In this paper we would like to contribute towards turning this around—to resurrect the socialist project; to do so by deconstructing the discourse on “neoliberal globalization” and reconstructing the actual contemporary dynamics of capitalist development.

This is a major task requiring a closer look at the issues. The modest contribution of this paper is to bring into focus the imperialist dynamics of capitalist development in Latin America. To this end, we present an analytical framework for an analysis of the dynamics of capitalist development and imperialism. We then summarize these dynamics in the Latin American context. Our argument is that the dynamics of capitalist development and imperialism have both an objective-structural and a subjective-political dimension and that a class analysis of these dynamics should include both. This means that it is not enough to establish the workings of capitalism and imperialism in terms of their objectively given conditions that affect people and countries according to their class location in this system. We need to establish the political dynamics of popular and working class responses to these conditions—to neoliberal policies of structural adjustment to the purported requirements of the new world order. The politics of the Left might so be better informed.

The Neoliberal Era of Capitalist Development and Imperialism

Capitalist development in Latin America can be periodized as follows: (1) an initial phase of primitive accumulation and national development dating more or less from the Independence Movement in the 1860s and crystallizing in the Porfiriato, an extended dictatorship of the big landowners and incipient bourgeoisie in Mexico; (2) a period of modernization, incipient industrialization (in the form of “Fordism”) and social reform, dating from the Mexican Revolution in the second decade of the twentieth century; (3) a period of state-led capitalist development with “international cooperation” (technical and financial assistance) dating from the end of the Second World War and the construction of the Bretton Woods world order (1945-70); (4) a period of transition (1971-82) characterized by an extended crisis in the global system of capitalist production and diverse efforts to restructure the system; and (iv) the construction of a new world order designed so as to free the “forces of freedom” from the constraints on capital accumulation imposed by the system of sovereign nation states. This phase, which can be dated from the onset of a region-wide debt and an ensuing “development” crisis, is characterized by dynamic processes of neoliberal globalization and imperialism – the institution of a neoliberal policy framework (the structural adjustment program, as it was termed at the time), a renewed imperial offensive, and the decline but then partial recovery of the capital accumulation process and the self-styled “forces of economic and political freedom”.

The latest period of capitalist development has two dimensions (globalization in theory / imperialism in practice, forces of opposition and resistance), both of which can also be broken down into four phases.
Neoliberalism and Imperialism in Practice: A Framework of Analysis

Phase I (1975-82) of the neoliberal project is associated with the bloody Pinochet regime in Chile constituted with a military coup in 1973. The “bold reforms” implemented by this regime and extended into Argentina and Uruguay were subsequently implemented by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and used by economists at the World Bank as a model for the structural reforms set as the price of admission into the new (neoliberal) world order.

Phase II (1983-90) of neoliberalism (imperialism masked as globalization) includes the foundation stones of renewed process of capital accumulation on a global scale; setting the parameters for a new configuration of economic and political power; implementation of a second round of neoliberal “structural reform”; launch of an ideology (globalization) designed to legitimate this reform process, and the first wave of privatizations as part of this reform process; and a process of redemocratization designed as a means of securing the political conditions of structural adjustment—a marriage of strategic convenience between capitalism /economic liberalism and democracy / political liberalism (Dominguez and Lowenthal, 1996).

Phase III (1990-2000) entails what might be viewed as a “golden age” of massive transfers of public property to the “private sector” (capitalists and their enterprises); an enormous net outflow of capital (“international resource transfers”) in the form of profits on investments, debt payments and royalty charges; virtually no economic growth—less than one percent per capita over the decade and a growing divide in the distribution of society’s wealth and income; huge bailouts of the banks and investors in corporate stock in a situation of financial crisis; and another round of neoliberal policy reform (“structural reform”), this time with a “human face” (adding to the reform process a “new social policy” targeted at the poor,); a second wave of privatizations and an associated denationalization of the banks and strategic economic enterprises; and a post-Washingron Consensus on the need for a more inclusive form of neoliberalism designed to empower the poor (Craig and Porter, 2006; Ocampo, 1998; Van Waeyenberge, 2006).

Phase IV (2000-09) begins with an involution in the system of capitalist production and the collapse of foreign direct investment inflows; and the onset of political crisis viz. widespread disenchantment with neoliberalism, and a process of regime change (Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Uruguay, Venezuela—a coup against and the restoration of Chávez to power—and Uruguay. In 2003, the production crisis gives way to a mild economic recovery for a number of countries in the region and a sweeping realignment of political forces into four blocs. The basis of this process of economic and political development is a realignment of global production—a primary commodities boom fueled by the growing demand in China and India for new sources of energy, natural resource industrial inputs and consumption goods for a rapidly growing middle class.

Opposition to Imperialism, Class Rule and Neoliberalism: Forces of Resistance

Phase 1 (1973-82) of the anti-neoliberal project includes a major counter-offensive of the landed proprietors and big capital against the incremental advance of the workers and peasants; a double-offensive of the state against the rural poor and landless peasants in the form of the “Alliance for Progress” (“rural development”) and use of the state’s repressive apparatus against the guerrilla armies of national liberation; the counter-offensive of capital, with the support of the state, against the working class, resulting in a disarticulation of the labor movement, cooptation of its leadership and a weakening in its capacity to negotiate for higher wages and better working conditions; and, with the agency and support of U.S. imperialism, the institution of military coups and the institution of military rule and a war against “subversives” under the aegis of a Washington-designed “Doctrine of National Security”.

Phase II (1983-99) was characterized by a reorganization of the popular movement, particularly in the countryside—in the indigenous communities and among the masses of dispossessed, landless workers and peasant producers; the mobilization of the forces of popular opposition and resistance against the neoliberal policies of the governments of the day; various uprisings of indigenous peasants in Ecuador, Chiapas and Bolivia, resulting in the ouster of several presidents if not regime change, and in the blocking of governments efforts to extend the neoliberal agenda; the division of the indigenous movement (in Bolivia and Ecuador) into a social and political movement, allowing it to contest elections as well as mobilize the forces of resistance in direct action against the state; a general advance in the popular movement with the growth of new offensive and defensive class struggles.

Phase III (2000-03), corresponding to a crisis in production and ideology vis-à-vis neoliberalism, was characterized by the emergence of various offensive struggles and social mobilizations that led to the overthrow of regimes in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador. In Venezuela, Hugo Chávez came to power, inciting the complex dynamics of a class struggle characterized by a series of counter-offensives by the ruling class (attempted coups, referendums), growing demands for radical reforms and the institution of the “Bolivarian Revolution” based on an anti-imperialist strategy designed to take the country along a socialist path.

As for Phase IV (2003-09) it saw the rise of a bloc of pragmatic neoliberal, quasi-populist democratic socialist regimes oriented towards the post-Washington Consensus, an ebb in the flow of the popular movements, the radicalization of Chávez’s project of “21st Century Socialism” and the reflux of the popular movement.

Four Cycles of Neoliberalism

“Neoliberalism” in this historic context denotes a national policy—or rather, reform of the then-existing policy of state-led development (“structural reform” or “structural adjustment”)—justified with a neoclassical theory of economic growth and development and an ideology of globalization. In this context, we can identify four cycles of neoliberal “structural reform”. The first cycle, initiated by the Chicago Boys in Chile under Pinochet . After this first round of neoliberal experiments in policy reform, extended to Argentina and Uruguay, crashed in the early 1980s, a second round of neoliberal policy reforms was implemented under conditions of redemocratization, an external debt crisis and the political leverage that this crisis provided the World Bank and the IMF, the agencies that assumed primary responsibility for implementing the Washington Consensus on needed policy reform.

The third cycle of neoliberal policies was implemented in the 1990s. At the outset only four major regimes had failed to fully embrace the “discipline” of structural adjustment. But serious concerns had surfaced as to the sustainability of the neoliberal model and the associated Washington Consensus. For one thing, neoliberalism had utterly failed to deliver on the promise of economic prosperity and mutual benefits to countries north and south of the global development divide. For another, structural reforms had not only released the “forces of freedom” but also forces of resistance that threatened the survival not only the viability of the neoliberal model but the survival of the state itself. To avert an impending crisis the ideologues of globalization and neoliberal architects of policy reform came up with a revised model: structural adjustment with a human face (UNICEF, 1989) in one formulation, productive transformation with equity (ECLAC, 1990) in another, and “sustainable human development” (UNDP, 1996) in yet another. The common feature of these and other such models was a continuing commitment to a neoliberal program of “structural reform” at the level of national policy, the design and adoption of a “new social policy” that “targeted” social investment funds at the poor and their communities, and specific policies that helped shelter the most vulnerable groups from the admittedly high “transitional” social costs of structural adjustment.

Policy Dynamics of Neoliberal Structural Reform

The discourse on “globalization” emerged in the 1980s in the context of efforts in policymaking circles to renovate the ailing Bretton Woods world order—to create a “new world order”. Under widespread systemic conditions of a capitalist production crisis and an associated fiscal crisis, economists at the World Bank and its sister “international financial institutions”, all adjuncts of the U.S. imperial state, formulated a program of policy reforms designed to open up the economies of the developing world to the forces of “economic freedom”, to integrate these societies and economies into the new world order. These policy reforms included various IMF stabilization measures such as currency devaluation and import restrictions, and policies of structural adjustment: (1) privatization of the means of social production and associated economic enterprises (reverting thereby the nationalization policies of the earlier model of state-led development); (2) deregulation of diverse product, capital and labor markets; (3) liberalization of capital flows and trade in products and services; and (4) and administrative decentralization, attempting to “democratize” thereby the relation of civil society to the state, transferring to local governments in partnership with civil society responsibility for economic and social development; that is, privatizing “development” (allowing the poor to “own” and be responsible for improving their lives, changing themselves rather than the system.

By the end of the 1980s, this package of policy reforms had transformed the economic and social system of many Latin American societies. The state-led reforms of the 1960s and 1970s (nationalization, regulation of capitalist enterprise and capital inflows, protection of domestic producers, rural credit schemes, land and income redistribution market-generated incomes, etc.) had been reverted, effectively halting, where not reversing, the process of development and incremental change.

The outcome and social impacts of this social transformation were all too visible and apparent, especially to those groups and classes that bore the brunt of the adjustment and globalization process. With a significant reduction in the share of labor (and households) in society’s wealth and national income, and an equally significant concentration of asset-based incomes and its conversion into capital, Latin American society became increasingly class divided and polarized between a small minority of individuals capacitated and able to appropriate the lion’s share of the new wealth and a large mass of producers and workers who had to bear the costs of this “structural adjustment” and excluded from its benefits. The economic and political landscape of Latin American society was, and is, littered with the detritus of this development process. The objectively given conditions of this process are not only reflected in the all too evident deterioration in living and working conditions of the mass of the urban and rural population. They are also reflected in the evidence of a process of massive outmigration, the export of labor as it were, and an equally massive process of capital export—a net outflow or transfer of “financial resources” estimated by Saxe-Fernandez and Núñez (2001) to amount to over USD 100 million for the entire decade of the 1990s. Recent studies suggest that if anything the process, fuelled by the financialization of development and policies of privatization, liberalization and deregulation, has continued to accelerate, putting an end to any talk, and much writing, about a purported “economic recovery” based on a program of “bold reforms” and “sound economics.” Neoliberalism is in decline if not dead.

Globalization or Global Class War?

It is commonplace among many intellectuals, pundits and policy makers both in Latin America as elsewhere to discuss “globalization” as of it were a process unfolding with an air of inevitability, the result of forces beyond anyone’s control—at worst allowing policymakers to manage the process and at best to push it in a more ethical direction; that is, allow the presumed benefits of globalization to be spread somewhat more equitably. This is, in fact, the project shared by the antiglobalization movement in their search for “another world” and the pragmatic centre-left politicians currently in power in their search for “another development”.

In this discourse, globalization appears as a behemoth whose appetites must be satisfied and whose thirst must be quenched at all costs—costs borne, as it happens but not fortuitously, by the working class. In this context to write, as do so many on the Left today, of the “corporate agenda” and “national interests”, etc. is to obfuscate the class realities of globalization—the existence and machinations of the global ruling class (Petras, 2007) and what Jeffrey Faux (2006) terms a “global class war.”

Faux’s book allows us to view in a different way the globalizing economy, the politics and economics of free trade, and soaring corporate profits on the one hand, and, on the other hand, deteriorating standards of living and the continuing (and deepening) poverty of most of the world’s people. What is behind this reality? A dynamic objective process, working like the invisible hand of providence through the free market to bring about mutual benefits and general prosperity? Or a class of people who in their collective interest have launched a global war with diverse features and theaters. One feature of this class war, one of many (on its manifestation in the European theater, see Davis, 1984; and Crouch and Pizzorno, 1978) entails ripping up the social contract that had allowed the benefits of capitalism to be broadly shared with other social classes. Another feature was the use of the state apparatus to reduce the share of labor in national income waken its organizational and negotiating capacity, and repress any movement for substantive social change.

The globalization discourse hides the class realities behind it. The press, for example, consistently talks about national interests without defining whom exactly is getting what and how, under what policy or decision-making conditions. Thus, American workers are told that the Chinese are taking their jobs. But the China threat, in fact, is but another global business partnership, in this case between Chinese commissars who supply global capital cheap labor and the U.S. and other foreign capitalists who supply the technology and much of the capital used to finance China’s exports. Workers in Latin America are told that it is their inflexibility and intransigence, and government interference in the free market, that hold them back from engaging meaningfully or at all in the many benefits of globalization. Many, including on the Left, view “globalization” in this way. However, it would be better to see it for what it is: a class project vis-à-vis the accumulation of capital on a global scale; and as “imperialism” vis-à-vis the project of world domination, a source and means of ideological hegemony over the system.

Neoliberalism is the reigning ideology of the global elite, a transnational capitalist class that holds its annual meeting in the plush mountain resort of Davos, Switzerland. Hosted by the multinational corporations that dominate the world economy (Citigroup, Siemens, Microsoft, Nestlé, Shell, Chevron, BP Amoco, Repsol-YPF, Texaco, Occidental, Halliburton, etc.), some 2000 CEOs, prominent politicians (including former and the current presidents of Mexico), this and other such meetings allow this elite to network with pundits and international bureaucrats, discuss policy briefs and position papers on the state of the global economy, and to strategize abut the world’s future – all over the best food, fine wine, good skiing and cozy evenings by the fire among friends and associates – fellow self-appointed and nominated members and guardians of the imperial world order.

Davos is not a secret cabal, although it is surrounded by meetings and workings of a host of groupings, meetings and committees and extended networks that is. Journalists issue daily reports to the world on the wit and informal charm of these unelected, self-appointed or nominated members of the class that runs and manages the global economy. In this sense it is a political convention of what Fauz dubs “the Davos Party” that includes solid representation from the economic and political elite in Latin America. The mechanism and dynamics of class membership are unclear; as far as we know it has not been systemically studied. But it likely involves “people” like Henrique Fernando Cardoso, former dependency theorist and later neoliberal president of Brazil, upon or before completion of his term in office, being invited to give a “talk” or address members of the imperial brain trust, the global elite, at one of its diverse foundations and “policy forums”, such as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a critical linchpin of the imperial brain trust and its system of thinktanks, policy forums and geopolitical planning centers. Certainly this is how former Mexican presidents Carlos Salinas and Ernesto Zedillo were appointed and assigned specific responsibilities on diverse working “committees” designed to identify and redress fissures in and threats to the system. It is evident that listing in Forbes’ listing of the world’s biggest billionaire family fortunes, such as Bill Gates, George Soros and Carlos Slim, is sufficient in itself to ensure automatic membership in the club.

The New World Order system easily identifies those members of the global elite in each country that, as Salbuchi (2000) notes, are “malleable, controllable and willing to subordinate themselves to the system’s objectives”. Their careers are then launched so that they may rise to become presidents of their countries or ministers of finance and central bank governors. This was the case, for example, for Argentina’s Domingo Cavallo, Chile’s Alejandro Foxley and Brazil’s Henrique Cardoso, each of whom received suitable local and international press coverage; were honored with “prestige-generating” reviews, interviews, conferences and dinners, etc.; and then invited to address the Council on Foreign Relations, the Americas Society and Council of the Americas, so that the key New World Order players in New York and Washington could evaluate them. If and when they pass muster their election campaigns are generously financed by the corporate, banking and media infrastructure of the “establishment” that has the resources and means to bring them to power legally and democratically—to do the bidding of their masters and colleagues.2 Some are even invited to join elite circles and organizations such as Trilateral Commission and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace), or one of the CRC’s working committees.

The Left Responds to the Crisis of Neoliberalism

Throughout the 1990s the dominant popular response to neoliberal globalization and associated regimes and policies was in the form of social movements that represented and advanced most effectively the struggle against what Ron Chilcote (1990) called a “plurality of resistances to inequality and oppression”. These movements placed growing pressure from below on the regime and the “political class”. However, by mid-decade, well into the left’s general retreat from class politics, a number of these movements followed Brazil’s labor movement (The PT or Workers’ party) in establishing a party apparatus to allow them to contest both national and local elections—to pursue an electoral strategy. This political development did not require or mean an abandonment of the social movement strategy of social mobilizations, etc. but it did open up a broader opportunity to participate in the electoral process, allowing the populace to participate in party politics.

Local Politics and Community Development

The mobilization of the electorate via the institutional trappings of liberal democracy provided a new impetus to the political left—the segment that opted for party politics over social mobilization as a strategy for achieving state power: influencing government policy from within rather than outside the system. However, a large swath of the Left seem to have heeded Jorge Casteñeda’s call for the Left to switch its electoral ambitions to the municipality, local politics and community development. His argument, advanced in Utopia Unarmed, was that “municipal politics should be the centre-piece of the left’s democratic agenda…because it typifies the kind of change that is viable…a stepping stone for the future” (1994: 244). Engagement in local politics, he argued –and much of the left seemed to have followed this line—would provide the basis for a consolidation of the Left after the so-called “democratic transition” from 1979 (Bolivia, Ecuador) to 1989 (Chile). In addition it would help re-articulate the civil society-local state nexus and restore legitimacy to the Left’s relationship with the popular sector (Lievesley, 2005: 8).

An example of the approach proposed by Casteñeda, and in fact widely pursued by the Left even before his book (the World Bank’s strategy in this regard was already quite advanced) had already is the PT’s experience with municipal government in Porto Alegre, the capital city of Brazil’s state of Rio Grande do Sul (1989-2004). The PT administration opened up municipal institutions with a stated commitment to accountability and transparency, as well as citizen participation in the budget planning process via the mechanism of public meetings (Orçamento Participativa).

The Porto Alegre experience with participatory budgeting was hailed by the World Bank and the International Development “community” of multilateral institutions and liberal academics as a good example of collective decision-making for the common good, a model of grassroots participatory development and politics, and it continues to serve as a guide to similar practices and experiences elsewhere (Abers, 1997). Other examples of this “participatory” approach towards local politics and community development, widely adopted by the Left in the 1990s in its retreat from class, can be found in Bolivia and Ecuador, both countries a laboratory for diverse experiments to convert the municipality into a “productive agent” (the “productive municipality”)3 and exertions by the Left to bring about social change via local politics (North and Cameron, 2003). On the left this shift from macro-politics and development (national elections versus social movements) to micro-politics and development (local politics, participatory development) was viewed as a salutary retreat from a form of analysis and politics whose time had come and gone. Within academe the dynamics of this process has been viewed in some circles as the harbinger of a “new tyranny” (Cooke and Kothari, 2001).

The World Social Forum Process: Is Another World Possible?

On January 3, 2007, Caracas, the capital city of an epicenter of social and political transformation in the region was concerted into the Mecca of the international left. Thousands of activists (100, 00 according to the organizers) arrived in Caracas from some 170 countries to participate in the sixth edition of the World Social Forum (WSF), a process initiated in Porto Alegre, Brazil, six years earlier. It was the first of a then thereafter annual event, extended to and replicated in other regional settings from India, Europe and most recently Nairobi, Kenya in the African subcontinent. In each place and in each annual event, the organizers would bring together hundreds of nongovernmental and civil organizations committed to the search for a more ethical form of globalization, a more human form of capitalism. The process brings together diverse representatives of a self-defined new left committed to the belief in the necessity and possibility of a “new world”, an alternative to globalization in its neoliberal form.

There are, of course, defined limits to this new political process: participants are invited and expected to explore diverse proposals for bringing about “another world” but to limit this search to reforms to the existing system, reforms that no matter how “radical” are expected to leave the pillars of the system intact. This liberal reform orientation to the process is ensured by explicit exclusions—any political organizations that include armed struggle or violent confrontation and class struggle in its repertoire, that are oriented towards revolutionary change.

ATTAC, a Paris-based social democratic organization is the most visible representative of this approach towards social change, but the World Social Forum from its inception morphed into and became a significant expression of what emerged as the “antiglobalization movement”. This movement had its origins in the encounter of diverse forces of resistance formed in middleclass organizations in the “global north” and mounted against the symbols of neoliberal globalization such as the World Trade Organization and the G-7/8 annual summit. A defining moment in this movement, rooted in the organizations of the urban middle class—NGOs, unions, students, etc.–in both Europe and North America, included the successful mobilization against the MAI in Seattle. This mobilization was the first of a number of serialized events scheduled to unfold at important gatherings of the representatives of global capital—Genoa, Quebec, Melbourne, Dakar….

In Latin America the World Social Forum process, is the basic form taken by the “antiglobalization movement” in the search for “another world” (the latest event in this process was hosted by Lula, taking place in Bélem towards the end of January 2009). Apart from the absence of an internal division between the advocates of moderate reform (ethical globalization) and more radical change the antiglobalization process is designed to define and maintain the outer limits of permitted change; that is, controlled dissent from the prevailing model of global capitalist development. Not anti-globalization but a more ethical form. Not anti-capitalism but a more humane form of capitalism, a more sustainable human form of development. Not anti-imperialism because imperialism is not at issue.

The New Left and the Politics of No-Power

In the shape and form of class struggle the path towards social change in the 1960s and 1970s was paved with state power. That is, the forces of resistance, at the time based in the countryside, in the organizations and movements of the landless and near landless peasants, and in the urban-based organized labor movement; and for the most part led by petit-bourgeois middle class intellectuals, were concerned with the capture of state power. In the 1990s, in a very different context—neoliberal globalization—and in the wake of the Zapatista uprising in January 1994, there emerged on the left a postmodern twist to the struggle for social change: “social change without taking state power” (Holloway, 2002).

In the discourse of Subcomandante Marcos, the Zapatismo came to symbolically—or theoretically, in the writings of Holloway and others (for example, Burbach, 1994)—represent a “new way of doing politics”: to bring about social change without resort to class struggle or the quest for state power (Holloway, 2002). However, much of the Latin American Left appeared all o ready to retreat from class politics and engage the new way of “doing politics”. Some of the Left joined the struggle for change at the level of local politics and community development–to bring about social change by building on the assets of the poor, their “social capital” (Portes, 1998, 2000; Ocampo, 2004). Another part joined the “situationists” and other militants of “radical praxis” in an intellectual engagement with the forces of social and political disenchantment in the popular barrios of unemployed workers—in Gran Buenos Aires and elsewhere (Besayag and Sztulwark. 2000; Colectivo Situaciónes, 2001, 2002). This was in the early years of the new millennium. In the specific conjuncture of economic and political crisis, a generalized rejection of the “old way” of doing politics (“que se vayan todos”), the search for redemption and relevance left a large part of the left without a political project, without a social base for their politics.

Dynamics of Electoral Politics: What’s Left of the Left

With the advent of the new millennium, it was clear that the neoliberal model even in its revamped form, had failed to deliver on its promise of economic growth and general prosperity. Instead it had deepened existing class and global divides in wealth and income, and regime after regime was pushed towards its limits of endurance by the forces of popular mobilization. In this context, the political class in each country turned to the left, opening up new opportunities for groups that had hitherto concentrated their efforts on local politics and community development. Governments of the day, many of them neoliberal client regimes of the US, fell to the forces of resistance and opposition.

Political developments in the region regarding this regime change led to a concern in the US, and widespread hopes and expectations on the Left, about a tilt to the left in national politics and what the press (Globe & Mail) has termed a “disheartening” triumph of politics over “sound economics”. A lot of this concern revolves around Hugo Chávez, who appears (to the press and U.S. policymakers) to be taking Venezuela down a decidedly anti-US, anti-imperialist and seemingly socialist path–and taking other governments in the region with him.

Chávez’s electoral victory was seen by many as the moment when a red tide began to wash over the region’s political landscape. In the summer of 2002, the Movement to Socialism (MAS) in Bolivia, led by militant coca growers’ leader Evo Morales, became the second largest party in the Congress while in December it achieved huge victories in municipal elections—in what was billed by the MAS itself as “la toma de los municipios”. The election to state power of Lula da Silva in Brazil (October 2002) wa followed by Nestor Kirchner in Argentina (May 2003), Tabaré Vasquez in Uruguay (November 2004), Evo Morales (December 2005), (December 2006) Rafael Correa in Ecuador (December 2006) and most recently Lucas Longo in Paraguay. The tide was checked in Mexico in the summer of 2006 when Lopez Obrador, presidential candidate of the PRD, fell just short of victory, and in Peru, where the nationalist Humala lost out to Alan Garcia, the once disgraced social democrat but reborn neoliberal. But it appeared to swell again with Daniel Ortega’s victory in Nicaragua—although, given his opportunism and religious rebirth, Ortega could hardly be viewed as on the Left notwithstanding his friendship with Chávez and Fidel Castro—and Rafael Correa.

Thus it appeared that Latin America had turned against the US-inspired—and dictated—neoliberal policies of structural adjustment and globalization by electing to state power a number of parties on the political left—although “moderate” or “pragmatic”. Centre-left regimes, some of which cherish their links with Cuba and relish throwing it in the face of the U.S. administration, which has shown itself to be extraordinarily ideological and non-pragmatic, now outnumber right-of-centre governments in the region. The days of the US-supported and instigated right-wing dictatorships and military rule are over, having long disappeared in the dustbins of history and replaced by a new breed of neoliberal regimes.

Latin America turns left?

These regimes in appearance (that is, as constructed in the rhetoric of public discourse) have changed or are changing economic course, ostensibly moving away from the neoliberal policies pushed by the US. This was the case in Argentina, for example where the Kirchner administration was compelled by the most serious economic and political crisis in its history to confront the IMF and the World Bank, and the US, by halting payments on the country’s external debt, redirecting import revenues towards productive and social investments, including short-term work projects demanded by the mass of unemployed workers that at the time constituted over 25% of the laborforce and who had taken to the streets, picketing highways in protest. The result: some three years later is an annual growth rate of 8%, the highest in the region.

Another example of apparent regime change was in Brazil, where and when in October 2002 the electorate after his third attempt voted Ignacio [Lula] da Silva, leader of the PT, into power, re-electing him in 2006 to a second term in office. The first President on the “left” voted into power since Allende in 1970, Lula is nevertheless (and for good reason, it turns out) very well received by Wall Street, if not Washington, which tends to view him as a thorn in the U.S. side. Indeed Lula played a major role in defeating the White House plan for a hemispheric free trade zone, and continues to annoy the U.S. with his support of Chávez-Morales-Correa axis in Latin American politics. In this context, the intellectual Left associated with the antiglobalization movement choose to see Lula as an opponent of neoliberal globalization. In fact, Lula, on behalf of Brazil’s agribusiness and other capitalist producers simply has been playing and continues to play hardball in negotiations over access to the U.S. market.

