababo, a Bolivian sociologist working on his Master’s degree in La Paz, was elated about the victory in the referendum. “The passage of this constitution is like the cherry on top of the ice cream, the culmination of many years of struggle.”

The new constitution, written in a diverse assembly which first convened in 2006, is expected to pass in the January 25th national referendum. Other governments led by left-leaning leaders in the region have also passed new constitutions in recent years, including Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in 1999, and Rafael Correa in Ecuador in 2008. In varying degrees, Bolivia’s new constitution is expected to play an important role in the implementation of progressive policies developed by the Morales administration and his party, the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS).

At the Tuesday rally in La Paz, the sun was strong as drums and roman candles pounded at the air. The screech of packing tape shot out as one bearded participant secured his indigenous wiphala flag to a plastic pole. A group of women blocked off the expanse of one street with a banner that said, “The right wing will not pass — Yes to Evo.”

A giant blown-up balloon statue of Evo Morales — present in nearly every La Paz rally in the days leading up the referendum — stood over the crowd. On his chest was the ballot voters were to face this Sunday: the “Si” box was checked, and, on two boxes regarding what hectare amounts to limit new land purchases at, the 5,000 hectare box was checked, the 10,000 hectare box left blank.

During his speech, Morales sounded a bit tired, no doubt from the nearly endless campaigning he’s been involved in for the new constitution. After the applause died down, he thanked various groups for arriving and urged people to vote for the new constitution. “Brothers and sisters we believe in you, we believe in the people of Bolivia, so that democratically we can transform Bolivia for all Bolivians,” Morales said. He listed off some of the highlights of his three years in office so far, which he said included the nationalization of Bolivia’s gas and the fight against corruption. “But we need to constitutionalize these changes,” he continued.

Morales pointed out that in the new constitution, basic services — such as water, sewage, gas and electricity — would be a human right, as would education and healthcare. Morales also reflected on the recent history of US intervention in the country and pointed out that the new constitution prohibits the creation of US bases in Bolivia. He clarified that, in spite of the right wing’s claims, the new constitution does not (unfortunately) legalize abortion and gay marriage. Above all, he explained, indigenous rights and indigenous representation in government would be empowered.

At this point in Morales’ speech, one security guard was already starting to yawn. A light rain began to fall, women pulled plastic bags over their bowler hats, and the “Viva La Nueva Constitución” cheers became weaker as people returned to work from their lunch breaks.

History and Division

Bolivian social movements have for decades been demanding that a constituent assembly be organized to rewrite the constitution. According to the book Impasse in Bolivia, by Benjamin Kohl and Linda Farthing, from 1826 to 2004, Bolivia has had 16 constitutions and six reforms. The first constitution, drafted by Simón Bolívar himself in 1826, promised to create the “world’s most liberal constitution.” However, even the most liberal of constitutions is ineffective if its dictates are not enforced, which has been the case throughout Bolivian history. Kohl and Farthing also point out that, “Until 1945, all constitutions made a distinction between being a Bolivian — a person born in the country or married to a Bolivian — and being a citizen: a status restricted to literate, propertied men that specifically excluded domestic servants, regardless of income.”

Calls for a new constitution as a tool to create a more egalitarian society re-emerged most recently in the 1990s when indigenous groups in the east of Bolivia demanded a constituent assembly to open new space for their political participation in decision-making at the government level. According to the Andean Information Network, indigenous organizations advocating a constituyente “sought greater participation in the political decisions regarding the use and distribution of land and natural resources, the allocation of state resources, and national development policies.” In fact, these demands correspond to many of the un-applied rights and guarantees made by previous constitutions.

It’s this sense of overdue justice that is leading many people to support the new constitution. As university student Leidy Castro told Prensa Latina, “We will be in favor of a Constitution that for the first time includes all Bolivians, no matter how much money people have. In addition, it protects sectors that have been marginalized for a long time.”

None the less, right wing opponents to the constitution have been active in recent weeks as well, organizing marches and campaigns across the country parallel to the activities of those supporting the constitution. Recently, when these groups collide, there have been some violent confrontations, or at least some strong words exchanged.

Around noon on Wednesday, January 21st, a march against the constitution went down the central Prado street in La Paz. Participants were waving the pink flags of the right wing Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR) party with the message “Vamos por el No” written on them. They arrived in the Plaza de Estudiantes where the ever-present Evo Morales balloon was situated along with a giant “Sí” balloon. A crowd of supporters of the new constitution had already gathered there; one of them had a microphone through which he broadcast his attacks on the right wing with comments such as “You traitors don’t have a real plan! We have a real plan with our new constitution!”

The tension escalated, and the two groups began tossing their ample literature and pamphlets at each other, yelling opposing chants. On one side were the blue flags of the MAS, and the multi-colored wiphala flag, and on the other were the pink flags of the MNR. After some spirited verbal battles, and a few scuffles and pushing matches, the MNR contingent marched back up the street, while the MAS supporters remained in the plaza, giving speeches and firing off roman candles into the evening. At a nearby university, revolutionary folk music blasted throughout the day from a speaker next to Palestinian flags and literature about Israel’s attacks on Gaza. (Morales recently expelled Israel’s ambassador to Bolivia in protest of the bombings in Gaza.) The university’s students have been hosting almost nightly marches and torch-filled, bonfire rallies in support of the new constitution.

Media and Change

There have been numerous street battles throughout the process of re-writing and approving the new constitution. But another battle has been waged in the country’s media. Major newspapers in Bolivia seem almost unanimously critical of the constitution and the MAS, spreading regular misinformation about both. For example, a recent headline in El Diario newspaper said, “Bolivia Will Return To Barbarism With Community Justice.” (Community justice, practiced by many indigenous groups across the country, is officially recognized in the new constitution.) In numerous papers, opinion articles and pieces that draw exclusively from right wing politicians and civic leaders are regularly passed off as straight news, with headlines full of outright lies about the new constitution’s contents.

Edwin, a La Paz taxi driver who used to work hauling furniture and goods on his back at local markets, agreed that most media in Bolivia are against Morales and the new constitution. “But who cares what they say? The journalists are few, but we, the Bolivian people, are many.”

In response to the media’s attacks against the government, Morales has announced the launch of new state newspaper, called Cambio (Change), which was released today, January 22. “We are organizing ourselves, we are preparing ourselves with media to broadcast the truth to the Bolivian people,” Morales said in a recent speech. “This new newspaper will be launched, that won’t humiliate anyone, but will inform and educate us.”

Regardless of the extent to which the changes in the new constitution are applied, the document is significant in that it has been a central part of the political battleground for the bulk of Morales’ time in office. The constitution is also a kind of mirror held up to Bolivian politics, representing the hopes, contradictions and shortcomings of various sides of the political divide.

There are many valid criticisms of the constitution from the left — that the document won’t allow for the break up of existing large land holdings, that it won’t legalize abortion, that it doesn’t go far enough in combating neoliberalism, that there exists a lot of vague language about how these changes will be implemented, and more. But of the many people who will cast their ballot for the constitution this Sunday, a significant number won’t be voting specifically for the new document, or even the MAS government, but against the right wing, and the racism, poverty and conflicts the right has exacerbated in recent years.

In any case, the passage of the constitution will open up a new phase for the Morales government, as well as a new period of electoral campaigning: if the constitution passes, general elections will be held on December 6th of this year. As Alfredo Rada, the Minister of the Government, said in an interview with Telesur, “The government is optimistic and believes that this Sunday we will win a majority triumph with the “Yes” vote, and with this open a new chapter in Bolivian history.”

“Now we have made history,” President Evo Morales told supporters in La Paz. “This process of change cannot be turned back…neoliberalism will never return to Bolivia.”

If the constitution is approved in the January referendum, a new general election will take place in December of 2009.

Leading up to Congress’s approval, Morales participated in sections of a march from Caracollo in Oruro to La Paz, a distance of over 100 miles and involving an estimated 100,000 union members, activists, students, farmers and miners.

The march took place to pressure opposition members in Congress into backing the constitution and referendum. When marchers arrived in La Paz they packed the center of the city to historic levels. Some media outlets said the march, which stretched 15 kilometers, was the longest one ever in the capital.

“Those who have been kicked out to the chicken coop, those who have been hidden in the basement, are jailed no more,” Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera said of the approval of the constitution, according to the Associated Press.

The road to this new constitution has been a long, complicated and often violent one. One key event in this process was the July 2, 2006 election of assembly members to the constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution. Later, in December of 2007, the new constitution was passed in an assembly meeting in Oruro which was boycotted by opposition members.

