In this past year as the world witnessed uprisings from Santiago to Zuccotti Park to Tahrir Square, social media has been lauded as a weapon of mass mobilization. Paul Mason, a BBC correspondent, wrote in his new book published this month Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions, (excerpted in the Guardian) that this new communications technology was a “crucial” contributing factor to these revolutionary times. Nobel peace laureate and Burmese human rights campaigner, Aung San Suu Kyi, pointed out in a lecture in June that this “communications revolution…not only enabled [Tunisians] to better organize and co-ordinate their movements, it kept the attention of the whole world firmly focused on them.” CNN even ran an article comparing Facebook to “democracy in action”, while Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who was imprisoned in Egypt for starting a Facebook page told Wolf Blitzer that the revolution in Egypt “started on Facebook” and that he wanted to “meet Mark Zuckerberg some day and thank him personally.”

While the positive contributions of technology to social movements and uprisings have been been amply noted, if not overstated, more attention needs to be paid to the intrinsic dangers looming in the co-optation of this technology-driven networking, specifically by Washington, but by other repressive governments as well.

Clay Shirkey, professor of New Media at New York University, wrote in the January/February 2011 issue of Foreign Affairs that “the state is gaining increasingly sophisticated means of monitoring, interdicting, or co-opting these tools.”

The Dangers of Digital Diplomacy

The Senate report, “Latin American Governments Need to ‘Friend’ Social Media and Technology” was written at the request of U.S. Senator Richard G. Lugar (R-IN) in order to assess the U.S. Department of State’s use of digital diplomacy.

“Despite Latin America’s broad social and economic progress, many countries in the region still face challenges to democracy similar to those recently seen in the Middle East,” wrote Lugar in the introduction to the report. “In the extreme cases, countries like Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua are led by authoritarian leaders who curtail civil and political freedoms.”

The report urges improving internet infrastructure in the region, along with expanding the use of social media such as Facebook and Twitter as essential in order to advance Washington’s foreign policy interests. This is also identified as a way to reassert Washington’s influence in a part of the world where it has been perceived to be waning since the Bush Administration and the subsequent rise of center-left governments in the region.

“In particular, the characteristics of Latin American social media use and engagement of connectivity resources…indicate that this area could be primed for substantial positive change in a manner similar in nature, if not in process, to that recently observed in the Middle East,” the report states.

The right-leaning journal Americas Quarterly praises this “smart idea” calling it “an innovative strategy to advance U.S. goals”, one of them being the need to “ramp up our data collection and research on the impact of social media and technology on fostering democracy in the region, particularly Venezuela.”

This all falls under what has been dubbed 21st Century Statecraft, the brainchild of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“Traditional forms of diplomacy still dominate, but 21st-century statecraft is not mere corporate re-branding—swapping tweets for broadcasts. It represents a shift in form and in strategy—a way to amplify traditional diplomatic efforts, develop tech-based policy solutions and encourage cyberactivism,” explains the New York Times in a July 2010 article.

Described as a “marriage of Silicon Valley and the State Department,” Washington has turned to “Software engineers, entrepreneurs and tech C.E.O.’s…to think of unconventional ways to shore up democracy and spur development” abroad.

“On their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress, but the United States does,” said Clinton in a speech on internet freedom in January 2010.

In August 2011 the Washington Post reported findings by the Lowy Institute for International Policy which show that U.S. State Department officials now operate some 230 Facebook accounts, 80 Twitter feeds, 55 YouTube channels and 40 pages on Flickr.

But Judith McHale, former under secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs at the State Department, gave a more honest assessment in March 2011 of what’s driving the State Department’s new initiative, stripped of the flowery and misleading language of freedom and democracy.

“New media and connective technologies enhance our ability to listen…Social media provides new ways for us to keep our ear to the ground,” said McHale. “Of course, we are not interested in developing social media platforms for the sake of having them. We are interested in applying social media to promote our strategic objectives in the Americas.”

But as history has shown, Washington’s strategic interests are often antithetical to freedom and human rights. And it is naïve to think that the State Department would be conducting this form of diplomacy in “a principled and regime-neutral fashion,” as intellectual apologists like Anne-Marie Slaughter may profess. And in Latin America, ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas) countries are undoubtedly in Washington’s cross-hairs.

During a June 30, 2011 Senate hearing,“The State of Democracy in the Americas”, Senator Lugar asked Roberta Jacobson, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of the Western Hemisphere at the time, to name programs specifically targeting ALBA countries. Jackson noted in her answer that the “Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor has programs that support media training in Bolivia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Ecuador; these programs address the use and impact of social media, along with traditional topics such as independent journalism, investigative reporting, and overcoming self-censorship.”

All of these countries have democratically-elected governments, and while they all are struggling in varying ways to build stronger democratic institutions and to translate democratic rhetoric into functioning policy, Washington’s meddling in internal affairs through 21st Century Statecraft is dangerous for social movements and democratic activists.

The Social Networking Counterinsurgency

On February 3, 2011 the Senate held a hearing examining US intelligence agencies’ alleged lack of anticipation of the uprisings in Egypt. Afterwards, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said “she was particularly concerned that the CIA and other agencies had ignored open-source intelligence on the protests, a reference to posts on Facebook and other publicly accessible Web sites used by organizers of the protests against the Mubarak government,” the Washington Post reported. The CIA has an Open Source Center, where analysts based in a headquarters in an undisclosed location in Virginia, along with analysts in working in U.S. Embassies (“to get a step closer to their subjects”) throughout the world monitor as many as millions of tweets per day, along with Facebook updates and other open source media outlets.

Wired Magazine reported in July that the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) unveiled its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program. Wired’s Adam Rawnsley points out:

It’s an attempt to get better at both detecting and conducting propaganda campaigns on social media. SMISC has two goals. First, the program needs to help the military better understand what’s going on in social media in real time — particularly in areas where troops are deployed. Second, Darpa wants SMISC to help the military play the social media propaganda game itself…SMISC is supposed to quickly flag rumors and emerging themes on social media, figure out who’s behind it and what.

Furthermore, the military solicited contracts for the development of software to create fake Facebook personas, to be “replete with background, history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographically consistent,” the Raw Story reported in February. Private security contractor HB Gary has already been exposed for doing such a thing on behalf of the US Chamber of Commerce as a way to “infiltrate left-leaning groups” in the country, as ThinkProgress revealed last year courtesy of 75,000 private company emails provided by the hactivst group Anonymous.

These strategies are particularly cynical given the following passage from Lugar’s Senate report:

Collaborators of President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela recently hacked the Twitter accounts of opposition activists. Staff strongly believes that this example indicates how policy needs to take into consideration the extent repressive governments will take to silence democratic voices using this technology.

What officials seem to be saying is: never-mind what happens in this country. The fact that the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring “social media sites, blogs, and forums throughout the world” isn’t important. And while US corporations are selling surveillance systems to repressive regimes, that’s just the free-market supply and demand economics at work.

And even if, “What elevated the [Occupy Wall Street] activism to a national and global movement, though, was the sophisticated and widespread use of social media,” as Betty Yu, national organizer at the Center for Media Justice, wrote last month, these same tools can, and are, being used to monitor, undermine and co-opt these and similar movements.

So if Washington approaches Latin American governments with aid for internet infrastructure and training, citizens and governments should approach this as a very loaded Trojan Horse.

“To be internationalist is to pay our debt to humanity” says Fidel Castro and this can be read on many billboards in Cuba.

What is internationalism?—cooperation among people and nations, states my dictionary. The book of definitions maintains that internationalism is a principle of communism and socialism. It is the belief of ideological leaders such as Lenin, Fidel and Che.

Che wrote in his essay, “Socialism and Man”, that proletarian internationalism isn’t just a duty but a necessity. If revolutionary leaders forget this, Che wrote, the revolution will lose its inspiration and imperialism will benefit.

Che was also known for having severely criticized Soviet Union leadership for having lost its internationalism with the world’s proletariat and the Third World. Following up on Che’s critique, I find it important to criticize communist and socialist parties, and governments led by these parties, which let down people who are oppressed by, or invaded by, national or foreign powers.

Internationalism in action

1. Internationalists must support resistance fighters against invasions. Therefore, one must chastise political parties and groups that give political or moral support to those who call themselves the Iraq Communist Party as it is part of the Quisling government the USA terrorist state set in. ICP leaders live side by side the invaders in the Green Zone. That there are organizations in the United States, UK, Denmark and elsewhere, which call themselves communist or socialist parties and that cooperate with the world’s greatest terrorist state is incomprehensible, shameful, immoral and anti-internationalist.

2. The same applies to people who still support the Zionist state of Israel, which commits genocide against the Palestinian people. Millions of decent people have gotten together to support Palestinians in many ways, including Ships to Gaza. In Denmark, four groups of people have challenged the state’s terrorist laws by donating solidarity aid to the secular leftist PFLP which is part of the Palestinian resistance. Rebellion (Denmark), Fighters and Lovers, Horserød-Stuthoff Association (veterans of WWII resistance fighters imprisoned in Horserød and Stuthoff prisons), and TIB’s club (local carpenters near Copenhagen) have aided both PFLP and FARC, Colombian armed liberation movement.

3. Internationalist can not cooperate with US-NATO aggressive wars, which always have the goal of controlling that country’s economy and politics for capitalist profits. It is shameful that many experienced socialists and communists, as well as naïve progressive people, have backed up West’s big capitalist plans to take over Libya, and thus have bombed Libya back to the stone age. Denmark was one of only six countries that dropped tens of thousands of bombs on Libya, destroying much of it infrastructure, schools, hospitals…In fact, Denmark dropped more bombs on Libya than it has on any other country in its history, Afghanistan included. And the pilots were cowards as there was no resistance by Libya’s air force, already decimated.

This conflict has little to do with the Arab Spring movement. It is a conflict between internal war lords, with ordinary people involved who wished to increase democracy but who were misled by US-NATO whose forces seek to control Libya’s oil and avoid a gold-based currency that Gaddafi was promoting amongst all African countries. Now, US-NATO has placed a lackey government in Tripoli just as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq.

4. Internationalists must also criticize comrade governments, such as Cuba and ALBA governments in Latin America, when they make big mistakes regarding internationalism. We can’t be true comrades-solidarity activists by keeping our mouths shut when this occurs. Such is the case with their support of the brutal government of Sri Lanka, which practices genocide against the minority Tamil population. Ever since independence from Great Britain, in 1947, the majority Sinhalese governments and chauvinist Buddhist monk system has discriminated against Tamils. They have constantly been treated as second class citizens, their language and religions relegated to secondary status without national recognition. Even pogroms have been employed with the brutal murder of many thousands on various occasions. And since May 2009, following the end of a 26-year civil war, ethnic cleansing in the traditional Tamil homeland in the north and eastern areas is the rule of the day.

Cuba and ALBA have spoken only positively of their historic ties with the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), to which Sri Lanka is a member, but so are 130 other nations. One cannot, in the name of protecting each nation’s sovereignty, avoid critique when one or more of these nations oppresses or conducts pogroms and genocide against part of the population. Nor can we accept as an excuse the immoral geo-political game that nearly all governments of whatever color play.

We shall also criticize Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil and other Latin American progressive governments for helping the US and France in their ouster of the only decent and only democratically elected people’s president in Haiti’s history, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. These Latin American governments actually assist the US’s 2004 coup d´état against Aristide by placing occupying troops in the small country, seeking to dampen the people’s anger. These progressive governments should, instead, back up the people’s desire to bring their president back to state power, just as they sought to do for President Zelaya in Honduras where national capitalists and generals kicked him out of office, with background support once again by the United States government.

5. On the personal and organizational plain, internationalism operates when workers of a major firm ask people to boycott a product because of the mistreatment of the workers by the firm. This is the case with Coca-Cola whose workers in Colombia asked us to stop buying the “drink of the death squad” (David Rovics song), because it hires mercenaries to murder workers who seek to organize a union and struggle for collective bargaining. Workers in other countries, such as Guatemala, and farmers in India have asked the same.

It is with joy that I can state that here where we gather (carpenters’ hall in Valby, Denmark), this union is one of the few local unions and political or grass roots groups in Denmark that has boycotted Coca-Cola. This is something any and all individuals can do. It is just a soda drink. So drink something else. Boycotting Coca-Cola is just like boycotting all products from Israel and Sri Lanka. It is a simple act of solidarity, of internationalism.

Charlotte and I have just returned from a six week trip in India where two of my books (“Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka” and “Sounds of Venezuela”) were published by New Century Book House, Tamil Nadu. The Tamil book concerns the history and contemporary life of the Tamil people in that island-nation, and the need to act in solidarity with them. The Venezuela short book concerns this people’s efforts to create a better world for themselves and solidarity with all peoples. When people asked us where we are from we often replied that we are “internationalists”. Interestingly, many Indians understood our meaning and were pleased to think in terms of being brothers and sisters in the world.

This concept, and feeling, of brotherly love, of internationalism has taken off in a bigger way, in 2011, than in many decades. It started in Tunisia, and has expanded to the indignados in Spain, to the anti-capitalists in Wall Street and in hundreds of cities throughout the US and the West.

We have much to criticize and yet much to be glad for as 2012 opens. We must remember and appreciate those who set us off on this new anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist, non-violent and democratic revolution—from the martyr in Tunisia (street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi) and his Iraqi spiritual brother a bit earlier, shoe-thrower Muntazar al-Zaidi, to Occupy Wall Street protestors to Bradley Manning and Julian Assange and co-workers at Wikileaks, who helped spark it all by blowing the whistle on the war criminals. These modern-day Paris Commune resisters without arms—OWS and Occupy the World—are growing and they are presenting a vision and with it a program-in-discussion that must be studied and supported.

Internationalism is an endless struggle, an endless challenge. It does not end even when one or more of our political parties take over the governing reigns. We activists from the streets must always keep our wary eyes pinned on the leaders, regardless of their names, just as our clear eyes cast light upon humanity’s future.

To transcend without transcending

— Ernst Bloch

In the 20thCentury, real socialism failed. In the 21st Century, unreal capitalism.

— Luis Eduardo Aute

In those heady early days of the Oakland Commune when the little village of newly-dubbed “Oscar Grant Plaza” was being set up, an old comrade who had been part of the early organizing of the occupation was walking through the village and describing it to me on his cell phone. We were doing relay reporting: I’d been down the day before and reported back to him, now he was giving me an update.

“…And just past the media tent and the library is the supply tent…” A young woman working at the supply tent jumped into the conversation and began to show him where things went as my friend explained that he was giving a comrade a “virtual tour” of sorts.

“Over here you drop off clothes; there is where you drop off food; tents and camping supplies go over there…”

“And money?” my friend asked. He had been carrying a $5 bill in his hand, money someone had given him to pass on to the camp.

“Oh.  We don’t do money,” she replied.

“’We don’t do money!’ ‘We don’t do money!’” my friend repeated incredulously as he walked away from the supply tent. “That’s the most radical statement I’ve heard so far!”

Since those glorious first moments of what could now be called an uprising or a movement, the occupiers have had to make greater concessions to “reality,” meaning that they now “do” money, but it’s to their credit that they have done so tentatively and on their own conditions. Every revolution begins by questioning the very concept of “reality” as it is socially defined and by pushing against it until it begins to fray and finally give way to a new definition. The root of the word “reality” is intertwined with “royalty” (“real” in Spanish means both “real” and “royal”) because there was a time when royalty defined reality. Now, in the Americas at least, “royalty” no longer exists and “reality” has been transformed in a redefinition that excludes royalty itself.

What seemed utopian before that moment in that moment suddenly became the very definition of reality. In the past this process has involved violence, like the execution of King James in the English Civil War, but that itself was only a culminating symbolic representation of a long process of psycho-social transformation through education, culture, ritual, etc. in the construction of a new model of reality that eventually supplanted the “royal” model.  In that sense “utopia” must be the home and destiny of a revolutionary struggle, and poetry must be its most powerful weapon, if it is to succeed.

One element in the process of the construction of new models of reality, or “revolutions” is the meme, the “viral message,” and it often takes the form of a slogan or chant. The power of political mantras to transform our understanding or redefine our understanding of reality is evident when we consider what the slogan “we are the 99%” has done in the Occupy movement.

Slogans can be prosaic, functional statements, rational and unambiguous, like a statement of doctrine for a church service or a political rally (“We are the 99%” or “The people united will never be defeated” etc.), or they can operate like a poem, suprarational and ambiguous, forcing us to reconsider our sense of “reality.” Those aphorisms in this latter category fit with the “sixth” type of ambiguity as enumerated by William Empson: “when a statement says nothing and the readers are forced to invent a statement of their own, most likely in conflict with that of the author.”

Of this latter group is the Situationist epigraph, “Be realistic: demand the impossible.” This statement, in fact, does say something, but it’s akin to “nothing” insofar as it is apparently contradictory: When could the “impossible” be considered “realistic”? What could be “realistic” about “demand[ing] the impossible”?  In contrast to the prosaic “marching” slogans repeated at every demonstration to unite and strengthen group solidarity, this Situationist epigraph is elusive and subversive by its very nature. And for that reason it warrants a closer look.

While we don’t know the actual context that inspired the writer of the Situationist epigram since the Situationist as a movement spanned the years 1957 to 1972, it is most likely that the slogan, “Be realistic: demand the impossible,” first appeared during the uprising of May 1968 in Paris. The slogan then probably referred to the clarity the writer had at that moment that the state would eventually cede to its demands and thereby destroy the movement for radical social change. This common ruling class response to the social demands of the oppressed is summed up in the words of a prince in Luchino Visconti’s classic movie, The Leopard: “If we want things to stay as they are, everything will have to change.” Making “realistic” demands that could, and would, be met, therefore, would ensure the end of the struggle, the destruction of the movement, and guarantee that “things stay the same.”