Elections of centre-left governments followed in Uruguay (2004), Chile (2005), Ecuador (2006) where the electorate was polarized between a business magnate, Alvaro Noboa, the richest man in the country and a committed neoliberal ideologue; and Rafael Correa, head of a centre-left coalition that appears to be taking Ecuador down the same path as Evo Morales is taking Bolivia, particularly in regard to a constituent assembly that might well, or is expected to, change the economic and social system as well as the correlation of class forces in the country’s politics. In this regard, elements of the political left in Ecuador, especially those associated with the “Coordinadora de Movimientos Sociales” (CMS), see a political opportunity to build a “radical bloc” on the basis of combined action “from above” (the government) and “from below” (the indigenous and popular movement). Whether this will happen (see Saltos, 2006)4 remains to be seen. For one thing, it hinges on the capacity of the popular movement for active mobilization – to pressure the Correa government from below towards the left. On this the historic record is fairly clear. As observed by Pedro Stedile, leader of the MST, “without active mobilization the government gives nothing”.

With the election of Rafael Correa over Alvaro Noboa the popular and indigenous movement in Ecuador at least placed on the agenda of government action issues such as national sovereignty, nationalization of the country’s natural resources, agrarian reform, indigenous rights, subordination of payment on the external debt to social programs, renegotiation of oil contracts will the multinationals, the ending of the military bases in Manta, and Latin American (vs. continental) integration. Whether the government will act on these issues remains to be seen.

The conflict that ensued over the Constituent Assembly (CA) in Ecuador and Bolivia, where the CA was finally approved) is symptomatic of the profound legitimation crisis in the system of class domination in these and other countries (Saltos, 2006). Earlier and other forms of hegemony, such as “globalization” and the trappings of representative “democracy”, have lost their hold over people, having been totally undermined by the all too tangible and visible signs of the negative effects of neoliberal policies. The reign of Washington in the region appears to be in serious decline. Nor can Washington, in its efforts to preserve the status quo or the status quo ante, revert to the use of force—to bring back the Armed Forces to restore order. Its only recourse is to engage “civil society” in the project of “good governance”—to restore political order by means of a broad social consensus that reaches well beyond the state and the political class (Blair, 1997; OECD, 1997; UNDP, 1996; World Bank, 1994b).

What we saw in Quito and La Paz in regard to the Constituent Assembly went beyond a conflict between two branches of government. At issue was that those who elected Correa and Morales had come to the point of refusing to be subordinated to a state controlled by the dominant class and servile to Washington and the interests of global capital. On achieving political representation with the election of Morales and Correa, and Chávez for that matter, the forces in the popular movement were all too aware that the legislature was dominated by the “oligarchy” (the ruling class is understood in Bolivia and Ecuador). In this situation, Morales and Correa were compelled to construct a multi-class alliance and mobilize the forces of resistance to class rule and the neoliberal agenda of previous governments under the post-Washington Consensus. The result is the construction of a multi-ethnic or pluri-national state oriented towards what the Vice-President of Bolivia, Alvaro Garcia, conceives of as an Andean form of capitalism, and a new anti-american axis of regional politics and trade.

These and other such political developments in Bolivia and Ecuador are illustrative of what appears to be a regional trend. For example, in neighboring Colombia in October 2003 the voters elected a former union leader Luis Garzón as mayor of Bogotá. The election marked a swing to the left in Colombia’s second most important elective office, a clear challenge to the pro-US, scandal-ridden right-wing government of Alvaro Uribe. If we take these and other such developments together, especially in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, there does indeed seem to be a leftward swing in the political winds of change, leading …to declare that democratic elections are not enough: governments in the region also have to “govern democratically”, i.e. place no constrictions on the forces of opposition to the new agenda in national and regional politics.

Whither Socialism in a Sea of Crisis and Neoliberal Decline?

A serious discussion of the prospects for socialism in Latin America today must take into account world economic conditions in the current conjuncture, the state of US-Latin American relations relative to the project of world domination and imperialism, the specific impact on Latin American countries of these conditions and relations, the conditions deriving from the correlation of class forces within these countries, and the class nature and agency of the state relative to these forces.

World Economic Conditions and Their Impact on Latin America

Latin America’s “restructured” capitalist economy emerged from the financial crisis of the 1990s and the recession of the early years of the new millennium with its axis of growth anchored in the primary sector of agro-mineral exports (Cypher, 2007; Ocampo, 2007). From 2003 to 2008 all Latin American economies, regardless of their ideological orientation or political complexion, based their economic growth strategy on the “re-primarization” of their export production, to take advantage thereby of the expanding markets for oil, energy and natural resources and the general increase in the price of primary commodities on the world market. The driving force of capitalist development in this period was agribusiness and mineral exports, export-oriented production of primary commodities leading to an increased dependence on diversified overseas markets and a change in the correlation of class forces, strengthening the right and, notwithstanding a generalized tilt to the Left at the level of the state, a weakening of the Left. Ironically, the primarization of exports led to the revival and strengthening of neoliberalism via the reconfiguration of state policy to favor agro-mineral exporters and accommodate the poorest section through populist clientelistic “poverty programs”. In the context of a primary commodities boom and the emergence of a range of democratically elected centre-left regimes, trade union leaders were coopted and the social movements that had mobilized the forces of resistance to neoliberalism in the 1990s were forced to beat a retreat from the class struggle (Petras and Veltmeyer, 2009).

The link between U.S. finance capital, the growth of industry and the domestic market in Asia, and the primary commodities boom, was responsible for the period of high growth in Latin America from 2003 to 2008, when the boom went bust and most economies in the region succumbed to a financial crisis of global proportions and a system-wide deep recession that threatened to push the U.S. economy, at the centre of the gravitational force of this crisis, towards collapse. With the U.S. empire’s “over-extension” and the exceedingly high costs of prosecuting imperialist war in Iraq and maintaining its enormous military apparatus—military expenditures on the Iraq war alone increasing by millions each minute (as of February 17, 2009 US$ 597.7 billion) and likely to cost well over a trillion dollars before it is over—the capacity of the U.S. to weather the storm of financial crisis and a deepening recession has been seriously diminished. Given the absorption of the U.S. state in the Iraq war, governments in Latin America in the latest phase of capitalist development managed to achieve a measure of “independence” and “relative autonomy” in their relations with the United States. And this has given leaders like Hugo Chavez a free hand in his efforts to push Venezuela in a socialist direction.
Impact of World Recession and U.S. Imperial Revivalism in Latin America

Latin America is feeling the full brunt of the world recession. Every country in the region, without exception, is experiencing a major decline in trade, domestic production, investment, employment, state revenues and income. The projected growth of Latin America’s GDP in 2009 has declined from 3.6% in September 2008 to 1.4% in December 2008 (Financial Times, January 9, 2009). More recent projections estimate Latin America’s GDP per capita as falling to minus two percent (-2%).5 As a result state spending on social services will undoubtedly be reduced. State credit and subsidies to big banks and businesses will increase; unemployment will expand, especially in the agro-mineral and transport (automobile) export sectors. Public employees will be let go and experience a sharp decline in salaries. Latin America’s balance of payments will deteriorate as the inflow of billions of dollars and euros in remittances from overseas workers, a major source of “international financial resource” for many countries in the region, declines. Foreign speculators are already withdrawing tens of billions of investment dollars to cover their losses in the U.S. and Europe. A process of foreign disinvestment has replaced the substantial inflow of “foreign investment” in recent years, eliminating a major source of financing for major “joint ventures”. The precipitous decline in commodity prices in 2008, reflecting an abrupt drop in world demand, has sharply reduced government revenues dependent on export taxes. Foreign reserves in Latin America can only cushion the fall in export revenues for a limited time and extent.

The recession also means that the economic and social structure, the entire socioeconomic class configuration on which Latin America’s growth dynamic in recent years (2003-2008) was based, is headed for a major transformation. The entire spectrum of political parties linked to the primary commodity export model and that dominate the electoral process will be adversely affected. The trade unions and social movements oriented toward an improvement in their socioeconomic conditions and wages, social reforms and increased expenditures of fiscal resources and social spending within the primary commodity export model will be forced to take direct action or lose influence and relevance.

The initial response of the left of center regimes that came to power in the context of a primary commodities boom and neoliberalism in its demise has largely focused on: (i) financial support for the banking sector (Lula) and lower taxes for the agro-mineral export elite (Kirchner/Lula); (ii) cheap credit for consumers to stimulate domestic consumption (Kirchner); and (iii) temporary unemployment benefits for workers laid off from closed small and medium size mines (Morales). The response of the Latin American regimes to date (up to the beginning of 2009) could be characterized as delusional, the belief that their economies would not be affected. This response was followed by an attempt to minimize the crisis, with the claim that the recession would not be severe and that most countries would experience a rapid recovery in “late 2009”. It is argued in this context that the existing foreign reserves would protect their countries from a more severe decline.

According to the IMF, 40% of Latin America’s financial wealth ($2.200 billion dollars) was lost in 2008 because of the decline of the stock market and other asset markets and currency depreciation. This decline is estimated to reduce domestic spending by 5% in 2009. The terms of trade for Latin America have deteriorated sharply as commodity prices have fallen sharply, making imports more expensive and raising the specter of growing trade deficits (Financial Times, January 9, 2009, p. 7).

The impact of these “developments” can be traced out not only in regime politics but on the class structure and the correlation of forces associated with this structure. Thus, the fall in the demand and price of primary commodities is resulting in a sharp decline in income, the power and the solvency of the agromineral exporters that dominated state policy in recent years. Much of their expansion during the “boom years” was debt-financed, in some cases with dollar and euro-denominated loans (Financial Times, January 9, 2009, p.7). But many of the highly indebted “export elite” now face bankruptcy and are pressuring their governments to relieve them of immediate debt obligations. And in the course of the recession/depression there will be a further concentration and centralization of agro-mineral capital as many medium and large miners and capitalist farmers are foreclosed or forced to sell. The relative decline of the contribution of the agro-mineral sector to the GDP and state revenues means they will have less leverage over the government and economic decision making. The collapse of their overseas markets and their dependence on the state to subsidize their debts and intervene in the market means that the “neoliberal” free market ideology is dead – for the duration of the recession. Weakened economically, the agro-mineral elite are turning to the state as its instrument of survival, recovery and refinancing.

In this new context, the “new statism” in formation has absolutely nothing “progressive” about it, let alone any claim to “socialism”. The state under the influence of the primary sector elites assumes the primary task of imposing the entire burden of the recession on the backs of the workers, employees, small farmers and business operators. In other words, the state is charged with indebting the mass of people in order to subsidize the debts of the elite export sector and provide zero cost loans to capital. Massive cuts in social services (health, pensions and education), and salaries will be backed by state repression. In the final analysis the increased role of the state will be primarily directed to financing the debt and subsidizing loans to the ruling class.

The State of U.S. Relations in Latin America in the Current Conjuncture

If the U.S. suffered a severe loss of influence in the first half decade of the early 2000s due to mass mobilization and popular movements ousting its clients, during the subsequent four years the U.S. retained political influence among the most reactionary regimes in the region, especially Mexico, Peru and Colombia. Despite the decline of mass mobilizations after 2004, the after-effects continued to ripple through regional relations and blocked efforts by Washington to return to relations that had existed during the “golden decade” of pillage (1990-1999).

While internal political dynamics put the brakes on any return to the 1990s, several other factors undermined Washington’s assertion of full scale dominance: (i) The U.S. turned all of its attention, resources and military efforts toward multiple wars in South Asia (Afghanistan), Iraq and Somalia and to war preparations against Iran while backing Israel”s aggression against Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. Because of the prolonged and losing character of these wars, Washington remained relatively immobilized as far as South America was concerned. Equally important Washington’s declaration of a intensified worldwide counter-insurgency offensive (the “War on Terror”) diverted resources toward other regions. With the U.S. empire builders occupied elsewhere, Latin America was relatively free to pursue a more autonomous political agenda, including greater regional integrations, to the point of rejecting the U.S. proposed “Free Trade Agreement.”

In this new context the spectrum of international relations between the U.S. and Latin America runs the gamut from “independence” (Venezuela), “relative autonomy” within competitive capitalism (Brazil), relative autonomy and critical opposition (Bolivia) to selective collaboration (Chile) and deep collaboration within a neoliberal framework (Mexico, Peru and Colombia). Venezuela constructed its leadership of the alternative nationalist pole in Latin America, in reaction to U.S. intervention. Chávez has sustained its independent position through nationalist social welfare measures, which has garnered mass support. A policy of “independence” was made possible, and financed as it were, by the commodity boom and the jump in oil prices. The “dialectic” of the US-Venezuelan conflict evolved in the context of U.S. economic weakness and over-extended warfare in the Middle East on the one hand and economic prosperity in Venezuela, which allowed it to gain regional and even international allies, on the other.

The autonomous-competitive tendency in Latin America is embodied by Brazil. Aided by the expansive agro-mineral export boom, Brazil projected itself on the world trade and investment scene, while deepening its economic expansion among its smaller and weaker neighbors like Paraguay, Bolivia, Uruguay and Ecuador. Brazil, like the other BRIC countries, which include Russia, India and China, forms part of newly emerging expansionist power center intent on competing and sharing with the U.S. control over the region’s abundant resources and the smaller countries in Latin America. Brazil under Lula shares Washington’s economic imperial vision (backed by its armed forces) even as it competes with the U.S. for supremacy. In this context, Brazil seeks extra-regional imperial allies in Europe (mainly France) and it uses the “regional” forums and bilateral agreements with the nationalist regimes to “balance” its powerful economic links with Euro-US financial and multi-national capital.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are the “imperial collaborator” regimes of Colombia, Mexico and Peru, which remain steadfast in their pro-imperial loyalties. They are Washington’s reliable supporters against the nationalist Chávez government and staunch backers of bilateral free trade agreements with the U.S.

The other countries in the region, including Chile and Argentina, continue to oscillate and improvise their policies in relation to and among these three blocs. But what should be absolutely clear is that all the countries, whether radical nationalist or imperial collaborators operate within a capitalist economy and class system in which market relations and the capitalist classes are still the central players.

Socialism and the Latin American State in the Current Conjuncture of the Class Struggle

Control of the state is an essential condition for establishing socialism. But it is evident that a more critical factor is the composition of the social forces that have managed to achieve state power by one means or the other. From 2003 to 2008, in the context of a primary commodities boom and a serious decline in the mobilizing power of neoliberal globalization, one state after the other in Latin America has tilted to the Left in establishing a nominally anti-neoliberal regime. However, the only regime in the region with a socialist project is that of Chávez, who has used the additional fiscal resources derived from the sale of oil and the primary commodities boom—specifically the growing world demand for oil – to turn the state in a socialist direction under the ideological banner of the “Bolivarian Revolution”. All of the other center-left regimes formed in this conjuncture for one reason or the other, and regardless of their national sovereignty concerns vis-à-vis U.S. imperialism, have retained an essential commitment to neoliberalism, albeit in a more socially inclusive and pragmatic form as prescribed by the post-Washington Consensus (Ocampo, 1998). A surprising feature of these centre-left regimes is that not one of them—again Venezuela (and of course Cuba) the exception—use their additional fiscal revenues derived from the primary commodities boom to reorient the state in a socialist direction, i.e. to share the wealth or, at least, in the absence of any attempt to flatten or eliminate the class structure to redirect fiscal revenues toward programs designed to improve the lot of the subordinate classes and the poor. Again, Chávez” is the exception in the use of windfall fiscal revenues derived from the primary commodities boom (oil revenues in the case of Venezuela) to improve conditions for the working class and the popular classes. The statistics regarding this “development” (see Weisbrot, 2009) are startling. Over the entire decade of Chávez rule, social spending per capita has tripled and the number of social security beneficiaries more than doubled; the percentage of households in poverty has been reduced by 39%, and extreme poverty by more than half. During the primary commodities boom (2003-2008), the poverty rate in Venezuela was cut by more than half, from 54% of households in the first half of 2003 to 26% at the end of 2008. Extreme poverty fell even more (by 72%). And these poverty rates measure only cash income, and do not take into account increased access to health care or education. However, in the other countries in the region governed by a centre-of-left regimes, not one of which is oriented towards socialism, conditions were and are very different. In a few cases (Chile, Brazil) the rate of extreme poverty was cut, but in all cases, despite recourse to an anti-poverty program following the PWC, government spending was relatively regressive. In only one case (Venezuela) is per capita PSE greater today than it was in 2000 in the vortex of a widespread crisis and a zero growth (Clements, Faircloth and Verhoeven, 2007). In many cases social programs and government spending was allocated so as to distribute more benefits to the richest stratum of households and the well to do than to the working class and the poor.6 Even in the case of Bolivia, where the Morales-Garcia Lineres regime has a clearly defined anti-neoliberal and anti-US imperialist orientation, not only has the government not expanded social program expenditures relative to investments and expenditures designed to alleviate the concerns of foreign investors but the richest stratum of households benefited more from fiscal expenditures on social programs than the poorest (Petras and Veltmeyer, 2009). All of the centre-left regimes that have came to power in this millennium, especially Brazil and Chile, elaborated anti-poverty programs with reference to the PWC. In the case of Bolivia fiscal expenditures on social programs defined by the “new social policy” of the post-Washington Consensus have been supplemented by a populist program of bonuses and handouts, and popular programs in health and education, but these have been almost entirely financed by Cuba and Venezuela. As for the fiscal resources derived from Bolivia’s participation in the primary commodities boom they have been allocated with a greater sensitivity to the concerns of foreign investors than the demands of the working class and the indigenous poor.

In this situation what is needed is not only access to state power, which the social movements managed to ostensibly achieve via the election of Evo Morales, but an ideological commitment of the government to socialism – to turn the state in a socialist direction. In this connection the Chávez regime is unique among Latin American heads of state. Even so the road ahead for the Bolivarian revolution in bringing about socialism of the twenty-first century promises to be long and “rocky”, as in the case of Cuba littered with numerous pitfalls but unlike Cuba with the likely growth in the forces of opposition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Terrorism and Genocide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• is a model participatory democracy;
• holds free, fair and open elections;
• respects the rule of law, civil liberties, and human rights;
• doesn’t intimidate its neighbors;
• uses its resources responsibly for the people;
• provides essential social services for the needy;
• champions judicial fairness and the rule of law;
• has a model free and open media;
• wages no foreign wars;
• doesn’t torture or imprison its adversaries;
• conducts effective operations to halt illicit drugs trafficking;
• promotes global peace, solidarity, equality and social justice; and
• its only threat is its good example that shames its northern neighbor.

In contrast, America:

• is a serial belligerent and world class bully;
• spends more on militarism than the rest of the world combined at a time it has no enemies;
• backs the world’s worst dictators and faux democrats like Colombia’s Alvaro Uribe, a man closely linked to the country’s paramilitary death squads and drug cartels; and
• through the CIA, has actively engaged in global drugs trafficking since the agency’s 1947 founding; it profits hugely from its dealings with local traffickers; so do major US banks and other powerful business and financial interests.

In addition, Washington

• serves the rich at the public’s expense;
• tolerates corruption at the highest levels;
• subverts democracy through electoral fraud;
• has a closed, corrupted dominant media system serving the powerful, not the greater good;
• incarcerates hundreds of political prisoners;
• uses torture as official policy; and
• wages state-sponsored terrorism and global wars.

So consider the hypocrisy. On October 27, Rep. Connie Mack (Rep. FL) introduced HR 872: Calling for the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela to be designated a state sponsor of terrorism for its support of Iran, Hezbollah, and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-EP). Its sole co-sponsor was Rep. Ron Klein (Dem. FL).

Connie Mack is a notorious right-wing ideologue. In an accompanying statement he said:

The evidence linking Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez to the FARC and Hezbollah — two of the most dangerous terrorist organizations, responsible for many bombings, kidnappings, killings and drug trafficking — is overwhelming. Naming Venezuela as a state sponsor of terrorism will strengthen the stability of the region. The Administration must not turn a blind eye to Chavez’s dangerous aggression and must add Venezuela to the state sponsors of terrorism with delay.

Fact Check

Iran hasn’t attacked a neighbor in over 200 years, but has defended itself vigorously when attacked, including during the 1980-88 war with Iraq, a conflict the Carter administration triggered in an attempt to destabilize and weaken both countries.

Noted Latin America expert James Petras calls the FARC-EP the “longest standing, largest peasant-based guerrilla movement in the world (that was) founded in 1964 by two dozen peasant activists (to defend) autonomous rural communities from” Colombian military and paramilitary violence.

Hezbollah is no terrorist organization. It’s a legitimate resistance group, and, as a political party, is part of Lebanon’s elected government. In addition, it’s well respected for providing essential social services, including a network of schools, medical clinics, and organized relief after Israeli South Lebanon bombings in 1993, 1996, and 2006.

Also, according to Aijaz Ahmad writing in the Indian magazine, Frontline:

It’s “the only entity which has, through armed resistance, forced the Israelis to relinquish any territory that the Jewish state has ever captured” through decades of regional belligerency.

Mack Attack Round Two

HR 872 is round two for Mack. On March 13, 2008, he and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R. FL) introduced HR 1049 (with eight co-sponsors) “calling for the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela to be designated a state sponsor of terrorism (and) condemn(ing) the Venezuelan government for it support of terrorist organizations,” at that time referring to the FARC-EP. The resolution died in the Foreign Affairs Committee.

Referred there as well, the new one won’t fare better. Otherwise the implications are serious as state terrorism designation means halting normal relations, prohibiting US companies from exporting and operating there, and denying America vitally needed Venezuelan oil. It’s the nation’s fourth largest supplier after Canada, Saudi Arabia and Mexico.

In its “State Sponsors of Terrorism Overview,” the US States Department imposes the following sanctions:

1. “A ban on arms-related exports and sales.

2. Controls over exports of dual-use items (that may be anything, including oil), requiring 30-day Congressional notification for goods and services that could significantly enhance the terrorist-list country’s military capability or ability to support terrorism.

3. Prohibitions on economic assistance.

4. Imposition of miscellaneous financial and other restrictions, including:

• Requiring the United States to oppose loans by the World Bank and other international financial institutions;
• Lifting diplomatic immunity to allow families of terrorist victims to file civil lawsuits in US courts;
• Denying companies and individuals tax credits for income earned in terrorist-listed countries;
• Denial of duty-free treatment of goods exported to the United States;
• Authority to prohibit any US citizen from engaging in a financial transaction with a terrorist-list government without a Treasury Department license; and
• Prohibition of Defense Department contracts above $100,000 with companies controlled by terrorist-list states.

In other words, it halts virtually all normal diplomatic, political and business dealings with “terrorist-list states.”

Corporate interests won’t tolerate it at a time every business opportunity counts. Nor will Venezuela with strong regional support given the political, security and economic implications.

As long as Bolivarianism flourishes, expect new efforts to vilify, isolate, destabilize, and topple Chavez, no more likely to succeed than others, and here’s why. According to the Venezuelan Institute of Data Analysis (IVAD), his latest approval rating tops 62% after nearly 11 years as president. Governing responsibly keeps him popular compared to Barack Obama’s noticeable slippage from his post inaugural high.

According to the November 3 Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll, only 28% of voters strongly approve of his performance, 41% strongly disapprove, 46% somewhat approve, 52% somewhat disapprove, and for Congress it’s far worse – 15% say its doing a good or excellent job compared to 53% ranking it poor.

Given Washington’s inattention to essential needs, watch for even greater erosion compared to Chavez remaining popular by a two-to-one margin — a profile befitting a democrat, not a state-sponsor of terrorism.

In a situation of negotiations between on the one hand the putschists and on the other hand the legitimate government and its allies in the Front, all this in the context of the presidential elections, what is the Micheletti de facto government attempting to do? Amongst other things, it is trying to divide the resistance forces and weaken the mass movement in the streets in order to gain time and legitimize itself through elections. However, all three forces, firstly the Front and its affiliate social and trade union organizations and followers in the street, secondly the two potential candidates for the presidential elections who are directly linked to the Front and thirdly the Zelaya government, have all further developed their unity with each other. Their combined tactics in this complicated situation constitute one of many examples exhibiting the rapidly growing political maturity and consciousness of all the components forming the resistance. All of these forces, far from succumbing to the usual imperialist tactics of divide and rule, are further unifying themselves. The resistance in the streets, the new political forces and the constitutional Zelaya government all complement each other.

From an exclusive October 5 telephone interview with Zelaya by some international media and reported by on-the-spot journalist Giorgio Trucchi, the following are excerpts:

Question: You have agreed to sign the San Jose Arias Plan or Agreement which does not envisage the main demand of the National Front Against the Coup, that is to begin a process to install a Constituent Assembly. Does this imply a concession by you? [The question is related to President Zelaya refraining from promoting the Constituent Assembly during the remainder of his mandate.]

Zelaya: The person who is going to sign the Plan is me as the elected representative of the Honduran people. The Plan has two components: my restitution in order to say No to coups d’etats; the Latin American presidents are interested in this so as to feel confident that the sovereignty of the people is going to be respected and that no military, economic and political elite can replace the will of the people.

The second component comprises the social processes and reforms and is related to timing….The Constituent [Assembly] is not a power of the President, neither of the de facto regime, nor any other group. It is a faculty of the Honduran people who, through a people’s consultation, can determine when they are going to do it. That is why the signing of the Arias Plan is consistent with my position in relation to the reforms that have to continue…. The decision to organize a Constituent [Assembly] belongs to the people who are sovereign…¹

In an October 14 interview with Front leader Juan Barahona and as reported by Telesur, in response to the question:

Another point where it will be difficult to reach an agreement is number 3, where it is proposed that President Zelaya concedes the promotion of a Constituent Assembly?

Barahona: President Zelaya has already said that he is ready to sign the Agreement of San Jose and renounce the Constituent Assembly during the period that will remain to end his mandate. We are going to respect this position of the President; however, we as the Resistance are never going to renounce the need to push for the Constituent [Assembly]…. There will be no elections if President Zelaya is not restored ….

I am very pessimistic [about the negotiations] and I do not have many expectations that it can reach a comprehensive agreement. The putschists are trying [since the beginning of the negotiations] to divide our delegation saying that there exists strong contradictions between the resistance and President Zelaya. We [the resistance] meet daily to refine strategy and seek common positions, but this disinformation campaign indicates that they want to make the dialogue fail and then place the responsibility on our shoulders. They have gone so far as to launch a campaign against myself personally saying that I am very tough [a hardliner] and therefore I am not fit for negotiations. In this sense, it is true that I am tough, because I will never be willing to renounce the rights of the people…²

In communiqué No. 28 of the National Front, dated October 13, it is stated:

…We withdrew our comrade Juan Barahoma from the so-called Guaymuras dialogue. Our comrade Barahona was acting as the representative of the National Front against the Coup in the delegation of President Zelaya in the said dialogue.