Given Morales’ support across the country, this new constitution is expected to pass in the January 2009 referendum. “The public support expressed for [Morales] Monday, coming on top of the 67 percent vote of confidence he was given in the Aug. 10 recall referendum, make it clear that he is the most popular president in the last 26 years of democracy in Bolivia,” Franz Chavez reported in IPS News.

The draft constitution includes, among other things, changes to allow the redistribution of land and gas wealth to benefit the majority of the country, and give increased rights to indigenous people. Questions still exist regarding what was fully changed in this version of the constitution which led to opposition politicians supporting it. For example, it’s still unclear to what extent eastern provinces will be granted autonomy.

However, in what was perhaps Morales’ biggest concession to the opposition, a change was made to the constitution which prevents him from running for two additional terms, as an earlier draft of the constitution allowed. Under the new changes — if the constitution is approved in the referendum — Morales will run for his last consecutive term in general elections in December of 2009.

This move indicates that the opposition got at least some of what they wanted in negotiations, and that the Movement Toward Socialism, Morales’ political party, may have plans to diversify its central leadership.

Morales commented on these changes in a speech in La Paz, “Here we have new leaders who are rising up, new men and women leaders who are coming up like mushrooms to continue this process of change.”

We have to stop him.

A Trade Agreement Everyone Likes

Nearly two decades ago, under President Bush’s father, the U.S. began the Andean Trade Preference Act (ATPDEA). That program offers Bolivia and a handful of other Latin American nations reduced U.S. tarriffs, allowing them to develop new industries and jobs exporting products such as textiles and handmade furniture. For the U.S., the aim is to create opportunities for employment as an to alternative to growing coca for the illegal drug market.

In September, as part of the Bush administration’s diplomatic battles with Bolivian President Evo Morales, President Bush announced that he will use his executive authority to axe Bolivia out of those trade preferences.

The actual victims of President Bush’s move, however, won’t be President Morales, but women and men who eke out modest livings as weavers, jewelry-makers and carpenters, creating products for U.S. markets. The U.S. Congress knows that, and just two weeks ago approved a six-month extension for Bolivia. But yesterday in Washington President Bush repeated his intent to sidestep Congress and use his powers to cut Bolivian workers out of the program.

Listen to the Voices of the People who Will be Affected by Bush’s Plan

We profiled some of these workers for our new book, Dignity and Defiance, and after President Bush’s announcement last month we traveled out across Bolivia to ask them how his threat would affect their lives. Today we have posted a five-minute video of their own words on our website. We hope that you will take a moment to listen to what they have to say, here.

We also demanded and won the right to have their video testimony from Bolivia played next week in Washington when the Bush administation holds the public hearing required by law before he implements his plan. Administration officials told us that this will be the first time that video testimony like this has been played in such a proceeding.

On October 23 in Washington, those officials will hear directly from people like Joaquín Aquino, a carpenter in his 50s who hand-makes furniture for the U.S. market and Natalia Alanoca Condori, a 28-year-old mother who makes clothing sold in American stores. These are the people, along with thousands others like them, who will be the real victims of President Bush’s actions against Bolivia.

What You Can Do to Help

We have an opportunity and an obligation to these workers to take action and help stop President Bush’s plan. Here are three simple ways that you can help:

1. Share this request for action with others

All across the United States there are people and organizations that care about making U.S. policy in Latin America more just. Help us spread the word about the need to act on this now, by forwarding this email to others.

2. Sign the Democracy Center’s online petition

You can directly add your voice to the campaign to stop President Bush’s threat against Bolivian workers. In less than sixty seconds right now you can add your name to an online petition that the Democracy Center will be submitting as part of the formal public record against Bush’s anti-Bolivia policy. Sign that petition here. If your organization wants to join the petition please send us an email telling us so at: Bolivia@democracyctr.org.

We need your petition endorsements no later than midnight October 30.

3. Submit Formal Comments to the Bush Administration

If you or your organization want to do more, federal law guarantees the right to submit formal comments to the Bush administration’s Trade Representative. To do that you must submit your comments by e-mail no later than 5pm on October 31. Those comments must be sent in the form of an attachment and must include the subject line, “Review of Bolivia’s Designation as a Beneficiary Country Under the ATPA and ATPDEA.” The address is: FR0812@ustr.eop.gov. You must also include in the attachment a cover letter with your name, address, telephone number and e-mail address.

Even if we can’t make President Bush back down on his plan to put Bolivians out of work, taking action now helps build the case for Congress and the new President to reverse it. Those leaders need to see that people in the U.S. care about this issue.

Raising Up Voices from Latin America

President Bush’s move against the Bolivian people is just one more example of how we, as citizens, need to not only change leaders but also change the political winds that drive U.S. policy toward Latin America. To help do that the Democracy Center is launching a new campaign – Voices from Latin America.

Voices from Latin America marries new technology and old-fashioned organizing to build a bridge between citizens in the U.S. and Latin America. It is a platform from which we can work together to help educate one another and take joint action, like the one we are starting today on Bush’s assault on Bolivian workers. On the website you will find:

• Briefing papers (in English and Spanish) on some of the main issues in U.S./Latin America relations, on topics such as trade, the ‘U.S. war on drugs’, and immigration.
• Video testimonies from across the region in which people tell how U.S. policy affects their lives and their nations.
• How to get involved, and real examples from people who have.

As citizens we have to be educated and involved in U.S foreign policy in ways that we never have before. That includes making sure that the people in other countries who are so affected by what the U.S. does have their voices heard in the U.S. Help us do that by visiting the Voices from Latin America web site.

Bolivia

In Bolivia, the secessionists are well organized and more powerful than their Venezuelan and Ecuadorian counterparts. Emboldened by CONFILAR and after sufficient agitation, the largely white ruling class of this Andean nation had an epiphany: that autonomy was the only way to escape Morales’ redistribution of wealth. The first aggressive action taken by the oligarchy was on May 4th with the illegal autonomy referendum held in Santa Cruz Department. Morales called for abstention in this quasi-consultation plagued with violence perpetrated by the Santa Cruz Youth Union, and, if abstentions are counted as no votes, the voting was split almost exactly down the middle.

This set the stage for the August 10th recall referendum for the President, Vice President, and all of the departmental prefects, called with support from both the governing MAS (Movement for Socialism) and the opposition. While some counter-revolutionaries thought that this would strengthen their position, the referendum did just the opposite. The people showed tremendous support for Morales, who garnered over 67% of the vote. In addition to this socialist victory, the secessionist prefects of the Cochabamba and La Paz departments were overwhelmingly voted out of office. After this great outpouring of popular support, the long-awaited constitutional referendum was called for December 7th, as well as the elections for those who would replace the recalled prefects. Having been trounced in the arena of democracy and faced with the threats of a very progressive constitution and that, in all likelihood, the secessionist prefects will find themselves in the minority, the oligarchy turned to violence.

The fighting began when “strikes” enforced by the Santa Cruz Youth Union were called in the Media Luna (as the departments ruled by the secessionists are called); which coincided with the seizure or vandalizing of government institutions and later, on September 10th, an attack on an important pipeline; truly a “civil coup.” This attack finally prompted Morales to deploy the military to defend vital infrastructure, and the violence reached its peak on September 11th when 16 pro-Morales peasants were massacred by groups connected to prefect Leopoldo Fernandez, who was later arrested. Faced with insurmountable odds, the oligarchs agreed to negotiate and the situation de-escalated after September 12th when negotiations began. These will almost certainly turn out favorably for the popular MAS government, as the powerful social movements of Bolivia had provided muscle were Morales was forced to be soft and will continue their blockade of the rebellious provinces until the referendum on the new constitution is secure. This referendum will (seeing the broad support for Morales during the crisis and in the recall referendum) almost certainly pass and consolidate and invigorate the socialist transformation taking place.

Ecuador

In Ecuador, the leftist government of Rafael Correa is the product of years of struggle. From the revolution that overthrew Lucio Gutierrez, who betrayed the people with his capitulation to neo-liberalism, to the Alianza PAIS (Proud and Sovereign Fatherland Alliance, Correa’s party) campaign to defeat the notorious capitalist Alvaro Noboa for the presidency, the Ecuadorian people have shown that exploitation is not acceptable. To that end, Correa’s APAIS administration (although one might stop short of calling the government socialist) has pursued an anti-imperialist line primarily via the drafting of a new constitution.