A few years later, reflecting on that romantic May of 1968, the French singer/songwriter, Georges Moustaki in his song, “Le Temps de Vivre”  (“The Time to Live”), reinterpreted that Situationist slogan:

Nous prendrons le temps de vivre  - We’ll take the time to live

D’être libres mon amour – to be free, my love.

Sans projets et sans habitudes – Without projects or habits

Nous pourrons rêver notre vie – we’ll dream our life.

Viens, je suis là, je n’attends que toi – Come, I’m here, awaiting only you

Tout est possible, tout est permis – Everything is possible.  Everything is permitted.

Viens, écoute, les mots qui vibrant – Come listen to these words that vibrate

Sur les murs du mois de mai – on the walls of the month of May

Ils te disent la certitude – They give us certitude

Que tout peut changer un jour – that everything can one day change

The song expresses the same utopian spirit as the slogan; it is also an affirmation that what is deemed “impossible” can be realistic. Moustaki, reflecting back on that historical moment from a context in which such a slogan had become an “impossible demand,” sees the revolutionary upsurge of 1968 as a hope or a “certitude” of revolutionary change “one day” in some indeterminate future.

A few years later, when the reaction against the “Revolution of 1968” was in full bloom and the likes of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and other champions of neoliberal capitalism suggested “There Is No Alternative” (the famous “TINA” that dominated the late 20th Century), the Situationist slogan took on a new meaning. It became a statement of resistance against impossible odds in the struggle for a new world that was nowhere to be seen. It was a statement of defiance of a “reality” decreed by the masters of the totalitarian lie of the neoliberal capitalist system watching over a locked-down world. With the collapse of “real” socialism and as the world slouched off into that netherland of the “end of history” where the hope of every left alternative, and even the humane possibilities of capitalism, if such existed, were extinguished with the end of the Cold War and the supreme victory of neoliberalism, the Situationist slogan was stored in the dusty attic of history. TINA was the only slogan allowed in this brave new world of neoliberal rule, the echolalia of a mantra that darkened the human mind and increasingly reduced it to catatonia with each repetition.

But almost immediately the “impossible” reappeared, especially in Berkeley, where I was living at the time, but also around the world. Little by little, the circle A of anarchism, no doubt painted by anarcho-punks with a clear grasp of the need for the “impossible,” was sprayed on walls and billboards. Then increasingly the circle “A” began to appear more broadly in personal wear, silk-screened on t-shirts, until it became a fashion statement. In the context of a Capitalist State that claimed the whole planet, the demand for the impossible demand reemerged.

With the Zapatista uprising of 1994 and thereafter, the slogan once again took on an immediate, positive meaning for people in the movement for a “possible world in which many worlds fit.” Contesting with the hegemon, the dream of the possible new world became not merely a demand for “the impossible” but for a plurality of possibilities, a rainbow of possibilities.

Out of the collapse of the 20th century utopia-turned-dystopia of “real socialism” and the flatulent promise of the “Third Way,” both of which having clouded and overshadowed all other radical alternatives of an earlier time, such as social democracy, mystical anarchism, secular anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, utopian cooperativism, religious socialism and, yes, the multitude of Marxist socialist alternatives, the World Social Forums (WSF) arose in the heart of the capitalist world that had prohibited the possibility of dreams. The “impossible” was transformed by WSF’s belief that “another world is possible” and as anti-globalization activists confronted the brutal capitalist state in Seattle and elsewhere.

But the definitive break with TINA and the neoliberal siege of the world, formed in iron around the “possible,” came with the changes in Latin America, particularly in South America, where left governments took power in the process of emerging from the military dictatorships organized and supported by the US. “Demanding the impossible” meant in that context something very similar to what it meant in 1968: it became a call to not settle for reforms to capitalism, but to push the agenda farther, beyond the realm of the “possible” as defined for us by the capitalist system or even by so-called “socialist” governments proclaiming the “socialism of the 21st century” but offering only more handouts and top-heavy, bureaucratic parties in the style of the Marxist-Leninist parties of 20th century communism.

In the present, just ten years after the uprisings in Argentina, the victory of left governments throughout Latin America, and the presidential victory of the first African American in US history, the slogan has a new, even more dramatic meaning: if the planet is to survive, we have no choice but to “demand the impossible.” Many of what were viewed as “impossible” achievements in 1968 have been won, and they clearly don’t go far enough.

In Latin America the “left” governments continue to follow the extractivist development model dictated by world capitalism even as they turn more attention to their poorest citizens. This is particularly true of Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa, who has repeatedly directed repressive military and police forces against environmentalists and indigenous people attempting to defend the earth. But even President Evo Morales works from a double discourse, proclaiming socialism and respect for indigenous rights and Pachamama while building roads through indigenous lands and nature reserves to facilitate the business of Brazilian capital.

Then, of course, there’s the United States, where the official political spectrum, by world standards, has been reduced to that very small space between the far right and the extreme right, rigidly confined, to this day, by strict neoliberal orthodoxy. Just a few years ago “demanding the impossible” seemed to consist of electing an African American liberal to the presidency. That achievement of anti-racist progressive forces still remains one of the most inspiring moments in the 21st Century USA despite the disappointment that followed. At best, President Obama has turned out to be only a shade different from his predecessor, and in some ways he’s worse: it’s doubtful that Bush would have managed to pass the free trade agreements Obama has pushed through, nor would Bush have been able to get away with murder – literally, in the case of bin Laden, Al-Awlaki and countless Pakistanis – without an enormous outcry from left liberals.

In this context, what does it mean to “be realistic” and “demand the impossible”? What “impossible demand” must we make in our context, a context in which the continuation of the capitalist system has become impossible (if Immanuel Wallerstein is correct in his analysis that we’re now experiencing a “systemic crisis”), and the survival of human civilization unlikely?

Those currently occupying the cities across the US and the world have been criticized for not “making demands” or “having a program” or “an agenda.” Occupiers have responded that “our occupation is our demand.” Certainly the right to peaceably assemble is a first requirement for any movement, but the occupiers, more than anyone, are quite clear that the demands can’t end there. Many argue that the occupiers need to come up with a long list of specific demands, but I would side with those Situationists who would argue that such a list would be self-defeating: it would invite the rulers of the world to cede demands and ensure that “things stay the same.”

Yet it’s clear that the “impossible” demand is the only alternative to this impossibly irrational and unsustainable system that turns “reason” and all its resources to the exploitation and destruction of the planet. The occupiers, for the most part, aren’t so simple-minded as to fall for the “possible.” They know that the last thing they should do is offer a “realistic” set of demands and settle for a “realistic” program. The time has come to make “impossible” demands on this impossible system because the future of the world is at stake. And we can’t settle for anything less

The Chinese/Russian veto has revived hopes of peace and security among developing countries, who have watched the orgy of violence unleashed by NATO bombings in Libya over the past 8 months with horror and outrage.

The security forces of the Syrian Arab Republic have been battling armed gangs backed by Western intelligence agencies since February. Thousands of innocent civilians and thousands of security personnel have been killed. NATO’s Blitzkrieg on the people of Libya and the covert war on the people of Syria have  proven the extent of the desperation that now besets Western capitalism and have served to highlight the sharp divide that now exists between progressive countries who are striving to create a multipolar world and the cancerous Western plutocracies now engaging in looting, pillaging and mass murder in a desperate attempt to maintain their global hegemony.

AlBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas) countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Cuba, have been unwavering in their support for the Great People’s Socialist Libyan Arab Jamahirya and the Syrian Arab Republic in their long struggle against NATO backed terrorists.

On October 9th a delegation of Alba officials visited the Syrian capital Damascus to express their solidarity with the terror-stricken country. The delegation included Bolivian Communications Minister Eban Canelas, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro Moros, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Eduardo Rodriquez, Deputy Foreign Minister of Ecuador, Pablo Villa Gomez, and Deputy Foreign Minister of Nicaragua, Maria Rubiales.

Nicolas Madura, Venezuela’s minister for foreign affairs told Syrian television on October 10th:

The world order which dominates the media is using media terrorism, political and psychological warfare to impose its vision on the world.

Madura added that during the past thirty years:

This order has imposed its own culture on the world, a culture of violence, of death and of drugs and it has formed a network of television stations and newspapers to subjugate the world.

The Bolivian communications minister Ivan Canelas told the same TV station:

What we saw on our visit to Syria was very different to what the foreign press have been showing us. We found peace and security here. People go about their business and live their lives normally. It is clear proof that many of the media outlets are working for the profits of the imperialist powers who have made attempting to damage the sovereignty and dignity not only of Syria but of other peoples in the world such as Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Ecuador, Cuba and Peru.

Mr. Canales also stressed the necessity for radical reform of the United Nations so as to free the organization from US control.

Maria Rubiales, Nicaragua’s vice minister for foreign affairs said:

When an immense crisis occurs in the West, especially in the United States of America, the  easiest way for them to get out of it is by destroying other countries.

Referring to the existence of terrorist groups in Syria armed by the West, Rubiales said:

If that happened in the United States of America, they would send in the army to put down the armed terrorists.”

The arrival of the Latin American delegation in Damascus is another poignant example of the growing isolation of the Atlantic imperialist cult.  As more and more people tune into alternative media around the world, the lies and propaganda of the Atlantic imperialist configuration are being continually exposed.

AlBA countries, Venezuela in particular, have close relations with the Syrian Arab Republic. In November 2010, Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro visited Damascus where 10 joint projects involving Syria, Belarus and Venezuela were agreed upon.

He told reporters “we are making a tour to consolidate the projects established with these brother countries, for the construction of a new world that has been designed in concrete terms.”

Belarus has been a close partner with Venezuela for many years. Minsk has been able to reduce its oil dependency on Russia through a deal with Caracas involving the importation of up to 10 million metric tons of oil.

On the other hand, Caracas has also benefited from close relations with the former Soviet Republic. Belarus has been helping Venezuela in its ambitious Mision Casa Vivienda, Great Housing Mission, which aims at overcoming the housing deficit in the country.

Belarus has also come under attack from the New World Order with several attempts at regime change there through US orchestrated ‘’colour revolutions’’.

The Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko told Russian reporters on October 7th:

They tried to push a revolution in Belarus through social networks. The person, who was running those social networks is in Poland, guarded by special services and funded by we know whom.

Bilateral trade ties between Syria and Belarus have intensified since 2007. Like the countries of the Bolivarian Alliance, Syria and Belarus strive for autonomy, national sovereignty and independence. The special trade agreements between Venezuela, Belarus and Syria are a cogent example of the desire of developing countries to create a multi-polar world.

The visit of the ALBA delegation to Syria was, unsurprisingly, ignored by the Western media. But the visit is highly significant. Syria has, since February, been fighting a covert war waged by Western intelligence agencies using Islamist terrorists presented to the world as ‘’peaceful protestors’’ by the corporate media.

Many of the ALBA countries have experienced US- orchestrated terrorism in the past.

The  US trained terrorists known as the “contras” used against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua during the 1980s cost up to 30,000 Nicaraguan lives.  The Nicaraguan terrorists were presented by the Western press as ‘freedom fighters’ just as the terrorists in Syria today are being portrayed as “pro-democracy” and victims of ‘state terror’.  The US backed terrorism campaign was so successful in Nicaragua, Washington decided to send its principal organizer Michael Kozak to Belarus as US ambassador. Kozak told the Times newspaper on September 3, 2001 that ‘’the objective and to some extent methodology are the same” in Belarus as in Nicaragua.

The ALBA delegation’s recent visit to Syria has made it clear that the real international community is aware of the “objectives” and “methodologies” of US imperialism in the Middle East and throughout the world, and, in particular, the nefarious role of the corporate media in misinforming the general public about the reality in Syria. But above all, the ALBA delegation’s visit has sent a signal to the degenerate Euro-Atlantic elites that their attempt to dominate the planet with their “culture of violence, death and drugs” is doomed to fail.

In contrast the same opinion makers, plus their academic counterparts, project images of the United States and the European Union as stable societies, with steady economic growth, incremental expansion of social welfare programs, resolving issues via consensual compromises and practicing sound fiscal policies.

In recent times, the better part of the current decade, these images have taken on the character of ideological dogmas – they no longer correspond to reality. In fact, a good argument can be made that the roles have been reversed: the US and EU are in perpetual crises and Latin America, at least most of the major countries, have experienced stability and growth which is the envy (or should be) of Washington pundits and financial commentators.

This ‘role reversal’ has been recognized by many US, EU and Asian investors and multinationals, even as respectable journalistic hacks for the Financial Times, NY Times and Wall Street Journal still write about vulnerabilities, imbalances and other weaknesses while grudgingly acknowledging the dynamic growth of the region.

Progressive opinion is equally at fault, focusing on the ‘advances’ of the left regimes but overlooking the underlying dynamics affecting most of the region and thus losing sight of the new points of conflict and contention.

We will proceed to outline the contrasting realities between the crises ridden “North” (US/EU) and the sustained growth of the “South” (South America). The analysis will raise questions of whether the South American experience is transferable to the North and what ‘structural adjustments’ would be necessary to pull the US and EU out of the downward spiral of stagnation and violent conflicts which have characterized these regions for the better part of the past decade.

The Lost Decade, US and EU Style

The Latin American countries during the 1980’s experienced a deep and persistent crises, manifested in negative growth, increased poverty levels and heavy indebtedness, which allowed creditors (like the IMF) to impose harsh and regressive austerity measures and “structural adjustment” policies which came to be known as neo-liberalization. These included the privatization of most strategic, lucrative public enterprises, and the ending of any semblance of state-directed industrial strategies.

For the peasants and the working and middle class the short-lived neo-liberal “boom” of the 1990s was a continuation of the ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s. The neo-liberal policies of the 1990s were based on fundamentally flawed structural foundations and polarizing income and public expenditures involving huge transfers of income to capital and downward pressures on wages and welfare. The neo-liberal regimes went into a deep crisis early in 2000 provoking major popular upheavals. The outcome resulted in a new set of political configurations and social power equations, which evolved into new post-neo-liberal regimes, at least in most of the major countries in Latin America.

In contrast and, in part thanks to the profitable opportunities opened by the debt crises and neo-liberalization of Latin America in the 1990s (and in the ex-Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and the Baltic/Balkan states) the US and EU prospered. In Latin America over 5,000 lucrative extractive resource-based industries, banks, tele-communications and other industries passed into the hands of foreign private MNC and local capital. High returns on bonds and loans and rents from technology transfers enriched the Northern capitalists even as poverty multiplied in the South. The 1990s was the “golden age” of Western capital as profits rose and leftist parties and the traditional urban trade unions appeared unable to withstand the ‘wave’ of predatory capitalism capturing the commanding heights of the economy.

The very successes of the US and EU countries, the enormous easy gains from pillage, speculation, and exploitation led to the dominance of financial capital and the belief in an irrevocable “new world order”. The dominance of the US and EU was built on their military superiority backed by pliant, collaborative, neo-liberal client regimes. The ‘new order’ lasted less than a decade: the economic crises of 1999/2000 smashed the illusions of a century of imperial grandeur. As markets collapsed so too did the Latin American oligarchic electoral regimes (dubbed “democracies”) which along with the financial elite and the military formed the triple alliance that defined Western supremacy. The final blow was the economic crises of 2001-2002 in the US and EU which steeply eroded their capacity to intervene and prop up their collapsing Latin clients ousted by rebellious masses.

The first decade of the new millennia has been the “lost decade”  of the North.   Over the course of the past eleven years the North has witnessed stagnation and recessions which have not given way to recoveries. The capitalist states temporarily saved the bankers but were powerless to set in motion economic growth.

The credit rating of the US economy was downgraded by the risk agencies. Unemployment and underemployment hovers close to one-fifth of the labor force, figures comparable to stagnant Third World countries. Social programs  are severely slashed in the US and throughout the European Union, reversing decades of incremental gains. Trade and budget deficits in the US have become chronic, while private and public lenders are becoming increasingly reticent to lend in the face of deep-seated recessionary tendencies.

The financial sector in the US and EU is rife with large scale fraud, swindles, mismanagement and falsified balance sheets, conditions previously prevalent among Latin economies. Wars proliferate. Military spending far exceeds productive investments, draining the US economy in a fashion reminiscent of the weapons spending during the reign of the warlords of Africa and the military dictators of Latin America.

In the EU, faced with brutal cuts in wages, pensions and jobs millions of workers and unemployed youth in Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy have taken to the streets. General strikes threaten the stability of increasingly isolated regimes, reminiscent of the popular rebellions which resulted in regime changes in Latin America in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In the US, public protests reflect deepening private discontent: over 75% of the population expresses negative views of the Congress and 60% of the White House. Deepening political alienation of the US electorate is comparable to the loss of popular faith in Latin governments during the “lost decades”, 1980-2000.

Both the US and the EU have been radically transformed for the worse during the lost decade of the current century. Economically, politically and socially the ‘North’ has been “Latin Americanized”: social instability, economic stagnation, political alienation, growing class inequalities and poverty is presided over by corrupt political elites.

Signs of the Better Times: Latin America

Recently the finance minister of Brazil raised the possibility that the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) might take a hand in a “rescue plan” to prop up the crises-ridden economies of Europe. While the statement had greater symbolic rather substantive consequences, it does reflect a certain reality: while the North plunges into deeper, unending crises, the Latin economies are doing reasonably well.

Except for the Latin countries still under US dominance, especially Mexico and most of Central America, the rest of Latin America has not only avoided the crises afflicting the North but have been growing at a healthy rate, three times that of the US over the decade. The new millennium, especially between 2003-2011 (except for a brief interlude in 2009) has been a period of high growth, general prosperity, booming exports, rising imports, greater inter-regional co-operation, and large scale poverty reduction.

Brazil alone has reduced the number of poor by 30 million. Regular elections, relatively honest and competitive, result in stable legitimate transfers of political power. Except for US-backed coups in Honduras and intervention in Haiti and Venezuela, violent seizures of power have disappeared over the past decade. Regional institution–building has prospered with the advent of UNASUR and a Latin American regional bank.  Because of fiscal controls and banking regulations, both results of the lessons learned from the crisis of the lost decades (1980-2000), Latin America was only slightly affected by the US-EU financial crash of 2008-2011.