The delegation of the coup regime, in a typical act of intransigence to hinder the advance of the negotiation, tried to paralyze the dialogue by refusing to accept that our representative would sign accord No. 3 referring to the installation of the National Constitutional Assembly with reservations, since we wished in that reservation to have it recorded that our Front does not renounce nor will it renounce the struggle for this demand, which is the demand of the Honduran people. Conscious of the fact that this was a manoeuvre to cause a failure of the dialogue using any pretext, since signing with reservations was suggested by them in an earlier session, we decided not to lend ourselves to this and therefore we took this decision, leaving President Zelaya at liberty to substitute another representative that enjoys his trust. In that sense, the lawyer Rodil Rivera Rodil was delegated as part of the commission of President Zelaya in substitution for our representative.

The preceding signifies that the [National Front] left the Guaymuras dialogue and that we will keep fighting in the street for the demands that we have raised since the 28th of June; the return of constitutional order, the restitution of President Zelaya to his office, and the convening of a Constitutional Assembly.

We declare that we respect the decision of our president if he decides to sign the San Jose Accord, even with all its conditions, and we declare that we are in full harmony with him in regard to the demand that the coup perpetrators sign an accord by which they will abandon power, and the office of President of the Republic will be returned to him [Zelaya.]³

It was reported on October 19:

In a telephone message to a meeting of the National Front…[on October 18, Zelaya] called on it to keep up the peaceful struggle to restore democratic legality, broken by the June 28 military coup. ‘We will resist until the people obtain victory’… [and] stressed that the struggle will continue until we obtain a country with justice and equity, in a truly participatory democracy. The national directorate of the Front agreed [on October 18] and vowed to continue the peaceful resistance until the return to power of Zelaya and then go on to a national Constituent Assembly…⁴

There are two candidates for the presidential elections who are fully involved in the National Front:

César Ham of the Unificación Democrática (UD) party and trade union leader and independent candidate Carlos Reyes. Zelaya called on them both to take a stand against participating in the elections under the existing conditions which would lend legitimacy to the putschist electoral process.⁵

In an interview carried out by Giorgio Trucchi in Honduras with popular trade union leader and independent presidential candidate Carlos Reyes, the latter stated, as published on September 30:

“…If we the people´s and democratic candidates do not withdraw from this electoral process, we would be endorsing all that scaffolding [built-up by Micheletti] and weaken the resistance…”⁶

This position was confirmed on October 15 by one of the Front leaders Rafael Alegría who emphasised that Reyes will not be candidate under the current conditions in order to “…refrain from legitimizing coups d’etats or constitutional breakdowns…”⁷

On October 19, the UD party, the third most important of five political force amongst all tendencies in Honduras, announced that it is withdrawing from the elections taking into account that they are “unconstitutional without the restoration of the legitimate president, Manuel Zelaya…”⁸

This tendency developed even further on October 22. Even a section of the Liberal Party, a party to which the coup perpetrators are linked and one of the biggest political parties in Honduras, joined the protest against the elections. According to an interview accorded to Prensa Latina on October 22: “The Coordination of the Liberal Party against the Coup in Honduras confirmed that it will abstain from participating in the November 29 elections if there is no re-establishment of democracy in the country…. In order for the elections to be recognized by the people and the international community, the indispensable requirement is the return to constitutional order and of the legitimate President, Manuel Zelaya. The Coordination was created in the middle of August during a meeting with the participation of more than 5,000 Liberal Party delegates who rejected the break-down of legal democracy carried out by the military on June 28…”⁹

Despite all the pressures, on October 25, the National Front, through the voice of its Coordinator Juan Barahona declared that the Front met on October 24 and confirmed their position that “one of the agreements reached was to ratify that if President Zelaya is not returned to his position, there will be no elections on November 29 in the face of the rejection by the vast majority of the people…Barahona pointed out that the candidates running as independents, those from the UD, from the sections of the Liberal Party, as well as Innovación and Unidad Social Democrática parties opposed to the coup, have all anticipated their withdrawal from the elections if Zelaya is not restored…”¹⁰

According to a Prensa Latina report, in order to make sure that this orientation regarding the elections makes its point, on October 25 the Front met at the local neighbourhood base and then following the mandate received from this level, decided on October 25 that the 121st consecutive day of resistance will take place on October 26…” Of great political significance, in my view, is that the Front decided in favour of “the resistance carrying out a variety of initiatives in order to stop the military dictatorship from succeeding in its attempt to seek an appearance of legality through the elections.”¹¹

This constitutes one of the most important steps in the struggle since the coup; right from the beginning the Honduran oligarchy and those supporting them either directly or indirectly have been attempting to gain time, to stall until the elections take place and in this way “legitimize” the coup.

Since June 28, the Honduran people and all progressive forces including the Zelaya legitimate government have been developing their unity, political consciousness, organization and peaceful tactics with the immediate objective being the restitution of Zelaya followed by Constituent Assembly, the latter whether Zelaya is ever returned to power or not. The putschists have provoked a mass movement in the country to renew Honduras through a new constitution as the foundation. In fact the new foundation has already been built on a solid basis constituted of the people’s political consciousness and the innovative alternative organization.

For example, in an October 23 interview, Barahona declared that “Honduras completely changed, and we are going to inherit a very positive result of all this; an organization and an important experience. During these days of struggle the level of consciousness has risen far more than by means of a hundred courses on class struggle…”¹²

Honduras 2009 already has carved out its place in the most recent history of this small Central American country. It is bound to win, nothing can stop it.

Each country in the region has its historic moments which have proven to be watersheds in its respective history:

* Cuba, as the pioneer, is so rich in ground-breaking historical steps. Taking the most recent history, one can indicate the attack on Moncada in 1953 as the continuation of José Marti’s nineteenth century tradition, and its future development following the Granma landing in 1956, the Sierra Maestra war in 1957-1958, with decisive events such as Che’s historic 1958 action in Santa Clara which broke the back of the pro US-military dictatorship.

* Venezuela 1998 is now synonymous with the first electoral victory of Hugo Chávez, coming out of a long struggle by the leader and his movement, a year which changed the coursed not only of Venezuela, but affected all of South America. However, a coup d’etat organized by Washington and their allies in Caracas in 2002 turned into a disaster for the US and Venezuelan oligarchy when the political and organizational strength of the people of Venezuela exploded into a massive action. The secret to success, amongst other factors such as the support for the President from a section of the military, had as its basis mass participation as was explained to the author in a recent interview accorded by a Venezuelan participant who is now a Legislator.¹³ The columns of people coming from all over completely overwhelmed the coup perpetrators in Caracas. The political consciousness including the need for further organization took a leap forward in a just a couple of days.

* Bolivia 2005: Evo Morales as an indigenous trade union leader and his movement were hoisted to the head of the government in the wake of a massive and successfully organized involvement of a marginalized people; they discussed and acted upon election procedures and soon after a new Constituent Assembly as the basis of a new constitution.

* Nicaragua 2006, nourished from the tradition of the 1970s and 1980s but with a renewed political organization and tactics, Daniel Ortega broke through to victory in 2006.

* Ecuador 2006, the election of Rafael Correa as President proved to be the first step in a rapid succession of political events running into 2008 including a referendum on the need for a Constituent Assembly, the actual election of a Constituent Assembly and the successful referendum on a new modern constitution emerging out of the Constituent Assembly.

Honduras 2009 marks the watershed between the old and the new in this country which Zelaya attempted to remove from its position of being one of the poorest nations in South America, an economic and military colony of the USA. Honduras 2009 may continue into 2010, but the Honduran people will win, just as did the Cubans, Venezuelans, Bolivians, Nicaraguans, Ecuadorians and others.

1. Entrevista en exclusiva con el presidente Manuel Zelaya, en Tegucigalpa, Giorgio Trucchi, Rel-UITA, 5 October 2009
2. Telesur, 14 October 2009
3. voselsoberano.com,13 October 2009.
4. Raimundo López, enviado especial Prensa Latina, 19 October 2009.
5. Telesur, 17 October 2009
6. Giorgio Trucchi, Carlos Amorín, Rel-UITA, 30 September 2009.
7. Telsur, 15 October 2009.
8. Venezolano de televisión, 19 October 2009.
9. Raimundo López, enviado especial Prensa Latina, 22 October 2009.
10. Prensa Latina, 25 October 2009.
11. Raimundo López, enviado especial Prensa Latina, 26 October 2009.
12. tercerainformacion.com, 23 October 2009.
13. Lor Mogollón, Henrys, Deputy ,Yaracuy Province, in a private interview with the author, October 14, 2009, Montreal.

Ururú was the oldest member of this close-knit, tiny group and an integral part of it.

Altair Algayer, head of FUNAI’s (Brazilian government Indian affairs department) team which protects the Akuntsu’s land said, ‘She was a fighter, strong, and resisted until the last moment.’ In addition, the oldest-surviving Akuntsu, Ururú’s brother Konibú, is seriously ill.

Ururú witnessed the genocide of her people and the destruction of their rainforest home, as cattle ranchers and their gunmen moved on to indigenous lands in Rondônia state. Rondônia was opened up by government colonisation projects and the infamous BR 364 highway in the 1960s and 70s.

With Ururú dies a large part of the historical memory of this people. While we shall perhaps never know the full horrors inflicted on the Akuntsu in the last half century, today’s survivors say their family members were killed when ranchers bulldozed their houses and opened fire on them. The two surviving men, Konibú and Pupak, have marks on their bodies where bullets entered as they fled.

FUNAI found the remains of houses which had been destroyed by ranchers who were clearing the forest for cattle pasture. The ranchers attempted to hide evidence of the crime, but wooden poles, arrows, axes and broken pottery were discovered.

When the Akuntsu were contacted by FUNAI in 1995 they numbered seven. The youngest, Konibú’s daughter, died in January 2000 when a tree fell on her house.

Today they live in a territory officially recognised by the Brazilian government, where FUNAI protects their land from invasion by surrounding ranchers.

Survival’s Director Stephen Corry said today, ‘With Ururú’s death we are seeing the final stages of a 21st century genocide. Unlike mass killings in Nazi Germany or Rwanda, the genocides of indigenous people are played out in hidden corners of the world, and escape public scrutiny and condemnation. Although their numbers are small, the result is just as final. Only when this persecution is seen as akin to slavery or apartheid will tribal peoples begin to be safe.’

The story of the Akuntsu, their neighbours the Kanoê, and the elusive ‘Man of the Hole’ is graphically told in a new film, Corumbiara. The Akuntsu also feature in Survival’s short film, Uncontacted Tribes.

Venezuela is far from the “dictatorship which has a facade of democracy” described by General Raúl Baduel, who has been accused of corruption. What kind of tyranny oversees a 70% increase of participation in presidential elections, as Chávez has, or the government holding 13 free and fair elections in 10 years?

Of course, Venezuelan society and democracy is imperfect. One example is that corruption remains a very real problem. Opponents have tried to use this issue to disparage the government, though it pre-dates the Chávez era. It is therefore ironic that when measures are taken to tackle it, as is the case in legal prosecutions, these are cited as examples of a clampdown on political freedoms. Many Chávez-supporting politicians are under investigation and it paints a distorted picture to focus only on prosecutions against those opposed to Chávez.

Taking the two most prominent cases of those aligned with the opposition. With Baduel, the military prosecutors investigating the disappearance of more than $18.6m in 2006 and 2007 while he was minister of defence have decided to prosecute. He has had all the rights to a defence lawyer and transparent trial, yet so far his defence has not produced any evidence to counter the charges of corruption.

Manuel Rosales, infamously a signatory to the decree backing the 2002 military coup against Chávez, is one of the most notorious cases. He has allegedly been unable to show the source of millions of dollars in assets both in Venezuela and abroad. He fled to Peru and requested political asylum, but being given asylum by Peru is not proof of innocence. Recently Bolivia nearly broke diplomatic relations with Peru for granting asylum to three ministers from a previous government charged with responsibility for the October 2003 massacre in which 67 people were killed by the Bolivian army.

What cannot be said of Venezuela is that the right to protest is threatened. This year alone, the opposition have staged dozens of marches free from state harassment. On numerous occasions opponents and marchers have been invited to address the nation from the National Assembly.

In contrast, it was only 20 years ago that protests were met by brutal repression in Venezuela, with the Caracazo massacre by state security forces leaving 276 dead according to official figures and up to 3,000, according to claims, once mass graves were uncovered.

The opposition’s hostile views of the Chávez government dominate the Venezuelan media. But that is not the reason why some radio stations were recently closed. These were operating illegally without proper licences and continued to refuse to comply with the law. More than 200 radio stations, most of which identify with the opposition, that were also operating irregularly but did renew their franchises continue to operate freely.

Respect for democracy is intrinsic to the particular model being followed by the Chávez government. It does not resort to violence – it wins elections. In contrast, it is noteworthy that the notable elements of the Venezuelan opposition have broadly sympathised with the illegal de facto government of Micheletti in Honduras. Maybe in Honduras we have a serious glimpse of what “democracy” would have been like in Venezuela had its violent attempts to overthrow Chávez been successful?

The process of globalization was the result of ‘external’ and ‘internal’ conditions and class coalitions embedded in the social structure of both the imperial and ‘recipient’ or targeted countries. The expansion of capital was neither a linear process or continual expansion (accumulation) nor of sustained collaboration by the targeted countries. Crises in the imperial centers and regime transformations in collaborator regimes affected the flow of capital, trade, rules and regulations.

One of the unintended consequences of the ascendancy of global ruling classes was the rise of large scale and tumultuous social movements, especially in Latin America, which challenged the rulers, ideology and institutions sustaining the global empire.

The relations between imperial globalization and social movements are complex, changing and subject to reversals or advances. This study, with its focus on Latin America, addresses several hypotheses exploring the relation of globalization and social movement over a thirty-five year period: from the onset of the free market doctrine which is the motor force of globalization (1975) to the present 2010. This time frame provides us with a sufficient period to observe the long term operations of global capital and the historical trajectories of social movements. By including Latin America as a whole, we incorporate an entire continent and lessen the possibility of idiosyncratic developments specific to a single country.

Our inquiry is guided by a specific set of hypothesis that will be tested through a historical analysis of global economic tendencies and the trajectory of social movements. We will proceed by providing a brief overview of the dynamics of globalization and the growth of social movements in Latin America and then proceed to specify our key hypothesis regarding the relationships between globalization and social movements.

Globalization: Class, State and Economy

The onset of a new and dynamic phase of imperial capital expansion, which we will call globalization, owes a great deal to the favorable political outcome of the capital – labor struggle on a world scale. The defeat and retreat of the working class in the West, particularly in the US and England, and the self-destruction of the Communist regimes of the East laid the groundwork for an aggressive global crusade against leftwing regimes and movements in the Third World, especially in Latin America. The ‘rollback’ of the working class movements was particularly vicious and successful in Latin America, where the major part of the continent experienced the onset of military dictatorship, which dismantled the national constraints on capitalist flows and trade tariffs.

Within this new global framework of imperial empire builders and authoritarian collaborator regimes, several factors enhanced global economic expansion.

   1. Technological innovations, especially information technologies accelerated the flows of capital and commodities.
   2. Large scale accumulation of capital in the imperial states, a relative decline in rates of profits and the growing role of finance capital spurred the drive for overseas investments, speculation and buyouts of privatized firms.
   3. Intensified competition between the US-EU-Asia drove MNC to seek advantages by securing banks, resources; market shares within Latin America.
   4. The rise of pro-western rightist dictatorships provided exceptionally favorable socio-economic conditions for buyouts and acquisitions of local enterprises and resources, extraordinary returns on financial speculation and minimum opposition from repressed trade unions and nationalist and leftist parties.

As a consequence of these structural changes, free-market doctrines and neo-liberal policies were put in practice resulting in bilateral free trade agreements (NAFTA),and deregulation of the economies. The growth of speculative activity took root and prospered, at the same time that social safety nets was dismantled.

After over two decades of highly polarized development and mediocre growth the neo-liberal economies stagnated and went into crises: commodity prices fell, the financial bubbles burst, large scale banking swindles impoverished middle class depositors, investors were defrauded, leading to a virtual economic collapse and mass unemployment. By the beginning years of the new millennium, Latin America faced a systemic crisis in which neo-liberal regimes were overthrown, social movements were in ascent and economic bankruptcies were multiplying. Center-left parties and coalitions were elected and moved to implement ameliorative measures which lessened the impact of the crises. Stimulus packages were passed to revive the economies. The vertical rise of agro-mineral prices in world market facilitated economic recovery which lasted till the onset of the world recession of 2008.

Social Movements

Growing out of the polarized growth, intensified exploitation of labor and displacement of peasants and farm workers, endemic to free market policies, social unrest spread in rural areas, especially among the landless rural workers, peasants and Indian communities. A new generation of militant leaders emerged, with a capacity to link local grievances to national and international structural policies. By the early 1990s mass movements took hold and launched a series of mass campaigns and mobilizations which spread to the cities and engaged the growing mass of unemployed urban workers, public sector employees and impoverished downwardly mobile middle class business people and professionals.

The crises precipitated large scale uprisings led by the new social movements, demanding systemic changes but settling for the election of center-left regimes. The first decade of the 21st century witnesses the ebb and flow of movement activity eventually settling into varying niches in the new order presided over by the center-left regimes.

Key Hypothesis

The expansion of ‘globalization’ or the imperial centered development model was accompanied by the growth of mass social movements. This raises the fundamental question of the relationship between the two processes. We set out several hypotheses to explore the relationship.

   1. The greater the deregulations of the economy leads to the acceleration of globalization and spurs the growth of the social movements.
   2. The crises and breakdown of deregulated globalization leads to a greater role and radicalism of the social movements up to and including social upheavals overthrowing incumbent regimes.
   3. The stronger the regulatory regime controlling the globalizing process the lesser the impact of the crises, the more moderate the activities of the social movements and the less likely a popular rebellion.
   4. The weaker the social safety net in time of crises the bigger the social movements and the more radical their demands. Conversely, the stronger the social safety net in time of crises the slower the growth of the social movements and the more reformist their demands.
   5. Depressed world commodity prices are more likely to engender radical social movements than periods of buoyant prices.

By combining our four principle variables into a single hypothesis on the relation of globalization and social movements, we come up with the following two propositions.

The optimal conditions for radical mass social movements occur when an economy is highly deregulated, in times of financial crises and productive recession, when commodity prices are depressed in the context of a weak social safety net.

Conversely, radical mass social movements are less likely to emerge under a highly regulated economy with a strong social safety net when world commodity prices are rising and the economy is buoyant.

Testing the Hypothesis: Latin America 1980-2010

Between 1980-1990, Latin America experienced a period of moderate growth and stable world prices for its commodities. This was a period of major dismantling of state regulations of the economy and weakening of the social safety net. Yet there were not major social uprisings nor mass social movements, except in Chile between 1985-1986, which ended with a US backed political pact between the Pinochet dictatorships and the Socialist-Christian Democratic parties and their subsequent ascent to government in 1990.

During the first half of the 1990’s world commodity prices declined to historic lows, the social safety net continued to deteriorate; capitalist profits soared in an orgy of privatizations and foreign takeovers, while overall growth stagnated. Social movements grew, mass mobilization, extended from the countryside to the cities but few popular rebellions occurred.

The period between the late 1990’s to the early 2000’s (roughly 1999-2003) experienced a major socio-economic and political crisis, including economic and financial crises in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru and Uruguay. After over twenty years of free market policies accompanying the globalization process, the social safety net was in tatters. Commodity prices remained low and financial deregulation deepened the vulnerability of the economies to the US recession.

Between 2000-2005, neo-liberal regimes were overthrown or replaced in Argentina (3 regimes in 2 weeks) 2001-2002, Bolivia (2003, 2005) Ecuador (2000, 2005), Peru, Uruguay, Brazil, Venezuela (coup regime 2002 lasted 48 hours). Social movements grew precipitously throughout the region and their demands radicalized, including fundamental structural changes. The Brazilian Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) led massive land occupation movements throughout the country. Worker, peasant, Indian uprisings in Bolivia ousted two incumbent electoral regimes. In Ecuador, Indian-urban movements in coalitions overthrew an incumbent neo-liberal regime in 2000 and a broad based urban citizens movement ousted a corrupt neo-liberal regime in 2005. In Argentina, a popular rebellion led by unemployed workers impoverished middle class neighborhood organizations ousted neo-liberal presidents and dominated politics throughout 2001-2003. In Venezuela a mass popular mobilization with military allies ousted the US backed business – military junta of April 2002 and restored President Chavez to power.

The period between 2003-2008 witnessed a sharp rise in commodity prices to record levels; the ascent of center-left regimes was accompanied by capital controls and the partial restoration of the social safety net, rapid economic recovery and relatively high growth. Social movements receded, their demands focused on immediate reforms, mobilizations were more infrequent and some of their key leaders were co-opted.

The period between 2008-2010 witnessed a sharp decline of growth, reflecting the impact of the world recession and the decline of commodity prices. While most countries entered a recession, the financial system did not experience a collapse comparable to the earlier period (2000-2002), in part because of the capital controls in place since the earlier part of the decade. While unemployment grew and poverty levels increased, the improved social net ameliorated the impact of the recession. The social movements increased their activity and experienced mild growth but with few if any direct challenges to state power, at least during the first two years of an ongoing crises.

Conclusion

Our historical survey demonstrates that single factors such as implantation of neo-liberal changes and deepening globalization in and of themselves do not lead to the growth of massive, radical social movements: witness the period of 1980-1990. Nor do low commodity prices a weak social safety net and declining state revenues provoke popular uprisings and radical mass social movements. Likewise an economic crises, such as the recession of 2008-2010 has not led to a resurgence of mass radical social movements and popular rebellions.

Only when a combination of internal factors, such as a weak social safety net and a deregulated economy and an external crises such as a global recession and declining world commodity prices do we have optional conditions for the growth of dynamic mass radical social movements.

Writers who focus or start from a ‘world system’ or other ‘globalist’ perspectives’ in attempting to address the rise of social movements as a function of the ‘operations’ of the market fail to take account of the internal political and social struggles and the resultant state social polices as determining factors.

We should note that social movement rebellions do not suddenly occur because all of the contingencies are in place. The social upheavals at the end of the nineties and early half years of the new millennium had a decade of gestation: organizing, accumulating social forces, creating alliances with institutional dissidents – like radical church people – and developing leaders and cadres. Economic crises, at best, were “trigger” events which severely discredited the ruling class, undermined the dominant ‘globalization’ ideology, and allowed the movements to make a qualitative leap from protest to political rebellion and regime change.

Finally though, it is not central to this paper, we should note that while social movements at their height were able to oust incumbent neo-liberal regimes, they were not able to take political power and revolutionize society: to their upheavals allowed center-left politicians to come to power. Ironically, once in power they passed sufficient social economic reforms to fend off the re-radicalization of the movements when the world economic crises struck again at the end of the first decade of this century.

The devastation wreaked by the bulldozers has been caught on satellite photographs. They have been hired by a Brazilian company, Yaguarete Pora S.A., to clear the land to make way for cattle-ranching in northern Paraguay. They are alleged to be hired from Jacobo Kauenhowen, owner of a large bulldozer business in the nearby Mennonite colony of Loma Plata.

The bulldozers’ entry onto the tribe’s land is completely illegal after Yaguarete had its licence to work in the area suspended by the government.

The tribe, the Ayoreo-Totobiegosode, is the only uncontacted tribe in South America outside the Amazon. Thousands of hectares of their land, in an area called the Chaco in northern Paraguay, were destroyed by Yaguarete and another company, River Plate SA, last year.

Some Totobiegosode have already been contacted and have relatives among those who are still uncontacted in the forest.

According to a local organisation supporting the Totobiegosode, Yaguarete has made it clear to them that ‘it does not respect indigenous rights nor Paraguay’s laws.’

Uncontacted tribes are exceedingly vulnerable to any kind of contact because of their lack of immunity to outsiders’ diseases. In an emergency report to the UN last year, Survival described the threat to the Totobiegosode as ‘the most serious threat to tribal peoples anywhere in the world.’

Survival director, Stephen Corry, said today, ‘The bulldozers must be stopped and withdrawn from the Totobiegosode’s territory. What kind of government would stand by while this continues?’

The military-civil coup in Honduras was the first in Latin America since the region re-democratization in the 80s-90s (aside from Alberto Fujimori’s proclaimed autogolpe in Peru in 1992) and has faced unanimous condemnation. The continent’s historical tradition of military takeovers has been challenged for the first time ever. After the “leaning leftwards” of the early 2000s, current governments in the region consider it to be shameful and humiliating to be deposed by means of force. It’s a natural fear for them that, if they tolerate this, they themselves can be next.

On Sunday night (27 September), the ‘de facto’ administration, headed by former speaker Roberto Micheletti, threatened to remove the status of embassy from the building where Zelaya is sheltered since last Monday. This would make way for storming the place, but attacking a diplomatic building is a severe rupture of international law – every embassy is considered to be territory of its parent country. Micheletti gave Brazil an ultimatum to either hand over Zelaya or grant him political asylum. And, at the same time, suspended civil rights, restored curfew, banned demonstrations, and threatened to shut down media outlets which broadcast or print speeches by the opposition. If there was still any doubt Honduras is under a dictatorship these days, they are now all gone.

Although the United States of Barack Obama have publicly joined the hemispherical unanimity to condemn the coup, word that the State Department and the CIA gave their support to overthrowing Zelaya spread throughout Latin American nations, ranging from suspicion to strong conviction. Although no evidence of U.S. interference has been found so far, the century-old history of Washington’s logistical and financial support to “breaches of constitutional order,” to be euphemistic, is a witness for the prosecution.

On the other hand, Luís Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil has emerged as the leading voice among Latin American governments calling for immediate restoration of Honduras’ democratically-elected president to his dutiful post. This time, it wasn’t theatrical Hugo Chávez denouncing the U.S. as the geopolitical Devil, nor timid center-left Chilean diplomats, who took the lead in tackling the reactionary forces of the region. It was the president of a rising star: the Brazilian one.

With its economy quickly recovering from the capitalist crisis, and practically returning the nearly one-million jobs lost since 2008, Brazil is presenting itself as the next best thing in the global scenario. The country is now an active voice in developing nations fora like the G20, BRIC (with Russia, India and China) and IBAS (with India and South Africa), while calls for South-South cooperation are finally materializing with crossed investments and united lobby in the World Trade Organization (WTO). But, historically, the diplomats of Brazil (long dubbed as “the sleeping-giant”) were vacillating about turning the economy high tide into political power in international relations.

It seems the self-confidence problems are being solved now. The “Itamaraty,” as the Brazilian foreign office is called, has decided to take a firm stance against the coup and to help Zelaya to get back to office. Brazil is sheltering the ousted president within its embassy in Tegucigalpa, where he claims he got “by his own means” – although we know it’s highly unlikely that Brasília was fully unaware of his coming, something the Itamataty will never admit. Besides that, Lula used his opening speech in the General Assembly to demand the immediate return of Zelaya into his elected post and an emergency meeting of the Security Council. Even other international entities like the Organization of American States and the World Monetary Fund, both formerly supportive of authoritarian regimes, joined the condemnation after pushed by Brazilian initiative.