Within three months of Correa’s taking office, a referendum was held on whether or not to proceed with the restructuring of the apparatus of state power. Overwhelmingly, the people approved by a margin of over 4 to 1. This was, naturally, followed by an election for the constituent assembly that would draft the new constitution. Held less than six months later, APAIS crushed the other parties, garnering nearly 70% of the vote. A few months of hard work later a new framework for a just, independent Ecuador was laid, ensuring social security, healthcare, education, the end of foreign military presence, and regional solidarity. All that was left was to rally the people for a final vote, the September 28th constitutional referendum. And this is when our friends from CONFILAR come in.

Jaime Nebot, the mayor of Guayaquil and therefore host of CONFILAR, became the de facto leader of the opposition to the constitution alongside the Catholic Church, which played a major role in a well coordinated misinformation campaign via a disgusting spectacle of manipulation playing to homophobic and misogynistic tendencies the Church itself instilled in some Ecuadorians. Opposing them were the social movements, toughened by the struggle against the corrupt governments of the past, carrying out an even more efficient mobilization campaign emphasizing the history-making significance of this consultation.

When September 28th finally rolled around, there was, in reality, two elections going on. One in Ecuador as a whole, determining the fate of the progressive constitution, and another in Guayas province, where the level of approval for the constitution would determine whether or not there was any future for the CONFILAR strategy. In both contests, the secessionists were defeated, with 64% support nationally and 51% support in Guayas. To give a final dose of legitimacy to the new order, a general election will be held in a few months, and from there on it’s easy to see Correa radicalizing just as Chavez did after the passing of Venezuela’s progressive, 1999 constitution. Although this may be too bold, at present it seems that the oligarchy will have to de-emphasize its secessionist tactics.

Venezuela

Certainly more developed than the Ecuadorian secessionists, but less so than their Bolivian counterparts, a CONFILAR-originated quasi-movement for autonomy has reared its head in the oil-rich state of Zulia, whose governor, Manuel Rosales, is a long time opponent of Chavez and was complicit in the 2002 coup attempt. In Venezuela, the opposition forces (which includes the media in its near entirety) are arguably the most radical and definitely the most hardened and manipulative. With tremendous popular support, Hugo Chavez and PSUV, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (in one incarnation or another), have won every election they faced with the exception of the most recent, the 2007 constitutional referendum. Through a combination of insufficient agitation by the Bolivarian forces and the vehement anti-Chavez attitude of the media, the constitution was defeated. The oligarchs used this momentum to attempt to construct a two-pronged counter-revolution: electoral organizing (backed by US government slush funds like USAID) and violence (carried out by thugs or reactionary officers).

The electoral organizing (if spending NED grants can be considered organizing) is focused on the November 23rd regional elections. Currently, 21 of the 23 states have Bolivarian governors. However, up to seven of these positions could be lost, and especially critical is control of the governorship Zulia. The construction of socialism could be totally put on hold or even begin to reverse should the oligarchy be able to multiply its momentum. On the other hand, should PSUV be able to hold on to the vast majority of states, the weaknesses of the revolution could be rectified.

Undeniably, Chavez and PSUV have vast popular support, so while the regional elections may strengthen the opposition, it will certainly not be an outright victory. As such, violence is a key tactic of the desperate counter-revolutionaries. At first, this was confined to bands of thugs, most notable of these is the March 13th Movement (M13). For example, a little over two months ago M13 (consistent with their actions before the 2007 referendum) instigated a riot in the city of Merida. However, these paramilitary actions have proved insufficient. No, the oligarchy has no other alternative than to take the route of Pinochet, Banzer, and Stroessner.

On September 11th, the 35th anniversary of Pinochet’s seizure of power from the Allende government, it was announced that a coup was being planned involving officers both presently and formerly serving as well as media tycoons Miguel Henrique Otero and Alberto Federico Ravell, heads of El Nacional newspaper and Globovision channel, respectively. Using an F-16, the plotters would bomb Miraflores (the presidential palace) or shoot down Chavez’s plane with an AT-4 rocket launcher. Luckily, yet another usurpation of state power was averted through excellent intelligence gathering. However, even if a putsch had occurred, the people would have, just like they’ve done before, came out in force to re-establish democracy and sovereignty. It’s essential that the popular support that would drive such an action is maintained, and this means reaffirming the Bolivarian government’s dedication to entirely removing capitalism, possible only with a victory on November 23rd.

From the tremendous show of support for the socialist government in Bolivia, to the successful resistance against a reactionary civil coup, the establishment of a starting point for radical change in Ecuador, and courageous resistance against imperialist and capitalist influence in Venezuela, we may very well be seeing the defining moment in the fight for South American liberation. However, we should be careful not to assume a triumphant attitude in the light of these recent victories. Anti-imperialists of all nations (especially in the United States) should fight on and redouble their efforts to not only achieve national sovereignty by fighting Western (or more accurately, Northern) lackeys in the two elections to come but to consolidate this freedom via Latin American integration along socialist lines.

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.

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.

While the Bolivian government has used state repression against peasant squatters and striking miners, it remained a passive, impotent spectator to the right-wing seizure of the Constitutional Assembly, the major airfields in Santa Cruz (forcing the President to flee back to his palace), suspending all public transportation, federal tax collection and public investment and projects. Worse still, paramilitary fascist gangs have repeatedly insulted, beaten, stripped and paraded ethnic Indian peasant supporters of President Morales through the main streets and plazas of the capital cities of the provinces they control.

Despite winning nearly 70% of the national vote in the recall election of August 10, 2008, Morales has not taken a single measure to counter the fascist seizure of regional power – continuing to plead for dialogue and compromise, as the far right gathers strength and prepares to engage in violent civil warfare against the poor and indigenous Bolivians. The Bolivian government expelled the US Ambassador, Phillip Goldberg, only after the US Embassy actively backed the far right’s regional power grab after almost 3 years of open financing and public collaboration with the secessionists. Since the Morales regime did not break relations with Washington, it is likely that a new Ambassadorial appointee will soon arrive to continue Goldberg’s active plotting with the far right.

The contrast between the ignominious passivity of the President and the aggressive violent political putsch of the fascist right is striking. The centerpiece of the violent uprising and the successful seizure of fascist power is located in five regional departments: Santa Cruz, Pando, Beni, Tarija and Chuquisaca, which are grouped in a regional mass organization, the National Democratic Council (CONALDE). This includes local prefects, mayors, business leaders and heads of landowner organizations backed by gangs of armed right-wing street thugs in a variety of organizations, the most important being the Cruceño Youth Union, which specializes in degrading, beating and even killing unarmed Indian supporters of Morales.

Prelude to the Civil War and Seizure of Power

The civil war and the rightist seizure of power in the five departments follows a sequence of events resulting in a gradual recovery of political and social power and the subsequent launching of a multiplicity of offensive moves from within the governmental institutions and increasingly through extra-parliamentary direct action. This has resulted in an escalation from sporadic assaults to systematic violence against individuals, organizations, public institutions and strategic economic resources. In this most recent phase, the opposition has shed its ‘legalistic’ institutional cover and embraced the violent seizure of state institutions and openly declared their secession from the central government, challenging the authority of the government to govern and to exercise its legal monopoly on police power.

From Popular Power to Neo-Fascist Seizure of Power

The starting point of the secessionist-neo-fascist uprising begin in 2005 when, to all intents and purposes, a mass worker-peasant-Indian-miner uprising overthrew the incumbent neo-liberal regime and dominated the streets, presenting all the ingredients for a new revolutionary government.
Under the leadership of Evo Morales and the former NGO organizer, Garcia Linera and their electoral party, the Movement to Socialism (MAS), the mass movement was turned from the streets, autonomous activity and social revolution toward electoral politics. Evo Morales was elected President in December 2005 and proceded to sign political pacts with the right-wing parties to share institutional power in pursuit of a centrist political-economic program. This involved joint ventures with all mineral-extracting multinational corporations (excluding expropriations and nationalization) minimalist token land reform programs (never implemented) and tight fiscal policies (excluding income redistribution and limiting wage and salary increases to the rate of inflation).

By the middle of 2006, the far Right had recovered from its electoral defeat and through its presence in the newly elected Constitutional Assembly effectively maneuvered to block the passage of the new Constitution. The government focused exclusively on its political reform agenda, consolidated its joint ventures with all the major gas and oil multinationals, renewed unfavorable gas contracts with Brazil (paying Bolivia well below world market prices) and demobilized the mass movements through the MAS party’s control over urban and rural leaders (with the exception of the miners).