Latin American trade has doubled, especially with Asia, aided by China’s double digit growth. Demand for agro-mineral commodities has tripled. The key to this new export-powered growth is Latin America’s growing economic independence. This has led to the diversification of its markets, taking advantage of new opportunities and reducing their dependence on the US. Latin America’s emphasis on economic growth, new markets and investments has led it to avoid entanglements in the proliferating and costly colonial wars which engage the US and EU.

While the US and EU print more money and increase indebtedness to cover trade deficits, Latin America has quadrupled its foreign reserves. These cushion any downturns and avoid any dependence on the IMF, architect of the lost decades of the 1980s and 1990s.

Within Latin America, the issue of poverty reduction has been tackled with varying degrees of effectiveness. With Venezuela under President Chavez leading the way the general direction has been toward increasing social payments, by increments in most cases, but with greater efforts in others. Except for Mexico, nothing resembling the social cuts of the US-EU has taken place in Latin America. The most striking structural advances have occurred in Venezuela and to a lesser degree in Argentina. They have significantly increased the minimum wage and pensions and increased welfare payments to the most vulnerable (single mothers, the disabled, those in extreme poverty).

With the exception of Colombia (the US’s principle military ally in the region) which is still the murder capital of the world for human rights advocates, trade unionists and peasant activists, human rights violations have declined. While the US-EU have vastly increased their human rights violations geometrically via multiple colonial wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and clandestine death squad ‘operations’, Latin America’s overseas human rights violations are largely limited to its occupation forces in Haiti – at the behest of the US and EU. Nevertheless repression of popular movements, especially indigenous peoples and peasant movements and students has increased in Bolivia, Chile, Brazil and elsewhere as the high growth policies on community rights and social expenditures.

Because of Latin America’s current political stability and dynamic growth, institutional and corporate investment is pouring into the region. In contrast the US and EU are suffering from disinvestment and declining rates of private investment. In other words, the development of Latin America is the other side of the coin of the US-EU under-development.

Latin America: New Contradictions

The class struggle is still the motor force in the social progress of Latin America. But unlike EU-US, Latin America’s class struggle is directed at increasing social and monitory wages, even if incrementally, as part of an offensive strategy to capture a greater share of rising income. In the US and EU the class struggle is ‘defensive’: an effort to stop declining income shares, limit job losses and cuts in pensions.

While militant class action including land occupations, street demonstrations and strikes are still part of the repertory of working class social weapons, they take place within the political parameters of democratic institutions. In Europe the elites have increasingly ignored mass street protests and strikes, largely pursuing austerity policies dictated by non-elected domestic and foreign bankers and creditors.

The limitations and ‘contradictions’ affecting all Latin American countries are located in the internal class inequalities. As national income has increased and exports boom, the inequalities between the ruling investor class and the mass of wage earners has increased. While initially the problem of class inequality was papered over by the general rise in living standards and employment, over time the employed and productive classes are no longer satisfied with incremental gains which barely surpass inflation rates. The rising standards of living have raised expectations. The percentage of poor may have declined but subsisting just above $4 dollars a day is increasingly unacceptable. Growth brings forth its own set of contradictions and a new set of demands. Formerly excluded classes included in the system, but exploited, have only their class organizations as their weapons to advance their socio-economic interests.

This is clearly the case in contemporary Chile where long term growth is accompanied by deeply entrenched inequalities comparable to the worse in the OECD. Beginning in July 2011 massive student protests over the high cost of public and private education and low levels of social expenditures have detonated mass activity from trade unions covering the gamut of economic sectors from teachers to copper miners.

The new and explosive issue confronting rulers and ruled in most of high growth Latin America is raising incomes for whom? The class issues are front and foremost in the current period and immediate future.

Growth, stability and democratic class struggles characterize most of the major countries, but not all. In several countries, the authoritarian and violent legacy of the dictatorial regimes continues robust. Colombia’s practice of murdering trade unionists, peasant leaders, journalists and human rights activists continues unabated: over 30 trade unionists were murdered during the first eight  months of 2011.

Honduras’ ruling regime, product of a US-backed coup and its allies among the paramilitary private armies of landowners, have killed scores of peasants and dozens of pro-democracy political and social activists.

Mexico’s killing fields are notorious: over 40,000 people have been killed by the police, military and drug gangs in a ‘war on drugs’ promoted by Obama and implemented by President Calderon.

What these three retro-regimes have in common is that they continue to follow the dictates of Washington, remain highly militarized states, with a strong US military and police presence in the form of bases, overseas advisers, and an intrusive role in setting policy. All three have failed to diversify markets and continue with a high degree of dependence on the stagnant US market. All have secured, or are in the process of signing, bi-lateral free trade agreements at the expense of exploring greater links with the dynamic Asian markets.

The three retro-regimes have never experienced the kind of popular rebellions and resultant center-left regimes which have emerged in most of Latin America. In Mexico pro-democracy candidates were twice defrauded of electoral victories, first in 1988 and later in 2006. In Honduras, a progressive liberal democratic President seeking to diversify markets was ousted by a military coup backed by the Obama regime in 2010. In Colombia, the murder of 5,000 activists and leaders of the pro-democracy Patriotic Union between 1984-86, the subsequent assassination of several thousand social activists, blocked a democratic opening. The abrupt termination of peace negotiations in 2002 and the total militarization of the country (2002-2011) funded by $6 billion in US military aid precluded the emergence of the political and social changes, which have dynamized the rest of Latin America’s sustained growth and opened the door for ‘democratic class struggle’.

While most of Latin America has forged ahead, thus far largely avoiding the instability and economic crises of the US and EU, past legacies and present inequities present a new set of structural impediments to the consolidation of long-term growth and political and social stability. The biggest structural contradiction is found in the high growth/increasing inequalities, socio-economic model based on the “3 ½ alliance”: foreign capital-national capital-the developmental state and the co-opted trade union/peasant leaders.

The profits and investments of this power configuration has been driven by the growth of agro-mineral exports, rising commodity prices, easy consumer credit and state regulation of financial markets. The economic returns on growth have been disproportionately appropriated by the “big three” with incremental payoffs to a minority of better paid organized workers. The ‘residuals’ are used to “lift the poor” from abject poverty to subsistence.

These growing inequalities have been “papered over” by the general rise of income, easy credit and improved public services. But rising incomes have set in motion a new set of class conflicts which will be exacerbated when the prices of commodities decline and the governments can no longer fund incremental improvements. Even today, severe conflicts have emerged between predator mining and timber, multi nationals and Indian/peasants in Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia and Chile. These sometimes violent struggles between the state/MNC and peasants in the “periphery of the countryside” can detonate a larger conflict in the central cities, if export revenues decline.

The second contradiction is between the “marginalized working poor” and a new class of local middle and business class investors who have invested their “savings” in shares of the foreign and locally-owned mining companies. Conservative and closely aligned with the rapacious multi-nationals, these new middle class investors have enriched themselves on the bases of unregulated plunder of natural resources and contamination of the adjoining rural communities. If, and when, commodity prices nose dive, the regimes will face a bankrupt hysterical middle class looking for a political savior where none exist, at least among the existing civilian parties.

The rightward drift of the center-left regimes and their opportune links to big business especially in Brazil, Uruguay, Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay has led to corruption in high places. Liberalization and exorbitant executive salaries has been accompanied by “unofficial payoffs” to public officials. Corruptions has eroded the social ethic of center-left politicians and replaced it with the ethos of “bringing in new and bigger investments”, whatever shortcuts and payoffs it requires. Corruption at the top spreads downwards greasing the wheels for foreign investors, but certainly lowering the trust and loyalties of employees and formal and informal workers not in the ‘magic circle’, a bribe takers and givers. “Patronage” and poverty reduction payouts can limit the fallout from corruption in high places among poverty-funded recipients. However, in time of economic downturn, it can turn social protests toward political regime change.

The third contradiction is found between the high level of dependency on commodity exports (which heretofore have been the dynamic element of growth) and the relative and absolute decline of manufacturing exports and production. The growth of income from commodities has led to the appreciation of the currency which has lessened the competitiveness of nationally produced manufactured products, leading to a sharp decline in profits and even bankruptcy.

Asian manufacturer-exporters – especially in China and to a lesser extent India and Korea – are increasingly penetrating Latin markets with lower cost finished products “de-industrializing” the Latin economies. In some cases, Latin American capitalists are looking to investing in Asia to lower costs and exporting back to their “home markets”. Brazilian industry, which has been hardest hit, has initiated “protectionist” measures including tariffs, 65% local content rules and state subsidies to counter the de-diversification of the economy.

The fourth contradiction is found precisely in the successful economic growth and high returns, which has attracted both speculative and “takeover” capital as well as productive investments. Speculative capital will flee and destabilize the financial system at the first sign of slowdown. Foreign ownership will lessen the government’s ability to leverage investment decisions in time of crises. Productive investments respond to expanding markets. They do not create them.

In summary, Latin America’s decade long dynamic growth has certainly out-performed the US and EU on a whole series of important economic, social and political dimensions. Yet, out of this growth have emerged a new set of contradictions and the need to correct increasingly grave “imbalances”: popular demands for a shift in income distribution, industrialist pressure for a rebalancing of the economy from dependence on finance and commodities to manufacturing and the urban poor demand improved social services especially in public health care and crowded classrooms.

These changes require a structural adjustment in the power structure. The economic imbalances reflect the growing concentration of political power among the extractive capitalists, bankers and local middle class investors of the major cities. Public employees, labor, the urban poor, the peasants and environmentally concerned Indians and ecologists, are marginalized from the key economic posts. They need to once again take to the streets with new independent movements which raise two basic questions: What kind of growth and growth for whom?

Lessons of Latin America: Listen Yankees and Eurocrats

Can the positive lessons of the dynamic Latin American experience provide a ‘model’ for the US and Europe? Is the “model”, in whole or part, transferable to the North or are the two regions so different that the lessons are not applicable?

Granted there are vast historical, cultural, economic and political differences between the regions yet some lessons from the Latin America’s decade of dynamic growth provides new ideas to counter the negative, self-defeating economic formulas put forth and practiced by US and EU experts, economists and policymakers.

Let us start from the beginning. The rise of Latin America was precipitated by a deep economic crisis, the breakdown of the economy, large scale unemployment and the impoverishment of the middle class. The crises led to the total discrediting of what has been called alternately the “free market”, “neo-liberal” and “de-regulated” capitalist model. So far so good: the US and EU likewise are experiencing a prolonged and deepening economic crises which has bankrupted Southern Europe, plunged the US into a double dip recession and led to a 20% un and underemployment rate. The entire “political class” in the US and Europe is largely discredited. From there forward the regions diverge.

In Latin America, the crises led to mass protests, popular uprisings and regime changes. Post neo-liberal center-left regimes, under mass pressure, subsequently launched employment generating investments and aid poverty reducing public works programs. Argentina, facing a financial crisis similar to Greece, Portugal and Spain today, defaulted on its foreign debt – channeling public revenues into reviving the economy. Because financial speculation linked to Wall Street and the City of London precipitated the crises, the Latin regimes instituted financial controls and regulations which limited financial volatility. The new regimes, influenced by the commodity boom, diversified their trading partners, entering dynamic Asian markets, reaping high returns and stimulating local consumption and public investments. What lessons can the crises-ridden US and EU learn from the Latin America’s successful recovery and expansion?

First, the beginning of a successful response depends on a political transformation. Regime change, a complete break with the ‘neo-liberal’ free market, and the political leaders and parties who are totally embedded in failed institutions and policies. Regime change presupposes the eruption of dynamic mass organizations, new, old, improvised and organized, capable of moving from protest and resistance to political power.

The object is to rebalance the US and EU economies from “financialization” and “militarism” to large scale, long term investments in manufacturing, applied technology, civilian infrastructure and social services. Direct public investments and loans applied to concrete employment-generating projects; total rejection of trickle down, monetary policies which never move from private banks to public works.

The entire militarist- Zionist-permanent war mentality is entirely vulnerable to change: doing so, will create jobs, the top priority for over two-thirds of the US public. The “war on terrorism”, the banner of the warlords in office, is considered a priority by only 3% of Americans. Once again the shift from militarism to the civilian economy in Latin America was a result of popular civilian upheavals via the street and the ballot box.

Of course, the Latin American republics had an easier time in rebalancing their economic priorities from failed military rulers and discredited neo-liberal policies. Citizen movements in the US and EU imperial states will have a harder time in closing down hundreds of military bases, ousting militarist politicians backed by powerful domestic and foreign lobbies and converting the empires to productive republics. Yet, Latin American exporters have prospered by avoiding entanglement in overseas imperial wars. They continue to pursue new markets in the Middle East and elsewhere instead of destroying adversaries of Israel as the EU and US have done through colonial wars in Iraq and Libya and sanctions against Iran, Syria and Venezuela.

The contrasting performance between Latin American republics and Euro-American empire builders is striking. The US and EU should shed their self-centered images of “successful” developed countries and outdated stereotype of Latin America as a collection of “volatile”, coup prone underdeveloped countries. The US is in deep trouble and it is heading into a deeper, less manageable economic crisis with few resources to counter it. Internationally it is increasingly isolated and in conflict with potential economic partners. Washington sides with Israel, alienating over 1.5 billion rich and poor Islamic peoples, from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan and all points east, west and south. It antagonizes Brazil via financial pump priming, overpricing the real (Brazilian currency) without helping US recovery.
Domestic and international failures multiply as the crisis deepens and nothing proposed by the blighted incumbents and besotted opposition offers any programmatic solution.

As in Latin America during the first years of this decade we need a popular rebellion: we need a profound regime change; we need to think of productive public investments not monumental loss of capital via Wall Street speculation and the waste of public resources via expenditures in weapons of destruction.

U.S. contractors in Latin America are paid by the Defense and State Departments to supply countries with services that include intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, training, and equipment.

“It’s becoming increasingly clear that our efforts to rein in the narcotics trade in Latin America, especially as it relates to the government’s use of contractors, have largely failed,” said U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill, chair of the Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight which released a report on counter-narcotics contracts in Latin America this month. “Without adequate oversight and management we are wasting tax dollars and throwing money at a problem without even knowing what we’re getting in return.”

Washington doled out $3.1 billion dollars between 2005 and 2009, with spending having increased 32 percent over the five year period. DynCorp International was the big winner, racking in $1.1 billion, or 36 percent of total counter-narcotics contract spending in the region by the Defense and State Departments. Other contractors benefiting from the spending include Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, ITT, and ARINC.

“The federal government does not have any uniform systems in place to track or evaluate whether counter-narcotics contracts are achieving their goals,” the report states.

The June 7th Senate Report was released less than a week after an international drug commission declared the “War on Drugs” a failure. The commission included former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, former U.S. Federal Reserve Chief Paul Volcker, and former Colombian President Cesar Gaviria.

The lack of transparency, oversight and accountability by the Defense and State Departments on counter-narcotics contracts was brought to light last year in a May 2010 hearing McCaskill held in which the Defense Department provided incomplete accounting on how “Drug War” money was spent on private contractors. Remarkably, it was revealed that the Defense Department actually outsourced their audit to a private contractor for the hearing. In response, the frustrated Senator said at the time that she “will not hesitate to use subpoenas” in order to obtain accurate information.

This laissez-faire approach Washington takes with private contractors often leads to crimes and human rights abuses in foreign countries. For example, DynCorp, the company Washington has entrusted with a majority of taxpayer-funded counter-narcotics dollars, has been mired in scandals over the years, that include: employees allegedly having sex with teenage girls in Bosnia and selling them as sex-slaves; pimping out young “dancing boys” in Afghanistan; and spraying toxic chemicals in Colombia that drifted into Ecuador and is believed to have caused “massive health problems, numerous deaths and widespread environmental damage.”

In response to criticisms, a Pentagon Spokesman told the the L.A Times that counter-narcotics efforts “have been among the most successful and cost-effective programs” in decades and that “the U.S. has received ample strategic national security benefits in return for its investments in this area.” Some of these “benefits” might include U.S. military bases in Colombia, a law enforcement academy in El Salvador run by American “trainers” that critics fear could become another “School of the Americas“, and securing commercial access to oil. But one of these benefits definitely does not include significantly curtailing the amount of drugs reaching the United States, as the Rand Corporation’s Peter Chalk recently pointed out in his report on Latin America’s drug trade, an analysis sponsored by the U.S. Air Force.

Clearly the US-led war on drugs is failing as a policy to stop the production and trafficking of drugs. And it’s not as though there are not numerous viable solutions being provided by people across the hemisphere. Javier Sicilia, Mexican poet and leading activist against drug war-related violence in his country, told journalist Laura Carlsen of the Americas Program, “The United States must go back to the drawing board, listen to what citizens are demanding, and the United States should remember, as a democratic country, that sovereignty lies in the citizens, not in government officials.”

While there is an anti-drug war movement budding in Mexico, we need to grow our own here in the United States and to start making our demands for humane and nonviolent policy alternatives.

An important aspect of President Correa’s policies has been a noticeable and ongoing reduction in poverty. In 2009, 38.3 percent of the population lived below the poverty line, in 2010 it was 35.1 and now in 2011 it is at 33.1 while the percentage in poverty is expected to continue declining. Furthermore, public investment has been on the rise from 2.4 billion in 2007, 3.450 billion in 2008, 5.66 billion in 2009 and 5.331 billion in 2010. In 2001, 50% of the GDP earnings were used to pay Ecuador’s foreign debt. Yet today the Correa government pays 15% of the GDP to the foreign debt with the majority of the rest of the balance going to investments in public and social work projects for the common good.

Similar pro-people programs are now instituted in Venezuela by President Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías, Bolivia by President Evo Morales, Brazil’s new President Dilma Rouseff, and, perhaps, by Argentina’s President Cristina Fernandez and Uruguay’s President Jose Mujica. A possible addition to Latin America’s leftist Presidents is Peru’s Ollanta Humala if he wins the upcoming June 5th election and who seemingly supports a similar program for his country’s people.