Anything more than that would be interfering in a foreign nation’s internal affairs. Lula has repeatedly stated he will not cross this line, but at the same time refused to sit on his own hands. However, that’s exactly what the conservative elites of Brazil are already claiming. This Saturday (26 September), Brazilian ultra-rightist weekly magazine Veja ran a cover story accusing Brazil of ‘megalomaniac imperialism’ – while no line was ever dedicated to the U.S. centennial imperialist tradition. The opposition parties, PSDB and Democrats, are criticizing the Itamaraty for hosting the lawful president. And the daily prime-time newscast of Globo TV, on Friday, aired an appalling report to argue that what happened in Honduras in June “was technically not a coup d’état,” quoting lines from the country’s constitution. Its article 239 says any president who proposes to alter the ban on reelection would be automatically removed, but the broadcasters omitted that Zelaya never did that – only called for a discretionary referendum.

What they all omit, however, is that Brazil has no other interests in Honduras but to assert is political strength in the region, something that cannot be seen as undermining in any way, but rather as a matter of state interest. Moreover, Brazil is acting not on its own behalf, but on behalf of the global South as a whole. This is the first time poor nations are rising a single voice against the use of brute force in politics. And the isolation which the regional governments have imposed on the ‘de facto’ government in Honduras is unprecedented, even if we count what happened to Cuba in the early 1960s.

With Fidel Castro old and officially out of power, the antagonistic role in the geopolitical script of the Americas has been performed by Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. But perhaps Chávez’s bombastic style might be counterproductive for his own foreign policy and for the left in general, while Lula’s more discrete – albeit straightforward – approach has proven successful in other regional crisis like Bolivia, Ecuador and Haiti, where Brazil keeps 1,200 troops under UN peacekeeping blue helmets since 2004.

Let it be clear: Zelaya is by no means an ideological leftist, but rather a populist leader in the very same shape the Latin Americans are used to. But ideology is really not the central matter here; it’s about sending a message to military to stay in the barracks. Had it happened to a liberal or elite-backed conservative government, the cry against the unlawful removal of an elected head of State would be done all the same – perhaps only less loud.

Even if the threats by the de facto administration are met, or any setback in the next days would prevent Manuel Zelaya from leaving the Brazilian embassy and walking in triumph to his lawful chair at the presidential palace of Tegucigalpa, the bridge is crossed already when it comes to the shift in regional powers. Any defeat of Zelaya now would not exactly be a defeat to the Itamaraty, but rather enforce its moral victory: that it achieved to forge an unprecedented unity in the continent and made it clear that the age of military takeovers in Latin America is over.

Despite recent popular upheavals and the ascent of center-left regimes in most of the countries in the region, the economic structures, strategies and policies pursued, followed in the footsteps of their predecessors particularly in relation to foreign economic practices.

Influenced by the sharp demand and rise in prices of commodities, especially agro-mineral and energy products, the Latin American regimes, backed off from any changes in several crucial areas and adapted to the policies and economic legacies of their neo-liberal predecessors. As a result, with the world wide recession beginning in 2008, they suffered a sharp economic decline with severe social consequences.

The resulting socio-economic crises provides important lessons and reinforces the notion that deep structural changes in investment, trade, ownership of strategic economic sectors is essential to stable, sustained and equitable growth.

The Free Market, Free Trade Doctrine: the 1990s

From the mid 1970’s with the advent of pro U.S. military and authoritarian civilian regimes and under the tutelage of U.S. free market academics and U.S. educated economists, Latin America became a laboratory for the application of free market-free trade policies.

Trade barriers were lowered or eliminated, so that subsidized U.S. and European Union agricultural products entered unhindered, decimating local small farmers producing food for local consumption. Under the doctrine of “comparative advantage” policymakers financed and promoted large scale agro-business enterprises specializing in export staples – wheat, soya, sugar, corn, cattle, etc. betting on favorable prices, favorable market access and reasonable prices of food, farm equipment and non-agricultural imports.

The total de-regulation of the economy and the privatization of public enterprises opened the floodgates to foreign investment, the takeover of strategic economic sectors and increasing dependence on foreign investment to sustain growth and the balance of payments.

The overall strategy of the regimes was to rely on export markets, at the expense of deepening and extending domestic markets (local mass consumption); a policy which relied on cheapening local labor costs, and sustaining the high profits, of the agro-mineral ruling class. The latter’s presence in all the key economic ministries of the regimes ensured that the self-serving policies were given an ideological veneer around the notion of “rational efficient markets”, failing to note the long term history of built-in instability of world markets.

Crises of the Traditional Neo-liberal Regimes

The deregulated financial system and the world recession of 2000 – 2001, the savage pillage of the economy and treasury by the free market practioners and the monumental corruption and the unmitigated exploitation of workers, peasants and public employees produced region-wide revolts. A whole series of U. S. backed electoral regimes were overthrown and/or defeated in electoral contests. Ecuador, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay witnessed popular upheavals, which however ultimately led to the election of center-left regimes, especially in electoral campaigns promising “deep structural change”, including changes in the economic structure of power and substantial increases in social spending and land redistribution in the countryside.

In practice the political defeats of the established right wing parties, and the weakened economic elite did not serve as a basis for large scale, long term socio-economic transformations. The new center-left regimes pursued socio-economic policies which sought to ‘reform’ the economic elites forcing them to accommodate to their effort to reactivate the economy and to subsidize the poor and unemployed. The political elites were driven from office, a few of the most venal officials implicated in mass repression were put on trial but without any serious effort to transform the party – political system. In other words the demise of the neo-liberal elites at the crises, induced by the free market policies, remained in place, temporarily held in abeyance by the center-left regimes state interventionist crises management policies.

Center Left Policies: Crises Management and the Economic Boom

The new center-left governments adopted a whole series of policies ranging from economic incentives for business, financial regulations, increased expenditure on poverty programs, widespread wage increases and consultation with leaders of popular organizations. They repudiated the political enemies and perpetrators of the previous period along with the intervention in a few bankrupt private enterprises. These symbolic and substantive policies secured, temporarily, the support of the mass electorate and isolated and divided the more radical sectors of the popular movements.

Nevertheless demands for broader and deeper changes were still on the mass agenda while the center left regimes attempted to balance between the radical demands from below and their political commitments to normalize and stimulate capitalist development, including all the existing elites (foreign multi-nationals, agro-mineral, financial, commercial and manufacturing elites). The dilemma of the center-left was resolved by the sudden upsurge in prices of commodities in large part stimulated by the dynamic demand and growth of the Asian economies, namely China.

The center-left regimes abandoned all pretexts of pursuing structural change and jumped on the bandwagon of “export driven growth” – based on the export of primary products. Abandoning the critique of foreign investment and demands to ‘renationalize’ strategic private firms, the center-left regimes opened the door to large scale inflows of foreign capital – suspending the application of some of their regulatory controls.

The commodity boom of 2003 – 2008 allowed the center left (and the right wing) regimes to “buyoff” the opposition: trade unions received hefty wage increases, business received substantial incentives, foreign investors were welcomed, overseas workers remittances were encouraged, as contributions to poverty reduction.

In a word the entire socio-economic edifice of Latin America’s high growth export oriented strategy rested on world market demand and economic conditions in the imperial countries. Few of the economic experts, financial columnists and political celebrants of ‘rational markets’ expressed any doubts about the sustainability of the “export market” model.

The extraordinary vulnerability of these economies, their dependence on volatile markets, their dependence on a limited number of export products, their dependence on one or two markets, their dependence on overseas remittance from the most precarious workers should have raised a red flag to any thinking economist and policy maker. The high priced consultants and overseas advisory missions drawn from the Harvard Business School, Penn’s Wharton School and other prestigious centers of higher learning (enamored by their mathematical equations which demonstrated what their premises assumed) argued that the least regulated markets are the most successful and convinced their Latin American counterparts from Center Left to Right to lower the trade barriers and let the capital flow.

After only five years of export market induced rapid growth, the Latin American economies crashed. According to the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin American exports from Latin American and Caribbean nations in 2009 will show their steepest fall in more than 72 years (since the last world depression). The regions exports will decline by 11% by volume, while imports will fall by 14%, the biggest drop since the world recession of 19821.

Pitfalls of Specialization in Commodity Exports

The benchmark dates are indicative of the long standing commitments and vulnerabilities in trade structure: past and present recessions have an acute impact on Latin America because both now and in the past their economies depend on agro-mineral exports to imperial markets, which rapidly shift their internal crises to their Latin American trading partners. The historic decline in trade inevitably doubles and triples the unemployment rate among workers in the export sectors and has a multiple effect on satellite economic enterprises linked to spending and consumption generated by overseas trade. Specialization in agro-mineral exports limits the possibilities of alternative employment in a way that a more diversified economy does not. The dependence of the state for most of its revenues from agro-mineral and energy exports means automatic cuts in public investment and expenditures in social services.

Latin America’s trade crises has especially affected those counties with the most traditional export product configuration in agriculture, mineral and energy commodities: Venezuela and Ecuador (oil) Columbia (oil and coal) and Bolivia have experienced as much as 33% decline in 2009, far above the average for the region. Mexico, dependent for 80% of its trade with the U. S. (oil, tourism, remittances, automobiles) experienced the biggest decline, 11% in GNP, of all countries in the hemisphere.

While all export driven economies were hard hit by the crises those countries which had a more diversified trade mix, (manufactures, agriculture, services) dropped by nearly 20% while the countries which specialized in oil and mineral exports fell by over 50%.

Pitfall of Single Market Dependence

The counties with a greater diversity of markets and trading partners especially those which traded within the Latin American zone and with China experienced a smaller decline compared to those countries like Mexico, Venezuela and Central America which depended on the markets of the U. S. and the European Union which fell by over 35%.

Trade was only one of the four fronts which impacted negatively on Latin America: Foreign direct investment, remittances from workers abroad, and commodity pricing contributed to the crises.

Pitfalls of Dependence on Foreign Investment

Latin America’s open door to foreign investment (FI) was a major cause of the crises. FI flows escalated in response to the internal growth of Latin America, taking advantage of the high profits generated by the commodity/trade boom. With the decline in trade, income and profits, FI exited, repatriated profits and disinvested, exacerbating the crises and increasing unemployment. FI follows the practices of easy entry and fast withdrawal – a highly unreliable and volatile agency for development.

Pitfalls of Dependence on Overseas Remittances

Latin American regimes took for granted and built into their economic policies and projections multi-billion dollar transfers of income from overseas workers, overlooking the highly vulnerable legal and economic position of their citizens working abroad. The vast majority of overseas workers are in very vulnerable positions: many are undocumented (“illegal immigrants”) and during recessions or economic downturns are abruptly fired. Secondly they work in sectors like construction, tourism, gardening, and cleaning which are hard hit by recessions. Thirdly they have little or no seniority and are “last hired and first fired”. Fourthly, many are not able to collect unemployment insurance and face deportation if they cannot support themselves. The results of the high vulnerability of overseas workers are visible in the multi-billion dollar decline in remittances to Latin America, exacerbating poverty and tilting the balance of payments in the red.

Volatility of Commodity Prices

By putting all of their eggs in the basket of high commodity prices and overseas markets, the governments of the center-left lost a great opportunity to deepen their internal market via import substituting industrialization, agrarian reform and public investments in infrastructure linking agricultural – mining – manufacturing and energy sources in a “grid” to protect the national economy from externally induced crises.

The Limits of Social Liberalism (“Center-Left”) and the Economic Crises

Throughout the first decade of the new millennium the newly minted center-left regimes railed against neo-liberalism and even identified themselves as “21st century” socialists. In practice what this meant was hitching increases in social expenditures to the existing economic structures and trade policies, with some adjustments in trading partners, and in some cases “joint-ventures” with foreign investors. Throughout the period the entire range of regimes practiced social liberal policies familiar to observers of contemporary European social democratic regimes: they combined free trade and an open door for foreign investment with greater spending for anti-poverty programs, unemployment benefits and increases in the minimum wage. On the other hand vast profits accrued to the agro-mineral elites and to the banking sector which financed trade, consumer consumption and debt roll-overs.

The entire social liberal model rested however on the fragile foundations of the crises prone commodity export strategy, highly volatile trade revenues and income from vulnerable overseas workers. When Latin export markets dried up and commodity prices fell, revenues declined and workers were laid off. The social liberal model collapsed into negative growth and the previous gains in employment and poverty reduction were reversed.

Lessons From the Collapse of the Social Liberal Model

Several important lessons can be drawn from the ongoing experience of social-liberal regimes.

   1. Positive social programs are not sustainable without structural changes which lessen external vulnerability.
   2. Reducing external vulnerability depends on public ownership of the strategic economic sectors in order to avoid capital flight, typical behavior of foreign based capital.
   3. Reducing economic vulnerability depends on diversifying markets away from crises ridden, financially controlled imperial centers. Greater economic sustainability depends on deepening the internal market, increasing inter-regional trade and redirecting trade toward high growth regions.
   4. Social expenditures are necessary immediate palliatives but do not go to the root of poverty and low incomes. Far reaching land distribution programs linked to large scale development financing and investment in local food production and in domestic industries which complement and link up with agro mineral production will lessen dependence on overseas markets and stabilize the economy.
   5. State control of foreign trade and strategic mineral enterprises allows for the capture of the economic surplus to finance economic diversification and innovation.
   6. Regional integration has to pass from rhetorical declarations to actual performance and practice. Venezuela’s President Chavez, the leading advocate of regional integration and promoter of Latin American Bolivarian Association (ALBA), still depends on the U. S. markets for 80% of its sale of petroleum and 70% of government export earnings from petroleum, and over 50%of its food imports from U. S. military client Columbia. Regional integration is feasible based on planning complementary investments, and joint public ventures in industrializing mineral,petrol and other primary commodities.
   7. Joint security pacts among and between Latin American regimes aimed at countering the U. S.-Columbian military bases and the U. S. militarization strategy can also have an economic function – creating joint venture armaments industries and reducing outside purchases.
   8. Diversification of trade to Asia and lessening dependence on the U. S. and EU is necessary but insufficient if the export content continues to be predominantly primary commodities. Changing trading partners but perpetuating “colonial style” trading patterns will not decrease vulnerability. Latin America especially Bolivia, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador must insist that their primary products are industrialized and value is added before they are exported to China, India, Japan and Korea.

In summary the current world crises reveals the limitations and unsustainability of the social liberal policies and regimes. Recognition of the vulnerabilities and volatility lays the groundwork for a more thorough structural transformation based on changes in land tenure, trade patterns and ownership of strategic industries. The current crises has discredited both the neo-liberal and social liberal prescriptions and opens the door to new thinking that links social expenditures with social ownership.

As must have been the case with all previous hegemonic societies, our nation’s pursuit of warfare abroad is inevitably cloaked in the rhetoric of national defense. Somehow the story is sufficiently twisted that it seems an inferior military force abroad poses an enormous threat to our national interest, and to such an extent that we must send our troops abroad to confront this force in its own territory and with civilian casualties almost entirely limited to its population. Intellectuals vent their doubts, so homespun Americans become indignant in response, insistent on the need once again to enforce their vision of democratic exemplification to the rest of the world. Meanwhile, our nation’s banks and defense industries reap enormous profits and increased financial liquidity benefits the rest of our population at least to a certain extent.

Warfare accordingly continues to play too big a role in our nation. There has been too much combat on foreign soil–far more than for all other nations combined since World War II. Vietnam and Iraq were illegal, the first because Secretary of State Dulles refused to sign the 1954 Geneva Accords, thereby precluding American involvement in the avoidance of a plebiscite election as dictated by the Accords, and the second by having bypassed Article 42 of the U.N. Charter, having already benefited from Article 41. The rest of the wars, if arguably legal, could have been avoided without much difficulty by effective negotiations. And too many innocent civilians have needlessly died in these wars. U.S. troops caused the deaths of as many as three million people in Vietnam and an estimated one million in Iraq, totaling two-thirds of the Holocaust victims during World War II. Throw in the two million lives lost in Korea, which was partly our responsibility, and we just about match the Holocaust. Not to forget the heavy financial burden of war, for example the congressional allocations to the military industrial complex to equip and supply the pursuit of warfare. According to Stiglitz, the total cost of our “war of choice” against Iraq will ultimately cost $3 trillion dollars from taxpayers that go into the military industrial complex.

The total financial cost of our military establishment has been no less debilitating to our economy than was the case for most of the previous hegemonic civilizations described two decades ago by Paul Kennedy in his excellent book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (Random House, 1987). It seems that all U.S. military expenditures combined, inclusive of such items as the Veterans Administration, now consume at least 55% of our annual federal budget. This might seem useful in military Keynesian terms, but the total now equals or exceeds military expenditures for the rest of the world combined. Whether we like it or not, our nation has become addicted to warfare since World War II. Most of our military budget is spent on defense industries with trickle-down benefits to a large number of grateful subcontractors (most of them highly patriotic for obvious reasons) as well as their host communities (also highly patriotic for obvious reasons), but this can only be at a substantial cost to the rest of the nation without sufficient trickle-down access. In general Vermont farmers tend to lose; Texas laborers tend to win.

But it cannot be sufficiently emphasized that the Vietnam and Iraq wars–as well as the military operations in Korea, Panama, the Persian Gulf, and even Yugoslavia–have been only the tip of the iceberg. According to Chalmers Johnson in The Sorrows of Empire, published in 2004, 725 U.S. military bases, inclusive of sixteen Main Operating Bases (MOBs), exist in as many as 41 nations. Altogether, 250 thousand U.S. troops are stationed abroad, including 118 thousand in Europe, 92 thousand in east Asia, and 14 thousand in the western hemisphere. Significantly, there was almost no military conflict in these regions at the time of Iraq’s invasion and occupation, yet large numbers of U.S. troops continued to remain deployed in these regions instead of being transferred to Iraq to participate in the fighting there. Preceding the 2007 “surge,” military spokesmen repeatedly insisted in prime time interviews that more troops were needed in order to win in Iraq. They neglected to explain why many thousands of U.S. troops were retained in military bases elsewhere in the world, apparently as a no longer necessary Cold War measure that seamlessly converted into a peacetime occupation strategy. It almost seems as if our government has had an unspoken commitment since the fall of the U.S.S.R. to dominate the entire world into the indefinite future. Proponents might argue that their purpose is to protect the world, but this is to protect the world under our nation’s authority, hence to dominate the world, just as gangland protectionist rings “protect” those they extort money from. It’s no accident that U.S. investors are active worldwide with governments fully cooperative with U.S. authority.

Also deplorable has been the ongoing effort of our government to intervene in other country’s internal affairs by manipulating elections, assassinating both enemies and potential enemies, and in general bringing into play whatever dirty tricks seemed useful. As calculated by William Blum in Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, published in 2003, at least fifty such interventions can be counted for less than the four decades since World War II. Among the many countries manipulated by the CIA and other such U.S. organizations have been Greece in the late forties, the Philippines in the 1940s and 50s, Iran and Guatemala in 1953-54, Syria in 1956-57, Ecuador in 1960-63, Iraq in 1972-75, Australia in 1973-75, Angola in 1975-the 80s, Morocco in 1983, and so on. Among the many foreign political leaders targeted for assassination were Chou en-Lai of China, Lumumba of the Congo, Castro of Cuba, Torrijos of Panama, Sukarno of Indonesia, Mossadegh of Iran, Nehru of India, Nasser of Egypt, Sihanouk of Cambodia, Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, De Gaulle of France, Allende of Chile, Manley of Jamaica, Milosevic of Yugoslavia, etc. Fortunately many of them lived to talk about it, but others didn’t.

According to John Perkins in Confessions of a Hit Man, published five years ago, the arrangement was simple enough. Bogus U.S. economists including himself (which he freely admitted) would try to convince foreign governments to “liberalize” their economies by accepting U.S. investments without imposing fees, tariffs, or other such costs. If these governments refused to cooperate, U.S. secret agents identified as “jackals” would arrive to take whatever steps seemed necessary in order to reverse the situation, even if it meant destabilizing the government or assassinating whoever seemed an impediment, presidents and friendly dictators included. And if the jackals failed, then an invasion became necessary as in the cases of Iraq, Panama, and the Dominican Republic. Of course the issue was always the war against communism, but somehow the beneficiaries just as inevitably turned out to be U.S. business ventures that had financial interests to be protected and/or advanced by U.S. military forces.

Our country’s unique relationship with Israel has been the source of enough problems that it deserves to be listed here in a category of its own. The $3 billion per year of foreign “aid” to Israel ($500 per capita) is relatively small compared to our nation’s budget as a whole even when a large variety of supplemental benefits provided to Israel is taken into account. However, this supportive relationship has borne unexpected difficulties that Truman should have recognized when he hastened Israel’s creation as a campaign strategy in 1948. Without any clear mandate, Israel’s relentless effort since then to annex adjacent territories in the West Bank has led to such excessive persecution of the Palestinians that the world’s entire Muslim population has become hostile to both Israel and the United States as its primary benefactor. Bin Laden’s first public statement after 9-11, made available on October 7, primarily spoke of retaliation for the American role in Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians.

The perhaps unrecognized Machiavellian advantage of our nation’s connection with Israel right now is that it has permitted military Keynesianism to persist during the Obama administration through combat with a variety of Arab nations hostile to Israel. Arab terrorists have replaced the commies as our nation’s most invidious enemies. As a result, warfare continues to play its role as a crutch to our economy exactly when it needs it the most. Obama insists the Afghan campaign is not a war of choice, but of course it has become one, and its potential economic benefit to our defense industries (i.e., all our major industries) can hardly have been overlooked. There is no doubt that bin Laden is still loose and that al Qaeda continues to thrive in Afghanistan as a potential threat to our nation. However, their role focuses U.S. aggression and thereby intensifies their appeal in almost every nation in the region. In fact, al Qaeda’s successful recruitment of guerrilla fighters thrives because of our nation’s aggressive military effort of to root it out in any particular country. And why not? If U.S. troops invaded and forcibly occupied Canada to root out murderous Canadians hostile to Americans, it wouldn’t be long before everybody in Canada could be treated as a potential enemy. The same with Afghanistan, especially now that the brutal Afghan warlord general Dostum has been allowed to return to the fold as a supporter of our puppet president Karzai.

One also asks whether Obama actually thinks combat can be limited to the mountainous region on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan? Or is a new full-scale war what he really wants? Because that’s what he is going to get. Of course we’ll “win” if this is his intention–but all we need to do is declare victory and withdraw any time we want, since the Taliban lacks the capacity to chase us beyond their own border. Nor do they want to. As a result the war is both unwinnable and unlosable–in other words at least as much a quagmire as Vietnam had been. But does Obama really want to mount an escalation that might be judged by history with the same disfavor as President Johnson’s fabricated 1965 Tonkin attack and Bush’s fabricated 2003 threat of Saddam Hussein’s atomic capability? Does he want to be another infamous American president for exactly the wrong reasons?

One also wonders why Obama has, if anything, expanded the use mercenary forces such as Blackwater (now identified as Xe) in Afghanistan, Iraq, and even Africa. It has been disclosed, for example, that roughly one quarter of our nation’s intelligence activity in Afghanistan is farmed out by the CIA to Blackwater. Once Obama and Secretary of State Clinton opposed Blackwater–now they depend on it. Also, why has Obama chosen to enlarge the size of our military by as many as 21,000 new troops, 17,000 of which will be sent to Afghanistan? And why doesn’t he put more effort into negotiating with Taliban factions who are willing to reject al Qaeda–just as was done to “win” the war in Iraq by paying once hostile Sunni tribal leaders monthly salaries between $240 and $300 per month to participate in the so-called surge? And when will our administration finally realize, if they haven’t already, that U.S. combat troops make inferior occupation troops, often provoking a hostile opposition sufficient to initiate a costly full-scale war? This is exactly what happened between March and September, 2003, when the Iraqi populace were goaded by the severe and unprovoked aggressiveness of U.S. troops into outright resistance. Many of these troops are now being used in Afghanistan. Do we truly want déjà vu all over again? Would McCain have gotten away with this sort of thing if he had been elected president? Indignant liberals would be demonstrating in Washington, New York City, and elsewhere.

As for potential conflict with Iran, why does Defense Secretary Robert Gates announce a “routine” trip to Israel to consult its leadership and deny that this consultation would involve the current standoff with Iran? And then, having concluded consultations, why does he announce in his press conference a September deadline imposed on Iran to fully cooperate with U.S. objectives? And why does he insist that if Israel chooses to attack Iran the U.S. would have no recourse but to accept this choice? Is an attack on Iran now in the works? Would this also be suggested by Dennis Ross’s reassignment to the National Security Council perhaps to take operational control of such an attack? If this is what happens, Zionists will once again succeed in diverting U.S. policy from the effort to obtain negotiations with the Palestinians to a peripheral issue that diverts our energies toward a useful and relatively harmless cause beneficial to Israel on another front–this time Iran instead of Iraq.

Speeches by Obama now and again indicate his full awareness that genuine peace is only possible in the Near East once a two-state solution has been implemented between Israel and the Palestinians. But what exactly has been done to bring this about since he came into office? Why hasn’t his administration offered Israel an obvious quid pro quo through diplomatic and trade relations with all Arab nations plus the guaranteed elimination of Iran’s nuclear weapons program–if it has one–in exchange for Israel’s full acceptance of a viable two-state solution respected by both parties? Just as our government has generously financed Israel’s aggressive foreign policy since 1967, it would even more generously finance a peace settlement based on all the agreements already in the works at Oslo, Madrid and Taba, to say nothing of Camp David, Roadmap and Annapolis. All groups and nations involved would get a fat payoff, even ourselves by once and for all terminating the crisis. Suddenly there would be an area-wide peace agreement such as has been proposed repeatedly by the Arab League. Both the Iranians and Palestinians would gladly accept such an arrangement as would most nations outside the Near East. Until this can be brought about, the United States will remain hostage to the Near East quagmire so effectively orchestrated by the Zionist lobby with lies, threats, broken promises, staged indignant rallies, and the like.

Turning to South America, why the announced establishment of three or four new U.S. military bases in Colombia near the border of Venezuela? Even if the command of these bases is turned over to the Colombian government, as Hillary Clinton promises, construction costs would obviously be paid by ourselves, and we can expect that American troops would be permitted to be stationed there. There would also be an airfield for military transport planes and fighter planes. Is this Obama’s first step to enlarge our military presence in South America in order to combat “Chavismo” at the very edge of South America’s most hostile nation? Also, why has it been disclosed that several other bases–half a dozen in all–would be constructed elsewhere in South America from the Andes to the Caribbean? Moreover, was the present military insurrection of Honduras a thousand miles away intended (or permitted) as a “friendly” takeover in the spirit of President Aristide’s forced exile from Haiti in 2004 orchestrated by the Bush administration? Is Obama actually dusting off Otto Reich’s counter-productive South American strategy a couple decades ago in order to initiate full-fledged regional imperialism once again in South America? How can an apparently aggressive shift in policy be undertaken at the same time both in South America and the Near East inclusive of Russia? Is some kind of an overarching strategy in the works to expand our military presence worldwide even further? Or is the timing simply to be chalked up to ineptitude by Washington bureaucrats? They shouldn’t want this kind of thinking to happen.

5. Running Dogs That Bark Up The Wrong Tree

American news coverage is heavy, lasting from morning to night, but with a paucity of genuine new information. Crime and human interest stories predominate, and, relevant to what might be described as “hard” news, the same stories are incessantly repeated until the topic has exhausted the public “mind,” whereupon the press switches to other such stories to fill the gap. In too many instances the primary task is to suppress crucial facts and shape and craft the stories that cannot be avoided to such an extent that they keep the American public ignorant of exactly the issues that matter the most. On the other hand, information that cannot be ignored but is found distasteful and/or ideologically unacceptable (for example, U.S. drones that accidentally kill large wedding parties in Pakistan) lasts just one or two news cycles at most.