Beginning in late 2006 and increasingly throughout 2007, the neo-fascist right relied on its extra-parliamentary shock troops to assault pro-government representatives in the Constitutional Assembly, to organize road blockages and to assert their independence (‘autonomy’) from the national government. The Bolivian government rejected any resort to popular mobilization demanded by the more radicalized sectors of the miners in Oruro and Potosi. Instead it retreated in the face of the institutional pressure of the neo-fascist right, offering concessions on the write-up of the Constitution. Morales made a series of strategic concessions on the size of land-holdings exempt from land reform, ceding judicial and fiscal powers to the fascist regional rulers and conceded control of the roads, highways and plazas to gangs of well armed neo-fascists.

Throughout 2008, the neo-fascist right continued its ‘march through the institutions’ consolidating its control over local and regional government and claims over revenues from strategic economic sectors – all of which are located in the contested regions. By the middle of 2008, the right openly asserted their secessionist claims and proceeded to create parallel police, custom, fiscal and other agencies of government. The secessionist regime gave license to the business, landlord and urban middle class elite. Through their leadership of the self-styled ‘civic organizations’ and their armed enforcers, they proceeded to intimidate and assault thousands of government supporters, peasants, Indian activists, officials and pro-government business owners, street venders, school teachers, health workers and other public employees. The neo-fascist strategy for seizing state power was based on accumulating forces through public demonstrations of power, massive meetings, and lockouts to shut down urban businesses. Any supporters of the national government who did not abide by their strike calls suffered cruel public punishment including beatings and the public humiliation of Indian and peasant Morales supporters in the urban plazas where they were stripped and whipped to the jeers of mostly white, European crowds.

From Protest to Seizure of Power

Having experienced only repeated anemic and inconsequential protests from the Morales-Garcia regime, in August 2008 the neo-fascists launched a full-scale blitz, giving free rein and financial and political backing to a large-scale assault on all major federal installations and agencies and trade union and peasant association offices in the five departments which they controlled. They seized control of the airfields denying landing rights to any government or government-related official, including President Morales and Vice President Garcia and any visiting dignitaries.

The trigger event for the launch of the neo-fascist ‘civil war’ from the top and the violent seizure of power was the electoral victory of Morales-Garcia in the August 8 referendum – where Morales got 67% of the national vote. The result made it clear that the right could not return to national power via elections when their only electoral majority was to be found in the departments they ruled. But even in the 5 right-wing controlled departments, Morales received approximately 40% of the vote, a strong minority in the cities and a majority in many rural areas among the peasantry.

The capitalist class, as elsewhere throughout history, when faced with even some moderate property reforms, but especially in the face of a cowardly, retreating and conciliatory regime, has discarded constitutional methods of opposition. They attached themselves to the neo-fascist local officials, ‘civic’ leaders and even the violent gangs of wealthy youth in Santa Cruz. Morales refused to order the police and military to defend public buildings in the face of arsonist and violent assaults, which destroyed public utilities, telecommunications, customs, accounting, land survey offices, official files and state records. On the contrary, Morales forced them to withdraw.

In Pando and Tarifa the oil and gas pipelines were blown up, causing extensive damage and costing millions of dollars in lost state revenues. Finally on September 11, 2008 over a hundred pro-Morales peasants were killed or wounded in Pando in an ambush organized by armed vigilantes supported by the department prefect Leopoldo Fernandez and his followers in the ‘civic’ organizations.

The systematic destruction of all signs and symbols of Federal government authority and the killing and intimidation of peasant-worker supporters of Morales ushered in the final stage of this 3-year process of secession, ethnic-racial repression and the imposition of a new fascist political order.

While the neo-fascist-led civil war proceeded without national government opposition throughout the 5 provinces, Morales’ ministers adopted bizarre postures: Garcia-Linera rationalized the regime’s impotence by dismissing the seizure of power by the neo-fascist apparatus of the 5 departments as ‘acts of vandals by a gang of 500 thugs’. As Bolivia burned, the Interior Minister Alfredo Rada and the ‘Defense’ Minister Walker San Miguel vainly tried to minimize the illegal neo-fascist takeover of almost half of the country with 80% of the national income by reducing the impending civil war to acts of ‘violent delinquent vandalism in different regions of the east and south of the country’.

On September 12, 2008, Morales apparently oblivious to the massive and sustained assault and takeover actually convoked an meeting with the neo-fascist prefects for a ‘dialogue without any pre-conditions’. In other words, Morales absolved them of the massacre and brutalization of over a hundred peasants and ignored the economic sabotage, which accompanied their seizure and destruction of oil, gas and other essential revenue-producing sectors. Needless to say the neo-fascists met with Morales without conceding a single issue. In fact the only reason they met at all is because Morales was finally forced to declare a ’state of siege’ in Pando – subsequent to the killing of 30 peasants by armed vigilantes under the control of Pando’s Prefect Leopoldo Fernandez.

The troops had to clear the airfield of right-wing thugs who had previously prevented the landing of a government transport plane. The other 4 departments under neo-fascists control were not affected by the declaration of a state of siege. In Pando, with the military presence now guarding public buildings and oil and gas installations, the government finally decided to arrest the right-wing prefect for his role in the massacres.

A Turn Toward Good Government?

President Morales finally ordered the US Ambassador Phillip Goldberg to leave the country after 2 years of direct intervention in the planning, financing and backing of the organized neo-fascist class warfare and seizure of regional power. Over $125 million in AID funds financed almost exclusively the neo-fascist ‘civic’ organizations and through them the armed racial vigilante ‘Santa Cruz Union of Youth’. Morales’ long-awaited declaration of a state of siege only came about under pressure of his restless supporters among the peasant and urban mass movements who began to organize and arm themselves independently of the impotent federal government. Morales also responded to pressure and from Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela and other countries to end the violence. Brazil and Argentina were affected by the disruption of vital natural gas shipments from Bolivia. Even constitutional right-wing regimes, like Bachelet of Chile and Alain Garcia of Peru, backed Morales and indirectly pressured him to act for fear of the precedent of a successful violent right-wing secessionist seizure of regional power might set for their own countries.

Conclusion

The state of siege and the expulsion of the US Ambassador can be seen as much-delayed positive moves to reassert Bolivian sovereignty and to defend the constitutional order. But what next?

The neo-fascists have seized regional governmental power. They still control 80% of Bolivia’s key economic resources. The majority of the population who live under rightist rule are without the protection of the central government. Only a few of the oil and natural gas pipelines have been temporarily secured by federal troops. Morales has relied on the military to defend his regime, sidelining, marginalizing and demobilizing the emerging popular mass self-defense movements. The reliability of the Bolivian Army is not guaranteed. By becoming key to the defense of the Morales regime against the neo-fascist right, the armed forces can assume broader powers, as arbiters of the future of the country. Morales is relatively safe, holed up in the Andes; but his followers in the 5 departments in the east continue to face the repressive rule of neo-fascists and their organized vigilante gangs. Equally important, Morales, faced with violent resistance from the far right, shows every intention of making new concessions on revenue and power sharing with the ruling elite. He is open to making even greater concessions to the one hundred big landowners, media moguls, bankers and agro-exporters who are pushing for secession.

Repeatedly, over the past 3 years, the Indians, peasants, miners, urban slum-dwellers and public employees have organized and fought for land reform, worker-controlled nationalization of the mines and oil fields and decent salaries and wages. What they have gotten from Morales is a government of fiscal austerity, economic agreements with foreign extractive multinational corporations and huge untouchable agribusiness complexes. Despite having a political mandate to rule, Morales has made a succession of failed efforts to conciliate with the irreconcilable economic and regional elites. If there is one lesson that Morales can learn from the peasants who have been degraded and horsewhipped in the streets of Santa Cruz, the trade unionists who have been burned out of their headquarters and homes in Pando and the street vendors who have been driven from the markets in Tarija, is that you cannot ‘make deals’ with fascists. You don’t defeat fascism through elections and concessions to their big property-owning paymasters.

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.

This upcoming recall vote on the president, vice president and eight of nine departmental governors is to take place at a time of historic change for the country. Half way through a five year term in office, Morales is applying social programs aimed at fighting poverty and inequality, and developing positive relationships with Latin America’s leftist leaders. At the same time, a series of regional disputes in Bolivia over departmental autonomy, the new constitution and wealth from the partially-nationalized gas industry continue to put the country’s stability at risk.

Since May 4, autonomy referendums have been approved by voters in the departments of Santa Cruz, Tarija, Beni, Pando and Chuquisaca. These votes were organized by the country’s right wing politicians and business elite to perpetuate neoliberal policies, resist the redistribution of land and natural gas wealth, and weaken the Morales government. Though the right points to these victories at the ballot box as proof of their mandate, the referendums are not legally recognized by the Bolivian Electoral Court, the Organization of American States, the European Union, President Morales or other major leaders throughout the region.