In relation to these leaders’ plans to uplift their countries’ citizenry, one wonders that programs cannot be made universally available. Surely they are needed in many nations in addition to the ones in which they are currently operative. Especially the United States and other nations struggling with increasing poverty amongst their citizens could benefit from developing such programs.

In any case, any government ought to be based on humanism and be fundamentally humanistic in nature regardless of whether it is a democratic, socialist, communist or other sort. Moreover, political organizations or movements that are not or have moved away from primarily serving their lands’ populaces will lose any sort of legitimacy that they may or may not have previously had.

Among those that have little legitimacy and are not truly left would include The Shining Path, FARC — the Columbian guerrilla movement, and the North Korean government. Surely, we can add some centrist, neoconservative and neoliberal counterparts into the mix of those political groups that are losing their sense of legitimacy. And surely this would indicate that governments that do not well serve their constituents’ needs gradually lose their sense of authority and popular support, as we presently see occurring in the U.S.

1. Prensa Latina News Agency “Ecuador Quadruples Social Spending,” 2 June 2011.

This assault led three of the local campesinos from Intag, Ecuador to file a lawsuit against the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) and Copper Mesa Corporation, the Canadian mining company responsible for hiring the “security firm” that sent the paramilitaries to intimidate the anti-mining residents of the region.

“I ask the noble people of Canada,” said Ramírez when she filed the lawsuit in March 2009, “that you demand from your elected authorities significant changes in your national legislation so that what has happened with Copper Mesa in Intag will never happen again, not in Intag nor in any other part of the world.”

John McKay, a Liberal Member of Parliament from Canada, actually introduced legislation that would have been a concrete first step in holding Canadian mining companies accountable for their behavior overseas. Bill C-300 would have sanctioned the Canadian federal government to investigate human rights and environmental complaints filed against companies with the authority to cancel any governmental funding if found guilty. While some activists and NGO’s leveled criticism against the bill for being too tepid, most supported the legislation. Unfortunately the Canadian government, largely perceived to be in the pockets of the mining industry, did not and the bill was voted down. Catherine Coumans, research coordinator for MiningWatch Canada, has charged the government with “aiding and abetting” the industry’s inhumane, if not criminal, behavior.

Injustice and Impunity Continues

Last month, when three judges at the Court of Appeals in Canada ruled against the three Intag residents, a lot more than a lawsuit was lost. The court basically said that people overseas have no right to sue a Canadian institution or company for human rights violations in Canadian courts. Their statement to the world reaffirmed what many communities effected by Canadian mining projects in the developing world already know: institutions like the TSX and Copper Mesa will never be held accountable for human rights abuses and environmental destruction they fund and carry out.

“Do Canadians really want to have their legal system on the one hand authorize Canadian mining companies to go abroad to developing countries, and then on the other hand totally absolve the directors in Canada of any responsibility whatsoever for human rights abuses those companies may perpetrate there?” asked Murray Klippenstein, legal counsel for the Ecuadorians, who is also legal counsel for a widow in Guatemala whose husband was murdered by the head of security of a Canadian mining subsidiary because of his outspoken concerns about the activities of the company.

But the ruling also produces another very unsettling effect, or better put, reinforces a widely-held belief in the extractive industry resistance movements overseas: that it is a waste of time, energy and funds to try to use the judicial system in order to have their rights recognized and communities protected. The implications are troubling.

One example to illustrate this point is the infamous Chevron-Texaco case where 18 long years had to pass before the 30,000 Ecuadorian indigenous and campesino plaintiffs got a favorable sentence in an Ecuadorian court for their lawsuit based on the grave health impacts from years of petroleum extraction- and contamination- in the Amazon. The destruction has been such that it’s been labeled a “Rainforest Chernobyl”. But even now the case could be held up in courts for an additional decade from appeals, meaning that many of the plaintiffs will have died before the possibility of collecting what is due them.

Canadians don’t hear too much about the environmental destruction and social upheaval their oil, gas and mining industries are spreading overseas. In spite of countless reports of human rights violations all over the world, Canadian corporations have been very successful at greenwashing the news back home and replacing it by images of the “socially responsible” Canadian corporate citizen bringing wealth and development abroad.

However, if the lawsuit contributed to the company being expelled from the TSX, as it was on February 2010, leads to its bankruptcy, and as a result pressures the judicial system in Canada to open itself up to legitimate lawsuits brought by communities overseas against their extractive industries, then it was very much worthwhile. If, in the long run, it will contribute to bringing about legislative reforms that will effectively reduce or stop the murders of anti-mining activists, like what happened in El Salvador and Mexico, and other human rights, social and environmental abuses, then it will have been a major victory. Much depends on how much information is able to filter through to the average Canadian, and what it will take to get them outraged to demand such changes.

Added to this failing of the justice system in Canada, the same week saw the superior court in Quito throw out my (Carlos Zorrilla) lawsuit against film producers working for Ecuacorriente for criminal libel. Unfortunately, this was also no major surprise given the state of the judicial system here. I had initiated a criminal lawsuit against Chinese-owned Ecuacorriente for a 45-minute documentary film paid for by the company where they falsely linked me to anti-mining violence in the south of the country.

The question that begs answering is: When the judicial system so utterly fails to guarantee minimum justice in cases of clear abuses by transnational corporations, or when the litigation is economically so out of reach for the majority of effected people, what other route is there for communities to seek justice? (The costs of the Canadian case was over a $100,000, although luckily it was all pro bono thanks to the law firm Klippensteins in Toronto.)

Communities understand, not only at a gut level but also through experience, that they are politically and legally outmatched by powerful corporations with deep pockets and decades of experience thwarting justice by manipulating the court systems. Rulings such as Ramirez vs. Copper Mesaonly reaffirm this belief.

Therefore, many communities could read into the defeat of the lawsuit that their only practical (and affordable) solution to the threats that mining and other extractive industries pose on their rights, land and cultures lies in physically standing up to these projects – even at the risk of being labeled terrorists or saboteurs. Ramirez vs. Copper Mesa will reinforce the idea that direct, physical resistance is the only way to prevent community members from being murdered, indigenous cultures from being annihilated, and the environment from being decimated. This, at a time when special laws are being enacted in countries rich in natural resources, such as Ecuador, to judicially categorize acts of civil disobedience as terrorism. As of today, there are nearly 300 activists in Ecuador facing terrorism and sabotage charges for standing up to mining and other extractive activities that threaten the livelihood, or well-being of communities and the environment. Over half of these targeted activists are indigenous, including the leaders of the most important indigenous groups in the country. Ironically enough, this happens in the context of Ecuador’s progressive Constitution, which recognizes that nature has rights, and that Ecuadorians have the right to a good life (Sumak Kawsay). Take away the only effective tool that communities and indigenous people have to protect these rights from transnational corporations and you have the making of a major, and sustained, human rights nightmare supported by the State.

This is why the court decision in Canada matters, not just in Ecuador, but throughout the world.

Dangl has previously written The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia (AK Press, 2007), and contributed to Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Latin American Issues (McGraw-Hill, 2006). He has written about politics and social issues in Latin America for The Guardian Unlimited, The Nation Magazine, The Progressive, Utne Reader, CounterPunch, Alternet, Common Dreams, Z Magazine, La Estrella de Panama and more. While currently teaching Latin American history and politics and globalization at Burlington College in Vermont, he also works as editor of the news websites: Upside Down World, focusing on politics and social movements in Latin America (founded by Dangl), and Toward Freedom, a progressive perspective on world events.

In Dancing With Dynamite’s introduction, Dangl writes that “this book deals with the dances between today’s nominally left-leaning South American governments and the dynamic movements that helped pave their way to power in Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela, Brazil, and Paraguay. The discussion surrounding the question of changing the world through taking state power or remaining autonomous has been going on for centuries. The vitality of South America’s new social movements, and the recent shift to the left in the halls of government power, make the region a timely subject of study within this ongoing debate. Though often overlooked in contemporary reporting and analysis on the region, this dance is a central force crafting many countries’ collective destiny.”

Dangl feels that US activists can learn much from studying this “dance,” telling Angola 3 News that “because South American social movements have been so successful in the past decade, I think it is important to learn and understand what’s been successful and to apply those strategies and tactics here, where we are facing very similar challenges.” Because the political climate in the US today is different from Latin America in many ways, Dangl argues that “these strategies and tactics shouldn’t just be taken and applied directly to our communities, but should instead be considered and made useful in our own context and realities.”

In the interview, Dangl cites several different lessons for US activists, including the need to “create the kind of social relationships within our own social movements that reflect the kind of world that we are fighting for every day. That’s been useful for neighborhood councils in El Alto, Bolivia where people work together every day, whether it’s to build roads, soccer fields, or pressure a mayor for better access to electricity and water. These kinds of social relations within the family and neighborhoods help to create the capacity to mobilize road blockades and protests when that’s needed.”

There are also lessons here for US activists seeking to push President Obama and other politicians further to the left, as Dangl thinks the question of “how to fight against a relative ally in political office without empowering the right” has been “negotiated very successfully throughout South America.”

Fortunately, US activists have already been learning from their neighbors to the south. In the book’s introduction, Dangl cites several examples, including “the 2008 occupation of the Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago which drew from tactics in Argentina, the movements for access to water in Detroit and Atlanta, which reflected tactics and struggles in Bolivia, and the Take Back the Land movement in Florida, which organized homeless people to occupy a vacant lot and pairs homeless families with foreclosed homes, mirroring the tactics and philosophy of the landless movement in Brazil.”

When asked for a closing thought at the end of our interview, Dangl emphasized the larger global struggle against oppression by arguing that Dancing With Dynamite’s lessons extend well beyond the US and Latin America. “With what’s happened in Egypt with the overthrow of Mubarak, and what is going on right now in Madison,Wisconsin with the fight for collective bargaining, I think these struggles are related in the sense that they’re all about political power. With these recent examples, there is a shift in power from the government office to the streets, and recognizing that is important today in the fight for social change. In Madison, activists say they’ve been really inspired by activists in Egypt. Recognizing these common oppressors & common systems of exploitation, and working for solutions together across borders is really a solution for making the world a better place.”

The sounds of car horns, salsa music, children in playgrounds, barking dogs and occasional gun shots rise out of Catia, one of the largest slums of South America. Catia is a sea of multi-tiered, tin-roofed brick shacks that cling to the mountains around Caracas, Venezuela. Uncollected garbage rots in the streets and tangled wires pirating electricity weave from house to house. Sporadically rising out of this neighborhood are dilapidated concrete apartment buildings with laundry flapping from the balconies like flags. Much of the support for President Hugo Chavez… comes from neighborhoods like Catia.

Many chapters of the book open similarly, with poetic imagery that captures the street-level reality of the South American revolutions as he sets about interviewing social movement activists to find out what’s really going on with the so-called “Pink Tide” rising over the continent. Not surprisingly, Dangl has written a very different script from Oliver Stone, whose material is filtered through translators, refracted by a Hollywood lens and drawn exclusively from interviews with the presidents in their government palaces.

Dancing with Dynamite enters a growing field of books on South American politics, so it’ll face competition for space on the bookshelf. Nevertheless, this is a daring, you could say “explosive,” little book, and it stands out in a big way from other volumes on the subject, especially since the latter tend to follow the same Great Man narrative that Stone develops in his film. For example, Pirates of the Caribbean, by Tariq Ali (who co-authored the South of the Border script, along with Mark Weisbrot, co-director of Center for Economic and Policy Research, CEPR) focuses almost exclusively on the so-called “leftist” presidents of the region: Chavez, Castro, Morales and Correa.

A much better book is Nikolas Kozloff’s Revolution!: South America and the rise of the New Left. While Kozloff tends not to be too dazzled by the Great Men of History to investigate the social movements, the influence of the dominant narrative still shows through: “Though many social movements pressure governments from without, some have also merged with political parties themselves, creating a potent coalition to spearhead social change.”

Dangl challenges and ultimately refutes this popular assumption, widely held on the left outside of South America, that there is a common interest between the governments and the social movements of the region. The assumption is based, it seems, on very little but hope: hope that things are different in South America than they are here in the U.S, where a president elected as a “progressive” has proven himself to be, at best, entirely indifferent to the people struggling for justice, and at worst, their enemy.

That becomes increasingly clear to the reader of Dancing with Dynamite is that there are many striking parallels between the US and its southern neighbors: in South America, particularly Argentina, Ecuador, Paraguay and Brazil, sharp conflicts are commonplace between left social movements and “progressive” governments that often only differ nominally from their right-wing predecessors. A confluence of interests between governments and organized movements in the region is the exception rather than the rule and Dangl goes so far as to argue that the governments of the region are “dancing with dynamite” because “the logic of social movements competes with that of the state.” By contrast to the assumptions made by Kozloff, Ali and others, Dangl’s conclusion is that “the state and governing party is, by its nature, a hegemonic force that generally aims to subsume, weaken or eliminate other movements and political forces that contest its power.” The book is offered as evidence to back up this statement, and it’s convincing.

Nevertheless, despite his sympathies toward the “autonomist” movements, Dangl shows himself willing to tip his hat to the state when appropriate: “While autonomist movements and actions are a focus of this book, the importance of state-created initiatives, social programs, and development projects aimed at empowering people and curtailing poverty should not be underestimated.” Dangl works in the tradition of the great historian Howard Zinn, keeping his focus on the common partners in this “dance” as he reveals how social movements have been more or less demobilized, set back or, in Ecuador, under direct, and sometimes violent, attack by many of the “progressive” governments.

Dangl’s earlier book, The Price of Fire, brought Bolivia’s struggles into focus, so it’s no surprise that he would pick up where he left off by dealing with this very complex political situation in the first chapter of Dancing with Dynamite entitled, “Bolivia’s Dance with Evo Morales.” Social movements played a major role in the election of one of South America’s first indigenous leaders, a man who also was a protagonist in those same movements. Dangl reveals through his interviews with social movement activists, community leaders and party militants of the official MAS (Movement Toward Socialism) Party, a problematic, complicated and contradictory relationship with the social movements.

Part of the problem is situational and structural, a simple result of what happens to the exercise of popular power when mediated by the State. If your community is organized to bring water to each home, a degree of “demobilization” is natural when that function is taken over by the state. What was a work built on personal, neighborly relations now becomes an anonymous enterprise and the personal bonds of neighbors are no longer “necessary.”As Pablo Mamani, an Aymaran sociologist at the Public University of El Alto framed the problem in an interview with Dangl: “Movements organized autonomously and created forms of self-governance before the MAS took power. If the party now directs those energies toward the state, it contributes to a level of demobilization.” Other activists Dangl interviewed argue that it also contributes to a certain level of political apathy.

Another factor contributing to that apathy, however, has been for members of the social movements to see their leaders jockeying for positions and high-paid sinecures in the new government. Many leaders of social movements have been seduced by power and money, “seeking better jobs, and more money in the government now, instead of focusing on meeting the demands of their bases.” As a result, Dangl notes that the MAS government “imposes direction and policy on coopted movements that are then used as part of a political machine to simply maintain centralized power and churn out votes.”

This also reflects what many argue to be a strategy from the beginning of the Morales government for the deactivation of the social movements. In fact Morales’ ambivalence toward the social movements has been evident since the beginning of his presidency. When I visited Bolivia just months after the Morales inauguration, a number of indigenous and social movement leaders expressed to me having felt, at best, ignored, and in some cases, betrayed by the new government.

In Cochabamba, Oscar Olivera, a main organizer of the infamous gas and water wars which brought down previous governments, told me, with a note of bitterness in his voice, that Evo had called him daily, often several times a day, before becoming president, but in the four months since he’d come to power, Oscar had yet to hear from him.

Already in April of 2006 rumors were abounding of government attempts to bribe, with money or power, or otherwise deactivate, the leadership of the movements.  In the intervening years more evidence of these conflicts has emerged, causing a great unease that mixes with the optimism of the Bolivian social movements. In interviews with members of the MAS, activists in various movements, and government officials, Dangl concludes starkly that Bolivia’s future depends on “how the movements navigate a rocky road filled with nepotism, corruption and cooptation, and how well they can rise above party politics and the adoration of a single leader.”

In Ecuador, another nation with a “progressive” president and a large indigenous population, the social movements are facing not cooptation, but frontal attacks by Rafael Correa, a president fond of the language of the “Socialism of the  Century” for dressing up his 21st century capitalist politics. “Correa turned his back on the indigenous people and Ecuadorian left almost immediately upon taking office,” Dangl tells us.

This coincides with US journalist Daniel Denvir’s wry observation that Correa is only known as a leftist outside of Ecuador. Also unknown outside of Ecuador are his authoritarian, controlling and insulting comments and behavior toward members of the social movements, particularly the environmentalists and indigenous people, both sectors that present obstacles to his extractivist capitalist policies. Correa commonly refers to members of both groups who refuse to go along with policies they consider reckless, invasive or destructive as “infantile.” In response, the social and indigenous movements have offered Correa tepid support, as noted in the recent “coup” or police uprising. Correa’s attacks on indigenous movements such as CONAIE has had the effect of pushing them “out of the political debate and calling on police repression to crack down on their dissent, Correa has worked to undermine the indigenous movement,” in Dangl’s words.

From Ecuador Dangl takes us to Argentina where a few years ago workers rose up against the neoliberal governments when the economy imploded in December of 2001. Workers began taking over factories, hotels and other businesses in direct actions. Piqueteros, groups of unemployed workers who had previously organized themselves into powerful popular organizations to demand justice, were exercising a growing power through the 1990s and through the crisis of December 2001. When President Nestor Kirchner (who died October 27 of this year) came to power on a progressive platform, he set out to coopt those movements he was able, and wear the others down by simply ignoring them, when possible, in what journalist Federico Schuster calls “ a strategy of wearing out the resistance” and dispersing it. Kirchner’s dual strategy worked and in Argentina today “one of the most expansive and momentous grassroots uprisings of the 21st century dissipated” and the groups that comprised it have mostly become, according to Dangl, “shadows of what they were in 2001 and 2002.”