Most obviously, the “respectable” American media has almost without exception given full support to our nation’s foreign intervention across the globe. Seldom does news coverage feature information that might discredit military operations against a foreign nation. Instead, with the current exception of Afghanistan, our press has celebrated the cause with full patriotic approval exactly when its approval has seemed the most useful. News coverage repeatedly vilifies the putative enemy and extols the American cause and those engaged in making it happen. And whenever needed, competent patriotic reporters can be found who willingly participate in bending their evidence to support a positive judgment, as illustrated by Barbara Miller’s famous coverage of U.S. preparations preceding the invasion of Iraq as well as the bias of “embedded” war correspondents in response to the fighting. The same “respectable” journalistic support, if not quite at the same level, was put into play to justify military operations in Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, and Afghanistan. All of these wars of choice were more or less illegal and ill conceived, and in at least two instances–Iraq and Vietnam–they were finally ruinous to our nation’s sense of collective decency among those who keep track of foreign policy issues. Yet the press promoted them with great enthusiasm exactly when they could have been prevented if there were more public opposition at the time.

Many claim the basic problem is that news coverage has become a commodity almost totally dominated by such media giants as Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, NBC Universal, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, and the New York Times Company. Among all these corporate entities, profit predominates at the expense of keeping the public informed. In varying degrees, with Fox at one extreme and the New York Times at the other, the reporter’s “job” of telling stories with a guaranteed audience takes precedence over informing the public at large on an adequate basis. Of course a modicum of information remains important, but it plays second fiddle to the bottom line, the profits guaranteed by the size and enthusiasm of the audience. As a rule of thumb, media owners are Republicans, reporters are middle-of-the-road Democrats (with one or two liberal Democrats to enliven the package), and publishers mediate between owners and reporters, almost inevitably giving the nod to the owners when the choice really matters, for example when it comes time to endorse a political candidate. The bias–and there always is one–thus tilts toward conservatism with a sprinkling of information that might be considered middle-of-the-road liberal.

As an exception to the rule, significant bias often occurs in news coverage relevant to Israel. The news corporations listed above are dominated by billionaires and multi-millionaires incidentally friendly to the Zionist cause as illustrated by their willingness to publicize Arab atrocities and to suppress information about Israeli transgressions. This bias seems evident in the almost total suppression of information about Sivan Kurtzberg and four other Israeli citizens (two of whom were connected with Mossad) when they were arrested at the edge of a New Jersey highway cheering and photographing the 9-11 catastrophe across the Hudson River. It seemed at the time that they were somehow involved in the event, if only as witnesses who knew in advance that it was going to occur. They were held in detention for 71 days, then flown back to Israel with little if any publicity. This bias may also be observed in the almost total lack of press coverage relevant to the 2005 story about Larry Franklin, a Zionist spy who served at a high level as a Pentagon analyst, having been caught and then involved in a sting operation that trapped Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman of AIPAC in the act of accepting secret information to be forwarded to Israel. Many other Zionist spies embedded in U.S. agencies might also have been uncovered if the investigation had been pursued more effectively, but it wasn’t, and the case against Rosen and Weissman was finally closed based on the argument that the secret information was so sensitive that it could not have been used as evidence in a courtroom hearing.

On the other hand, the media’s persistent anti-Arab bias has been in in full display most recently in the media’s top billing over the better part of a week of its indignation with the release of Abdel Baset al Megrahi from prison in Scotland for the destruction of Pan American flight 103 in 1988, over two decades ago, in which a total of 270 people were killed. The official explanation for releasing Megrahi, the token culprit, was his terminal cancer. But whether or not he had any part in the conspiracy–which he has persistently denied–the U.S. media has featured his presumed guilt while totally neglecting the probable justification for this act of terrorism, either the earlier sinking of a couple of Libyan boats in the Gulf of Sidra by American fighter planes or the destruction just six months earlier of an Iranian civilian airliner, flight IR 655, by antiaircraft fire from the U.S. aircraft carrier Vincinnes under the command of Captain Will Rogers III. In this case 290 passengers died (twenty more than in flight 103), 66 of whom were children en route to a vacation with their families on a recognized civilian air route. Neither Rogers III nor President Bush ever apologized for this inexcusable “mistake,” but a couple years later the U.S. government paid slightly over $60 million in damages.

Significantly, the IR 655 incident led to Iran’s acceptance of a U.N. ceasefire that ended the war between Iran and Iraq at a time when Reagan’s administration was intensifying the conflict with its Iran-Contra strategy that just happened to benefit Israel through the mutual destruction of two potential enemies. Today, newsmen such as Wolf Blitzer, a former reporter for the Jerusalem Post, excoriate Megrahi’s release without at all mentioning the overall context. As usual, they totally ignore the full story with the justified expectation that the American public has an even shorter memory than they themselves. But some of us don’t.

Too often the media seems almost eager to convey approved misinformation without questioning it. The majority of intrepid Fox watchers, for example, did not realize for a couple years beyond the 2003 invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein had no connection whatsoever with al Qaeda. Vice President Cheney kept insisting that a connection existed between the two based on false reports, and Fox kept this assumption afloat on the airwaves as an unassailable fact–which it wasn’t.

But excessive collaboration has been in effect at all levels in the media, including the three most respectable newspapers, the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal.

Even today, for example, during the supposedly enlightened Obama administration, the American public is kept ignorant of the likelihood that our government secretly encouraged the recent coup d’etat in Honduras. Suggestive of this possibility are the facts that our nation already has 400 troops stationed there and that the military coup leaders are using the Washington lobbyist Lanny Davis, once closely connected with Bill and Hillary Clinton, to represent their case in Washington. It also seems relevant that a U.S. military airfield was used to help fly the deposed president out of Honduras and that U.S. government apologists first tried to excuse themselves with the argument that U.S. representatives in Honduras–whether military, diplomatic, or both–warned the coup leaders not to go through with their plan. How, though, could these Americans have done this if they weren’t aware that a coup attempt was being undertaken? And if they did know of it and opposed such a possibility, as they now insist to their Latin American friends, why didn’t they make an effort to prevent it?

But there are more questions as well. Honduras’ military leadership, mostly educated in Fort Benning’s School of the Americas, avoids doing anything we don’t let them do–so why did we let them do this? Why has our government belatedly cancelled its aid of $30 million to Honduras at exactly the same time as an aid package of $150 million is being provided by the IMF? Could our current administration’s manipulative involvement have anything to do with the State Department’s concern about President Zelaya’s friendship with President Chavez of Venezuela? And is its “lukewarm” support of Zelaya linked with the strategy of “waiting it out” until the next election is held on November 29, less than three months from now, when our government can once again help to manipulate election results as it has done so many times before? One wonders, though, if Zelaya might be able to run for reelection on the technicality that he has not served his full term. The answers to these and other such questions will have far-reaching impact on our nation’s relations with most of Latin America during the rest of Obama’s presidency. Yet coverage in the American press tells us very little. Everybody who is anybody in Latin America is well aware of what is involved–it is the supposedly informed American reader who remains ignorant.

Of course one cannot discount the possibility that the NYT and WP are now researching the Honduras issue to be able to give a full report later, but this did not happen after last August, when Georgia waged a surprise attack against South Ossetia. U.S. newspapers inclusive of the NYT and WP treated the counter-attack of Russian troops as having been the initial assault. But this was not true, and these news sources never fully conceded their error afterward. This left American readers with the false impression that the Russians were mostly at fault–which was not the case. Instead, the encounter began with a highly destructive midnight surprise attack on South Ossetia’s capital planned by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. One suspects his strategy was at least partly to expedite admittance in NATO in the near future. But Russians troops stationed in South Ossetia staged a successful counter-attack the next morning, and Georgian troops fled for their lives.

In his recent visit to Georgia, Vice President Biden was able to reinforce the notion that Russia was at fault in his repeated insistence that Russia had first launched the invasion, once doing so while standing arm in arm with Saakashvili. Whether he believes it himself, Biden’s misinformation is only possible because of the failure of most of the American press, especially the New York Times, to set the record straight. Now, just a couple weeks later, we hear that 750 Georgian troops are to be trained by U.S. marines, presumably to serve in Afghanistan. But who is kidding whom? If Russia retaliates, for example by supplying its most advanced technology to augment Iran’s defensive missile system, as it has already announced, the Cold War just might be effectively resurrected, and Obama will have pulled off what McCain could never have achieved if he had been elected. We also learn from a recent Nation article by Alexander Cockburn that Saakashvili has actually boasted of Georgia’s defense minister, David Kezerashvili, and Temur Iakobashvili, its minister in charge of negotiations regarding South Ossetia, having both been Israeli residents before coming to Georgia.

So the picture gets complicated. Israel demands that pressure be exerted on Russia to withdraw its offer to Iran, and the State Department seems to be making an effort to use both the training of Georgian troops and a new missile system offered to Poland, manned by as many as 100 American technicians, as leverage against Russia in order to give Israel what it wants–the opportunity to attack Iran without any possibility of high-tech Russian intervention. A little news coverage is to be found in our major newspapers relevant to some of what is happening right now, but only in bits and pieces, and without acknowledging the other side of the story or the full extent of all the tradeoffs now in play. If and when military conflict erupts in the region involving a Zionist attack on Iran, our press can take satisfaction in Israel’s “existential” justification, and nobody in the United States will know any better. And with Iran eliminated as a potential threat, Israel can junk any prospects of a regional solution for the Near East, letting it (Israel) continue doing what it pleases in its suppression of Palestinians, hopefully culminating in their transfer elsewhere within another decade or two.

6. Matters Cultural (or not)

And finally the demoralization of the American public cannot be disregarded as a byproduct of collective decline resulting from what might be described as spent expansionism. When a hegemonic civilization begins to disintegrate, in imperial America no less than our nine hegemonic predecessors, this decline bears with it with a full array of negative consequences that are more or less precipitous. Just as our economy is both broke and extravagant at the same time, and just as our military juggernaut is both powerful and ineffectual at the same time, our collective lifestyle and the social infrastructure that supports it are both wasteful and impoverished at the same time. The virtue of growth has degenerated into mere extravagance, and traces of decline can be expected to penetrate every aspect of society that has directly or indirectly shared in this excess. Enlarged rewards proportional to output become an insistence at all levels of economic behavior, and innovation (today a corporate mantra) usually consists of useless variation to suggest improvement instead of a cheapening of the product. Greed thrives, and intrinsic value almost completely takes a back seat to profit maximization.

Cherished possessions become junk too soon. Almost every feature of what we buy and use manifests planned obsolescence as first explained by Bernard London in 1932. Our cars, appliances, TV, computers, cameras, and telephone gadgetry too quickly become obsolete, far too vulnerable to damage, and far too intricate to understand for anybody but the most avid junkies devoted to their use. New houses and furniture are actually stapled together, and new cars and appliances too often depend on plastic components exactly at the sites where wear is the greatest, thus guaranteeing the need for early replacement. Metal isn’t exactly metal, nor is plastic quite plastic. Nor are wood and its various substitutes straight from the tree, if at all. Also, our food, our lawns, and everything we touch, smell or breath is laced with presumably non-toxic chemicals that somehow increase corporate profits but whose combined effect on our health can only be harmful. And so on.

Our medical system is the most expensive and least productive, dollar for dollar, in the entire post-industrial world. Our longevity statistics are actually forty-sixth from the top worldwide according to the 2008 CIA World Factbook estimates. Almost all of Europe lives longer than we do. Obesity has become rampant resulting from the consumption of processed junk food, much of it with the “diet” brand. Today an estimated one-third of the American public are both too bulky and too unhealthy, emblematic of our society as a whole. Also contributing to our nation’s bad health, as many as forty-six million Americans go without health insurance, and according to the Institute of Medicine in 2004, quoted by Wendell Potter (a former private health insurance publicist), as many as eighteen thousand Americans die each year because of the lack of health insurance. Their medical care at emergency wards is both too expensive and necessarily insufficient.

Meanwhile the 1200 private health care providers collectively reap about $30 billion in annual profits. Thirty percent of the health industry’s overall budget is spent on administration costs inclusive of profits, lobbying, and so-called “rescissions,” the ongoing effort of lawyers and medical researchers to exclude potentially unprofitable individuals (i.e., those with bad health) from its benefits programs. Trained employees scour the medical records of patients suddenly in trouble to find an earlier medical problem unmentioned in their original applications, however minor, then retroactively cancel these application for fraud exactly when these patients are the most desperately in need of this support.

No wonder the private health care industry depends as heavily as it does on lobbying elected officials in Washington and dredging up a swarm of blustering “angry” demonstrators presumably eager to retain their private health insurance. During the first three months of this year alone, it is also estimated that health-care companies and their employees have contributed almost $1.8 million to House members supervising health care reform, with the 52 Blue Dog Democrats receiving 25 percent more apiece than other Democrats. Another report says altogether $5.4 million has been spent in campaign donations, 60 percent of which went to the Blue Dog Democrats who now control the committees.

Unfortunately, single-payer insurance comparable to the programs of other post-industrial nations no longer seems a viable possibility in Congress. Moreover, even the substitution of a public option that would include single-payer insurance as a competitive alternative to private insurance plans seems likely to be sacrificed in favor of a much watered-down co-op option guaranteed to fail. Not surprisingly, conservative congressmen supportive of the health insurance industry are now suggesting that even this concession would be unacceptable to them. And it appears their lobby has the political leverage to impose their own choice. As a result, Obama’s campaign promise to obtain genuine health insurance reform if elected seems to have caved in despite its widespread public support, in large part because his public relations effort has been inadequate and he and his subordinates have been too compliant in their negotiations toward acceptable compromises. It seems he is willing to make basic concessions before obtaining an adequate tradeoff from those with whom he is negotiating.

Our educational system is also victimized by bloated costs matched with inferior results. This contradiction is relevant to both the current K-through-12 test-based improvement strategies and the steady degeneration of colleges and universities into corporate ventures that primarily treat knowledge and student enrollment as marketable commodities. Business Administration and computer technology have almost completely replaced history, philosophy, anthropology, and comparative literature as the chosen majors of students, and this is in fact the appropriate choice, given our nation’s current economic crisis. Our universities feature expensive new construction, high salaries for an excessive number of administrators, and a variety of operational costs that have escalated proportional to the total budget. If all these expenses were pegged to faculty salaries and/or student tuition at the same level as five, three, or even one decade ago, one suspects there would be no serious budget crisis. To offset these needless costs peripheral to the basic task of education, our colleges and universities jack up tuition each year and substitute instructors and teaching assistants for tenure-track faculty as much as possible–to the extent that many students do not encounter a genuine tenured professor until they reach their junior year. As a result many college-educated individuals are no longer particularly educated, only competent in making money–that is to say, in maximizing their income relative to the effort expended.

The gap between poverty and perceived respectability seems to have become almost unbridgeable. Vertical mobility has become less accessible than in the past, quite opposite the prevalent myth of poor people striking it rich one way or another. The few who do succeed (rock stars, etc.) get heavy publicity, and most others rest satisfied with the dream. The poor are mostly to be found in run-down urban neighborhoods, the middle-class in stapled split-level houses located in upscale housing projects, and the wealthy in gated communities crowded with stapled McMansions minus personal libraries except for Christmas and birthday books.

Moreover, traditional families have become almost archaic.

Among two-parent families both fathers and mothers work to support an artificial standard of living, and their children either run free or endure the supervision of nannies, many of whom have trouble coping with the English language. Similarly, the rates of divorce and single parenthood are off the chart, as is the deliberate rejection of parenthood among exactly the best and most suitable candidates for this role. Too many of our most promising potential parents don’t parent, while too many of our most challenged parents excessively test this challenge.

Meanwhile, a steady diet of teen-appeal TV movies, reality TV programming, violent computer games, and internet pornography consume the attention of too big an audience. Extravagance has become an obsession of too many Americans who live otherwise impoverished lives. Hollywood movies have become for the most part hebephrenic junk except for a few weeks preceding the March Oscar ceremonies. In response to this collective vulgarity, an ultra-reactionary tide of mindless opposition now manifests itself among our nation’s quasi-literate sub-population of supposedly concerned citizens. As to be expected, these strident misguided soldiers of democracy have latched onto arch-patriotism, fundamentalist religion, the rights of unborn babies, and the freedom to bear arms as the primary answers to our nation’s most compelling problems. A fraudulent $3 trillion war is far less offense to them than health care reform at a far lower cost that actually saves many tens of thousands of American lives.

So exactly who, then, best fits the description as our current generation’s great thinkers, great creators, great jurists and great statesmen comparable to those of previous generations? Alas, they don’t exist except for a few dozen angry iconoclasts, further testimony to our nation’s present decline into mediocrity despite its abundance of glitz and technological gimmickry.

7. Flopping on the Dock

President Obama is certainly bright and competent enough to confront this challenge under the right circumstances. However, he is far too conciliatory with the Bush-style Republicans who managed to survive the last election. It is to be conceded that his supposedly unbeatable majority in both houses of Congress is vulnerable to partisan resistance by blue-dog Democrats working in conjunction with their Republican friends equally indebted to the K-Street lobbyists. Nevertheless, Obama seems almost eager to appease these people, and if his ultra-conciliatory strategy persists much longer his administration is likely to replicate the disappointing outcome of the Carter and Clinton presidencies as opposed to the earlier successes of the FDR and Johnson administrations, the latter despite the glaring exception of the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, Obama’s current foreign policy adventurism should be curtailed, to begin with by coming up with an acceptable withdrawal strategy from Afghanistan. Obama might seem a more effective spokesman in defense of military operations abroad than Bush had been, but his ability to gild a sullied strategy will eventually catch up with him.

Again it is to be acknowledged that the United States enjoys dominant status in the world today similar to that of a handful of hegemonic societies–nine in all–that preceded us throughout the history of Western Civilization. But as much as anything this historic similarity suggests the likelihood of a similar outcome, of course in a manner appropriate to our particular circumstances. For history cannot entirely be forgotten. In 1909, exactly a hundred years ago, England seemed completely dominant across the entire world, and in 1809 so did Napoleon across Europe inclusive of Spain, Egypt, and soon enough Moscow. Both hegemons tumbled, England beginning with the First World War five years later, and France more decisively with Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo six years later. So what about our current prospects as a world power in 2009? As with all our precursors, paradoxically, our economy and military capabilities are at once both formidable and fatally overextended, dependent on a debt level one trillion dollars in excess of the total annual GDP of the entire world combined, the United States included. This amounts to incredible extravagance. It is what has paid for everything else, and now the party is over–almost. Like a landed barracuda, our nation vigorously flops on the dock. It is dangerous to everybody who stands too close but its chances of surviving much longer as a threat to others are slim. So the question poses itself what can be done to slow down this process, if not turn it around. For, again, our nation’s particular version of hubris seems to be running on empty, unable to take things much farther in the direction we’re going.

As the largest recipient of US military aid in the hemisphere, Colombia has long been the US’ most important ally in Latin America. Simultaneously, Colombia has also become the hemisphere’s worst human rights violator, with Colombia’s numerous paramilitary organizations recently taking center stage, as they’ve gradually become directly responsible for more human rights atrocities than the formal military and police. In the name of fighting “narco-terrorism,” poor people and dissidents are massacred, assassinated, tortured, and disappeared, among other atrocities—done to eliminate particular individuals and to “set an example” by intimidating others in the community. 97 percent of human rights abuses remain unpunished.

In recent years, a variety of human rights organizations, as well as mainstream academics and journalists have found it impossible to ignore the astronomical human rights violations. However, even though these groups have accurately reported on the actual atrocities, Jasmin Hristov argues that in their reports, the atrocities are largely de-contextualized from the powerful forces in Colombia and the US that directly benefit from this repression. According to Hristov, this mainstream presentation serves to mask the fact that US and Colombian elites directly support (via funding, training, supervising, and providing legal immunity for) state repression carried out by the police and military, as well as illegal paramilitary groups that are unofficially sanctioned by the government. Whether it is murdering labor organizers or displacing an indigenous community because a US corporation wants to drill for oil on their land, Hristov passionately asserts that death squad violence is purposefully directed towards sectors of society that stand in the way of the ruling class’ efforts to maintain economic dominance and acquire more resources to make even more profit.

In her book, Hristov does make a convincing argument that Colombia’s notorious death squads are inherently linked to maintenance of the country’s extreme economic inequality. Particularly since the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s that have increased poverty, Colombia’s poor continue to resist their oppression in many different ways. In response, state repression on a variety of levels is needed to terrorize unarmed social movements and other community groups and activists.

Throughout Blood & Capital, Hristov seeks to expose the rational motivations behind state violence for capitalism’s economic elites in the US and Colombia. In meticulous detail, Hristov shows how the super-rich benefit from state repression and how the violators of human rights have essentially become immune from any consequences for their actions. If death squads are truly to be abolished in Colombia, we must look honestly at how and why they exist today. Hristov’s new book is a powerful tool for exposing who truly calls the shots.

Neoliberalism or Neopoverty?

Hristov asserts that “it is not a mere coincidence that during the era of accelerated neoliberal restructuring, the deterioration in the living conditions of the working majority has been accompanied by an increase in the capabilities and activities of military, police, and paramilitary groups, as well as the portrayal of social movements as forces that must be monitored, silenced, and eventually dismantled.” The scandalous epidemic of poverty in Colombia is key to understanding Colombian politics, and why the upper classes so fear political organizing among the poor, who could mount a formidable opposition to the status quo if allowed to organize unrestrained by state repression.

When neoliberal policies were adopted by the Colombian government in the 1990s, it dramatically increased poverty, and made an already terrible situation worse. Hristov writes that the “essential components of neoliberalism are trade liberalization, privatization, deregulation, and austerity. Trade liberalization entails the removal of any trade barriers, such as tariffs and quotas. Privatization requires the sale of public enterprises and assets to private owners. Through the removal of government restrictions and interventions on capital, deregulation allows market forces to act as a self-regulating mechanism… Austerity requires the drastic reduction or elimination of expenditures for social programs and services.”

She argues that the “main cause that led to the official adoption of neoliberal policies by the developing countries in Latin America and elsewhere was the pressure to service their external debts in the late 1970s. In order to receive loans from the World Bank (WB), or the International Monetary Fund (IMF), nations had to agree to a program of structural adjustment that included drastically reducing public spending in health, education, and welfare,” and much more.

Because Colombia had less debt than other Latin American countries, “major neoliberal restructuring did not begin until 1990, under President Cesar Gaviria Trujillo (1990-94), when the country began to receive massive amounts of US military aid…In addition to the significant social damage wrought by these policies, by the mid-1990s Colombia had to almost double its borrowing from the IMF because of the economic crisis brought on by the market liberalization,” writes Hristov.

These drastic reforms have intensified since current President Alvaro Uribe came to power in 2002. After the IMF loaned $2.1 billion in 2003 on the condition that the reforms be accelerated, Uribe “privatized one of the country’s largest banks (BANCAFE), restructured the pension program, and reduced the number of public-sector workers in order to cut budget deficits, as required by the international lending institution. Uribe also closed down some of the country’s biggest public hospitals, eliminating over four thousand medical jobs, and denationalized companies in the telecommunications, oil, and mining sectors,” reports Hristov.

These are a few of the statistics compiled by Hristov, who writes that “in a country of 45 million, around 11 million people are unable to afford even one nutritious meal a day. According to statistics from 2005, 65 percent of Colombians are unable to regularly satisfy basic subsistence needs. In rural areas, the poverty rate is as high as 85 percent… In 2000 it was estimated that half a million children suffer from malnutrition and close to 2.5 million children between the ages of six and seventeen are forced to work… Furthermore, there has been a notable decline in school attendance, literacy, and life expectancy as well as access to child care and education over the past couple of years.”

Blood, Capital, and the State Coercive Apparatus

Throughout Blood & Capital, Hristov details many horrifying ways in which the rich are empowered by violence from what she identifies as the “state’s coercive apparatus” (SCA). She argues that “two intertwining motifs run throughout Colombia’s history: (1) social relations marked by inequality, exploitation, and exclusion and (2) violence employed by those with economic and political power over the working majority and the poor in order to acquire control over resources, forcibly recruit labor, and suppress or eliminate dissent.”

Dating back to the European conquest of the Americas, Hristov asserts that violence has been central to the creation of modern-day Colombia’s government and economy. She writes that “starting in the late 1500s, the conquerors began clearing the indigenous population from territories with desirable characteristics—mineral deposits, fertile soil, access to water, transportation routes, and so on. The separation of the indigenous from their means of subsistence allowed the formation of a local colonial elite who transformed what used to be the native inhabitants communal lands into large estates or haciendas. The creation of landless peasants facilitated the supply of labor for the Spaniards’ ventures, such as mining and agriculture.”

State violence supporting the economic elite continued, but became much worse in the 1960s under the direction of the US military. Alfredo Vasquez Carrizosa, President of the Colombian Permanent Committee for Human Rights reports that in the 1960s, “during the Kennedy administration,” the US “took great pains to transform our regular armies into counterinsurgency brigades, accepting the new strategy of the death squads.” This “ushered in what is known in Latin America as the National Security Doctrine… not defense against an external enemy, but a way to make the military establishment the masters of the game… the right to combat the internal enemy… this could mean anyone, including human rights activists such as myself.”

As Edward Herman, co-author of The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism explained in a previous interview with Upside Down World, US support for repressive governments in Colombia and throughout Latin America was, and still is, part of a general policy towards third world populations. Focusing largely on US support for the Latin American “National Security States,” Herman and co-author Noam Chomsky argue that U.S. corporations purposefully support (and in many instances create) fascist terror states in order to create a favorable investment climate. In exchange for a cut of the action, local military police-states brutally repress their population when it attempts to assert basic human rights.

In the 1960s, the US and Colombian governments launched Plan Lazo, designed to target the “internal enemy.” Hristov writes that “the military aid that was part of Plan Lazo (and all subsequent programs, including those in place today, such as the Patriot Plan) were given on the condition that Colombian forces would use terror and violence, since these formed a legitimate part of the overall anticommunist offensive. In 1966 the field manual US Army Counterinsurgency Forces specified that while antiguerrilla should not employ mass terror, selective terror against civilians was acceptable and was justified as a necessary response to the alleged terrorism committed by rebel forces.”

Hristov asserts that while the US handled the “financial and ideological aspects” of building and strengthening the SCA, locally the Colombian elites also played a key role. “It implemented many of the policies suggested by the US counterinsurgency manual in order to discipline the civilian population through measures such as press censorship, the suspension of civil rights (to permit arrest on mere suspicion), and the forced relocation of entire villages. President Guillermo Leon Valencia (1962-66) boosted the anticommunist campaign by declaring a state of siege whereby judicial and political powers were transferred to the military while the latter was freed from accountability to civilian authorities for its conduct.”

With US financing and supervision, the Colombian armed forces have since become one of the most renowned human rights violators in the world. This despicable conduct eventually created significant local and international opposition, and under this pressure the SCA has been forced to adjust. In response, the responsibility for repression has shifted more towards paramilitaries, whose activities are officially independent of the government. In this situation, when paramilitaries target the “internal enemy,” the same goal is accomplished as if the government itself did it, yet the government cannot be officially linked to the violence.