In addition, all of the referendums were marked by high levels of voter intimidation and abstention — Morales urged his supporters to abstain from voting. In Pando, for example, the combined number of “no” votes and abstentions was 16,303, while the “yes” votes totaled only 12,671. In other departments, Morales supporters were kidnapped, tortured and beaten by right wing thugs in an attempt to suppress the anti-autonomy vote.

In spite of the questionable legitimacy of these referendums, the votes illustrate the growing polarization in the country. In another setback to the Morales administration, opposition prefect Savina Cuéllar, was elected in Chuquisaca on June 29. She was running against MAS candidate Walter Valda in a vote that took place in tandem with a successful autonomy referendum. However, the opposition’s apparent momentum is likely to be put in check by the August 10 recall vote.

In an attempt to break up a political impasse in December 2007, and in response to demands from the opposition, Morales proposed the recall bill which was passed on May 8, 2008 by the opposition-controlled Senate. The recall bill states that if the president, vice president and governors do not receive both a higher percentage of votes, and actual number of votes, in the recall referendum than what they received in the 2005 election, they will lose their position. Therefore, it’s possible to win the necessary percentage of votes, but lose the necessary number of votes, thus losing the recall vote. If Morales and vice president Alvaro Garcia Linera lose, they have to hold new elections within 90-120 days. If the governors lose, they are to be replaced by an interim governor of Morales’ choosing until the next election. The recall vote on the governors will take place in eight out of the nine provinces; Chuquisaca won’t participate as Cuéllar was just recently elected governor there.

The results of the recall vote could vary widely. Polls indicate that Morales and Linera will win; they will likely be bolstered by new voters in rural areas voting for the first time after a massive voter registration drive led by the government. Morales is also likely to benefit from the fact that many voters and social organizations, in spite of any criticisms they have of his administration, will likely back him in a vote in which the alternative is essentially the right wing. As an analysis article on the Bolivian news publication BolPress explained, “[V]arious popular organizations have initiated a campaign to ratify Morales and kick out the oppositional governors, not because they consider that the actual leader [Morales] is managing the government well, it’s because the oligarchy’s return to power would imply an end to the possibility of transformation within the socio-economic structures of the country.”

Though the recall vote may invigorate Morales’ mandate, and perhaps weaken the right, it’s unlikely to resolve many of the disputes tearing the political landscape apart. The question of whether the executive and legislative powers will be based in Sucre or La Paz remains a regional controversy. The new draft of the constitution, passed in December 2007 by an assembly boycotted by opposition parties, still awaits approval in a national referendum which the opposition-controlled Senate is blocking.

Some opposition governors and their supporters will likely not respect the results of the recall vote, or even participate in it at all. Vice president Linera recently told reporters that “They will probably boycott some regions, those where they know will lose. I believe they are laying the grounds for some sort of boycott on August 10 to create conflicts.” It is also not entirely clear if the recall vote will proceed at all. Magistrate Silvia Salame, the only judge on Bolivia’s Constitutional Tribunal Court, has called on the National Electoral Court to postpone the recall vote until challenges to the vote’s legality are considered. Government officials in the Morales administration said they would ignore her decision because the Tribunal requires three votes, not one, to make a decision. Salame is on the only judge serving on the court at this time. In response, Bolivian Electoral Court President José Luis Exeni stated the recall vote would proceed as planned.

While debates over the recall vote go on, controversy continues to surround how to best use Bolivia’s gas and oil wealth. Right wing governors and civic leaders in Santa Cruz, Tarija, Beni and Pando are demanding more funding from the profits of the oil and gas industry, which was partially nationalized by the Morales administration on May 1, 2006. Opposition leaders denounce that the Morales government redirected $166 million dollars from oil and gas tax revenue into a new pension plan that currently gives $315 dollars per year to Bolivians over 60 years old. Right wing governors have threatened to go on a hunger strike on August 4 in protest of the policy. Yet what the opposition doesn’t acknowledge in their pleas is that their departments now receive many times more funding from the gas industry this year than they did in 2005 thanks to the Morales administration’s nationalization policies and renegotiations with private and foreign gas companies.

Meanwhile, Washington’s influence in the coca-producing Chapare region of Bolivia is waning, and Morales’ is strengthening his own relations with other Latin American leaders as he presses forward with progressive economic and development policies.

On June 24, Coca growers in Bolivia’s Chapare region decided to expel the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). In the Chapare USAID has, among other activities, historically tried to weaken the impact and political power of coca unions. The Morales administration has also accused USAID of working to undermine the current government and strengthen the right wing opposition. (For more information on Washington’s work in Bolivia, see the article “Undermining Bolivia.”) On July 14, Morales, a former coca farmer himself, said, “USAID is managing a lot of money that’s being used to confuse the population, they want to divide and create problems…”

At the same time, regional support for the Morales administration’s policies is on the rise. Venezuela and Cuba have sent doctors and teachers to rural areas in Bolivia. Cuba is building dozens of hospitals in the country, and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said his nation would continue to support the expansion of Bolivia’s gas industry: 73% of Bolivian gas now goes to Brazil. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez recently announced his government will give $883 million dollars in aid to improve and expand the output of Bolivia’s oil and gas industry. Thanks in part to increased revenue from the gas industry, Morales said that $1.8 million dollars would be contributed to the development of 21 potable water projects in Santa Cruz.

Lula and Chavez recently pledged to collectively contribute $530 million dollars to help with the development of highways linking La Paz, Beni and Pando. The collaboration supports Morales in his efforts against pro-autonomy governors. Chavez said of the highway plan, “We’re against those who want to tear Bolivia apart.”

Back in Sicaya, where Morales said he would return to coca farming if he lost the recall vote, the president stated that now, “the vote serves not only to name authorities, but also to revoke their mandate. We are talking about expanding democracy.” Yet recent history shows that democracy in Bolivia can manifest itself in unpredictable ways.

Throughout modern imperial history, ‘Divide and Conquer’ has been the essential ingredient in allowing relatively small and resource-poor European countries to conquer nations vastly larger in size and populations and richer in natural resources. It is said that for every British officer in India, there were fifty Sikhs, Gurkhas, Muslims and Hindus in the British Colonial Army. The European conquest of Africa and Asia was directed by white officers, fought by black, brown and yellow soldiers so that white capital could exploit colored workers and peasants. Regional, ethnic, religious, clan, tribal, community, village and other differences were politicized and exploited allowing imperial armies to conquer warring peoples. In recent decades, the US empire builders have become the grand masters of ‘divide and conquer’ strategies throughout the world. By the 1970’s, the CIA made a turn from promoting the dubious virtues of capitalism and democracy, to linking up with, financing and directing, religious, ethnic and regional elites against national regimes, independent or hostile to US world empire building.

The key to US military empire building follows two principles: direct military invasions and fomenting separatist movements, which can lead to military confrontation.

Twenty-first century empire building has seen the extended practice of both principles in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, China (Tibet), Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Somalia, Sudan, Burma and Palestine — any country in which the US cannot secure a stable client regime, it resorts to financing and promoting separatist organizations and leaders using ethnic, religious and regional pretexts.

Consistent with traditional empire building principles, Washington only supports separatists in countries that refuse to submit to imperial domination and opposes separatists who resist the empire and its allies. In other words, imperial ideologues are neither ‘hypocrites’ nor resort to ‘double standards’ (as they are accused by liberal critics); they publicly uphold the ‘Empire first’ principle as their defining criteria for evaluating separatist movements and granting or denying support. In contrast, many seemingly progressive critics of empire make universal statements in favor of the ‘right to self-determination’ and even extend it to the most rancid, reactionary, imperial-sponsored ‘separatist groups’ with catastrophic results. Independent nations and their people, who oppose US-backed separatists, are bombed to oblivion and charged with ‘war crimes’. People, who oppose the separatists and who reside in the ‘new state’, are killed or driven into exile. The ‘liberated people’ suffer from the tyranny and impoverishment induced by the US-backed separatists and many are forced to immigrate to other countries for economic survival.

Few if any of the progressive critics of the USSR and supporters of the separatist republics have ever publicly expressed second thoughts, let alone engaged in self-critical reflections, even in the face of decades long socio-economic and political catastrophes in the secessionist states. Yet it was and is the case that these self-same progressives today, who continue to preach high moral principles to those who question and reject some separatist movements because they originate and grow out of efforts to extend the US empire.

Washington’s success in co-opting so-called progressive liberals in support of separatist movements soon to be new imperial clients in recent decades is long and the consequences for human rights are ugly.