Dangl examines Uruguay under the Frente Amplio (FA), a stunning example of coalition building and grassroots organizing for an electoral campaign (as is the Worker’s Party in neighboring Brazil), in his aptly titled chapter, “Turning Activists into Voters in Uruguay.” On the positive side, some democratic structures such as base committees and communal councils (Dangl doesn’t clearly distinguish these two) came into being through the electoral organizing, yet “when the logic of electoral politics takes precedence over the urgent demands of a population, the role of social movements as powerful political protagonists can be lost or confused.” As a result, the social movements of Uruguay are viewed by many as stagnant. Moreover, while base committees of the FA offer possibilities for citizens to participate more fully in their government, Dangl concludes that they can “also constrain the autonomy of communities.”

Dangl agrees with most observers that social movements have prospered and increased under the Chavez government in Venezuela, saying “a number of government initiatives and policies have empowered the grassroots in unprecedented ways and created space in which social movements can flex their muscles.” He visits health clinics, community radio stations, video collectives and, impressed as he is by what he sees, Dangl still wonders if “the Bolivarian Revolution can outlast Chavez.”

A centralized system such as Venezuela’s also tends to breed patronage. Many analysts have taken note of this and attribute it to the country’s dependency on a single resource administered by the state: oil. The problem antedates Chavez by some eighty years, and it’s one he’s alternately used to his advantage and also attempted to resolve by organizing communal councils and other decentralizing structures. Unfortunately, as Dangl notes, there is an ongoing resistance to these attempts from within the Chavez government itself, and the majority of Venezuelans are dependent upon the government for some form of employment or assistance, making the development of autonomist movements very difficult.

Nevertheless, autonomist organizations and movements do exist in Venezuela and Dangl has included three of them in this chapter, although briefly and not always by name: the factory workers who took over their valve-manufacturing plant (Inveval), campesinos who occupied and gained title to land in Cojedes, and Wayuu indigenous activists who fought against coal mining in Zulia. From what Dangl offers us, these are isolated events and not manifestations of vital and powerful autonomous social movements representing distinct, independent sectors of Venezuelan society. Certainly to delve into that would have required time and space beyond the twenty-five pages Dangl allotted to the chapter on Venezuela, but it would have been quite valuable to connect those dots.

In his chapter on Brazil Dangl examines one of the most significant and successful social movements as well as one of the more neoliberal governments among the South American nations he’s selected to analyze. Lula, praised by moderates and conservatives alike, left office with enough popularity to help bring his successor, Dilma Rousseff, to power. But the social movements haven’t been very happy with Lula, nor do they seem to be convinced of any further leftward movements on the part of his successor, Rouseff. Dangl affirms the wisdom of the Landless Movement (MST, for their initials in Portuguese) in its decision to maintain a distance from electoral politics, especially given that, as he points out, land reform actually slowed under the Lula administration. The MST comes off as exemplary for the way they have maintained a focus, energy and clear organizational strategy without being pulled away into electoral politics.

Dangl ends his examination of South America in Paraguay, where he opened his introduction. Fernando Lugo, a bishop formed in Liberation Theology, became president of this country in 2008 after an unending succession of presidents and dictators from the ruling Colorado Party, most notoriously Alfredo Stroessner. Despite the enthusiasm that greeted Lugo’s victory (my Argentinian friends and I drove all night to attend the inaugural celebrations, and were met there by joyous activists from all over South America), the new Paraguayan president has proven to be a great disappointment. One Paraguayan from the Frente Social y Popular, an organization which came into being to elect him, told me: “Lugo isn’t a fighter. He tries to make peace with everyone.” Unfortunately, he has made peace primarily with the great Brazilian soy farmers, the oligarchy, the notorious mafias that trade in black and gray market goods, and the Colorado Party, which maintains hold on the congress and most of the apparatus of the state, including security and military. Lugo, it seems, has made peace with everyone in the country but the social movements that continue to struggle for justice with very little aid or comfort from the man who was formerly known as “the Red Bishop of the Poor.”

By the end of the book, or from the vantage point of the US, it all looks so familiar: progressive presidents who usurp the energy of the social movements and channel it into their electoral campaigns turn out to be just another capitalist brand against whom the movements, if they maintain their clarity and independence, must engage in a new struggle. The story line repeats all over the Americas, and that’s just the point. “When connections are made across borders to identify both the systems of oppression and the strategies to overcome them, a better world will indeed be possible,” Dangl argues. With such parallels between the political situation in the US and in many South American countries, it’s fitting that Dangl would end his book in the US, with a focus on activists applying strategies and tactics from Latin America. Dangl examines the Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago, the anti-water privatization activists, particularly in Highland Park, Michigan, and the housing activists organized by Max Rameau in Miami, each engaged in struggles mirroring those taking place over the past decade in South America.

“Moving beyond traditional concepts of democracy and acting outside the logic of the state,” Dangl tells us, “has been beneficial to movements throughout history.” He continues: “Working toward Utopia within the autonomous territory of the movement means a new world can be created without the blessing of the state or capitalism, but according to the movement’s logic and reality.”

By the final chapter of Dancing with Dynamite and after a tour through a South America in upheaval, or resurrection, the reader might find these words convincing, even in the absence of massive concrete evidence of the existence of an actual social movement in the US. Those of us who lived through the ‘60s know that movements can appear almost overnight in an illuminating flash of self-conscious recognition when the constricting fabric of long-held delusions and stupefying apathy rips open as the result of a crisis to reveal a long-repressed reality.

Dancing with Dynamite is more than a simple romantic fascination with far-off, exotic revolutions. It offers a glimpse of what we might find beyond the crisis that has paralyzed us, the first inklings of that process that, should it come to fruition, is guaranteed to strike terror in the hearts of the Great Men of History.

While President Correa and all governments in Latin America, and significant sectors of the Ecuadorian public described the violent actions as a coup, the principle organ of Wall Street – the Wall Street Journal – described it as a “police protest”. Spoke persons for Goldman Sachs and the Council of Foreign Relations referred to the police and military power grab against the democratically elected government as a self-induced “political crises” of the President. While the coup was underway the “Indian” movement CONAIE, launched a manifesto condemning the government, while the “Indian” party Pachakutik supported the ouster of the President and backed the police coup as a “just act of public servants”.

In summary, the imperial backers of the coup, sectors of the Ecuadorian elite and Indian movement downplayed the violent police uprising as a coup in order to justify their support for it as just another “legitimate economic protest”. In other words, the victim of the elite coup was converted into the repressor of the peoples’ will. The factual question of whether their was a coup or not, is central to deciding whether the government was justified in repressing the police uprising and whether in fact the democratic system was endangered.

The Facts about the Coup

The police did not simply “protest” against economic polices, they seized the National Assembly and attempted to occupy public buildings and media outlets. The air force – or at least those sectors collaborating with the police – seized the airport in Quito, concerted actions seizing and blocked strategic transport networks. President Correa was assaulted and seized and kept hostage under police guard by scores of heavily armed police, who violently resisted the Special Forces who eventually freed the president resulting in scores of wounded and ten deaths. Clearly the leaders of the police uprising had more in mind that a simple “protest” over cancelled bonuses – they sought to overthrow the president and were willing to use their firepower to carry it off. The initial economic demands of public sector employees were used by the coup leaders as a springboard to oust the regime.

The fact that the coup failed is, in part, a result of the President’s vigorous and dramatic appeal to the people to take to the streets to defend democracy – an appeal, which resonated with thousands of supporters and denied the coup makers public support in the streets.

The facts on the ground all point to a violent attempt by the police and sectors of the military to seize power and depose the president – by any definition a coup. And so it was immediately understood by all Latin American governments, from right to left, some of whom immediately closed their frontiers and threatened to break relations if the coup leaders succeeded. The only exception was Washington – whose first response was not to join in the condemnation but to wait and see what would be the outcome or as presidential spokesperson Philip Crowley announced “we are monitoring events”, referring to the uprising as a “protest” challenging the government. When Washington realized that the coup was actively opposed by the Ecuadorian public, all the Latin American governments, the bulk of the armed forces and doomed to failure, Secretary of State Clinton called Correa to announce US “backing” for his government, referring to the coup as merely an “interruption of the democratic order”.

In the run-up to the restoration of democracy, the trade unions were by and large passive observers, certainly no general strikes were discussed or even active mobilizations. The response of top military officials in the army were by and large opposed to the coup, except perhaps in the air force which seized the principle airport in Quito, before handing it over to anti-drug units of the police force. The anti narcotic police were in the forefront of the coup and not surprisingly were under intense US training and indoctrination for the past five years.

Explanation for the Varied Responses to the Coup

The responses to and interpretations of the coup varied according to different sets of objective interests and subjective perceptions. Latin American regimes unanimously rejected the coup fearing a coup multiplier effect in the region, in which other successful coups (after last year’s in Honduras) would encourage the military and police to act in their countries. The memories of the recent past in which the military dismantled all representative institutions and jailed, tortured, killed and exiled political leaders was a key factor in shaping Latin America’s resounding rejection. Secondly, the existing political order benefits the capitalist class, in almost all of Latin America and provides the bases for political stability and elite prosperity. No powerful mass movements threaten capitalist socio-economic hegemony, which might require the economic elite to back a coup.

Correa supporters were in the streets, though not in the numbers of his previous calls to action ousting ex-President Lucio Gutierrez. They were mainly party loyalists. Others supported his “anti-imperialist” measures (expelling the US military base from Manta) or were defending democratic institutions even as they have become critical of his recent policies.

The US vacillation, shifting from an initial refusal to condemn to later denouncing the failed coup, was based on longstanding ties to the military but especially the police. Between 2006-2011 US military and police aid will have totaled $94 million, of which $89 million was channeled to the “war on drugs”. From 2006-2008, Ecuadorian military and police trainees numbered 931, 526 of whom were incorporated in the “counter-drugs programs”. It was precisely the anti-drug sector of the police which played a major role in seizing the airports in Quito during the abortive coup. The US certainly had plenty of motives for the coup. Correa came to power by ousting pro-US client Lucio Gutierrez and decimating the oligarchical parties who were responsible for dollarizing the economy and embracing Washington’s free market doctrine. Correa called into question the foreign debt, declining to pay debts incurred under fraudulent circumstances. Most of all Correa was an ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a member of ALBA and a strong opponent of Colombia, Washington’s main ally in the region. Ecuador’s policy weakened Washington’s strategy of “encircling Venezuela” with hostile regimes. Having already backed the successful coup against Honduras President Zelaya, an ally of Chavez, Washington had everything to gain from a military coup which ousted another member of ALBA. Washington is pursuing a “triple strategy” of 1) diplomacy, offering to improve relations, 2) subversion by building subversive capacity by financing the police and military, and 3) financing via AID, NED, World Bank and NGO’s sectors of the Indian movement especially Pachacutik and dissident groups linked Lucio Gutierrez.

The leadership of the Indian movement varied in its response to the coup. The most extreme position adopted by the near moribund electoral party Pachacutik (US aid recipient) actually endorsed the police coup and call on the masses to form a “united front”, a call which fell on deaf ears. The bulk of the Indian movement (CONAIE) adopted a complex position of denying that a coup was taking place, yet rejecting the police violence and setting forth a series of demands and criticisms of Correa’s policies and methods of governance. No effort was made to either oppose the coup or to support it. In other words, in contrast to its militant anti dictatorial past, CONAIE was virtually a marginal actor.

The passivity of CONAIE and most of the trade unions has its roots in profound policy disagreements with the Correa regime.

Correa’s Self-Induced Vulnerability: His Right Turn

During the emerging citizens-movement five years ago, Rafael Correa played an important role in deposing the authoritarian, corrupt and pro-imperialist regime of Lucio Gutierrez. Once elected President, he put in practice some of his major electoral promises: evicting the US from its military base in Manta; rejecting foreign debt payments based on illicit accounts; raising salaries, the minimum wage, providing low interest loans and credit to small business. He also promised to consult with and take account of the urban social and Indian movements, in the lead up to the election of a constitutional assembly to write up a new constitution. In 2007 Correa’s list running with his new party Alianza Pais (the country alliance) won a two thirds majority in the legislature. However facing declining revenues due to the world recession, Correa made a sharp turn to right. He signed lucrative contracts with multi-national mining companies granting them exploitation rights on lands claimed by indigenous communities without consulting the latter, despite a past history of catastrophic contamination of Indian lands, water and habitat. When local communities acted to block the agreements, Correa sent in the army and harshly repressed the protestors. In subsequent efforts to negotiate, Correa only heard his own voice and dismissed the Indian leaders as a “bunch of bandits”, and “backward elements” who were blocking the “modernization of the country”.

Subsequently, Correa went on the offensive against the public employees, pushing legislation reducing salaries, bonuses and promotions, repudiating settlements based on agreements between unions and legislators. In the same way, Correa imposed new laws on university governance, which alienated the professoriate, administration and students. Equally damaging to Correa’s popularity among the organized sectors of the wage and middle classes, was his authoritarian style in pushing his agenda, the pejorative language he used to label his interlocutors and his insistence that negotiations were only a means to discredit his counterparts.

Contrary to Correa’s claim to be a pathfinder for “21st century socialism”, he was, instead, the organizer of a highly personal strategy for 21st century capitalism, one based on a dollarized economy, large scale foreign investments in mining, petroleum and financial services and social austerity.

Correa’s ‘right turn’, however, also depended on political and financial support from Venezuela and its Cuban and Bolivian allies. As a result Correa fell between two chairs: he lost support from the social left because of “pro-extractive” foreign economic policies and austere domestic programs and did not secure support from the US, because of his ties to Chavez and Cuba.

As a result, Correa so alienated the unions and the Indian and social movements that he was only able to secure very limited amount of “street power” in closing down the economy to thwart the coup. Equally important, the US and its collaborators saw in his declining organized support and the growth of social protest, an opportunity to test the waters for a possible coup, via their most dependable collaborators in the police and to a lesser degree in the air force. The police uprising was a test run, encouraged to proceed, without any overt, commitment, pending its success or failure. If the police coup secured sufficient military support, Washington and its civilian political oligarchs could intervene, call for a “negotiated outcome” which would either oust Correa or “turn him” into a “pragmatic” client. In other words, a “successful” coup would eliminate another Chavez ally, but even a failed coup would put Correa on notice for the future.

Final Reflections in the Way of a Conclusion

The unfolding of the police coup turned into a farce: the coup makers miscalculated their support within the military as well as among the protesting Indians and unions. They stood alone without glory or success. Lacking national leaders, or even a coherent strategy, they were put down in a matter of hours. They misjudged the willingness of the US to commit, once it became clear that the coup makers lacked any resonance among the military elite and were totally inept. What may have started as a coup ended as a comic opera with a brief shoot-out with the military at a police hospital.

On the other side, the fact that Correa, in the end could only rely on his elite special forces, to free him from police hostage, reveals the tragedy of a popular leader. One who started with immense popular backing, promising to finally fulfill the demand of the campesinos for land reform, the Indians demand for sovereignty to negotiate over mineral riches and urban labors’ demands for just remuneration, and ended returning to the Presidential Palace protected by military armored carriers.

The failed coup in Ecuador raises a larger political question: Does the near demise of Correa spell the end of the experiment of the ‘new center-left regimes’ which attempt to “balance” vigorous export-based growth with moderate social payoffs? The entire success of the center-left regimes has been based on their ability to subsidize and promote agro-mineral foreign and domestic capital while increasing employment, wages and subsistence payments (anti-poverty programs). This ‘political formula’ has been underwritten by the boom in demand from Asia and other world markets and by historically high commodity prices. When the crises of 2008 broke, Ecuador was the weakest link in Latin America, as it was tied to the dollar and was unable to ‘stimulate’ growth or cushion the economy. Under conditions of crises, Correa resorted to repression of the social movements and trade unions and greater efforts to secure support from petro-mining multi-nationals. Moreover, Ecuador’s police and military was much more vulnerable to infiltration by US agencies because of large scale funding and training programs unlike Bolivia and Venezuela which had expelled these agencies of subversion. Unlike Argentina and Brazil, Correa lacked a capacity to “conciliate” diverse sectors of social movements through negotiations and concessions. Of course, the penetration of the Indian communities by imperial funded NGO’s promoting “separatism” and identity’ politics did not make conciliation easy.

Nevertheless, despite the particularities of Ecuador, the failed coup underlines the relative importance of resolving basic socio-economic grievances, if the center-left macro-economic projects are to succeed. Apart from Venezuela, none of the center-left regimes are carrying out structural reforms (land reform) nationalizations of strategic sectors, income redistribution. Even the Chavez regime in Venezuela has lost a great deal of popular support because of neglect of essential services (public safety, garbage collection, delivery of water, electrical power and food delivery) because of corruption and incompetence. Over time, the center-left can no longer depend on “charismatic” leaders to compensate for the lack of structural changes. The regimes must sustain the improvement of wages and salaries and delivery of basic services in an ambiance of ‘social dialogue’. The absence of continuous social reforms, while agro-mining elites prosper, opens the door for the return of the right and provokes divisions in the social coalitions supporting the center-left regimes. Most important the implosion of the center-left provides an opportunity for Washington to subvert and overthrow the regimes, reverse their relatively independent foreign policy and reassert its hegemony.

The institutional foundations of the center-left are fragile everywhere, especially the police and army, because officialdom is still engaged in government programs with US military, narco-police and intelligence agencies. The center-left regimes – except Venezuela – have continued to participate in all joint military programs. The center-left has not transformed the state. Equally important it has promoted the economic bases of the pro-US Right via its agro-mineral export strategy. It has ignored the fact that political stability is temporary and based on a balance of social power resulting from the popular rebellions of the 2000-2005 period. The center-left ignores the reality that as the capitalist class prospers, as a result of center-left agro-mineral export strategies, so does the political right. And as the wealth and political power of the export elites increase and as the center-left turns to the Right, as has been the case with Correa, there will be greater social conflict and a new cycle of political upheavals, if not by the ballot box then via the bullet – via coups or via popular uprisings.