The Paramilitarization of Colombia

The size and strength of paramilitary death squads in Colombia has steadily increased since they were first established in the 1960s. According to Hristov, the paramilitaries are now responsible for about 80 percent of human rights violations in Colombia, compared to 16 percent by the rebel guerrillas. The paramilitaries’ evolution, Hristov argues, is the result of “perhaps the most creative and intelligent effort by an elite-dominated state to counteract revolutionary processes… The Colombian parastatal system represents neither a traditional centralized authoritarian regime, as those that existed in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, nor merely a collection of autonomous armed bands dispersed over rural areas, each ruling locally, as in Mexico. What we see in Colombia is a mutated SCA that has assumed a nonstate appearance.”

The function of the paramilitaries in Colombia was explained well by Captain Gilberto Cardenas, former captain of the national police and former director of the Judicial Police Investigative and Intelligence Unit in the Uraba region. In 2002, testifying against the commander of the Seventeenth Brigade of the Colombian armed forces, Cardenas told representatives of the United Nations and Colombian authorities, “The paramilitaries were created by the Colombian government itself to do the dirty work, in other words, in order to kill all individuals who, according to the state and the police, are guerrillas. But in order to do that, the [the government] had to create illegal groups so that no one would suspect the government of Colombia and its military forces…members of the army and the police even patrol side by side with the paramilitaries.”

The paramilitary system first began in the mid-1960s when the Colombian government passed legislation that authorized citizens to carry arms and assist the military in repression. Hristov argues that “paramilitary forces entered the scene to perform two main functions.” The first was to participate in combat at a local level, as described by the 1966 US Army Counterinsurgency Forces field manual, which stated: “paramilitary units can support the national army in the conduct of counterinsurgency operations when the latter are being conducted in their own province or political subdivision.” Second, Hristov writes that paramilitaries “were intended to monitor and gather intelligence on the rebels, their civilian supporters, and social organizations by establishing networks throughout the country.”

While these early paramilitaries did play some role in state repression, it would not be until the 1980s that they really began to increase in size and influence. Hristov writes that “the 1980s were the golden age of paramilitary development, as many new groups formed, expanded, and rapidly acquired financial and military strength… This second wave of creation enacted by large-scale landowners, cattle ranchers, mining entrepreneurs (particularly those in the emerald business) and narco-lords took place in a particular context, characterized by five main features: a shift in the state’s (unofficial) policy toward the partial privatization of coercion; the state’s fusion with the elite; a legal framework that had set the ground for the design, training, equipping, and administration by the state military of armed bodies outside its institution; a prevailing anticommunist ideology; and militarized patches of the country that served as models to emulate.”

This second wave was given another boost in 1994 with the creation of the Community Rural Surveillance Associations (CONVIVIR) by current President Alvaro Uribe Velez, who was the governor of the department of Antioquia at that time. Hristov writes that Uribe made CONVIVIR into “a replica of the original paramilitary bodies designed in the 1960s. As it had thirty years ago, now the civilian counterpart of the SCA was to take on a central role in the Dirty War under a legal mantle. By the time CONVIVIR was outlawed, in 1999, most of the numerous paramilitary self defense bodies had united, attaining an organizational and military capacity unsurpassed by paramilitary forces in any other Latin American country.”

In August, 1998, just before the legislation supporting CONVIVIR was abolished, hundreds of members publicly announced that they would be joining the AUC paramilitary network, which became the most prominent paramilitary network in Colombia. The AUC had been created in 1997, mostly under the leadership of Carlos Castano and his paramilitary group, the ACCU, which became the largest group in the AUC federation. Others that operated in this loose confederation of paramilitary groups included Bloque Cacique Nutibara, the Bloque Central Bolivar, and the Bloque de Magdalena Medio.

Following official “peace negotiations” between the AUC and the Colombian government which began in 2002 with an official AUC ceasefire agreement, the AUC officially disbanded in February 2006, as part of an overall public disarmament of many paramilitaries throughout Colombia. However Hristov argues that “there are many factors challenging the legitimacy of the peace process. First, during the entire period of the cease-fire announced by the AUC, its groups regularly engaged in military actions against civilians, thereby committing human rights violations (and such activities continue to take place). Second, often those who claimed to be demobilizing were not the real paramilitary combatants but hired criminals, or drug dealers who had bought the AUC franchise. Third, large quantities of arms that should have been turned over were not. Fourth, fighters who are officially considered demobilized are in reality already active militarily in new organizations, where their skills of terrorizing the civilian population for economic gains are necessary and valued.”

Since 2006, there have been several government initiatives that give the formal appearance of the Colombian government working to combat paramilitaries. Hristov explains that “early in 2007 the Supreme Court began investigating numerous connections between paramilitaries and important state actors, such as senators, representatives, deputies, councilors, and mayors. As time went by, the public learned of more and more cases in which the legal (state officials with their political authority and legitimacy) and the illegal (paramilitary groups with their economic and military power) had entered into alliances to advance their mutual interests. Through mid-2008, 38 percent of members of Congress have been implicated in this parapolitica scandal.”

While Hristov recognizes some importance in these recent investigations, she feels that their real impact has been extremely limited. She argues that “despite all the cases that have been exposed, parapolitica is not likely to be eradicated from the Colombian political system. On the contrary, the flood of revelations about politicians’ connections to the paramilitary actually allows serious crimes, such as complicity in massacres, to get buried under waves of minor offenses, and eventually the entire issue becomes just another corruption scandal.”

In their 2009 report on Colombia, Human Rights Watch concluded that there are many “threats to accountability for paramilitaries’ accomplices,” reporting that “the Uribe administration has repeatedly taken actions that could sabotage the investigations. Administration officials have issued public personal attacks on the Supreme Court and its members, in some cases making accusations that have turned out to be baseless, in what increasingly looks like a campaign to discredit the court. In mid-2008 the administration proposed a series of constitutional amendments that would have removed what are known as the ‘parapolitics’ investigations from the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction, but it withdrew the proposal in November. The administration also blocked what is known as the ‘empty chair’ bill, which would have reformed the Congress to sanction parties that had backed politicians linked to paramilitaries.”

Hristov concludes that the centrality of paramilitaries to Colombian politics will not be disappearing anytime soon, mostly because repression has been necessary to enforce the country’s stark social/political/economic injustice. Hristov argues that the paramilitaries have become an essential tool of repression, and because Colombia’s poor majority will continue to resist this outrageous poverty, the paramilitaries’ repression will continue. Seen in this context, the recent demobilization process is only a tactical restructuring of paramilitaries and the SCA, similar to their restructurings in the 1980s and 1990s. Hristov sees this restructuring as an “adaptation response” to “assure its future survival” in the face of “the reality of resistance and opposition by numerous sectors of society against further dispossession,” with the state’s ultimate goal being “the institutionalization of paramilitarism and the legalization of capital accumulation through violence.”

War on Narco-terrorists?

Since the official end of the Cold War in 1989, US rhetorical justification for allying itself with and providing military aid to the Colombian government has shifted from fighting “communism” to fighting “narco-terrorism.” Hristov argues that official rhetoric may have changed but it’s still easy to expose this fraudulent war on narco-terrorism as actually being a war against poor people. Concerning the so-called war on terrorism, how can the hemisphere’s worst human rights violator fight terrorism? Then, similar to the absurd notion of a terrorist fighting terrorism, how can a government heavily complicit in the drug trade claim that it is fighting a war on drugs?

The Colombian government’s multi-faceted complicity in drug trafficking extends all the way to current President Uribe, who was listed by the Pentagon itself, as one of the most wanted international drug traffickers. A declassified National Security Archives report dated September 23, 1991, explicitly accused Uribe of being a collaborator of the Medellin cartel and a personal friend of Pablo Escobar. This report states further that Uribe was one of the “more important Colombian narco-terrorists contracted by the Colombian narcotics cartels for security, transportation, distribution, collection, and enforcement of narcotics operations in both the US and Colombia. These individuals are also contracted as ‘HIT MEN’ to assassinate individuals targeted by the ‘extraditables,’ or individual ‘narcotic leaders,’ and to perform terrorist acts against Colombian officials, other government officials, law enforcement agencies, and groups of other political persuasions.”

It’s not just the Colombian government! Hristov argues that the US government’s Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) “has in reality been converted largely to an instrument of drug traffickers and paramilitaries.” To support this assertion, she cites a 2004 memorandum issued by a lawyer at the US Department of Justice named Thomas M. Kent, which accused the DEA of extreme misconduct. Kent states that strong evidence of misconduct is routinely ignored by the control agencies of the Department of Justice. Hristov summarizes key points made in Kent’s memorandum, including “to supplement their $7,000 monthly salary, some DEA agents have managed to negotiate with Colombian drug dealers… DEA personnel have been implicated in the killing of informants… Members of the AUC [paramilitaries] have been assisted by DEA agents in money laundering… DEA agents have participated in the extortion of drug traffickers awaiting extradition.”

On another note, Hristov makes the important point that drug trafficking and the rise of paramilitaries have both fed each other in two key ways. “First, the groups involved in trafficking needed to protect their laboratories, illegal cultivation, and clandestine airstrips in rural areas stimulated the emergence of local armed groups outside the state. Second, many drug dealers had begun to invest their capital in millions of hectares of the best agricultural land in the country… and they needed armed forces to protect their lands.” Hristov adds further that “the preexisting concentration of land ownership in the hands of the elite and the displacement of impoverished peasants was aggravated dramatically by this trend.”

To further expose this fraudulent “war on drugs,” it should be noted that the US government has a long history of complicity in drug trafficking, particularly in Latin America. While author William Blum has written the definitive short article on the topic, Alfred McCoy has written the most comprehensive book, titled The Politics of Heroin, documenting the CIA’s relationships with drug traffickers around the world, including in France, Italy, China, Laos, Afghanistan, Haiti, and throughout Latin America. In 1989, a Senatorial Committee chaired by Senator John Kerry documented that during the 1980s, while working with the anti-Sandinista “Contras,” the CIA and other branches of the US government were complicit in trafficking cocaine into the US from Latin America. The Kerry Committee concluded a three year investigation by stating in their report that “there was substantial evidence of drug smuggling through the war zones on the part of individual Contras, Contra suppliers, Contra pilots, mercenaries who worked with the Contras, and Contra supporters throughout the region… US officials involved in Central America failed to address the drug issue for fear of jeopardizing the war efforts against Nicaragua… In each case, one or another agency of the US government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring, or immediately thereafter.”

The Kerry Committee’s report and the story behind it has been analyzed well by authors Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall in their book Cocaine Politics. In 1996, investigative journalist Gary Webb wrote a series of articles for the San Jose Mercury News (later expanded and made into a book in 1999) which directly tied Contra cocaine traffickers Danilo Blandon and Norwin Meneses (both protected by the US government) to Los Angeles drug kingpin “Freeway” Rick Ross, who played a key role in starting the crack-cocaine epidemic of the 1980s. The mainstream media launched a smear campaign attacking Webb’s story that eventually caused even the Mercury News to denounce Webb. However, several prominent journalists came to Webb’s defense and challenged the mainstream media’s smear campaign, including Norman Solomon, Robert Parry, and Counterpunch co-editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.

Unmasking The Unholy Alliance

The relationship between the US and Colombian elite is truly an unholy alliance. With US President Barack Obama praising the Colombian government and attempting to build several new military bases in Colombia, it is more important than ever to expose the truth about who supports death squads and why. Hopefully Blood & Capital will receive the attention that it deserves, and Hristov’s meticulous research can be used to truly disarm the state coercive apparatus in Colombia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To explore some tentative hypotheses of why there is little organized protest, we need to examine the historical-structural antecedents to the world economic depression. More specifically, we will focus on the social and political organizations and leadership of the working class, the transformation of the structure of labor and its relationship to the state and market. These social changes have to be located in the context of the successful ruling class socio-political struggles from the 1980’s, the destruction of the Communist welfare state, and the subsequent uncontested penetration of imperial capital in the former Communist countries. The conversion of Western Social Democratic parties to neo-liberalism, and the subordination of the trade unions to the neo-liberal state are seen as powerful contributing factors in diminishing working class representation and influence.

We will proceed by outlining the decline of labor organization, class struggle and class ideology in the context of the larger political-economic defeat and co-optation of anti-capitalist alternatives. The period of capitalist boom and bust leading up to the current world depression sets the stage for identifying the strategic structural and subjective determinants of working class passivity and impotence. The final section will bring into sharp focus the depth and scope of the problem of trade union and social movement weakness and their political consequences.

History of Economic Depression and Worker Revolts: US, Europe, Asia and Latin America

The social history of the 20th and early 21st Century’s economic crises and breakdowns is written large with working class and popular revolts, from the left and right. During the 1930’s the combined effects of the world depression and imperialist-colonial wars set in motion major uprisings in Spain (the Civil War), France (general strikes, Popular Front government), the US (factory occupations, industrial unionization), El Salvador, Mexico and Chile (insurrections, national-popular regimes) and in China (communist/nationalist, anti-colonial armed movements). Numerous other mass and armed uprising took place in response to the Depression in a great number of countries, far beyond the scope of this paper to cover.

The post-World War II period witnessed major working class and anti-colonial movements in the aftermath of the breakdown of European empires and in response to the great human and national sacrifices caused by the imperial wars. Throughout Europe, social upheavals, mass direct actions and resounding electoral advances of working class parties were the norm in the face of a ‘broken’ capitalist system. In Asia, mass socialist revolutions in China, Indo-China and North Korea ousted colonial powers and defeated their collaborators in a period of hyper-inflation and mass unemployment.

The cycle of recessions from the 1960’s to the early 1980’s witnessed a large number of major successful working class and popular struggles for greater control over the work place and higher living standards and against employer-led counter-offensives.
Economic Crises and Social Revolts in Latin America

Latin America experienced similar patterns of crises and revolts as the rest of the world during the World Economic Depression and the Second World War. During the 1930-40’s, aborted revolutionary upheavals and revolts took place in Cuba, El Salvador, Colombia, Brazil and Bolivia. At the same time ‘popular front’ alliances of Communists, Socialists and Radicals governed in Chile and populist-nationalist regimes took power in Brazil (Vargas), Argentina (Peron) and Mexico (Cardenas).

As in Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America also witnessed the rise of mass right-wing movements in opposition to the center-left and populist regimes in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia and elsewhere – a recurrent phenomenon overlooked by most students of ‘social movements’.

The phenomenon of ‘crisis’ in Latin America is chronic, punctuated by ‘boom and bust’ cycles typical of volatile agro-mineral export economies and by long periods of chronic stagnation. Following the end of the Korean War and Washington’s launch of its global empire building project (mistakenly called ‘The Cold War’), the US engaged in a series of ‘hot wars’, (Korea- 1950-1953 and Indo-China- 1955-1975) and overt and clandestine coups d’etat (Iran and Guatemala – both in 1954); and military invasions (Dominican Republic, Panama, Grenada and Cuba); all the while backing a series of brutal military dictatorships in Cuba (Batista), Dominican Republic (Trujillo), Haiti (Duvalier),Venezuela (Perez-Jimenez), Peru (Odria) among others.

Under the combined impact of dictatorial rule, blatant US intervention, chronic stagnation, deepening inequalities, mass poverty and the pillage of the public treasury, a series of popular uprisings, guerrilla revolts and general strikes toppled several US-backed dictatorships culminating in the victory of the social revolution in Cuba. In Brazil (1962-64), Bolivia (1952), Peru (1968-74), Nicaragua(1979-89) and elsewhere, nationalist presidents took power nationalizing strategic economic sectors, re-distributing land and challenging US dominance. Parallel guerrilla, peasant and workers movements spread throughout the continent from the 1960’s to the early1970’s. The high point of this ‘revolt against economic stagnation, imperialism, militarism and social exploitation/exclusion’ was the victory of the socialist government in Chile (1970-73).

The advance of the popular movements and the electoral gains however did not lead to a definitive victory (the taking of state power) except in Cuba, Grenada and Nicaragua nor did it resolve the crisis of capitalism (the key problem of chronic economic stagnation and dependence). Key economic levers remained in the hands of the domestic and foreign economic elites and the US retained decisive control over Latin America’s military and intelligence agencies.

The US backed military coups (1964/1971-76),US military invasions(Dominican Republic 1965 ,Grenada1983,Panama 1990,Haiti 1994,2005),surrogate mercenaries Nicaragua 1980-89 and right-wing civilian regimes (1982-2000/2005), reversed the advances of the social movements, overthrew nationalist/populist and socialist regimes and restored the predominance of the oligarchic troika: agro-mineral elite, the ‘Generals’ and the multinational corporations. US corporate dominance, oligarchic political successes and pervasive private pillage of national wealth accelerated and deepened the boom and bust process. However the savage repression, which accompanied the US-led counter-revolution and restoration of oligarch rule ensured that few large-scale popular revolts would occur, between the mid 1970’s to the beginning of the 1990’s – with the notable exception of Central America.

Civilian Rule, Neo-liberalism, Economic Stagnation and the New Social Movements

Prolonged stagnation, popular struggles and the willingness of conservative civilian politicians to conserve the reactionary structural changes implanted by the dictatorships, hastened the retreat of the military rulers. The advent of civilian rulers in Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Argentina in the late 1980’s was accompanied by the rapid intensification of neo-liberal policies. This was spelled out in the ‘Washington Consensus’ and was integral to the President George H.W. Bush’s New World Order. While the new neo-liberal order failed to end stagnation it did facilitate the pillage of thousands of public enterprises, their privatization and de-nationalization. At the same time the massive outflow of profits, interest payments and royalties and the growing exploitation and impoverishment of the working people led to the growth of ‘new social movements’ throughout the 1990’s.

During the ascendancy of the military dictatorships and continuing under the neo-liberal regimes, while social movements and trade unions were suppressed, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) flourished. Billions of dollars flowed into the accounts of the NGOs from ‘private’ foundations. Later the World Bank and US and EU overseas agencies viewed the NGOs as integral to their counter-insurgency strategy.

The theorists embedded in the NGO-funded feminist, ecology, self-help groups and micro-industry organizations eschewed the question of structural changes, class and anti-imperialist struggles in favor of collaboration with existing state power structures. The NGO operatives referred to their organizations as the ‘new social movements’, which, in practice, worked hard to undermine the emerging class-based movements of anti-imperialists, Indians, peasants, landless workers and unemployed workers. These class-based mass movements had emerged in response to the imperial pillage of their natural resources and naked land grabs by powerful elites in the agro-mineral-export sectors with the full support of voracious neo-liberal regimes.

Toward the end of the 1990’s, neo-liberal pillage throughout Latin American had reached its paroxysm: Tens of billions of dollars were literally siphoned off and transferred, especially out of Ecuador, Mexico, Venezuela and Argentina, to overseas banks. Over five thousand lucrative, successful state-owned enterprises were ‘privatized’ by the corrupt regimes at prices set far below their real value and into the hands of select private US and EU corporations and local regime cronies. The predictable economic collapse and crisis following the blatant looting of the major economies in Latin America provoked a wave of popular uprisings, which overthrew incumbent elected neo-liberal officials and administrations in Ecuador (three times), Argentina (three successful times) and Bolivia (twice). In addition, a mass popular uprising, in alliance with a constitutionalist sector of the military, restored President Chavez to power. During this period mass movements flourished and numerous center-left politicians, who claimed allegiance to these movements and denounced ‘neo-liberalism’, were elected president.

The deep economic crisis and repudiation of neo-liberalism marked the emergence of the social movements as major players in shaping the contours of Latin American politics. The principal emerging movements included a series of new social actors and the declining influence of the trade unions as the leading protagonist of structural change.

The Crisis of 1999-2003: Major Social Movements at the ‘End of Neo-liberalism’

Major social movements emerged in most of Latin America in response to the economic crisis of the 1990’s and early 2000’s and challenged neo-liberal ruling class control. The most successful were found in Brazil, Ecuador, Venezuela, Argentina and Bolivia.

Brazil: The Rural Landless Workers Movement (MST), with over 300,000 active members and over 350,000 peasant families settled in co-operatives throughout the country, represented the biggest and best organized social movement in Latin America. The MST built a broad network of supporters and allies in other social movements, like the urban Homeless Movement, the Catholic Pastoral Rural (Rural Pastoral Agency) and sectors of the trade union movement (CUT), as well as the left-wing of the Workers Party (PT) and progressive academic faculty and students. The MST succeeded through ‘direct action’ tactics, such as organizing mass ‘land occupations’, which settled hundreds of thousands of landless rural workers and their families on the fallow lands of giant latifundistas. They successfully put agrarian reform on the national agenda and contributed to the electoral victory of the putative center-left Workers Party presidential candidate Ignacio ‘Lula’ Da Silva in the 2002 elections.

Ecuador: The National Confederation of Indian and Nationalities in Ecuador (CONAIE) played a central role in the overthrow of two neo-liberal Presidents, Abdala Bucaram in 1997 and Jamil Mahuad in January 2000, implicated in massive fraud and responsible for Ecuador’s economic crisis of the 1990’s. In fact, during the January 2000 uprising, the leaders of CONAIE briefly occupied the Presidential Palace. Beginning in the late 1990’s CONAIE had resolved to form an electoral party ‘Pachacuti’, which would act as the ‘political arm’ of the movement. Pachacuti, in alliance with the rightist populist former military officer Lucio Gutierrez in the 2002 elections, briefly held several cabinet posts, including Foreign Relations and Agriculture. CONAIE’s and Pachacuti’s short-lived experience as a government movement and party was a political disaster. By the end of the first year, the Gutierrez regime allied with multi-national oil companies, the US State Department and the big agro-business firms, promoted a virulent form of neo-liberalism and forced the resignation of most CONAIE-backed officials. By the end of 2003, widespread discontent and internal divisions were exacerbated by an army of US and EU-funded NGOs, which infiltrated the Indian communities.

Venezuela: Major popular revolts in 1989 and 1992 culminated in the election of Hugo Chavez in 1999. Chavez proceeded to encourage mass popular mobilizations in support of referendums for constitutional reform. A US-backed alliance between the oligarchy and sectors of the military mounted a palace coup in April 2002, which lasted only 48 hours before being reversed by a spontaneous outpouring of over a million Venezuelans supported by constitutionalist soldiers in the armed forces. Subsequently, between December 2002 and February 2003, a ‘bosses’ lockout’ of the petroleum industry, designed to cripple the national economy, supported by the Venezuelan elite and led by senior officials in the PDVSA (state oil company), was defeated by the combined efforts of the rank and file oil workers with support from the urban popular classes. The failed US-backed assaults on Venezuelan democracy and President-elect Chavez radicalized the process of structural changes: Mass community-based organizations, new class-based trade union confederations and national peasant movements sprang up and the million-member Venezuelan Socialist Party was formed. Social movement activity and membership flourished, as the government extended its social welfare programs to include free universal public health programs via thousands of clinics, state-sponsored food markets selling essential food at subsidized prices in poor neighborhoods and the development of universal free public education including higher education. At the same time numerous enterprises in strategic economic sectors, such as steel, telecommunications, petroleum, food processing and landed estates, were nationalized.

While the ruling class continues to control certain key economic sectors and highly-paid officials in the state sector retain powerful levers over the economy, the Chavez government and the mass popular movements have maintained the initiative in advancing the struggle throughout the decade from the late 1990’s into the first decade of the new millennium.

The Venezuelan social movements retain their vigor in part because of the encouragement of Chavez’ leadership, but the movements are also held back by powerful reformist currents in the regime, which seek to convert the movements into transmission belts of state policy. The movement-state relationship is fluid and reflects the ebb and flow of the conflict and the threats emanating from the US-backed rightist organizations.

The regime-movement relationship deepened during the crisis period of 1999-2003 and was further strengthened by the rise in oil prices during the world commodity boom of 2003-2008. With the unfolding of the world economic crisis in late 2008-2009, the positive relationship between the state and the movements will be tested.

Bolivia: Bolivia has the highest density of militant social movements of any country in Latin America, including high levels of mine and factory worker participation, community and informal market vender organizations, Indian and peasant movements and public employee unions. The long years of military repression from the early 1970’s to the mid 1980’s weakened the trade unions and was followed by intense application of neo-liberal policies.

By the end of the 1990’s, new large-scale social movements emerged but the locus of activity shifted from the historically militant mining districts and factories to the ‘sub-proletariat’ or ‘popular classes’ engaged in informal, ‘marginal’ occupations, especially in cities like ‘El Alto’. ‘El Alto’, located on the outskirts of La Paz, is densely populated by recent migrants, displaced miners and impoverished Indians and peasants, and received few public services. The new nexus for direct action challenging the neo-liberal regimes emerged from the coca farmers and Indian communities in response to the brutal implementation of US-mandated programs suppressing coca cultivation and the displacement of small farmers in favor of large-scale, agro-business plantations. In the cities, public sector employees, led by teachers, students and factory health worker unions fought neo-liberal measures privatizing services, like water, and cutting the public budgets for education and health care.

The economic crises of the late 1990-2000’s led to major public confrontation in January 2003, followed by a popular revolt in October and insurrection centered in ‘El Alto’ and spread to La Paz and throughout the country. Before being driven from power, the Sanchez de Losada regime murdered nearly seventy community activists and leaders. Hundreds of thousands of impoverished Bolivians stormed the capital, La Paz, threatening to take state power. Only the intervention of the coca farmer leader and presidential hopeful, Evo Morales, prevented the mass seizure of the Presidential palace. Morales brokered a ‘compromise’ in which the neo-liberal Vice President Carlos Mesa was allowed to succeed to the Presidency in exchange for a vaguely agreed promise to discontinue the hated neo-liberal policies of his predecessor, Sanchez de Losada. The tenuous agreement between the social movements and the ‘new’ neo-liberal President survived for two years due to the moderating influence of Evo Morales.

In May-June 2005, a new wave of mass demonstrations filled the streets of La Paz with workers, peasants, Indians and miners forcing Carlos Mesa to resign. Once again, Evo Morales intervened and signed a pact with the Congress calling for national elections in December 2005 in exchange for calling off the protests and appointing a senior Supreme Court judge (Rodriguez) to act as interim President.

Morales diverted the mass social movements into his party’s campaign machinery, undercutting the autonomous direct action strategies, which had been so effective in overthrowing the two previous neo-liberal regimes. This resulted in his election as President in December 2005.

While the economic crisis abated with the boom in commodity prices, President Evo Morales’ social-liberal policies did little to reduce the gross income inequalities, the vast concentration of fertile land in a handful of plantation elite and the dispossession of a majority of Indian communities from their lands. Morales’ policies of forming joint ventures with foreign multinational gas, oil and mining companies did little to end the massive transfer of profits from Bolivia’s natural resources back to the ‘home offices’ of the MNCs. Nevertheless the Morales’ tepid ‘nationalist gestures led to a ‘political-economic’ confrontation with the US-backed Bolivian oligarchy, which was funded by their enormous private profits gained during the ‘commodity boom’.

Argentina: The strongest relationship between a severe economic crisis and a mass popular rebellion took place in Argentina in December 19-20, 2001 and continued throughout 2002.