Most European and US progressives supported the following:

1. US-backed Bosnian fundamentalists, Croatian neo-fascists and Kosova-Albanian terrorists, leading to ethnic cleansing and the conversion of their once sovereign states into US military bases, client regimes and economic basket cases — totally destroying the multinational Yugoslavian welfare state.

2. The US funded and armed overseas Afghan Islamic fundamentalists who destroyed a secular, reformist, gender-equal Afghan regime, carrying out vast anti-feudal campaigns involving both men and women, a comprehensive agrarian reform and constructing extensive health and educational programs. As a result of US-Islamic tribal military successes, millions were killed, displaced and dispossessed and fanatical medieval anti-Communist tribal warlords destroyed the unity of the country.

3. The US invasion destroyed Iraq’s modern, secular, nationalist state and advanced socio-economic system. During the occupation, US backing of rival religious, tribal, clan and ethnic separatist movements and regimes led to the expulsion of over 90% of its modern scientific and professional class and the killing of over 1 million Iraqis… all in the name of ousting a repressive regime and above all in destroying a state opposed to Israeli oppression of Palestinians.

Clearly US military intervention promotes separatism as a means of establishing a regional ‘base of support’. Separatism facilitates setting up a minority puppet regime and works to counter neighboring countries opposed to the depredations of empire. In the case of Iraq, US-backed Kurdish separatism preceded the imperial campaign to isolate an adversary, create international coalitions to pressure and weaken the central government. Washington highlights regime atrocities as human rights cases to feed global propaganda campaigns. More recently this is evident in the US-financed ‘Tibetan’ theocratic protests at China.

Separatists are backed as potential terrorist shock troops in attacking strategic economic sectors and providing real or fabricated ‘intelligence’ as is the case in Iran among the Kurds and other ethnic minority groups.

Why Separatism?

Empire builders do not always resort to separatist groups, especially when they have clients at the national levels in control of the state. It is only when their power is limited to groups, territorially or ethnically concentrated, that the intelligence operatives resort to and promote ‘separatist’ movements. US backed separatist movements follow a step-by-step process, beginning with calls for ‘greater autonomy’ and ‘decentralization’, essentially tactical moves to gain a local political power base, accumulate economic revenues, repress anti-separatist groups and local ethnic/religious, political minorities with ties to the central government (as in the oppression of the Christian communities in northern Iraq repressed by the Kurdish separatists for their long ties with the Central Baath Party or the Roma of Kosova expelled and killed by the Kosova Albanians because of their support of the Yugoslav federal system). The attempt to forcibly usurp local resources and the ousting of local allies of the central government results in confrontations and conflict with the legitimate power of the central government. It is at this point that external (imperial) support is crucial in mobilizing the mass media to denounce repression of ‘peaceful national movements’ merely ‘exercising their right to self-determination’. Once the imperial mass media propaganda machine touches the noble rhetoric of ‘self-determination’ and ‘autonomy’, ‘decentralization’ and ‘home rule’, the great majority of US and European funded NGO’s jump on board, selectively attacking the government’s effort to maintain a stable unified nation-state. In the name of ‘diversity’ and a ‘pluri-ethnic state’, the Western-bankrolled NGO’s provide a moralist ideological cover to the pro-imperialist separatists. When the separatists succeed and murder and ethnically cleanse the ethnic and religious minorities linked to the former central state, the NGO’s are remarkably silent or even complicit in justifying the massacres as ‘understandable over-reaction to previous repression’. The propaganda machine of the West, even gloats over the separatist state expulsion of hundreds of thousands of ethnic minorities — as in the case of the Serbs and Roma from Kosova and the Krijina region of Croatia… with headlines blasting — “Serbs on the Run: Serves Them Right!” followed by photos of NATO troops overseeing the ‘transfer’ of destitute families from their ancestral villages and towns to squalid camps in a bombed out Serbia. And the triumphant Western politicians mouthing pieties at the massacres of Serb civilians by the KLA, as when former German Foreign Minister “Joschka” Fischer (Green Party) mourned, “I understand your (the KLA’s) pain, but you shouldn’t throw grenades at (ethnic Serb) school children.”

The shift from ‘autonomy’ within a federal state to an ‘independent state’ is based on the aid channeled and administered by the imperial state to the ‘autonomous region’, thus strengthening its ‘de facto’ existence as a separate state. This has clearly occurred in the Kurdish run northern Iraq ‘no fly zone’ and now ‘autonomous region’ from 1991 to the present.

The same principle of self-determination demanded by the US and its separatist client is denied to ‘minorities’ within the realm. Instead, the US propaganda media refer to them as ‘agents’ or ‘trojan horses’ of the central government.

Strengthened by imperial ‘foreign aid’, and business links with US and EU MNCs, backed by local para-military and quasi-military police forces (as well as organized criminal gangs), the autonomous regime declares its ‘independence’. Shortly thereafter, it is recognized by its imperial patrons. After ‘independence’, the separatist regime grants territorial concessions and building sites for US military bases. Investment privileges are granted to the imperial patron, severely compromising ‘national’ sovereignty.

The army of local and international NGO’s rarely raise any objections to this process of incorporating the separatist entity into the empire, even when the ‘liberated’ people object. In most cases the degree of ‘local governance’ and freedom of action of the ‘independent’ regime is less than it was when it was an autonomous or federal region in the previous unified nationalist state.

Not infrequently ‘separatist’ regimes are part of irredentist movements linked to counterparts in other states. When cross national irredentist movements challenge neighboring states which are also targets of the US empire builders, they serve as launching pads for US low intensity military assaults and Special Forces terrorist activities.

For example, almost all of the Kurdish separatist organizations draw a map of ‘Greater Kurdistan’ which covers a third of Southeastern Turkey, Northern Iraq, a quarter of Iran, parts of Syria and wherever else they can find a Kurdish enclave. US commandos operate alongside Kurdish separatists terrorizing Iranian villages (in the name of self-determination; Kurds with powerful US military backing have seized and govern Northern Iraq and provide mercenary Peshmerga troops to massacre Iraqi Arab civilian in cities and towns resisting the US occupation in Central, Western and Southern regions. They have engaged in the forced displacement of non-Kurds (including Arabs, Chaldean Christians, Turkman and others) from so-called Iraqi Kurdistan and the confiscation of their homes, businesses and farms. US-backed Kurdish separatists have created conflicts with the neighboring Turkish government, as Washington tries to retain its Kurdish clients for their utility in Iraq, Iran and Syria without alienating its strategic NATO client, Turkey. Nevertheless Turkish-Kurdish separatist activists in the PKK have lauded the US for, what they term, ‘progressive colonialism’ in effectively dismembering Iraq and forming the basis for a Kurdish state.

The US decision to collaborate with the Turkish military, or at least tolerate its military attacks on certain sectors of the Iraq-based Kurdish separatists, the PKK, is part of its global policy of prioritizing strategic imperial alliances and allies over and against any separatist movement which threatens them. Hence, while the US supports the Kosova separatists against Serbia, it opposes the separatists in Abkhazia fighting against its client in the Republic of Georgia. While the US supported Chechen separatist against the Moscow government, it opposes Basque and Catalan separatists in their struggle against Washington’s NATO ally, Spain. While Washington has been bankrolling the Bolivian separatists headed by the oligarchs of Santa Cruz against the central government in La Paz, it supports the Chilean government’s repression of the Mapuche Indian claims to land and resources in south-central Chile.

Clearly ‘self-determination’ and ‘independence’ are not the universal defining principle in US foreign policy, nor has it ever been, as witness the US wars against Indian nations, secessionist southern slaveholders and yearly invasions of independent Latin American, Asian and African states. What guides US policy is the question of whether a separatist movement, its leaders and program furthers empire building or not? The inverse question however is infrequently raised by so-called progressives, leftists or self-described anti-imperialists: Does the separatist or independence movement weaken the empire and strengthen anti-imperialist forces or not? If we accept that the over-riding issue is defeating the multi-million killing machine called US imperialism, then it is legitimate to evaluate and support, as well as reject, some independence movements and not others. There is nothing ‘hypocritical’ or ‘inconvenient’ in raising higher principles in making these political choices. Clearly Hitler justified the invasion of Czechoslovakia in the name of defending Sudetenland separatists, just like a series of US presidents have justified the partition of Iraq in the name of defending the Kurds, or Sunnis or Shia or whatever tribal leaders lend themselves to US empire building.