The successful coup in Honduras (2009) and the recent failed coup in Ecuador are symptomatic of the deepening crises of “post-neo-liberal” politics. The absence of a socialist alternative, the fragmentation of the social movements, the embrace of “identity politics”, have severely weakened an effective organized alternative when and if the center-left regimes go into crises. For the moment most “critical intellectuals” cling to the center-left in hopes of a “left turn”, of a political rectification, rather than taking the difficult but necessary road of rebuilding an independent class based socialist movement.

….as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers….we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety…. (impossible to) behold… with indifference.

Thereafter, it was all downhill against Mexico, Nicaragua, Cuba, Panama, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, Grenada, Venezuela, and at one time or another, practically all other parts of the Americas, directly or indirectly.

In 1905, in fact, President Theodore Roosevelt declared Washington to be “the policeman” of the Caribbean and Central America, and by implication, the entire hemisphere. To date, nothing has changed, Ecuador just the latest targeted nation, an earlier article explaining the failed coup attempt, accessed here.

On September 30, Ecuador’s President Raphael Correa was targeted. First elected in November 2006 with a 58% majority, he was easily reelected in April 2009 with a 55% majority against seven challengers. His current term runs until August 10, 2013, and will extend until 2017 with another electoral victory.

Yet Ecuador’s volatile history is now in focus. The country’s eighth president in 14 years, Correa’s easily the most popular, though less so after earlier imposing austerity measures. Pro-business ones also, including policies favoring oil, mining, and agribusiness interests at the expense of local communities and environmental considerations.

They’re practiced despite Ecuador’s new 2008 Constitution, recognizing and guaranteeing indigenous peoples’ rights, and a mandate to “preserve and promote their management of biodiversity and their natural environment,” among other populist provisions, including the “rights of nature.”

As a result, indigenous groups like the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) and Confederation of Peoples of Kichwa Nationality (ECUARUNARI) criticized him, including recently saying:

While the government has dedicated itself exclusively to attacking and delegitimizing organized sectors like the indigenous movement, workers’ unions, etc., it hasn’t weakened in the least the structures of power of the right, or those within the state apparatus.

After the failed September 30 coup, Quito’s Regional Advisory Group on Human Rights urged Correa to renew support for his base, saying:

(W)e call upon the national government to set aside its arrogant attitude that is isolating it from the social bases. Together we can build a country with dignity, peace and sovereignty, in which dialogue with social sectors in a daily activity that guides our path toward a country distanced from extractive polices and dependence on a development model based on the destruction of nature.

Given his close call, it remains to be seen if he’s listening, though Washington and internal hard liners will try again if he goes too far. James Petras explains that they don’t oppose his domestic policies, mainly his “ties with US arch enemy Chavez and ALBA,” the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas WTO/NAFTA alternative endorsing pro-South trade principles, ones Washington strongly opposes as well as Correa’s decision to close the US Manta airbase.

As a result, Pentagon and CIA operatives, in league with Ecuadorean hard-liners, want Correa ousted, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and USAID financing opposition groups and political parties to topple him. Correa knows it, saying on September 30 that the:

attempt at destabilization is the result of a strategy that has been brewing for quite some time. A barrage of messages and misinformation have been given to the National Police, which today has been realized through violent actions from a conspiracy attempt.

He accused former right wing president, Lucio Gutierrez, of inciting violence and supporting rogue police and military plotters. A former army colonel, Gutierrez co-led a 2000 coup, then was ousted by a 2005 popular uprising.

Himself victimized by an aborted two-day 2002 coup and fearing another attempt, Hugo Chavez condemned US imperialism, saying: “The Yankee extreme right is trying now, through arms and violence, to retake control of the continent,” having ousted Manuel Zelaya in Honduras in June 2009 and Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February 2004.

In addition, Washington tipped its hand earlier, the State Department calling Ecuador “difficult to do business in,” a Investment Climate Statement stating:

Ecuador can be a difficult place in which to do business…. There are restrictions or limitations on private investment in many sectors that apply equally to domestic and foreign investors… .A 2006 hydrocarbons law imposed new conditions in the petroleum sector that have been problematic for many companies, complicated by a 2007 decree that imposed additional restrictions. A 2008 mining mandate stalled mining activity, and a new Mining Law is expected in early 2009. Negotiations for a free trade agreement between the United States and Ecuador, which would have included investment decisions, stopped in 2006. The current Government of Ecuador has not expressed interest in restarting negotiations.

In December 2008, Correa (a University of Illinois economics PhD) also alienated international lending agencies and foreign bond holders by halting payments on billions of dollars of debt, calling them “illegal (and) illegitimate,” at the time saying:

I have given the order that interest payments not be made. The country is in default. I couldn’t allow the continued payment of a debt that by all measures is immoral and illegitimate. It is now time to bring in justice and dignity.

He also angered Israel by sponsoring an Organization of American States (OAS) resolution last June, condemning the IDF’s Gaza Flotilla attack, leaving some analysts to suspect Mossad wanted him ousted and may have been involved in the attempt.

In 2005, Voltairenet.org quoted Alexis Ponce, Ecuador’s Permanent Assembly for Human Rights (APDH) speaker, saying:

The Mossad trained Ecuadorean police in torture techniques between 1986 and 1994. The Israeli secret services gave technical support to the tyranny that stained Ecuador with blood. The police corps received advanced training by Israeli agents to torture and to force those who opposed the tyranny to speak. The Israeli agents transmitted their knowledge about the numerous techniques used to torture people. They are criminals! Hundreds of people disappeared during those dark years.

Mossad agents have long operated in Ecuador, covertly through Israel’s Quito embassy and perhaps throughout in the country, like in so many others.

In addition, Israel maintains business ties with Ecuador, having sold 26 Kfir combat planes and reportedly Python-3 air-to-air missiles in 1997. Afterward, its technicians and trainers provided support and perhaps continues to do so. Further, in 2009, Israel’s On Track Innovations contracted with Ecuador’s Central Registry Office to provide an electronic biometric-based electronic identification card system.

A Final Comment

America’s major media largely downplayed the coup plot, broadcasters and cable channels especially saying little on September 30, then practically nothing by way of follow-up.

On October 4, in her weekly Wall Street Journal America’s column, Mary O’Grady headlined, “What Really Happened in Ecuador,” saying:

Eyewitnesses deny police kidnapped the president, and there’s no evidence a coup was in the making.

O’Grady, of course, is a notorious liar, her columns a truth-free zone, her extremism and anti-populist vitriol unsurpassed in print media — precisely the “journalistic” attributes Rupert Murdoch values and features daily on Journal op-ed pages, his other publications, and Fox News, straight unabashed disinformation, devoid of truth.

According to O’Grady, Correa’s presidential powers were never threatened, nor did tear gas fumes deter him from “walking across the street to the hospital, his notorious macho dignity obviously wounded.”

In fact, he was overcome by exploding tear gas, AFP, among other news services, saying “he was taken out by stretcher to the nearby hospital,” then “was unable to leave, surrounded by hostile police as clashes broke out in the streets while rebels stormed Congress and seized the main international airport for hours.”

Clearly, it was a coup attempt. Outside America, Murdoch publications, and O’Grady’s column, it’s widely acknowledged. Even New York Times columnist, Simon Romero, reported the following in his October 3 article, titled, “Debate Over Meaning of Standoff in Ecuador:”

– Correa “had been holed up on the third floor of the police hospital here for more than 10 hours after being assaulted by….rebellious police officers….This Andean nation was on tenterhooks;”

– hospital staff “put a helmet on Mr. Correa;” electricity in parts of the hospital went down;

– “an intense exchange of bullets” took place; “five men were shot dead,” dozens more wounded;

– “the president’s armored Nissan sport utility vehicle showed bullet damage, including a shot to the windshield;”

– police “prevented a helicopter from landing” and blocked escape routes;

– Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino was wounded leaving the hospital, his head bleeding;

– “Inside the hospital, doctors, nurses, patients and journalists lay on the floor, hoping to avoid getting shot;”

– “As Mr. Correa’s SUV drove away,” it was attacked by a volley of gunfire, a “uniformed member of (his) security team” shot dead “as he trotted alongside the vehicle;” and,

– the bloodbath outside the hospital continued, police shouting “Kill the chuspangos,” slang for military men before gunfire subsided.

Nonetheless, O’Grady continued, saying:

Mr. Correa had little trouble managing the story. In the morning he closed down independent television reporting, limiting Ecuadoreans to his version of the day’s events.

In fact, Ecuador’s Constitution guarantees press freedom, short of criminally committing defamation, slander, or insurrection advocacy. Nonetheless, the corporate dominated media remains largely combative, Correa calling them “trash talking,” “liars,” unethical,” and “political actors who are trying to oppose the revolutionary government.”

The television Teleamazonas network has been especially harsh, regulators ordering it off air for three days last December for “incit(ing) public disorder.” Earlier, it violated Article 58 of the Broadcasting Law that prohibits airing “news based on unfounded allegations that could produce social unrest.” Several times it was fined nominal amounts, then suspended for repeat violations. After the attempted coup, it again incurred a three-day suspension for inflammatory reporting. However, Correa insists he’s committed to press freedom, provided constitutional and broadcast laws are observed, what all democratic states require.

Nonetheless, O’Grady concluded, saying:

One thing is certain: Mr. Correa is not going to let the crisis go to waste. Since Thursday he has been seizing the airwaves to broadcast his version of the narrative, which implicates his political opponents in what increasingly looks like a coup that never happened.

In fact, it did. Independent reports and many others confirmed it. Ecuador’s media are required to give the president (and other government officials) free air time, and he’s entitled to denounce dark force attempts to oust him. This time, Washington’s fingerprints are again visible, and though unsuccessful, Correa can no means rest, not with actors like O’Grady around, vilifying less than hard right leaders, stopping just short of endorsing their ouster.

From Obama’s record so far, expect it. He continues imperial Iraq and Afghanistan wars and occupations. In addition, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Palestine, Lebanon, North Korea, and other countries are targeted, besides deploying CIA and Special Forces armies into at least 75 countries worldwide for targeted assassinations, drone attacks, and other disruptive missions.

More than ever under Bush and Obama, America rampages globally, Ecuador’s Raphael Correa lucky to survive a plot to oust (or perhaps kill) him. September world headlines explained, including by New York Times writer Simon Romero headlining, “Standoff in Ecuador Ends With Leader’s Rescue,” saying:

“Ecuadorean soldiers stormed a police hospital Thursday night in Quito where President Rafael Correa was held by rebellious elements of the police forces, and rescued him amid an exchange of gunfire….”

AlJazeera explained more in an article headlined, “Ecuador declares state of emergency,” saying:

“Coup plotters shut down airports, blocked highways, burned tires, and “rough(ed) up the president.” They also took over an airbase, parliament, and Quito streets, the pretext being a law restructuring their benefits, despite Correa doubling police wages.

In fact, Washington’s fingerprints are on another attempt against a Latin leader, some (not all) of whose policies fall short of neoliberal extremism.

A tipoff was State Department spokesman, Phillip Crowley, saying we’re “monitoring (not denouncing) the situation,” much like it refused to condemn Zelaya’s ouster, instead calling on “all political and social actors in Honduras to respect democratic norms, the rule of law, and the tenets of the Inter-American Democratic Charter.” Most other Latin states demanded his “immediate and unconditional return,” whether or not they meant it.

Washington opposes Correa for Ecuador’s ties to Hugo Chavez and Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas (ALBA) membership, a WTO/NAFTA alternative based on principles of:

• complementarity, not competition;
• cooperation, not exploitation; and
• respect for each nation’s sovereignty, free from corporate and outside control.

Though falling short of these goals, ALBA nations, in principle, pledged:

• to benefit and empower their citizens;
• provide essential goods and services; and
• achieve real grassroots economic growth to improve the lives of ordinary people and reduce poverty.

ALBA membership, however, signals opposition to US hegemony, especially its neoliberal model, dominance, dismissiveness, and one-way trade deals for the Global North over the South, the curse Latin states have endured for decades, besides earlier US-sponsored coups and belligerency.

Fast Moving Developments

Before his rescue, police spokesman Richard Ramirez told AP that “the chief of the national police, Gen. Freddy Martinez, presented Correa with his irrevocable resignation because of Thursday’s events.”

On October 1, the Russian Information Agency, Novosti headlined, “Ecuador in chaos as police put president in hospital,” saying:

Correa remained hospitalized… one person was killed and dozens injured during (street) riots.” After Ecuadorean military and special police forces rescued him, Correa told the national radio in a phone interview:

“This is a coup d’etat attempt by opposition forces. They resorted to (violence) because they will not win the election. I call on the citizens to stay calm.”

After being attacked by tear gas, he was hospitalized, then prevented from leaving when rebel police and coup supporters surrounded the building. Inside he said, “It seems that the hospital is under siege… (The) conspiracy (was) planned long ago,” and he knows where. He added, “I will leave (the hospital) as president, or they will have to carry my corpse out of here.”

His government declared a state of emergency. Flights from Quito’s Mariscal Sucre International Airport were suspended, then resumed early October 1. In addition, scattered violence and looting was reported in several Ecuadorean cities, including the capital.

Freed by soldiers, a visibly angry Correa addressed a huge crowd of supporters from the presidential palace, saying:

Ecuadorean blood, the blood of our brothers has been needlessly spilled. You have mobilized to support the national government… the citizens’ revolution, democracy in our fatherland. When we realized we couldn’t talk and wanted to leave, they attacked the president. They threw tear gas at us, straight at our faces. They had to take me to the police hospital where they held me hostage. They wouldn’t let me leave. They shamed the institution (the police). They will need to leave the ranks.

While still captive, Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino urged supporters to “walk peacefully to the hospital, where the president is blocked by (rebel) police officers.” On arriving, they shouted, “This is not Honduras. Correa is president. Down with the coup, down with the enemies of the people.”

Ecuador remains in flux. As a result, new developments need close monitoring. Writing for the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Andres Ochoa said:

Before the coup attempt, “Correa seemed an untouchable figure in Ecuadorian politics. However, his presidency might very well be defined by the outcome of this day, and his political projects may rest on the results.”

A Final Comment

On October 1, AFP writer Alexander Martinez headlined, “Ecuador president rescued from police uprising,” saying:

Correa “made a triumphant return to the presidential palace after loyalist troops rescued him from a police rebellion amid gunfire and street clashes that left at least two dead” and dozens wounded.

“We got him out, we got him out,” Interior Vice Minister Edwin Jarrin told AFP.

“The rescue capped a dramatic day of violence and confusion that began early Thursday” when rebel police assaulted him.

After his rescue, Correa thanked the military and a police special operations unit, saying:

“If not for them, this horde of savages that wanted to kill, that wanted blood, would have entered the hospital to look for the president and I probably wouldn’t (be) telling you this because I would have passed on to a better life.” Supporters are not grateful yet.

Commenting on developments, Latin American expert James Petras explained that Ecuador’s “ELITE MILITARY” put down the coup. In 2008, Interior Minister Gustavo Jahlk “denounced” Washington “for subverting police.”

At the same time, there’s “legitimate protest by trade unions against Correa’s austerity plan, which the right exploited, seeing the pro-Correa forces divided.” In addition, some NGOs and “supposed Indian groups who tacitly supported the coup are on the take from America’s National Endowment of Democracy (NED) and USAID,” the usual suspects with a long disruptive history throughout the region and beyond.

Their operatives weren’t on the streets visibly, but they expressed no opposition to coup plotters. Instead, “Their statement called for the government’s replacement,” meaning it’s Obama administration policy — not for Correa’s domestic policies, says Petras. It’s for his “ties with US arch enemy Chavez and ALBA.”

Events remain fluid and fast moving.

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.

ENRIQUE (septuagenarian who picked us up on side of road in province of Esmeraldas
in northwest Ecuador): Baghdad is the capital of Iran.

Enrique was a retired bakery owner en route to the Ecuadorian coast, where he and his considerably younger wife Gina were hoping to invest Enrique’s savings in beachfront property in case the dollar proved unsustainable and the sucre was suddenly reinstalled as Ecuador’s national currency. Amelia and I offered alternate suggestions for the capital city of Iran and suggested that the installment of the Iranian rial, instead, might grant the Ecuadorian economy a greater degree of insulation in the event of subsequent global financial crises.

US Secretaries of State had also exhibited a tendency to view members of the Axis of Evil interchangeably, and Madeleine Albright’s assertion that sanctions against Iraq were worth half a million dead children was followed up by Hillary Clinton’s recommendation that Iranians consider the possibility of total obliteration. For his part, Enrique dismissed the strengthening of ties between Ecuador and Iran on the grounds that both nations produced fruit and oil and that redundant commercial relations were not worth the wrath of the US; he then addressed other instances of geographical confusion outside of Iran and Iraq, such as why Amelia and I were in the province of Esmeraldas if we were trying to get to Venezuela.

We explained that we intended to travel northeast along the Colombian coast. Enrique asked why we had failed to consult a roadmap, and informed us that the only way to cross from Esmeraldas to Colombia without dealing with guerrillas was on a boat that departed once a week. This revelation complicated our current schedule, according to which we were supposed to reach Venezuela with enough time to insert ourselves into the national health care system prior to the referendum scheduled for 15 February.

Amelia and I had based our medical endeavors on Hugo Chávez’ past offers of free eye surgery to millions of citizens of the western hemisphere, the parameters of which we were hoping could be expanded to include dental work. Direct benefits of such expansion for Chávez, we felt, would consist of heightened convictions among sectors of the international community that there was nothing inherently harmful about leaving him in power for the next several decades, one possible outcome of the February referendum. Enrique foresaw eager replications on the part of Correa of free dental programs for foreign nationals — lack of adequate Ecuadorian resources notwithstanding — and proposed reappointing the evicted Venezuelan ambassador to Israel as head of Ecuador’s new embassy in Iran in order to save on airfare. Gina meanwhile limited herself to flapping her hand in front of her husband’s face every few minutes in order to indicate that he was about to plunge over a speed bump, pothole, or chicken.