The conditions for the economic collapse were building up in the 1990s during the two terms of President Carlos Menem. His neo-liberal regime was marked by the corrupt ‘bargain basement’ sale of the most lucrative and strategic public enterprises in all sectors of the economy. The entire financial sector of Argentina was de-regulated, de-nationalized, dollarized and opened up to the worst speculative abuses. The national economic edifice, weakened by the massive privatization policies, was further undermined by rampant corruption and gross pillage of the public treasury. Menem’s policies continued under his successor, President De la Rua, who presided over the banking crisis and the subsequent collapse of the entire national economy, the loss of billions of dollars of private savings and pension funds, a thirty percent unemployment rate and the most rapid descent into profound poverty among the working and middle classes in Argentine history.

In December 2001, the people of Buenos Aires staged a massive popular uprising in front of the Presidential palace with the demonstrators taking over the Congress. They ousted President De la Rua and subsequently three of his would-be presidential successors in a matter of weeks. Hundreds of thousands of organized, unemployed workers blocked the highways and formed community-based councils. Impoverished, downwardly mobile middle class employees and bankrupt shopkeepers, professionals and pensioners formed a vast array of neighborhood assemblies and communal councils to debate proposals and tactics. Banks throughout the country were stormed by millions of irate depositors demanding the restitution of their savings. Over 200 factories, which had been shut down by their owners, were taken over by their workers and returned to production. The entire political class was discredited and the popular slogan throughout the country was: ‘!Que se vayan todos!’ (‘Out with all politicians!’). While the popular classes controlled the street in semi-spontaneous movements, the fragmented radical-left organizations were unable to coalesce to formulate a coherent organization and strategy for state power.

After two years of mass mobilizations and confrontation, the movements, facing an impasse in resolving the crisis, turned toward electoral politics and elected center-left Peronist Kirchner in the 2003 Presidential campaign.

Low Intensity Social Movements: Peru, Paraguay, Colombia, Chile, Uruguay, Central America, Haiti and Mexico

The entire Latin American continent and the neighboring regions witnessed the significant growth of social movement activity of greater or lesser scope. What differentiated these movements from their counterparts in Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela was the absence of political challenges and regime change and the limited scope of their social action.

Nevertheless significant outbreaks of mass popular movements raised fundamental challenges to the reigning neo-liberal hegemony.

In Haiti, a mass popular rebellion to reinstate the democratically elected President Jean Bertrand Aristide, who had been taken hostage and flown into exile by a joint US-EU-Canadian military operation, was brutally repressed by a multinational mercenary force led by a Brazilian general. Subsequent massacres in crowded slums by the occupying troops aborted the resurgence of the popular ‘Lavelas’ movement protesting the foreign imposition of neo-liberal ‘privatization’ and austerity measures.

Mexico witnessed a series of localized rebellions and mass uprisings against the neo-liberal regimes dominating Mexico. In 1994, the Zapatista National Liberal Army (EZLN), based in the Indian communities of rural Chiapas, rose and temporarily succeeded in gaining control of several towns and cities. With the entry of many thousands of Mexican Federal troops, and in the absence of a wider network of support, the Zapatistas withdrew to their jungle and mountain bases. An unstable truce was declared, frequently violated by the government, in which an isolated EZLN continued to exist confined to a remote area in the state of Chiapas. In Oaxaca, an urban rebellion, backed by trade unions, teachers and popular classes in the capital city and surrounding countryside, organized a popular assembly (comuna) and briefly created a situation of ‘dual power’ before being suppressed by the reactionary neo-liberal governor of the state using ‘death squads’ and Mexican troops. Faced with the repressive power of the state, the insurgent popular movements shifted toward the electoral process and succeeded in electing center-left Andres Manual Lopez Obrador in 2006 in the midst of the neo-liberal economic debacle. Their victory was short-lived, with the election results, overturned through massive fraud in the final tally of the votes. Subsequent peaceful protests involving millions of Mexicans eventually lost steam and the movement dissipated.

In Colombia, mass peasant, trade union and Indian protests challenged the neo-liberal Pastrana regime (1998-2002) while the major guerrilla movements (FARC/ELN) advanced toward the capital city. Fruitless peace negotiations, broken off under US pressure and a $5 billion dollar US counter-insurgency program, dubbed ‘Plan Colombia’, heightened political polarization and intensified paramilitary death-squad activity. With the election of Alvaro Uribe, the Colombian regime decimated peasant, trade union and human rights movements as it advanced its neo-liberal policies.

The political effects of the economic crisis at the end of the 1990’s, which had precipitated social movement activity throughout the hemisphere, led to brutal repression in Haiti, Mexico and Colombia in order for the neo-liberal regimes to continue their policies.

In several other Latin American countries, namely Peru and Paraguay, as well as in Central America, powerful rural-based peasant and Indian movements engaged in rural road blockages and land occupations against their governments’ neo-liberal ‘free trade’ agreements with the US. Since these rural movements lacked nation-wide support, especially from the urban centers, their struggles failed to make a significant impact even as their economies crumbled under neo-liberal policies.

Social Movements in the Time of the Commodity Boom

The sharp rise of agricultural and mineral commodity prices between 2003-2008, along with the election of center-left politicians, had a major impact on the most active and dynamic social movements.

In Brazil the election of Lula De Silva (2002-2006) from the putatively center-left Workers Party was backed by all the major social movements, including the MST (Landless Rural Workers Movement) under the mistaken assumption that he would accelerate progressive structural changes like land re-distribution. Instead, Da Silva embraced the entire neo-liberal agenda of his predecessor, President Cardoso, including widespread privatization and tight fiscal policies, which, with the rise of agro-mineral prices, led to a narrowly focused agro-mineral export strategy centered exclusively on large agro-business and mineral extractive elites to the detriment of small businesses and rural producers. The MST’s efforts to influence Da Silva over the past decade(2003-2009) were futile – as state, local and federal governments criminalized the movement’s direct action tactics of land occupation. Lula’s policy of granting subsistence federal food allowances to the extremely poor and his success at co-opting movement leaders, especially from the huge trade union federations, neutralized the landless peasants and organized workers’ capacity to protest and strike. Lula’s policies isolated the MST from its ‘natural’ urban allies in the labor movement.

Lula’s right-turn and the vast increase in export revenues from high commodity prices led to increased social expenditures and reduced the level of activity and support for the MST in its struggle for agrarian reform. While retaining its mass base and continuing its land occupations, the MST no longer had a strategic political ally in its quest for social transformation. Subsequently it pursued more moderate reforms to avoid confrontation with the Lula regime, to which it still offered ‘critical support’.

In Argentina, the massive wave of direct action social movements subsided with the election of Kirchner (2003-2008) and the 7% economic growth rate stimulated by the commodity boom and the recovery from the dramatic economic melt-down of 2001-2002. With the recovery of employment and the return of their savings, the middle class assemblies rapidly disappeared. Kirchner offered subsidies to the unemployed and co-opted their leaders, which led to a sharp reduction of road blockages and membership in the militant unemployed workers organizations. Kirchner won over part of the human rights movement with his policies, which included his public purge of some of the more notorious military and police officials and the granting of subsidies to certain sectors of the human rights movement, including the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. With the decline of the radicalized movements of 1999-2002, the economic recovery of 2003-2008 led to a partial recovery of trade union activism, whose demands were mostly economic, focusing on the recovery of the workers’ wages and benefits lost during the systemic crisis.

In Bolivia, the economic boom, which began under the neo-liberal regime of Carlos Mesa continued under ‘leftist’ populist Evo Morales. He quickly moderated movement demands as he moved to the center-left. As an alternative to the social movement platform calling for the nationalization of the principal resource sectors exploited by multi-national corporations, Morales promoted ‘joint ventures’ which he demagogically claimed were ‘nationalization without expropriation’. Likewise he answered peasant and Indian demands for agrarian reform by opening up mostly uncultivatable public lands in the Amazon to the landless peasants. By the same token, he protected the most fertile land in the largest privately owned plantations from expropriation by exempting private land, which was classified as performing a ‘social function’. Avoiding structural change, Morales was able to use the windfall of state revenues from the high prices of Bolivian minerals and gas to co-opt movement leaders, provide incremental increases in the minimum wage, finance subsidies to Indian communities, encourage legal, political rights and recognize indigenous jurisdiction over their local communities.

Morales retained his leadership of the coca farmers union and, through his Movement to Socialist Party (MAS), exercised hegemony over the major community-based movements. His close ties with Presidents Castro in Cuba and Chavez in Venezuela set him in radical opposition to Washington’s interventionist policies and its supporters among the five rightist-controlled provinces centered in Santa Cruz. The extreme right gained ascendancy in the latter region and launched a violent racist frontal assault on the Morales government, polarizing the countryside while guaranteeing Morales the continued mass support among the popular classes and movements throughout the country.

In Ecuador, the powerful Indian movement (CONAIE) and its allies in the trade unions supported the neo-liberal regime of Lucio Gutierrez and suffered a severe decline in their power, support and organizational cohesion. The recovery has been slow, hindered by interventions of numerous US/EU funded NGOs.

With the demise of the established social movements, a new urban-based ‘citizens’ movement’ led by Rafael Correa overthrew the venal, corrupt, neo-liberal Gutierrez regime and led the electorate to vote Correa into power in both 2006 and 2009. Correa adapted center-left political positions, financing incremental wage and salary increases and state subsidized cheap credit to small and medium size businesses. He adopted a nationalist position on foreign debt payments and the termination of US military basing rights in Manta. The boom in mining and petroleum prices and ties with oil-rich Venezuela facilitated President Correa’s capacity to fund programs to secure support among the Andean bourgeoisie and the popular classes.

In Venezuela, the economic boom, namely the tripling of world oil prices, facilitated Venezuela’s economic recovery after the crisis caused by the opposition coup and the bosses’ lockout (2002-2003). As a result, from 2004 to 2008 Venezuela grew by nearly 9% a year. The Chavez government was able to generously fund a whole series of progressive socio-economic changes that enhanced the strength and attraction of pro-government social movements. The social movements played an enormous role in defeating opposition referendums, which had called for the impeachment of the President. Peasant organizations were prominent in pressuring recalcitrant bureaucrats in the Chavez government to implement the new agrarian laws calling for land distribution. Trade union militants organized strikes and demonstrations and played a major role in the nationalization of the steel industry. Given the vast increase in state resources, the Chavez government was able to both compensate the owners of the expropriated firms and meet workers’ demands for social ownership.

Summary

The economic boom and the ascendancy of center-left governments led to incremental increases in living standards, a decline of unemployment and the co-optation of some movement leaders — resulting in the decline of radical movement activity and the revival of traditional ‘pragmatic’ trade union moderates. During the economic boom and the rise of the center-left, the only major mass mobilization took the form of right wing movements determined to destabilize the center-left governments in Bolivia and Venezuela.

A comparison of the social movements in countries where they played a major role in political and social change (Venezuela, Ecuador, Brazil and Bolivia) and movements in countries where they were marginalized reveals several crucial differences. First of all, the differences are not found in terms of the quantity of public protests, militant direct actions or number of participants. For example, if one adds up the number of social movement protests in Mexico, Peru, Colombia and Central America, they might equal or even surpass the social actions in Brazil, Argentina and Bolivia. What was different and most politically significant was the quality of the mass action. Wherever they were of marginal significance, the organizations were fragmented, dispersed and without significant national leadership or structure and without any political leverage on the institutions of national power. In contrast, influential social movements operated as national organizations, which coordinated social and political action, centralized and capable of reaching the nerve centers of political power – the capital cities (La Paz, Buenos Aires, Quito and to a lesser degree Sao Paolo). To one degree or another, the high impact social movements combined rural and urban movements, had political allies in the party system and bridged cultural barriers (linking indigenous and mestizo popular classes).

World Economic Crisis and Social Movements – 2008 Onward

Beginning in late 2008 and continuing in 2009 the world economic crisis spread across Latin America. The crisis came later to Latin America and with less initial severity than in the US or EU. Because it is an ongoing process, the full socio-political implications and economic impact is still far from clear. What we can observe is that, at least initially, the current crisis has not provoked anything like the mass upheavals and the surge of radical social movements that we witnessed during the crisis beginning in 2001.

Gross Domestic Product
($ Millions of dollars, constant 2000 prices)
Annual growth rates
Country	2007	2008	2009*
Argentina	8.7	7.0	1.5
Bolivia	4.6	6.1	2.5
Brazil	5.7	5.1	-0.8
Chile	4.7	3.2	1.0
Colombia	7.5	2.6	0.6
Costa Rica	7.8	2.6	3.0
Cuba	7.3	4.3	1.0
Ecuador	2.5	6.5	1.0
El Salvador	4.7	2.5	-2.0
Guatemala	6.3	4.0	1.0
Haiti	3.4	1.3	2.0
Honduras	6.3	4.0	2.5
Mexico	3.3	1.3	-7.0
Nicaragua	3.2	3.2	1.0
Panama	11.5	9.2	2.5
Paraguay	6.8	5.8	3.0
Peru	8.9	9.8	2.0
Dominican Republic	8.5	5.3	1.0
Uruguay	7.6	8.9	1.0
Venezuela	8.9	4.8	0.3
Sub-total Latin America	5.8	4.2	-1.9
Caribbean	3.4	1.5	-1.2
Latin American and the Caribbean	5.8	4.2	-1.9

* Projections
Source: ECLAC

If anything, we have seen a surge of right-wing movements and electoral organizations in countries, like Argentina, and a US-backed right-wing military coup backed by the rightist business associations in Honduras, and the continued ‘pragmatic’ behavior of mass social movements in Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador.

The only exception is in Peru where the organized Indian communities in the Amazonian region have engaged in armed mass confrontations with the US-backed, right-wing regime of Alan Garcia. The Amazonian Indians responded to a series of Government decrees, which handed mineral and gas exploitation rights on Indian lands to foreign mining and energy corporations. From a historical perspective, the struggle was ‘conservative’, in so far as it pitted indigenous communities defending traditional use and ownership of lands and resources against the modern economic predators and the the neo-liberal state.

The Lumpen-Bourgeoisie: The Triple Alliance of the Neo-Liberal State, Narco-traffickers and the Unemployed Poor

The least studied, but most dynamic, and, possibly best organized social movement in Latin America today is the right-wing drug trafficking movement. Headed by a powerful narco-bourgeoisie, with strong ties to the military and neo-liberal state apparatus and with armed lumpen-cadres drawn from the urban unemployed and landless peasantry, the ‘Lumpen’ Movement has created a powerful geographic and social presence in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and elsewhere.

It was the agrarian neo-liberal policies that prepared the ground for the ‘mass base’ of the rightist narco-movement. The promotion of mechanized agro-export agriculture in Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Central America uprooted millions. State terror and paramilitary death squads drove millions of peasant families from the land and into urban slums. The large-scale importation of cheap, subsidized agricultural produce from the US wiped out many thousands of small-scale family farms. The stagnant of manufacturing sector was unable to absorb the migrants into labor-intensive work. This created massive numbers of young rural unemployed landless and urban workers, who could be either recruits for progressive social movements or recruits for the narco-industry. Cultivating coca and opium, refining and smuggling the drugs and soldiering for the drug lords provided a livelihood for these desperate young men and women. The deep economic crisis and stagnation of the 1990’s and early 2000’s created a large mass of young unemployed and under-employed workers in the cities ripe for employment by the narco-gangs who paid a living wage for an often deadly occupation.

The links between right-wing political parties, banking, business and landowner associations has been demonstrated repeatedly throughout Latin America. In Colombia, drug traffickers have become large landowners after their death squads devastated peasant communities suspected of supporting leftists or progressive organizations. ‘Sicarios’ or ‘hit-men’ are mostly young men from working or peasant class background who ‘work’ for business leaders and multi-national corporations as assassins. They have killed hundreds of trade union and peasant and Indian leaders each year in Colombia alone. Over a third of the members of the Colombian Congress, the principle backers of President Uribe, have been financed by the drug cartels. Uribe has long-term ties with prominent narco-traffickers and death-squad militia leaders.

In Mexico, drug traffickers have recruited widely among the impoverished peasants. In many Mexican states the narcos have purchased the services of thousands of government officials from top to bottom. In the absence of employment and a social safety-net, many of the poor find work in the narco-trade. Narco-traffickers have established alliances and business associations with upper class financial groups engaging in joint ‘philanthropic’ activities, such as handing out cash and delivering needed services to the poor. Narco-traffickers eventually wash their illegal earnings through major banks in the US, Canada and Europe and then invest in real estate, tourist complexes and landed properties.

Narco-trafficker organizations and death squads have worked closely with rightwing movements in Sta. Cruz (Bolivia), with rightist political parties in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, as well as in Mexico and Colombia.

The ‘lumpenization’ process operates via two routes: In some cases, young unemployed males are directly recruited via neighborhood organizations; in other cases the dispossessed, bankrupt and downwardly mobile farmers and long-term unemployed workers are gradually forced into the ‘illegal’ labor market.

The long-term, large-scale process of stagnation, despite the periods of export growth, marginalize the rural poor and accelerate their impoverishment without generating compensatory stable, urban employment paying a living wages. The ‘lumpenization’ of these displaced, marginalized peasants and workers, produced by the crisis and class polarization, is accompanied by the rise of a ‘lumpen culture’ with its own hierarchical structures, where the few at the ‘top’ develop ties to the economic and state elite and the masses at the ‘bottom’ aspire to a degenerate kind of middle-class consumerist life-style.

By the first decade of the new millennium, the rightist lumpen-narco movement far exceeded the progressive popular movements in terms of power and influence in Mexico, Colombia, Central America and some countries in the Caribbean, like Jamaica. The relationship between the ‘legal’ rightist and the ‘narco’ rightist movements is one of collaboration and conflict: They join forces to oppose powerful rural and trade union movements and progressive electoral regimes. The lumpen-narcos provide the ‘shock troops’ to assassinate progressive leaders, including elected officials and to terrorize supporters among the peasantry and urban poor. On the other hand, violent conflict between the rightists can break out at any time, especially when the lumpen-elite encroach on the state prerogatives, business interests, ties with imperial drug enforcement agencies and raise questions about the legitimacy of the bourgeois class.

Latin America’s Social Movements and the Economic Recession/Depression

Economic crises have multiple and diverse impacts on the popular classes and social movements.

The profound economic crisis of the 1990’s and first years of 2000 radicalized the popular classes and led to widespread ‘high impact’ protests and national rebellions, which overthrew incumbent neo-liberal regimes and replaced them with ‘center-left’ regimes. At the same time the social changes, implicit in the neo-liberal crisis, led to a downwardly mobile urban and rural sector. This formed the basis for the growth of dynamic leftist social movement led by popular mass-based leaders and rightist movements led by lumpen-narco chiefs and supported by the economic elites. The conservative, far-right confronted popular social movements from positions in the state and through the military and para-military death squads.

The commodity boom and the ascendancy of the ‘center-left’ regimes led to the ‘moderation’ of demands from below in the face of cooptation from above. Large-scale job creation and poverty programs, cheap credit and incremental wage and salary increases all contributed to moderating mass politics. The trade unions re-emerged as central actors and collective bargaining replaced mass direct action. Rural movements engaged in militant struggle were relatively isolated. The key political factor in this period was the demobilization of the popular classes, the decline of the direct action movements and the restoration of the power of the business, land-owning and mining elite based on their strengthened economic position. The rejuvenated Right took the lead in directing their own ‘direct action’ movements in Bolivia, Argentina and Central America.

As the crisis of 2008-2009 unfolded, the progressive movements were slow to respond, having been ‘under the tent’ of the center-left electoral regimes. Since these regimes were now being held responsible for the fallout of the commodity crash, the left social movements were in a weak position and unable to pose any radical alternatives.

It is important to remember that the world economic crisis had hit the ‘North’ (US/EU) earlier and harder than in Latin America. In Latin American, the social impact was weaker – at first. Unemployment grew mainly during the last months of 2008. The gradual unfolding of the crisis contrasted with the system-wide crash of the late 1990’s-2002, which precipitated mass rebellions. In addition, as a consequence of the earlier crisis, capital and finance controls had been imposed that limited the spread of the toxic assets and financial crisis from the US to Latin America.

Moreover, Latin American countries are diversifying their trade, especially toward Asia including China, which continues to grow at 8% a year. Diversification and financial controls limited the impact of the US financial melt-down on the Latin American economies. In addition, the early ‘stimulus’ measures, taken in response to the first signs of the crisis, had the effect of temporarily ameliorating the impact of the global recession/depression on Latin America.

Nevertheless as the depression deepens in the North, Latin America’s trade has plunged, and the region has fallen into negative growth. As a result, unemployment is growing in both the export sectors as well as in production for the domestic economy. In response, the right-wing parties and leaders blame the center-left regimes. Moves are underway in Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador to oust these regimes through elections or through coups, backed by US President Obama’s ‘rollback’ global strategy. The July 2009 coup in Honduras, covertly backed from the strategic US military base in the country, is the first sign that Washington is moving its military client to overthrow the new independent ‘center-left’ regimes in the region. This is particularly true among the Central American and Caribbean countries linked with Venezuela in the new integration programs, such as ALBA and PetroCaribe.

The first manifestations of progressive mass popular protests in the current economic recession are not directly related to the economic decline. In Peru, the indigenous Amazonian communities organized militant road blockages and confrontations with the military resulting in over one hundred dead and wounded. This mass movement developed in response to the Peruvian government’s granting concessions of mining exploitation rights to foreign multi-nationals, an infringement of the rights of the indigenous people to their lands in the Amazonian region. Demonstrations in solidarity with the Amazonian Indians occurred in most cities, including Lima. The Congress, fearing a mass uprising, temporarily canceled the concessions. This was a major victory for the indigenous communities. Moreover, the success of the Amazonian Indian communities has detonated widespread sustained strikes and protests in most of the major cities of Peru, in response to economic decline resulting from falling commodity prices.

The sustained popular struggle in Honduras is in response to the military coup overthrowing President Zelaya, a moderate reformer pursuing an independent foreign policy. Led by the urban public sector trade unions and peasant movements, the struggle has combined democratic, nationalist and populist demands.

Apart from these two mass popular movements, the economic crisis has yet to evoke mass radical rebellions, like those which took place during earlier crises between 2000-2003. We can posit several possible explanations or hypotheses for the contrasting responses of the mass movements to economic crises.

Hypotheses

1. The full impact of the world crisis has yet to hit the popular classes – it began late in

2008 and only began to register increased unemployment in the first quarter of 2009.

2. The current crisis, at first, did not hit the lower middle classes, public employees and skilled workers. It has been highly segmented, thus weakening cross class solidarity and alliances present in earlier crises.

3. Unlike the previous period, the crisis takes place in many countries, which are ruled by ‘center left’ regimes with an organized social base backed by the social movements. These regime-movement linkages neutralize mass protests, out of fear of a return to the hard right.

4. The mass movements on the left have responded to the crisis with relative passivity – in part because the governments have intervened with economic stimulus measures and some social ameliorative policies. The continuation and deepening of the crisis and the inadequate coverage of moderate public interventions could eventually lead to the resurgence of mass struggles.

5. The increasing economic vulnerability of the incumbent center-left regimes and the relative passivity of the progressive social movements has opened political space and opportunities for rightwing mass mobilizations, combining electoral and street politics to build a base for a return to power.

6. The crisis will likely accelerate the lumpenization process, as long-term unemployment sets in and if alternate movements fail to organize the chronically unemployed in consequential struggles.

7. As the bourgeoisie and its political supporters find few legitimate sources for profiteering available, they will likely serve as intermediaries and ‘protectors’ of the narco-traffickers and other criminal syndicates and rely on them to eliminate left social movement leaders and activists.

8. The rise of the ‘lumpen-Right’ may lead to a virtual ‘dual power’ situation in which legitimate and illegitimate power configurations cooperate in repressing social movements and compete for influence.

9. The relative passivity of the social movements is likely a transitory phenomenon, influenced by the convergence of circumstances. If the crisis deepens and extends over time and rightist regimes return to power, recent past historical experience strongly suggests that the massive increase in poverty and unemployment, combined with repressive rightist regimes, could lead to mass rebellions on the part of the previously ‘passive’ popular classes.

Also in June, a military coup overthrew the democratically-elected government of Honduras. President Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped and deported to Costa Rica on June 28. Initial clashes between troops loyal to the coup plotters and Zelaya supporters left at least one person dead and 30 injured. On July 30, as many as 150 people were arrested, with dozens injured, when soldiers and police attacked demonstrators with tear gas, water cannon, clubs and gunfire. One of the wounded, a 38-year-old teacher, was left fighting for his life after being shot in the head. Journalists reporting from the scene were also attacked.¹

Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, describes how the Honduran people have been “risking their lives, confronting the army’s bullets, beatings, and arbitrary arrests and detentions”. And yet the US media has reported this repression “only minimally, with the major print media sometimes failing even to mention the censorship there.”²

Our own media database search (August 3) of national UK press editorials mentioning the word ’Iran’ over the previous five weeks delivered 26 results. A search for editorials containing the word ’Honduras’ delivered 2 results. In fact, there has been a single leading article on the Honduran crisis (in the Independent on June 30 — see below). Over the same period, a search for UK national press articles mentioning ‘Iran’ gave 848 results; for ‘Honduras’ 96 results. This is not hard science, but it does indicate comparative levels of UK media coverage of the two issues.

Weisbrot notes that the Honduran coup is “a recurrent story” in Latin America, pitting “a reform president who is supported by labor unions and social organizations against a mafia-like, drug-ridden, corrupt political elite who is accustomed to choosing not only the Supreme Court and the Congress, but also the president.”³

Mainstream outlets claim the coup marks a worrying return to earlier regional trends. A July 23 BBC “Q&A“ on Honduras commented:

“Coups and political upheaval were common in Central America for much of the 20th Century, and until the mid-1980s the military dominated political life in Honduras. Mr Zelaya’s removal is the first in the region since 1993…”⁴

This is false. In April 2002, a US-backed military coup briefly ousted Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez until mass protests returned him to power. A Guardian article that month reported that the “US ‘gave the nod’ to Venezuelan coup.” Several weeks prior to the coup attempt, US government officials had met the business leaders who assumed power after Chávez was arrested. General Rincon, the Venezuelan army’s chief of staff, had visited the Pentagon the previous December and met senior officials.⁵

A 2004 military coup forced Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide to flee to Central Africa. Aristide told the Associated Press that he was forced to leave Haiti by US military forces.⁶ Jeffrey Sachs, professor of economics at Columbia University, wrote:

“Haiti, again, is ablaze… Almost nobody, however, understands that today’s chaos was made in Washington – deliberately, cynically, and steadfastly.”⁷

The BBC Q&A noted: “The role of the US is key, as it is Honduras’s biggest trading partner.”