What defines anti-imperialist politics is not abstract principles about ‘self-determination’ but defining exactly who is the ‘self’; in other words, what political forces linked to what international power configuration are making what political claim for what political purpose. If, as in Bolivia today, a rightwing racist, agro-business oligarchy seizes control of the most fertile and energy rich region, containing 75% of the country’s natural resources, in the name of ‘self-determination’ and autonomy, expelling and brutalizing impoverished Indians in the process — on what basis can the left or anti-imperialist movement oppose it, if not because the class, race and national content of that claim is antithetical to an even more important principle — popular sovereignty based on the democratic principles of majority rule and equal access to public wealth?

Separatism in Latin America: Bolivia, Venezuela and Ecuador

In recent years the US backed candidates have won and lost national election in Latin America. Clearly the US has retained hegemony over the governing elites in Mexico, Colombia, Central America, Peru, Chile, Uruguay and some of the Caribbean island states. In states where the electorate has backed opponents of US dominance, such as Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and Nicaragua, Washington’s influence is dependent on regional, provincial and locally elected officials. It is premature to state, as the Council for Foreign Relations claims, that ‘US hegemony in Latin America is a thing of the past.’ One only has to read the economic and political record of the close and growing military and economic ties between Washington and the Calderon regime in Mexico, the Garcia regime in Peru, Bachelet in Chile and Uribe in Colombia to register the fact that US hegemony still prevails in important regions of Latin America. If we look beyond the national governmental level, even in the non-hegemonized states, US influence still is a potent factor shaping the political behavior of powerful right-wing business, financial and regional political elites in Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and Argentina. By the end of May 2008, US backed regionalist movements were on the offensive, establishing a de facto secessionist regime in Santa Cruz in Bolivia. In Argentina, the agro-business elite has organized a successful nationwide production and distribution lockout, backed by the big industrial, financial and commercial confederations, against an export tax promoted by the ‘center-left’ Kirchner government. In Colombia, the US is negotiating with the paramilitary President Uribe over the site of a military base on the frontier with Venezuela’s oil rich state of Zulia, which happens to be ruled by the only anti-Chavez governor in power, a strong promoter of ‘autonomy’ or secession. In Ecuador, the Mayor of Guayaquil, backed by the right wing mass media and the discredited traditional political parties have proposed ‘autonomy’ from the central government of President Rafael Correa. The process of imperial driven nation dismemberment is very uneven because of the different degrees of political power relations between the central government and the regional secessionists. The right wing secessionists in Bolivia have advanced the furthest — actually organizing and winning a referendum and declaring themselves an independent governing unit with the power to collect taxes, formulate foreign economic policy and create its own police force.

The success of the Santa Cruz secessionist is due to the political incapacity and total incompetence of the Evo Morales-Garcia Linera regime which promoted ‘autonomy’ for the scores of impoverished Indian ‘nations’ (or indianismo) and ended up laying the groundwork for the white racist oligarchs to seize the opportunity to establish their own ‘separatist’ power base. As the separatist gained control over the local population, they intimidated the ‘indians’ and trade union supporters of the Morales regime, violently sabotaged the constitutional assembly, rejected the constitution, while constantly extracting concession for the flaccid and conciliatory central government of the Evo Morales. While the separatists trashed the constitution and used their control over the major means of production and exports to recruit five other provinces, forming a geographic arc of six provinces, and influence in two others in their drive to degrade the national government. The Morales-Garcia Linera ‘indianista’ regime, largely made up of mestizos formerly employed in NGOs funded from abroad, never used its formal constitutional power and monopoly of legitimate force to enforce constitutional order and outlaw and prosecute the secessionists’ violation of national integrity and rejection of the democratic order.

Morales never mobilized the country, the majority of popular organizations in civil society, or even called on the military to put down the secessionists. Instead he continued to make impotent appeals for ‘dialog’, for compromises in which his concessions to oligarch self-rule only confirmed their drive for regional power. As a case study of failed governance, in the face of a reactionary separatist threat to the nation, the Morales-Garcia Linera regime represents an abject failure to defend popular sovereignty and the integrity of the nation.

The lessons of failed governance in Bolivia stand as a grim reminder to Chavez in Venezuela and Correa in Ecuador: Unless they act with full force of the constitution to crush the embryonic separatist movements before they gain a power base, they will also face the break-up of their countries. The biggest threat is in Venezuela, where the US and Colombian militaries have built bases on the frontier bordering the Venezuelan state of Zulia, infiltrated commandos and paramilitary forces into the province, and see the takeover of the oil-rich province as a beach-head to deprive the central government of its vital oil revenues and destabilize the central government.

Several years into a Washington-backed and financed separatist movement in Bolivia, a few progressive academics and pundits have taken notice and published critical commentaries. Unfortunately these articles lack any explanatory context, and offer little understanding of how Latin American ‘separatism’ fits into long-term, large-scale US empire building strategy over the past quarter of a century.

Today the US-promoted separatist movements in Latin American are actively being pursued in at least three Latin American counties. In Bolivia, the ‘media luna’ or ‘half-moon’ provinces of Santa Cruz, Beni, Pando and Tarija have successfully convoked provincial ‘referendums’ for ‘autonomy’ — code word for secession. On May 4, 2008 the separatists in Santa Cruz succeeded, securing a voter turnout of nearly 50% and winning 80% of the vote. On May 15, the right-wing big business political elite announced the formation of ministries of foreign trade and internal security, assuming the effective powers of a secession state. The US government led by Ambassador Goldberg, provided financial and political support for the right-wing secessionist ‘civic’ organizations through its $125 million dollar aid programs via AID, its tens of millions of dollar ‘anti-drug’ program, and through the NED (National Endowment for Democracy) funded pro-separatist NGOs. At meetings of the Organization of American States and other regional meetings the US refused to condemn the separatist movements.

Because of the total incompetence and lack of national political leadership of President Evo Morales and his Vice President Garcia Linera, the Bolivian State is splintering into a series of ‘autonomous’ cantons, as several other provincial governments seek to usurp political power and take over economic resources. From the very beginning, the Morales-Garcia regime signed off on a number of political pacts, adopted a whole series of policies and approved a number of concessions to the oligarchic elites in Santa Cruz, which enabled them to effectively re-build their natural political power base, sabotage an elected Constitutional Assembly and effectively undermine the authority of the central government. Right-wing success took less than 2 ½ years, which is especially amazing considering that in 2005, the country witnessed a major popular uprising which ousted a right-wing president, when millions of workers, miners, peasants and Indians dominated the streets. It is a tribute to the absolute misgovernment of the Morales-Garcia regime, that the country could move so quickly and decisively from a state of insurrectionary popular power to a fragmented and divided country in which a separatist agro-financial elite seizes control of 80% of the productive resources of the country… while the elected central government meekly protests.

The success of the secessionist regional ruling class in Bolivia has encouraged similar ‘autonomy movements’ in Ecuador and Venezuela, led by the mayor of Guayaquil (Ecuador) and Governor of Zulia (Venezuela). In other words, the US-engineered political debacle of the Morales-Garcia regime in Bolivia has led it to team up with oligarchs in Ecuador and Venezuela to repeat the Santa Cruz experience… in a process of “permanent counter-revolutionary separatism.”

Separatism and the Ex-USSR

The defeat of Communism in the USSR had little to do with the ‘arms race bankrupting the system’, as former US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski has claimed. Up to the end, living standards were relatively stable and welfare programs continued to operate at near optimal levels and scientific and cultural programs retained substantial state expenditures. The ruling elites who replaced the communist system did not respond to US propaganda about the virtues of ‘free markets and democracy’, as Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton claimed: The proof is evident in the political and economic systems, which they imposed upon taking power and which were neither democratic nor based on competitive markets. These new ethnic-based regimes resembled despotic, predatory, nepotistic monarchies handing over (‘privatizing’) the public wealth accumulated over the previous 70 years of collective labor and public investment to a handful of oligarchs and foreign monopolies.

The principle ideological driving force for the current policy of ‘separatism’ is ethnic identity politics, which is fostered and financed by US intelligence and propaganda agencies. Ethnic identity politics, which replaced communism, is based on vertical links between the elite and the masses. The new elites rule through clan-family-religious-gang based nepotism, funded and driven through pillage and privatization of public wealth created under Communism. Once in power, the new political elites ‘privatized’ public wealth into family riches and converted themselves and their cronies into an oligarchic ruling class. In most cases the ethnic ties between elites and subjects dissolved in the face of the decline of living standards, the deep class inequalities, the crooked vote counts and state repression.

In all of the ex-USSR states, the new ruling classes only claim to mass legitimacy was based on appeals to sharing a common ethnic identity. They trotted out medieval and royalist symbols from the remote past, dredging up absolutist monarchs, parasitical religious hierarchies, pre-capitalist war lords, bloody emperors and ‘national’ flags from the days of feudal landlords to forge a common history and identity with the ‘newly liberated’ masses. The repeated appeal to past reactionary symbols was entirely appropriate: the contemporary policies of despotism, pillage and personality cults resonated with past ‘historic’ warriors, feudal lords and practices.