After passing the Esmeraldas oil refinery, which Enrique claimed was a likely benefactor of increased Iranian influence in the country, we stopped for seaside piña coladas at the request of Gina, who downed hers immediately and proceeded to recount for us her marriage at age 14 to a British CIA agent 30 years her senior. She appeared to have alternated between the agent and Enrique until the agent’s recent death; Enrique condemned endorsements of the Monroe Doctrine by British individuals and briefly declared patriotic support for Correa’s squandering of public funds on hospitals and roads.

Support diminished when we got back in the vehicle and resumed damaging its underside. As for Amelia’s and my Venezuelan intentions, Enrique and Gina invited us to stay at their hotel on the coast for a night before hitchhiking back east to Quito, where the Pan-American Highway would then lead us north to more navigable sections of the Colombian border. By the time we reached the hotel, the Panamericana had come to constitute a glorious Bolivarian vision linking the nations of the former Gran Colombia with no interference from unmarked mounds of asphalt. (Other potential obstacles to Bolivarianism were ignored for the moment, such as that:

1. the Panamericana was in fact a system of roads linking Argentina to Alaska.

2. the Panamanian portion of the Panamericana was separated from the rest of Gran Colombia by forests and swamps.)

Following a destructive ride to dinner that evening, Amelia and I raised the possibility of Iranian improvement projects on provincial roads. Iran’s expertise in such fields had already infiltrated the borders of other nations in which the US dollar was an encouraged unit in daily transactions; additional similarities between Ecuador and Lebanon included unique interpretations of laws of centrifugal motion on the part of motorists, although reversing down the highway appeared to be less of an institution in Ecuador.

One likely outcome of Iranian contributions to Ecuadorian roadways was the erection of roadside emblems of the Islamic Revolution, replacing current signs featuring the Energizer bunny and entreating drivers to have faith in God but to drive carefully. The substitution of symbols would in turn legitimize the inclusion of the roads in lists of wartime casualties, thereby necessitating additional improvement projects by other concerned nations, as had happened during the Israeli war on Lebanon in 2006. Following the war, the US had declared its intention to restore the Mdairej Bridge, the infrastructural culpability of which presumably stemmed from the fact that it helped link Beirut to Damascus; the only difference between American and Iranian postwar contributions to Lebanese roads was that Iran had not provided the weapons to destroy them in the first place.

Enrique explained that Ecuadorian infrastructure was already in danger, as Correa had advocated arms purchases from Iran in order to guard against Colombian convictions that one’s territorial sovereignty did not end at one’s borders. Along with infrastructure, other likely casualties of Correa’s recent policies included Ecuador’s foreign debt—which he had defaulted on in December—and the US air base in Manta, the lease for which was set to expire in 2009.

As for other Iranian military apprentices aside from Correa, Enrique reprimanded Hamas for the “lluvia de cohetes” (rain of rockets) that had prompted Israel’s own convictions on the nature of territorial sovereignty; he then backed down under pressure, illustrating the susceptibility of Latin America to pernicious outside influence:

ENRIQUE: There was a lluvia de cohetes.
US: There was not a lluvia de cohetes.
ENRIQUE: Yes, you’re right.
GINA (downing further piña coladas): Enrique is like my father.

Enrique was subsequently demoted to grandfather and then to devil, which was the same label Hugo Chávez had previously applied to George W. Bush. In a show of regional continuity, Correa had then proclaimed the label offensive to the devil; additional continuity was exhibited in the Ecuadorian referendum of 2008, which resulted in the passage of a new constitution potentially permitting Correa’s reelection to two more consecutive terms. (Correa had thus far refrained, however, from establishing a unique time zone for Ecuador, according to which Ecuadorian clocks would strike the half hour when the rest of the world’s clocks — minus those in Venezuela and a smattering of other locales such as Iran — struck the hour.)

Three days later Amelia and I found ourselves on the Panamericana in the southern Colombian department of Cauca, where a Colombian truck driver analyzed Álvaro Uribe’s compatibility with regional continuity and added that at least neighboring political leaders held referenda to assure their immortality. As for competing geostrategic interests in South America, the truck driver expressed the imperial tendencies of the US Drug Enforcement Administration in terms of the number of people from his village who had lost fingers, tongues, and other appendages to paramilitaries.

The Pan-American vision Amelia and I had concocted had already begun to fade prior to this point, due to certain realities such as that:

1. the Panamericana often appeared to be a euphemism for cliffs, falling rocks, and Colombians posing with shovels in one hand and receptacles for donations in the other—part of an ongoing road improvement charade.

2. the Ecuadorian Energizer bunny was superceded in Colombia by ubiquitous black four-pointed stars outlined in gold that were painted on the road to commemorate victims of traffic accidents. (Amelia and I quickly adopted billboard slogans in favor of star reduction, such as “No más estrellas en la vía.”)

3. standing on the side of the road in Colombia with one’s thumb extended was an ineffective means of travel, thanks to the seemingly pervasive assumption that female hitchhikers were accomplices in plots to deprive motorists of their savings and/or physical wellbeing.

Amelia and I had arrived to Colombia via the Tulcán-Ipiales crossing, where the goal of a Latin America without borders appeared to still be within reach given that it was entirely possible to cross from Tulcán to Ipiales without being asked a single question aside from “Qué es eso?” — in reference to the cups of yerba mate we were holding. During the several hours that then elapsed between the time we stuck out our thumbs and the time we got a ride, we were thus able to contemplate not only why the FARC was not keeping tabs on foreigners standing alone on the side of the road but also why US financing of the war on drugs had merely produced curiosity in the national beverage of Argentina.

In order to combat Colombian resistance to hitchhiking, Amelia and I eventually devised new tactics such as drawing Spanish-language stop signs on notebook paper in red marker and stationing ourselves in the middle of the street. When vehicles continued to careen by undeterred, we began approaching checkpoints belonging to the Ejército Nacional de Colombia, where — provided there were people on duty and not life-size cardboard cutouts of people on duty — we recruited mercenaries for our hitchhiking cause. The Ejército enjoyed a higher rate of success than we had at stopping vehicles, underlining the fundamental link between possession of arms and prospects for social change in Colombia, and Amelia and I were inserted onto a succession of trucks, eventually making it to the city of Cali.

In Cali we were picked up by a father-son team en route to Bogotá in two separate trucks marked TÓXICO. The truckers described their toxic cargo as products for farmers; they did not specify whether the products were meant for use by farmers on their own crops or for use on farmers and crops alike by government airplanes.

During a stop at one of the various roadside establishments bearing the name Restaurante Panamericano, Amelia’s and my geographical sensibilities were once again called into question when the truckers asked why we were going through Bogotá to reach Venezuela. The confusion, which this time stemmed from the fact that our map of Colombia featured rivers and not roads, was rectified by transferring Amelia and me to a different road leading to the city of Cúcuta on the Venezuelan border. The transfer took place at an Ejército checkpoint after the city of Ibagué in the department of Tolima, where the Ejército confirmed that the Pan-American Highway did not begin and end in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and loaded us into a truck with a driver named John. John was transporting feminine hygiene products to a city near Cúcuta, accompanied by very loud salsa music.

Our trajectory was promptly interrupted when a two-truck collision resulted in the closure of the road for 4.5 hours. John amused himself with even louder salsa music, interspersed with shouted lectures on how the distribution of the Ejército across Colombian thoroughfares brought far greater seguridad to the nation’s poor than the distribution of Venezuelan wealth brought to poor Venezuelans. Amelia and I, in turn, tried to interest John in possible Iranian contributions to the campaign against estrellas en la vía.

John rejected Iran’s ability to reduce fatality rates and suggested that Iranian road works would consist of replacing the estrellas with Hezbollah martyr posters, which he speculated might already line the streets of Caracas. Once the accident had been cleared, we continued in the direction of Venezuela, where the upcoming referendum will help determine future intersections of the Panamericana and the Pax Americana.

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

Chavez recounted phone conversations he had during the night of March 1st with Ecuador President Rafael Correa, whose land had just been invaded by Colombian troops, pilots and police. Their objective was not Ecuador itself but an encampment of FARC guerrillas located two kilometers inside northern Ecuador.

Raul Reyes, FARC’s second in command, and twenty-four other guerrillas were murdered, many in cold blood. Among those murdered was Olga Marin, Reyes companion and the daughter of Manuel Marulanda, FARC’s founder and leader for 40 years. The guerrillas had not been able to resist, because they were asleep, later found in their underwear, when attacked by planes from the US base Manta in Ecuador, which dropped five “smart bombs”, followed by helicopters flying in from the south of Colombia. Several of them were shot in cold blood directly in the back of the head or face as was the case with Reyes and Julián Conrado, the only cadavers taken to Colombia in a police helicopter. The other persons were found by Ecuadoran troops in the coming hours. Three wounded persons, who were able to hide, were found and gave eye-witness testimony to their rescuers and to an OAS (Organization of American States) investigation team, which later came to the area. Among the dead and wounded were five Mexican students, who were not guerrillas.

President Chavez told the nation that Uribe had lied about the operation to Correa, whom he telephoned after its “success”, as Uribe viewed the blood bath.

“Uribe is a lying lackey of the US Empire, a mafiosa, a criminal supporting para-militarist assassins and a narco-trafficker. He doesn’t want peace.”

[Uribe did nothing to aid the process of returning four captured Colombian congresspersons, which FARC had unilaterally released just two days before this horrible massacre.]

“Uribe operates in the style of Israel, converting Colombia into the key arm of US interests in Latin America just as Israel is in the Middle East.”

“We won’t tolerate this and we must protect our borders against this satellite. Correa has broken diplomatic relations and moved troops to the border. Correa can count on us. Generals, send ten battalions with tanks and aircraft to our border with Colombia!”

In the upcoming investigations by Ecuador, Venezuela and OAS we learned that Operation Phoenix, as the Uribe-US plan was named, used technology not possessed by any Latin America country and which had disclosed where Reyes group was hiding. Army and police units from Colombia cooperated with Ranger army units of the United States operating out of its Manta base. Manta had been used during eight years against Colombian peasants and their armed forces, FARC, as part of the billion dollar-a-year Plan Colombia extermination operation. At least 50,000 Colombians—mostly civilians—had been killed in Plan Colombia’s eight-year operation. And 300,000 had been forced to flee their homes into the welcoming arms of Venezuela. They live there with the same rights and benefits as citizens, just as do all three million Colombian immigrants.

President Correa declared that he will not renew the Manta contract at the end of 2008.

In these days, I witnessed intense concern in La Victoria about a possible war, a subject that embraced everyone across the nation. Just after Chavez’ announcement of cutting diplomatic relations with Colombia and sending troops to the border, I heard my next door neighbors yelling, “Who wants war? Chavez that’s who. It was Ecuador that Uribe violated not Venezuela. Then why mess in it?”

My neighbor across the Plaza Ricaurte park told me, “I support Chavez 100%. I’m ready to die for the fatherland. But I’m tired, tired of the oligarchy, the corruption within the Chavez government, tired of all the waiting. I want it all to end. It’d be better to declare war and get it over with.”

This park contained many opinions. There were those who applauded Chavez’ action and hoped it would prevent Bush-Uribe from testing Venezuela’s will to defend its revolution by sending provocative bullets across the long border, not possible to close off entirely. Then there were the young men with fancy cars and motor cycles who could care less about anything else. As one neighbor described them, “They play with life and wait for capitalism to return in full.”

Both Chavez and Correa had been patient, too patient many militant revolutionaries maintained, with Bush-Uribe provocations. Chavez reminded us of occasions when Colombian soldiers and para-militarists had been captured on Venezuelan soil. They were preparing sabotage and murder, hoping to start a war. Para-militarists sold drugs and pistols to young inane gangsters, hoping to destabilize the government. After some arrests and a short time in prison, Chavez had agreed with Uribe to return them to Colombia. Correa told the world that he had been patient with Uribe too. His troops has found several small FARC camps and turned them away. Colombian soldiers had crossed into Ecuador five times between February 2007 and January 2008. And now this massacre.

During this tense week, Uribe’s generals claimed they had found three computers among Reyes possessions. Miraculously, they were the only material left untouched by the “smart bombs”, and they allegedly showed that Chavez had financed FARC with $30 million. They also claimed that Correa’s people were cooperating and trading with FARC. Correa answered that his emissaries, and Chavez’, were on the verge of accomplishing final negotiations for the number one held prisoner, Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt. Chavez had served as the principle international negotiator in the two prisoner releases by FARC. These seven released prisoners, and Betancourt’s mother, all praised Chavez for his humanitarian efforts on television.

Meanwhile in Bogota, the cadaver of Reyes was placed on public display. A newspaper photograph showed a boy hitting his hanging body with a bat while his father stood proudly behind him.

VEA newspaper ran a photograph of a Coca-Cola worker in Venezuela wearing a t-shirt with the words: Don’t Drink Coca-Cola. Although there is no grassroots boycott of Coca-Cola in Venezuela, as there is in Colombia, India, USA, UK and other lands, there is general knowledge that Coca-Cola companies inside Colombia pay death squads to murder workers who try to organize a union, struggling for decent conditions. In fact, Coca-Cola is on trial in Miami for doing just that: murder. Chiquita banana had to pay a $25 million fine for hiring death squads to murder its workers in Colombia. No one went to prison, of course. And Bush-Uribe talk of democracy, accusing Chavez and Correa of financing and cooperating FARC, which the Coca-Cola/Chiquita bosses and their politicians contend are “terrorists.” The devil claims God is the devil.

It is an Alice in Wonderland world we live in!

Just as the Venezuelan troops had settled in at the border, Chavez ordered them home. A week had gone by since the massacre in Ecuador. OAS had met about the conflict and so had the 20-nation member Rio Group. Even before OAS’ investigation was completed, these bodies expressed unanimous agreement that what Uribe did was wrong. They simply needed to read aloud what is written in all the agreements of these bodies, the United Nations and all other international agreements. It is unlawful for any nation to invade another without the agreement of international bodies, namely the UN or OAS, or if not acting in defense of an armed attack by forces of another government.

Uribe said he was sorry and wouldn’t do it again.

Chavez called this a great victory for all of Latin America and a great defeat for the US Empire. Fidel did the same in his written reflections. Correa was a bit less optimistic and somewhat taken aback when he saw Chavez embrace the “lying, murderous, criminal…” and then call Uribe to be his “brother” and “friend” a week later.

As the media was proclaiming that calm had returned, another leader of FARC was murdered, this time by a compatriot hired by the Colombian army. Pablo Montova turned on his leader, Iván Rios, killing him and his female companion and then cutting off one of Rios’ hands, which he turned over to the army as proof of his ugly deed. He was to receive $2.6 million for these murders, and the security, according to him, that the army would not murder him and his female companion. Although the death penalty is legally prohibited in Colombia, the government fulfilled its promise of paying the hired killer.

This occurred at the same time that unionists in Colombia and progressives conducted a peaceful march in Bogotá. They sought an end to the internal war and the corrupt Uribe government. Dozens of Uribe’s staff and ministers, connected to narco cartels and para-militarists, had been condemned and even sentenced to prison by a sometimes independent attorney general and Supreme Court. Within three days of this march, three unionist leaders of the protest were murdered, and one had been tortured prior to death.

In the middle of March, Marulanda died of a heart attack. FARC did not announce this, however, for two months. Half of FARC’s seven-man leadership was now dead. It had lost several thousands of its 17-20,000

The brave of FARC is everyone

It is an Alice in Wonderland world we live in!

Read Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8.

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.

The liberal approach emphasizes ‘universal responsibility” for the destruction of the environment – rich and poor, mining companies and miners, factory owners and factory workers, auto manufacturers and drivers, governments and citizens, real estate speculators and slum dwellers. The liberal ecologists claim the negative consequences adversely affect everyone: “We all suffer from the destruction of the environment.”

The liberal approach to the development of Indian movements and politics follows a similar approach, using the non-class categories of ‘community’, ‘culture’ and religion, to discuss Indian social structure as a ‘homogeneous’ social phenomenon.

The Marxist approach to ecological destruction and Indian social movements focuses on the inequality of power and control over the means of production and destruction, unequal exposure to contamination in the workplace and neighborhoods, inequality in access to land and use of chemical fertilizers and herbicides and other contaminants and unequal access to state power. Marxists focus on the class structure, class inequalities and the class nature of the environmental disasters which take place. Marxists view ethnic and contemporary Indian movements, policies, leadership and relationships in relationship to the larger class system through the lens of class analysis. Marxists do not accept the liberal rhetoric and indigenous identity or ‘indigenista’ ideological assumption that Indian society is made up of homogeneous ‘communities’ bound together by harmonious undifferentiated ethnic interests without class divisions and conflicting class interests. Today, even more than in the past, the deepening penetration of capitalist expansion and market relations, capitalist and socialist ideology and political parties, imperialist funded non-governmental organizations (NGOs) funded by US and European governments and the World Bank, have created class-polarized and divided Indian societies. ‘Communalism’ and communitarian ideology is the ideology of the rising Indian economic and political petit bourgeoisie articulated to subordinate the impoverished Indian peasantry to their struggle to share power with the established ‘European’ or mestizo bourgeoisie.

Case Studies

To demonstrate the validity and relevance of the class analysis approach to ecology and the Indian movements, it is essential to empirically examine concrete contemporary cases of major environmental issues and existing Indian movements.

We have chosen several cases of environmental disasters, which have large-scale, long-term negative impacts, which are familiar to world public opinion. These include: Fish depletion in the waters off Eastern Canada, Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the world wide food crises and global warming.

Fish Depletion

Maritime scientists have published numerous studies documenting the catastrophic decline in fish stocks, the destruction of livelihood of millions of small-scale fishermen and the loss of maritime high protein food for tens of millions of poor people. The causes, according to liberal ecologists are ‘over-fishing’, ‘contamination; and state subsidies – without identifying the class character of those responsible.

Over-fishing is the result of the concentration and centralization of the fishing industry in large-scale capitalist enterprises, which operate massive factory ships with 3-mile drag nets that drag the bottom of the sea, indiscriminately destroying fish habitats and pulling in undersize fish thereby undermining the reproductive process.

Contamination of fishing waters is the result of large-scale fish farms, the massive use of chemical fertilizers and the run-off of animal waste which destroy the delicately balanced coastal water ecology, as well as oil spills by big petroleum and shipping companies.

State subsidies financed the growth of large fleets with high technology fishing gear, while state de-regulation policies, favored big fishing companies over the interests of the small local artisan fisherfolk. In summary, the world-wide depletion of fishing stock is the result of environmental conditions induced by the operation of the capitalist system – namely the concentration of fishing industry in a powerful capitalist class, subsidized and promoted the state under capitalist control.

Hurricane Katrina

In August 2006 Hurricane Katrina hurled winds of over 100 miles an hour through the Caribbean, hitting both Cuba and the Southern Gulf Coast of the United States, especially Louisiana and Mississippi. The consequences for the people of Cuba and those of the two southern states were vastly different: Several thousand poor, mostly black, United States citizens were killed, while in Cuba there were fewer than ten deaths. The difference in mortality was a product of the different social systems: Socialist Cuba has a highly organized and effective, centrally planned civil defense system which puts the highest priority in diagnosing, anticipating and mobilizing tens of thousands of civilian and military personnel and sending thousands of public buses and trucks to transport people and their farm animals to safety. The country is mobilized to prevent even a single Cuban death. In contrast, the capitalist United States government placed higher priority in creating a repressive political apparatus (Homeland Security) which failed to anticipate the impact of the storm, abandoned hundreds of thousands of low income residents to the raging storm surge and flood waters and provided inadequate mobilization of transport, water supplies and food for the destitute. The results were catastrophic. In the aftermath of the hurricane, Cuba gave highest priority to rebuilding the homes of the displaced people; whereas in the US, the capitalist state displaced the poor and rebuilt the urban landscape to suit the interests of multi-millionaire real estate speculators, commercial interests and the tourist elite.

While the hurricane was a ‘natural’ disaster, the unprecedented destruction in New Orleans was a consequence of the capitalist priorities in political repression (Homeland Security and the Patriot Act) over basic civil defense, commercial expansion and speculation over environmental safeguards and individual forced to survive on their own over state planning.

Food Crisis

Liberal ecologists argue that natural disasters, excess state intervention in the market and over exploitation of land by peasants and farmers are responsible for the ‘food crisis’, defined as ‘excess demand over supply’ leading to rising prices. Marxists argue that ‘free market’ policies have resulted in the bankruptcy of millions of food producing peasants and farmers, the concentration of landownership in the hands of giant agro-business consortiums which specialize in exports of staples, thus decreasing the production and increasing the price of food for local popular consumption.

Neoliberalism has accelerated the normal capitalist process of concentration and centralization of the means of agricultural production (land, fertilizers, marketing, farm machinery); the profit motive has led to agro-business converting land use from food for the people to the production of agricultural commodities (sugar and corn) for automobile fuel (ethanol).

The conversion of food to ethanol has led to a massive invasion of finance capital into agriculture, and the demise and destitution of peasants and small farmers, lowering the purchasing power of food and creating large-scale hunger.

The over-exploitation of land is the result of the expansion of agro-exporters and their displacement of peasants into precarious laborers. The high price of agricultural inputs and the low income of peasants producing in low production regions means that small producers have few financial resources to rejuvenate the productivity of their land. The ‘food crisis’ is a direct consequence of the expansion of capitalist agriculture which determined what is produced (supply), the target market (demand) and the cost of reproduction (the price of inputs/profits).

Global Warming

Liberal ecologists blame ‘human consumption’ of fossil fuel, the failure of state regulation, the private transport (automobiles) and manufacturing industries.

Class analysis provides a more comprehensive and specific diagnosis. In the first place, it was the capitalist owners of the auto-industry in control of state transport policy which destroyed public transportation, eliminating subsidies and lowering budgetary funding for electric light rail while channeling billions of dollars into highways, bridges and road maintenance for private vehicles. The massive increase in CO2 was a result of the power of privately owned automobile industry over publicly owned railroads. The widespread use of highly contaminating private auto was a result of advertising which promoted the purchase of big gas-guzzling automobiles depicting them as status symbols. The bigger the car, the higher the profit, the greater the contamination.

Private and public manufacturers who operate on the market principle of higher production, lower costs and higher returns have been the driving force of industrial pollution. It is not manufacturing per se that leads to pollution; technology, productive and organizational processes exist which can substantially reduce or eliminate pollution, but they increase immediate costs and lower profit. State policies, which deregulate control over pollution levels, are the result of capitalist power. The problem of climate warmth is not the result of individual car owners or workers in polluting factories. The responsibility of pollution and high CO2 levels leading to climate change rests in the capitalist class and its state, which own and ‘regulate’ the means of pollution.

Indian Movement in Class Perspective

Liberal writers on ‘Indian movements’ and ‘Indian communities’ wrongfully conceptualize them as homogeneous social phenomena, understating the degree of capitalist penetration, class differentiation and subsequent political polarization. Liberal writers adopt a simplistic bi-polar view in which homogeneous classless ‘Indian communities’ are compared to an undifferentiated ‘white society’. On the basis of this classless conception, liberals argue in favor of so-called ‘communitarian’ politics in which micro-projects, based on class collaboration in which religion and tradition are treated as ‘bonds’ that link upwardly mobile petit bourgeois Indian political and business leaders to the mass of landless and impoverished subsistence peasants.

The Marxist analysis is based on several key theoretical assumptions and historical cases backed by empirical observations.

Capitalist penetration of Indian communities deepened pre-existing social differences, leading to the formation of multi-class society. A small group of Indians become ‘intermediaries’ between the masses of poor Indians and the local, regional, national and international markets. These intermediaries, speaking in the name of the ‘Indian communities’, in fact, became the owners of transport (trucks), local commercial buyers and sellers, moneylenders, commercial farmers. Rather than sending their children to public schools taught in regional indigenous languages, their children went to private schools taught in Spanish in order to become professionals, politicians, lawyers and heads of NGOs specializing in ‘indigenous’ issues and linked to foreign foundations, government agencies and the World Bank.

These linkages between the upwardly mobile Indian petit bourgeois with national and international capital were not without tension, conflict and competition. Two sets of conflict emerged: 1) At one level between the mass of impoverished Indians exploited by agro-business through violent dispossession of communal/individual lands, exploitation of semi-serf (and even semi-slave) and wage labor and repression by the capitalist state; 2) at another level, the rising Indian petit bourgeois competed and confronted the mestizo/European national and international ruling class, which imposed limits on their access to economic resources, finance, credit, markets and land and limited and marginalized their political role. The goal of the bourgeois Indian elite was to share power with the ‘white’ oligarchy, not to overthrow them. Evo Morales provided the exact formula for class collaboration by declaring his intention to interact with the oligarchs as ‘partners not bosses’. To open the doors to social mobility and sharing of wealth and power, the marginalized petit bourgeois Indian minority needed organized mass power to threaten, pressure and force political negotiations with the intransigent ruling class. The politics of the Indian social movements reflect the dual class basis of Indian society: a revolutionary impoverished peasant mass base and an electoral-reformist petit bourgeois leadership. Political influence and government office had two different meanings for each: For the Indian masses it meant a comprehensive integral land reform, public ownership on banking, trade and strategic economic sectors; for the petit bourgeois Indian it meant collaboration with the ‘productive’ agro-business sector and distribution of marginal, less fertile public lands, profit sharing between the Indian/Mestizo elite in the private sector and foreign-owned extractive sectors.

The class differentiation of Indian society and the overt and covert conflicting interests became clearer with the electoral advances of the Indian parties in Ecuador and Bolivia.

Ecuador: 2000-2003

In 2000, the Ecuadorian Indian movement (CONAIE) played a leading role in the overthrow of the bourgeois government of Jamil Mahuad. Three years later, in 2003, the Indian political party, Pachacuti, together with CONAIE formed an electoral alliance with a retired military officer, Lucio Gutierrez, and won the presidency. The ascendant Indian petit bourgeois leaders gained several ministries and many lesser positions under Gutierrez, including the Foreign Ministry and Agriculture. Within a year, the Gutierrez regime proceeded to privatize the oil fields, repress labor, defend and extend support to large agro-business exporters, foreign MNCs and banks and sign an intrusive security pact with the US. Pachacuti leaders in the government were forced to resign from office; CONAIE lost significant membership and was severely demoralized and fragmented. The mass of poor Indians felt betrayed by the political deals their petit-bourgeois leaders had made with the oligarchs.

Bolivia: 2003-2005

Between 2003-2005 the Indian movement formed with factory workers, unemployed and informal workers of the city slums and militant miners to overthrow two bourgeois regimes: Sanchez de Losada (2003) and Carlos Mesa (June 2005). In both uprisings the petit bourgeois leadership of the Indian-led electoral part, MAS, or ‘Movement to Socialism’, played no role in the mass struggle. Instead they intervened to block a revolutionary transformation, imposing a neoliberal substitute (Carlos Mesa) in 2003 and a caretaker bourgeois regime (Rodriguez) in July 2005. Evo Morales, his party MAS and his followers in the Indian social movements channeled most activity into electoral politics culminating in his successful electoral campaign for the presidency. The social class, property and income inequalities between the ‘white European’ ruling class and the Indian majority in Bolivia has remained intact. What did change was the social inequalities within the Indian society as a whole new strata of former Indian social movement (NGO) leaders received second level government positions and subsidies for restraining and channeling their followers into supporting the Morales government. Numerous petit bourgeois Indian/mestizo lower level professionals occupied government offices and rose in wealth and influence. The mass of Indian peasants were demobilized from the streets and re-mobilized according to the tactical needs of the Morales’ regime as it negotiated with the big bourgeoisie. Morales’ accommodation of the traditional ruling class led to their rapid recovery of power following the insurrection of May/June 2005. It did not lead to an agreement with the ruling class to ‘share power’ with the ‘Indian President’ Morales. The issue was not inequality of land ownership, which was never questioned by the governing MAS regime: 100 ‘European’ families still owned 80% of the arable land after 3 years of Morales’ ‘Indian presidency’. The question was one of sharing political power, state revenues and a recognition of co-government between the ‘flexible’ (often bent over) government of an Indian petit bourgeois leader and the ‘intransigent’ (thoroughly racist and brutal) European big bourgeoisie. It became a struggle between a petit-bourgeois Indian ‘liberal democracy’ and an oligarchic ‘fascist’ European regional government and middle class social movements.

Faced with fascist threats to eliminate political freedoms, liberal racial equality (constitutional citizen rights), access to individual social mobility and local autonomy and right to collective organization, the Indian peasants and working class masses overwhelmingly backed the liberal Morales regime against the advance of the fascist ruling oligarchs. As a result, the real divergence of class interests between the property-less and impoverished Indian masses and the upwardly mobile pro-capitalist Indian petit bourgeois professionals and leaders were subordinated to the common struggle against the racially exclusive fascist big capitalist regional power bloc.

Clearly the case studies of Ecuador and Bolivia demonstrate that ‘communitarianism’ is an ideology of the rising Indian petit bourgeois eager to undermine an intensive intra-Indian class struggle. The defining reality of Indian society in Bolivia and Ecuador is that it is class divided – one that poses a continual tension and conflict between a petit bourgeoisie struggling with the larger capitalist society to join the elite and share power and a mass of impoverished Indians without propert or influence over state policy. In summary: There are two class struggles, which are intertwined, one led by the petit bourgeois Indian professionals to consolidate a liberal democracy backed by the masses mystified by religious and cultural symbolism and another led by independent, downwardly mobile, class conscious Indian workers and peasants against both the European ruling class and their own Indian petit bourgeois leaders.

Conclusion

Our discussion suggests that both the ecology and Indian movements are not ideologically or socially homogeneous. Underneath the veneer of common goals against ecological destruction and exploitation of indigenous peoples are two diametrically contrasting ideologies – liberalism and Marxism – based on competing and conflicting social interests and political strategies. Marxist class analysis highlights the centrality of property ownership, specifically the class nature of the ownership of the means of production and control over state power as central to understanding the destruction of the environment and the complex politics of Indian society. We reject the notion of a ‘classless’ approach promoted by liberal ecologists and ideologues of Indian communitarianism as intellectually limiting and politically disastrous. These cannot create a sustainable environment and cannot provide the material basis for the social liberation of the poor and Indian majorities in Latin America. Ecology and Indian liberation are essentially and inextricable part of the class struggle.

The new constitution gives nature the “right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution” and mandates that the government take “precaution and restriction measures in all the activities that can lead to the extinction of species, the destruction of the ecosystems or the permanent alteration of the natural cycles.”

“I think a lot of eyes will be on Ecuador this weekend” said Mari Margil, Associate Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.

Margil and other members of the Defense Fund were invited as a result of their environmental litigation and legislative work with municipalities in the United States. They made several trips to Montecristi over the last year where they worked with members of Ecuador’s constitutional assembly on drafting legally enforceable Rights of Nature, which Margil believes marks a watershed in the trajectory of environmental law.

Dr. Mario Melo, a lawyer specializing in Environmental Law and Human Rights and an advisor to Fundación Pachamama-Ecuador, said that the new constitution redefines people’s relationship with nature by asserting that nature is not just an object to be appropriated and exploited by people, but is rather a rights-bearing entity that should be treated with parity under the law.

“In this sense, the new constitution reflects the traditions of indigenous peoples living in Ecuador, who see nature as a mother and call her by a proper name, Pachamama,” said Melo.

Challenging Corporate Power

Ecuador’s leadership on this issue just may have a global domino effect as the Defense Fund is now fielding calls from other countries such as Nepal, which is currently writing its first constitution. This could begin to make neoliberal development models obsolete and have a tremendous impact on multinational corporations, especially those in the extractive industries, from entering new markets and conducting “business as usual”.

“I expect them to fight it,” said the Defense Fund’s Margil. “Their bread and butter is being able to treat countries and ecosystems like cheap hotels. Multinational corporations are dependent on ravaging the planet in order to increase their bottom line.”

The class-action lawsuit in Ecuador against Chevron is a testament to Margil’s forecast. Tens of thousands of Ecuadorians accuse the California-based company of dumping millions of gallons of toxic waste into the Amazon (when it was formerly Texaco), and as a result causing massive environmental destruction and widespread health problems. Chevron, which could be forced to pay as much as $16 billion, refuses to take responsibility and calls the action a “shakedown.”

“The ultimate issue here is Ecuador has mistreated a U.S. company,” a Chevron lobbyist who asked not to be identified told Newsweek in July. “We can’t let little countries screw around with big companies like this-companies that have made big investments around the world.”

Chevron is lobbying Congress to squeeze Ecuador on the issue by threatening to withhold the renewal of the Andean Trade Preference Act. Chevron took similar measures in 2006 by lobbying for the exclusion of Ecuador from Andean Free Trade Agreement negotiations as retribution for the lawsuit–something Democratic Presidential nominee Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill) and Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) criticized at the time in a letter to then U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman.

Jorge Daniel Taillant, President of the Center for Human Rights and Environment (in Argentina), recently wrote, “The crude reality of the Chevron lobbyist comment, brings home what few politicians or oil industry representatives want to admit, that our societies have been unsuccessful in properly balancing our need for oil and containing the negative impacts that this industry has on our natural and social environment.”

It is this lack of success, as vindicated by the symptoms of global warming, and which are becoming all too apparent, that for Margil emphasize the urgent need to try something different, like what’s being proposed in Ecuador. But even this might not be far enough.

Populist Greenwashing?

For all of the hope and tangible progress the Rights of Nature articles in Ecuador’s proposed constitution represent, there are shortcomings and contradictions with the laws and the political reality on the ground.

Carlos Zorrilla, executive director of Defensa y Conservación Ecológica de Intag, who has been a tireless defender of Pachamama against transnational mining companies such as Canada’s Ascendant Copper (which recently changed its name to Copper Mesa Mining Corp.), takes a more skeptical approach to the proposed laws.

“It sounds great,” said Zorilla, “but in practice governments like [President] Correa’s will argue that funding his political project, which will bring ‘well being and relieve poverty’, overrules the rights of nature because the best technology will be used and mining and other extractive industries will be, of course, sustainable.”

The articles place the responsibility of carrying out these laws largely to the government, though it does give citizens and communities legal recourse if its determined that the government is failing in its responsibilities.

“It comes down to the government doing what is the will of the people,” said an optimistic Margil.

But Zorrilla, along with many other critics from social movements, point to Correa’s refusal to include in the constitution a clause mandating free, prior and informed consent by communities for any development project that would of affect their local ecosystems, as well as the Correa Administration’s embrace of an extractive economic model of development, although one with greater State control.

“They aren’t issues you can reconcile,” said environmental lawyer Melo. “On various occasions, President Correa has stated his will to amplify border-region projects for the extraction of natural resources, especially petroleum and metals, and this can only be done in Ecuador at the cost of natural resources important for their biodiversity, since they are the source of rivers and the homes of local communities. The Constitution Project, on the contrary, promotes a development model oriented towards ‘good living’ (buen vivir), which means living in harmony with nature and strengthening environmental rights for this end. This contradiction, between Correa’s statements and buen vivir, will probably provoke an intensification of socio-environmental conflicts in the coming years.”

Despite any shortcomings, the eyes of the world should stay on Ecuador beyond this weekend’s vote when the constitution will most likely pass. If history is any indicator, Ecuadorians will fight for the Rights of Nature, with or without President Correa.