As the new post-USSR despots lost their ethnic luster as a consequence of public disillusion with local and foreign predatory pillage of the national wealth, the leaders resorted to systematic force.

The principle success of the US strategy of promoting separatism was in destroying the USSR — not in promoting viable independent capitalist democracies. Washington succeeded in exacerbating ethnic conflicts between Russians and other nationalities, by encouraging local communist bosses to split from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and to form ‘independent states’ where the new rulers could share the booty of the local treasury with new Western partners. The US de-stabilization efforts in the Communist countries, especially after the 1970’s did not compete over living standards, greater industrial growth or over more generous welfare programs. Rather, Western propaganda focused on ethnic solidarity, the one issue that undercut class solidarity and loyalty to the communist state and ideology and strengthened pro-Western elites, especially among ‘public intellectuals’ and recycled Communist bosses-turned ‘nationalist saviors.’

The key point of Western strategy was to first and foremost break-up the USSR via separatist movements no matter if they were fanatical religious fundamentalists, gangster-politicians, Western-trained liberal economists or ambitious upwardly mobile warlords. All that mattered was that they carried the Western separatist banner of ‘self-determination’. Subsequently, in the ‘post Soviet period’, the new pro-capitalist ruling elites were recruited to NATO and client state status.

Washington’s post-separatism politics followed a two-step process: In the first phase there was an undifferentiated support for anyone advocating the break-up of the USSR. In the second phase, the US sought to push the most pliable pro-NATO, free market liberals among the lot — the so-called ‘color revolutionaries’, in Georgia and the Ukraine. Separatism was seen as a preliminary step toward an ‘advanced’ stage of re-subordination to the US Empire. The notion of ‘independent states’ is virtually non-existent for US empire builders. At best it exists as a transitional stage from one power constellation to a new US-centered empire.

In the period following the break-up of the USSR, Washington’s subsequent attempts to recruit the new ruling elites to pro-capitalist, client-status was relatively successful. Some countries opened their economies to unregulated exploitation especially of energy resources. Others offered sites for military bases. In many cases local rulers sought to bargain among world powers while enhancing their own private fortune-through-pillage.

None of the ex-Soviet Republics evolved into secular independent democratic republics capable of recovering the living standards, which their people possessed during the Soviet times. Some rulers became theocratic despots where religious notables and dictators mutually supported each other. Others evolved into ugly family-based dictatorships. None of them retained the Soviet era social safety net or high quality educational systems. All the post-Soviet regimes magnified the social inequalities and multiplied the number of criminal-run enterprises. Violent crime grew geometrically increasing citizen insecurity.

The success of US-induced ‘separatism’ did create, in most cases, enormous opportunities for Western and Asian pillage of raw materials, especially petroleum resources. The experience of ‘newly independent states’ was, at best, a transitory illusion, as the ruling elite either passed directly into the orbit of Western sphere of influence or became a ‘fig leaf’ for deep structural subordination to Western-dominated circuits of commodity exports and finance.

Out of the break-up of the USSR, Western states allied with those republics where it suited their interests. In some cases they signed agreements with rulers to establish military base lining the pockets of a dictator through loans. In other cases they secured privileged access to economic resources by forming joint ventures. In others they simply ignored a poorly endowed regime and let it wallow in misery and despotism.

Separatism: Eastern Europe, Balkans and the Baltic Countries

The most striking aspect of the break-up of the Soviet bloc was the rapidity and thoroughness with which the countries passed from the Warsaw Pact to NATO, from Soviet political rule to US/EU economic control over almost all of their major economic sectors. The conversion from one form of political economic and military subordination to another highlights the transitory nature of political independence, the superficiality of its operational meaning and the spectacular hypocrisy of the new ruling elite who blithely denounced ‘Soviet domination’ while turning over most economic sectors to Western capital, large tracts of territory for NATO bases and providing mercenary military battalions to fight in US imperial wars to a far greater degree than was ever the case during Soviet times.

Separatism in these areas was an ideology to weaken an adversarial hegemonic coalition, all the better to reincorporate its members in a more virulent and aggressive empire building coalition.

Yugoslavia and Kosova: Forced Separatism

The successful breakup of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact alliance encouraged the US and EU to destroy Yugoslavia, the last remaining independent country outside of US-EU control in West Europe. The break-up of Yugoslavia was initiated by Germany following its annexation and demolition of East Germany’s economy. Subsequently it expanded into the Slovenian and Croatian republics. The US, a relative latecomer in the carving up of the Balkans, targeted Bosnia, Macedonia and Kosova. While Germany expanded via economic conquest, the US, true to its militarist mission, resorted to war in alliance with recognized terrorist Kosova Albanian gangsters organized in the paramilitary KLA. Under the leadership of French Zionist Bernard Kouchner, the NATO forces facilitated the ethnic purging, assassination and disappearances of tens of thousands of Serbs, Roma and dissident non-separatist Kosova Albanians.

The destruction of Yugoslavia is complete: the remaining fractured and battered Serb Republic was now at the mercy of US and its European allies. By 2008 a EU-US backed pro-NATO coalition was elected and the last remnants of ‘Yugoslavia’ and its historical legacy of self-managed socialism was obliterated.

Consequences of ‘Separatism’ in USSR. East Europe and the Balkans

In every region where US sponsored and financed separatism succeeded, living standards plunged, massive pillage of public resources in the name of privatization took place, political corruption reached unprecedented levels. Anywhere between a quarter to a third of the population fled to Western Europe and North America because of hunger, personal insecurity (crime), unemployment and a dubious future.

Politically, gangsterism and extraordinary murder rates drove legitimate businesses to pay exorbitant extortion payments, as a ‘new class’ of gangsters-turned-businessmen took over the economy and signed dubious investment agreements and joint ventures with EU, US and Asian MNCs.

Energy-rich ex-Soviet countries in south central Asia were ruled by opulent dictators who accumulated billion dollar fortunes in the course of demolishing egalitarian norms, extensive health, and scientific and cultural institutions. Religious institutions gained power over and against scientific and professional associations, reversing educational progress of the previous seventy years. The logic of separatism spread from the republics to the sub-national level as rival local war lords and ethnic chiefs attempted to carve out their ‘autonomous’ entity, leading to bloody wars, new rounds of ethnic purges and new refugees fleeing the contested areas.

The US promises of benefits via ‘separatism’ made to the diverse populations were not in the least fulfilled. At best a small ruling elite and their cronies reaped enormous wealth, power and privilege at the expense of the great majority. Whatever the initial symbolic gratifications, which the underlying population may have experienced from their short-lived independence, new flag and restored religious power was eroded by the grinding poverty and violent internal power struggles that disrupted their lives. The truth of the matter is that millions of people fled from ‘their’ newly ‘independent’ states, preferring to become refugees and second-class citizens in foreign states.

Conclusion

The major fallacy of seemingly progressive liberals and NGOs in their advocacy of ‘autonomy’, ‘decentralization’ and ‘self-determination’ is that these abstract concepts beg the fundamental concrete historical and substantive political question — to what classes, race, political blocs is power being transferred? For over a century in the US the banner of the racist right-wing Southern plantation owners ruling by force and terror over the majority of poor blacks was ‘States Rights’ — the supremacy of local law and order over the authority of the federal government and the national constitution. The fight between federal versus states rights was between a reactionary Southern oligarchy and a broader based progressive Northern urban coalition of workers and the middle class.

There is a fundamental need to demystify the notion of ‘autonomy’ by examining the classes which demand it, the consequences of devolving power in terms of the distribution of power, wealth and popular power and the external benefactors of a shift from the national state to regional local power elites.

Likewise, the mindless embrace by some libertarians of each and every claim for ‘self-determination’ has led to some of the most heinous crimes of the 20-21st centuries — in many cases separatist movements have encouraged or been products of bloody imperialist wars, as was the case in the lead up to and following Nazi annexations, the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and the savage Israeli invasion of Lebanon and breakup of Palestine.

To make sense of ‘autonomy’, ‘decentralization’ and ‘self-determination’ and to ensure that these devolutions of power move in progressive historic direction, it is essential to pose the prior questions: Do these political changes advance the power and control of the majority of workers and peasants over the means of production? Does it lead to greater popular power in the state and electoral process or does it strengthen demagogic clients advancing the interests of the empire, in which the breakup of an established state leads to the incorporation of the ethnic fragments into a vicious and destructive empire?