Curiously, the article failed to mention that the US has its only Central American military base in Honduras. In fact the Honduran military is armed, trained and advised by Washington in a relationship that is deep and enduring. The two generals who led the coup were both trained at the US School of the Americas (SOA) based in Georgia (SOA is now known as The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or WHINSEC). Commander-in-chief Romeo Vasquez, head of the Honduran military, received training at SOA between 1976 and 1984. Luis Javier Prince Suazo, head of the air force, studied there in 1996. Colonel Herberth Bayardo Inestroza, a Honduran army lawyer who also trained at SOA, has admitted the illegality of the military’s kidnapping of Zelaya. He told the Miami Herald: “It would be difficult for us, with our training, to have a relationship with a leftist government. That’s impossible.”²

Father Roy Bourgeois, founder of School of the Americas Watch, described SOA last month as “this school of assassins, this school of coups, this school with so much blood on its hands.”⁸

Weisbrot notes that Washington’s response to the Honduran coup is guided by conflicting interests: “powerful lobbyists such as Lanny Davis and Bennett Ratcliff, who are close to [Hillary] Clinton and are leading the coup government’s strategy; the Republican right, including members of Congress who openly support the coup; and new cold warriors of both parties in the Congress, the state department and White House who see Zelaya as a threat because of his co-operation with Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and other left governments.”⁹

This explains Washington’s ambiguous reaction. The Obama administration’s first statement did not criticise the coup, and the state department continues to refuse to describe it as a coup. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has repeatedly refused to say that ‘restoring the democratic order’ in Honduras requires the return of Zelaya. It took three weeks for the White House to threaten to cut off aid.

Roger Burbach, Director of the Center for the Study of the Americas, writes:

U.S. efforts to restore Zelaya have been quite tepid compared to other countries. While many ambassadors have been withdrawn, the US head diplomat Hugo Llorens, appointed by George W. Bush, remains in place. There are reports that he may have even given the green light to the coup plotters, or at least did nothing to stop them. And while the World Bank has suspended assistance, the State Department merely warns that $180 million in US economic aid may be in jeopardy. Most importantly the United States refuses to freeze the bank accounts and cancel the visas of the coup leaders, measures that Zelaya and other Latin American governments have urged Washington to do.¹⁰

Recently, US Assistant Secretary of State Philip Crowley, commented:

We certainly think that if we were choosing a model government and a model leader for countries of the region to follow, that the current leadership in Venezuela would not be a particular model. If that is the lesson that President Zelaya has learned from this episode, that would be a good lesson.¹¹

The Independent: Doing Democracy A Service

In their June 30 leading article, the Independent’s editors, led by pro-Iraq war editor Roger Alton (formerly editor of the Observer), opened with this extraordinary paragraph:

The ousting of the Honduran President Manuel Zelaya by the country’s military at the weekend has been condemned by many members of the international community as an affront to democracy. But despite a natural distaste for any military coup, it is possible that the army might have actually done Honduran democracy a service.¹²

By contrast, many experienced observers have warned that the coup represents an extreme threat to prospects for democracy in Honduras and the region. The Independent explained its reasoning:

President Zelaya was planning a referendum to give him power to alter the constitution. But the proposed alterations were perilously vague, with opponents accusing Mr Zelaya of wanting to scrap the four-year presidential term limit. The country’s courts and congress had called the vote illegal.

This is an increasingly familiar turn of events in emerging democracies: an elected leader, facing the end of his time in office, decides that the country cannot do without him and resorts to dubious measures to retain power. The Venezuelan President, Hugo Chávez, won a referendum in February altering his country’s constitution and abolishing term limits. He now talks about ruling beyond 2030.

On the same day, in the same newspaper, Heather Berkman, a Latin America associate at the global political risk consultancy Eurasia Group, wrote:

Manuel Zelaya has taken a few unexpected turns to the left during his tenure as President of Honduras, deviating from its political norms. This time, it looks like he may have gone too far… Mr Zelaya can be blamed for staging a coup that, in turn, provoked a counter-coup.”¹³

Recall that these articles appeared in the Independent, widely considered to be at the left of the mainstream media spectrum.

Weisbrot argues that in fact there was no way for Zelaya to extend his rule even if the referendum had been held and passed:

The June 28 referendum was nothing more than a non-binding poll of the electorate, asking whether the voters wanted to place a binding referendum on the November ballot to approve a redrafting of the country’s constitution. If it had passed, and if the November referendum had been held (which was not very likely) and also passed, the same ballot would have elected a new president and Zelaya would have stepped down in January. So, the belief that Zelaya was fighting to extend his term in office has no factual basis – although most people who follow this story in the press seem to believe it. The most that could be said is that if a new constitution were eventually approved, Zelaya might have been able to run for a second term at some future date.²

Nikolas Kozloff, journalist and author of Revolution!: South America and the Rise of the New Left, traces the deeper sources of opposition to the Honduran president. Around 2007-2008, the initially conservative Zelaya began to embrace “the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas.” Kozloff explains:

It’s Chávez’s answer to the US-imposed free trade agreements in the region. And Zelaya had come out in support of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas. And so, this set him at odds with the United States, and there was a history of friction between the US and Zelaya leading up to the coup.”¹⁴

As the Independent editorial makes clear, the mainstream offers a different version of events. Kozloff comments:

I think if you were just reading the reports in the mainstream media, you might get the impression that this coup is just about term limits in Honduras and it’s just a conflict over whether Zelaya will be able to extend his constitutional mandate of one four-year term.

The BBC, for example, reported: “Zelaya was sent into exile on 28 June amid a power struggle over his plans for constitutional change.”⁴

The Times wrote: “His opponents say that he wanted to overturn term limits and extend his power like leftist regional allies such as President Chávez of Venezuela…”¹⁵

Kozloff comments: “And my point is that there is an ideological component to this coup… the first salvo against the Honduran elite was his moves to raise the minimum wage by 60 percent… I mean, this is a country where you have these maquiladora assembly plants, and the Honduran elite were, to say the least, displeased by the moves.”

In a rare exception to his newspaper’s wretched performance, Johann Hari wrote in the Independent of how Zelaya had “increased the minimum wage by 60 per cent, saying sweatshops were no longer acceptable and ‘the rich must pay their share’.

“The tiny elite at the top – who own 45 per cent of the country’s wealth – are horrified. They are used to having Honduras run by them, for them.”¹⁶

As Hari noted: “It was always inevitable that the people at the top would fight back to preserve their unearned privilege.”

Prior to the coup, US multinational Chiquita expressed its concern at Zelaya’s minimum wage decrees, which they said would reduce profits and increase export costs. Chiquita appealed to the Honduran Business Association, which was also opposed to Zelaya’s minimum wage policy. Kozloff told the website Democracy Now!: “what I find really interesting is that Chiquita is allied to a Washington law firm called Covington, which advises multinational corporations. And who is the vice chairman of Covington? None other than John Negroponte…”¹⁷

Negroponte was US ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, when he played a key role in coordinating US terror attacks on Nicaragua by means of “the Contras”, a mercenary army. Negroponte is complicit in massive human rights abuses committed by the Honduran military.

Throughout the twentieth century, Chiquita, then known as United Fruit Company, was associated with “some of the most backward, retrograde political and economic forces in Central America and indeed outside of Central America in such countries as Colombia”, Kozloff notes. In 1954, United Fruit played a leading role in the US-backed coup that ousted Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically-elected leader of Guatemala.

Kozloff reports that the current US Attorney General, Eric Holder, was Deputy Attorney General under Bill Clinton. Holder defended Chiquita and its actions in Colombia when Chiquita was allied to right-wing paramilitary death squads in the 1990s and was found guilty of paying off paramilitaries. Holder was Chiquita’s lead counsel.

We searched national UK newspapers (August 3) for articles containing the words ‘Honduras’ and (separately) ‘Chiquita,’ ‘John Negroponte’ and ’Eric Holder’ since June 28; all searches produced zero results.

1. Bill Van Auken, ‘Honduran coup regime launches brutal crackdown,’ August 1, 2009, World Socialist Web Site.
2. Weisbrot, ‘Hondurans Resist Coup, Will Need Help From Other Countries,’ ZNet, July 9, 2009.
3. Weisbrot, ‘Does the US back the Honduran coup?’ The Guardian, July 1, 2009.
4. ‘Q&A: Crisis in Honduras,’ BBC website, July 23, 2009.
5. Julian Borger and Alex Bellos, ‘US “gave the nod” to Venezuelan coup,’ The Guardian, April 17, 2002.
6. Eliott C. McLaughlin, Associated Press, March 1, 2004.
7. Sachs, ‘Fanning the flames of political chaos in Haiti,’ The Nation, February 28, 2004.
8. ’Generals Who Led Honduras Military Coup Trained at the School of the Americas,’ Democracy Now!, July 1, 2009.
9. Weisbrot, ‘U.S.- Brokered Mediation Has Failed – It’s Time for Latin America to Take Charge,’ ZNet, August 1, 2009.
10. Burbach, ‘Obama and Hillary Nix Change in Honduras,’ ZNet, July 27, 2009.
11. James Suggett, ‘Honduras Coup,’ ZNet, July 28, 2009.
12. Leading article, ‘Guns and democracy,’ The Independent, June 30, 2009.
13. Berkman, ‘Zelaya pushed,’ The Independent, June 30, 2009.
14. ‘What’s Behind the Honduras Coup? Tracing Zelaya’s Trajectory,’ Democracy Now!, July 1, 2009.
15. Hannah Strange, ‘Deposed President “can never return”,’ The Times, July 3, 2009.
16. Hari, ‘The other 9/11 returns to haunt Latin America,’ The Independent, July 3, 2009.
17. ‘From Arbenz to Zelaya: Chiquita in Latin America,’ Democracy Now!, July 21, 2009.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The full text of the ‘correction’ is:

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

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

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

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

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

Internal and External Correlation of Forces

The correlation of forces between capitalists and workers in the energy sector in Latin America varies greatly: In Venezuela, the Chavez government, with the backing of the oil workers union, has extended public ownership and distributed oil revenues to the popular classes through food subsidies, universal health and public education programs. At the other extreme in Colombia under President Uribe, private foreign oil companies are increasingly in control, profits are repatriated to the imperial countries or taken out of the country by the domestic elite, government revenues subsidize the oligarchy and government-backed death squads and the military to assassinate and threaten trade union and community leaders.

Between these two poles of the nationalist left and the neo-fascist right, several other variants exist: Social democrat, social liberal and neo-liberal.

Bolivia and Ecuador, under Evo Morales and Rafael Correa, represent the social democratic approach, proposing ‘partnerships’ between ‘state’ and foreign capitalist oil companies, which share the profits from exploitation of crude petroleum. The foreign companies still control most or all of the refining and trading and the social democratic government have yet to establish their own ‘marketing systems.’

The ‘social liberal’ policies are found in Brazil and Argentina where the major oil companies are ‘state’ only in name only, as they are traded on the stock markets in Latin America and Wall Street. State revenue is distributed in an unequal proportion, the bulk used to subsidize the agro-mineral sector and minority share to fund social programs – including basic anti-poverty programs.

The neo-liberal policies are found in Mexico and Peru where former publicly owned oil companies and energy resources have been handed over to foreign oil and energy companies. In Mexico only the militancy of the electrical workers union(SME) has prevented the government from privatizing this strategic industry. Under the neo-liberal regimes the oil and energy revenues have been distributed almost exclusively among the foreign and domestic ruling class and only a minimum’ trickles down’ to the workers, peasants and Indian communities in the form of subsistence “poverty programs.” Neo-liberal regimes disinvest and plunder the public enterprises, decreasing their share of production and leaving them with debts, obsolete technology and declining capacity to fulfill overseas obligations.

The Impact of the Economic Boom and Global Recession (2003-2009)

The performance and ownership of the energy sector is influenced by the internal class struggle, the condition of the world economy and the rise and decline of US imperialism. The crisis of neo-liberalism and the popular rebellions between 1999-2005 ended the principal phase of large-scale privatization in many countries of Latin America. The overthrow of the governments of de la Rua in Argentina, Sanchez de Losado in Bolivia and Noboa and Gutierrez in Ecuador, the defeat of the golpistas in Venezuela (April 2002) and the bosses lockout (December 2002-February 2003) led the radical mass movements to set a new agenda: The re-nationalization of the energy sector: petroleum, the electrical sector, mining and other strategic sectors.

The popular rebellions however, with the exception of Venezuela, did not lead to worker-peasant governments. Instead, center-left middle class-led alliances with the popular classes led to some partial reforms. In Bolivia, Evo Morales increased the role of the state in partnership with 42 foreign-owned oil and gas companies. Kirchner set up a state company but refused to re-nationalize YPF/Repsol in Argentina. In Ecuador, Correa increased taxes on petroleum companies, but the foreign multinational companies still produce 57% of the oil. In Brazil, Lula refused to re-nationalize the privatized enterprises – and the majority of shares in Petrobras have remained in the hands of private investors.

The major struggle against the energy and mining companies’ exploitation in Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and Chile were led by the Indian movements and in some cases were supported by petroleum workers and peasant organizations. The reason is clear: The energy companies were not merely exploiting labor, they were destroying their economies and living conditions through massive contamination of the environmentand seizure of their traditional.

In Brazil, Lula’s large-scale, long-term promotion of huge multi-national sugar plantations and refineries producing ethanol displaced thousands of small farmers and Indian communities and intensified the exploitation of the rural workers. The rural landless workers’ movement (MST) and other rural social movements, allied with Lula, engaged in defensive struggles. However, without urban allies, they were unable to defeat the combination of Lula and agro-business.

Urban Workers and Trade Unions

The major driving force in the popular rebellions against neo-liberalism varies in different countries and at different times.

In Ecuador, the oil, mining and factory workers joined the mass peasant movements to overthrow Noboa at the beginning of the decade. In Argentina, the unemployed workers and the middle class led the struggle to overthrow De la Rua. In Venezuela, the petroleum workers split with a minority supporting the bosses’ lockout and the majority took control and operated the wells in support of President Chavez. Throughout the decade, however, the energy sector workers have been organized and militant in defense of their economic sector, opposing privatization and protecting their living standards through mass struggle. But their presence in the popular rebellions has been scarce. In many cases the leadership of the energy trade unions has supported the center-left regimes in order to secure wage concessions and job protection. In the best of cases, the energy trade unions have engaged in solidarity demonstrations with the mass struggle of the peasants, Indians and unemployed.

Paradoxically, the strong and militant organization of the energy unions has led to economic gains and sectoral reforms, which have led to highly segregated islands of affluence among a mass of urban and rural poor. The past decade has witnessed the decline of the energy workers as a vanguard in the popular rebellions: Other classes have taken their place. This has created a strategic danger because in the course of large-scale privatizations of the energy sector, the workers will fail to secure the support of the rest of the working class and peasants.

While oil exploitation in the Amazon creates ‘jobs for oil workers,’ it destroys the livelihood of the Indigenous communities and sets off a deadly conflict between the oil companies and their workers against the mass of artisans, small farmers and Indigenous communities dependent on farming, fishing, and handicrafts in proximity to the petroleum and mining operations.

The World Recession and the Energy Sector

The world crisis cannot be resolved by strikes and protests alone. Even re-nationalization cannot, in itself, create the basis for a national recovery. The only alternative facing the energy sector workers is an internal ‘cultural-political revolution’ in which they rethink their basic strategy and move beyond sectoral struggles.

The current prolonged deep recession can only be confronted at the national-political level – by a turn to forming a broad-mass political alliance with the popular classes with a strategy for taking state power. In the face of the collapse of capitalism, the trade union struggle is no longer effective. The trade unions can only succeed by taking a decisive turn toward anti-capitalist movements – a turn toward an explicit embrace of socialism.

Today the entire capitalist class has seized control of the state, specifically the state treasury, to finance their survival and recovery at the expense of the workers, peasants, Indians and the urban poor. As the crisis deepens, mass urban and rural rebellion will once again break the bonds of bourgeois hegemony. The question will arise: Will the energy workers be part of a socialist solution or part of the capitalist problem? Will the energy workers return to become part of the vanguard or remain part of the rearguard? What is absolutely clear is that the energy workers occupy a strategic position in the world capitalist system – without petroleum nothing moves, without electricity the bankers cannot count their profits and the investors cannot read their dividend payments.

Never has the capitalist system in its entirety demonstrated today in real life that it is a failed system – neither producing goods and services, nor providing credit and finance, nor employing labor.

Karl Marx’s famous phrase comes to mind: “A specter is haunting the capitalist class: The coming of the socialist revolution.”

When we look around the world we see a number of leaders – Chávez is one of them but not the only one – who, over the last eight years, have become more and more negative and oppositional to the United States. The prior administration tried to isolate them, tried to support opposition to them, tried to turn them into international pariahs. It didn’t work.

We are going to see what other approaches might work. We have no guarantees that we can create a better relationship with someone who has a different view of politics, the economy, and so much else. But we think it’s worth trying to just explore this and see what comes of it. I don’t think that in today’s world — a multipolar world where we are competing for attention and relationships with at least the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians — it’s in our interest to turn our backs on countries in our own hemisphere.

So we’re going to try some different approaches. No illusions about who we’re dealing with or what the issues are. But I think it’s worth a try, because what we’ve been doing hasn’t worked very well. In fact, if you look at the gains, particularly in Latin America, that Iran is making and China is making, it’s quite disturbing. They are building very strong economic and political connections with a lot of these leaders. I don’t think that’s in our interest.

I’m certainly open to constructive criticism and ideas, but – we talked about exchanging ambassadors again with Chávez, which I think we will do at some point. We are looking to figure out how to deal with Ortega. The Iranians are building a huge embassy in Managua, and you can only imagine what it’s for.

We want to try to build better relationships with [Ecuador's Rafael] Correa, and we want to see if we can figure out how to get an ambassador back and work with [Evo] Morales in Bolivia.

We’re facing an almost united front against the United States regarding Cuba. Every country, even those with whom we are closest, is saying ‘you’ve got to change, you can’t keep doing what you’re doing.’ We would like to see some reciprocity from the Castros on political prisoners, human rights, and other matters.

So we’re looking at a number of different relationships and trying to figure out whether we can be more productive. My bottom line is: What’s best for America? How do we try to influence behavior that is more in our interest than not? And that’s how we’re looking at it.

– US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Address to State Department Employees, May 1, 2009

In resisting the aggressions of the most powerful empire ever to have existed, our people fought for the other sister peoples of this continent. The OAS was an accomplice of all the crimes committed against Cuba.

At one moment or another, the totality of the countries of Latin America were victims of interventions and political and economic aggression. There is not one single one that can deny that. It is ingenuous to believe that the good intentions of a president of the United States can justify the existence of that institution that opened the gates to the Trojan horse that backed the Summits of the Americas, neoliberalism, drug trafficking, military bases and economic crises. Ignorance, underdevelopment, economic dependence, poverty, the forced return of those who emigrate in search of work, the brain drain, and even the sophisticated weapons of organized crime were the consequences of interventions and plundering proceeding from the North. Cuba, a little country, has demonstrated that it can resist the blockade and advance in many fields, and even cooperate with other countries.

– Fidel Castro, “The Trojan Horse,” June 2, 2009

Washington “pretty much by itself”

On June 3, at the end of a a Ministerial Conference of the Organization of American States (OAS) in San Pedro Sula, Honduras – and while President Barack Obama was the recepient of lavish pomp and circumstance by the absolutist monarchy and semi-feudal dictatorship of the House of Saud in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia – Washington’s delegation, led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, patched together a last-minute, highly-diluted resolution that allowed Washington to save some face and prevent an abject political humiliation over its anti-Cuba policy. Nevertheless the gathering registered a further retreat by a clearly stung Washington in the face of overwhelming Hemispheric (and international) opposition to the decades-long US economic and political war – and permanent military intimidation and threats – against revolutionary and socialist Cuba.

Washington continues to hold onto the core of its bipartisan policy of demanding the overturning of the Cuban government and promoting the consequent return of US economic, financial, and political domination. But, in doing so, Washington, under the Obama Administration, was forced, at San Pedro Sula, to jettison yet another legal prop cushioning and justifying the core policy, in this case a US-promoted 1962 resolution expelling Cuba from the OAS.

According to an article in the May 31, 2009 USA Today the Obama Administration went into the Conference prepared to accept the abrogation of the 1962 resolution and retreat to a position of setting political conditions for Cuba’s “membership” in an Hemispheric body which the Cuban revolutionaries view with contempt as an historic tool of US imperialism against Latin America and the Caribbean. Other national delegations, led by Nicaragua and Venezuela, put forward a position of opposing any conditions on Cuba. This view was apparently supported by at least the two-thirds majority needed to pass if things had moved to an open and public vote. But a push for an up-or-down vote did not happen and apparently an accomodation was made to Washington’s “needs.”

When the US delegation found no support for specific language deliniating its political conditions – the usual demagogic and hypocritical boilerplate about “democracy,” “political prisoners,” “free elections,” and so on – the Clinton-led team was reduced to conjuring up language, mealy-mouthed enough to reach “consensus,” that could be nevertheless be spun into a stick to attack Cuba and maintain Washington’s core, unchanged agenda.

The language within the actual resolution, passed by acclamation, reads “…that Cuba’s participation in the OAS would be the result of a dialogue initiated at the government of Cuba’s request and in conformity with the practices, purposes and principles of the OAS.”

Dan Restrepo, who is a special assistant to President Obama and senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs on the U.S. National Security Council said, “What we’ve seen today is really a testament to the hard work of multilateral diplomacy…The United States and other countries from various parts in the hemisphere fought, defended and prevailed in saying that this was not an automatic process, that ‘yes, let’s leave an argument of the past in the past, let’s not become prisoners of the past, but let us ensure that we are defending the basic principles of democracy and human rights and nonintervention and noninterference as the path forward to Cuba’s return to the organization.”

In an article in the June 5 Washington Post – based on mostly unattributed interviews with “diplomats” and obviously spun by US officials to present what happened in the most positive light – it was reported that polarization, rupture, and even the possible disintegration of the OAS appeared imminent. At one point, before bolting to the Middle East to join Obama, Clinton had blurted out the reality that Washington was “pretty much by itself” in the discussions over Cuba at the OAS Conference.

The Post piece further asserts that “The United States compromised more than it ever had in the OAS on the Cuba issue, diplomats said, and it mustered its most impressive diplomatic firepower to get a deal – with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton leading the delegation and [President] Obama calling Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva.”

On the defensive throughout the San Pedro Sula Conference, Clinton took the line that the new Obama Administration had already done so much to reverse Bush’s “failed” policy on Cuba that they were actually taken aback by how little this had softened the united, clear, and unwavering call by all governments and countries across the Americas for Washington to immediately and unilaterally end all economic and travel sanctions against Cuba.

“I want to emphasize the United States under President Obama is taking a completely new approach to our policy toward Cuba: We have eased restrictions on family travel and remittances,” Clinton said. “As I was getting ready in my hotel room this morning, I had CNN on and I saw just a tearful reunion between a man and his little baby boy who he hadn’t seen in a year and a half because of the prior travel restrictions.” Clinton added that the Obama Administration had also authorized telecommunications links with Cuba supported resuming bilateral talks on immigration and direct mail.

“We are not interested in fighting old battles or living in the past,” she said in the text of a speech prepared for delivery to the group. “At the same time, we will always defend the timeless principles of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.” Of course the whole “past” of US interventions and subversion in the Americas shows a vicious disregard for the “timeless principles of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.”

The Post article tells us that “Nicaragua and Venezuela were threatening to quit the group unless Cuba was readmitted…And there was a possibility that members could put the issue to a vote, leaving the United States alone on the losing side, which would have caused a backlash in Congress.” Republican and Democratic Congessional Representatives most strongly identified with the counter-revolutionary elements in the Cuban-American community tied to decades of terrorism and sabotage inside Cuba (who are in now in a distinct and shrinking minority) have been threatening to cut off US funds to the OAS which has historically been utterly dominated by Washington’s political and economic interests and priorities – with no higher political priority than eliminating the Cuban revolutionary example.

Recovering from the Bush years

Such a move is viewed as politically disastrous by top US policymakers who are attempting to advance, not further erode, US political authority in the Americas, which is seen as having deteriorated significantly during the years of the George W. Bush Administration. Those years saw the defeat in 2002 of a US-backed military coup in Venezuela and the failure of the White House drive to get rid of the government of Hugo Chavez as well as the election and consolidation of other left-wing governments in Bolivia and Ecuador that are in conflict with Washington and international capital and which quickly developed close relations and deepening economic and political collaboration with Cuba. All of those governments came into power out of the mass popular struggles and class battles against the imperialist-imposed austerity, or “neoliberal,” policies that have increasingly framed and marked politics in Latin America from the mid-1990s under the Democratic William Clinton Adminstration through the years of the second Bush Administration.

Throughout the Americas the traditional political spectrum moved significantly to the left in the Bush years as conservative governments were defeated electorally in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Paraguay, and El Salvador (and narrowly maintained power in Mexico and Peru). All of these new governing parties and coalitions remain firmly within the framework of the prerogatives of the capitalist market and the boundaries of bourgeois electoralism, eschewing the use of governmental power to promote mass mobilizations of workers and peasants. Nevertheless, to one degree or another, these governments present themselves as receptive to the demands and pressures from working people and the class and popular struggles and resistance that break out independently of them, including the increasingly politically conscious and militant struggles of indigenous peoples fighting institutionalized racism. These governments have not generally been marked by harsh repression against workers and peasants and political space has expanded.

All of this can easily bring these “leftist” governments into conflict with the “national” capitalist and landlord classes and consequently the US government which ultimately is the main prop of these ruling classes. At the same time US economic and financial power competes ferociously and unequally with these same ruling classes. One registration of all these economic, social, and political contradictions is that all of these governments (and indeed more conservative governments such as Colombia and Mexico) have pursued normal and friendly relations and collaboration with Cuba. Cuban medical and education missions thrive and do amazing work in many of these countries, where popular solidarity with Cuba is strong whatever the political coloration of the government.

The Obama Adminstration is in the unenviable position of seeing Washington’s anti-Cuba policy become a very public obstacle to the positive (from their point of view) development of US diplomacy and policies throughout the Americas. It is striking that even relatively conservative governments in Latin America and the Caribbean feel unable to identify publicly with Washington in placing conditions and politically attacking a government in Cuba that is led by revolutionary Marxists.

The Obama Administration and the US rulers in general understand fully that the disintegration of the OAS – the historic instrument and cover of US policy and Hemispheric domination – could only strengthen the already clear tendency in Latin America and the Caribbean toward regional and other bodies independent of US (and Canadian) participation which register the growing economic integration and common political orientation that runs counter to the economic, financial, social, and political policies and priorities promoted by Washington. In December 2008 Brazil hosted a Summit of Latin American and Caribbean leaders which pointedly excluded the United States and Canada and included Cuba.

The Bolivarian Alternative to the Americas (ALBA), initiated by Venezuela and Cuba and expanded to now include Bolivia, Nicaragua, Dominica, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Honduras, and Ecuador began and developed out of the struggle against the drive by Washington, under the cover of the OAS, to impose the so-called Free Trade in the Americas (FTAA) treaty on the peoples of the Hemisphere, reinforcing and extending neoliberal imperialist domination and unequal economic and financial exchange and social relations. FTAA is now in, at best, a comatose state to the great dismay of Washington and Wall Street.

Needless to say the current economic and financial crisis and the onset of world depression conditions can only exacerbate class and social polarization and struggle throughout the Americas, adding to the urgency for Washington to reposition itself politically and recover from the derailment of US policy over the past decade.

The Cuban Revolution and the OAS

In 1962 the Democratic Party Administration of John Kennedy was able to push through Cuba’s expulsion from the OAS based on an “adherence…to Marxism-Leninism [which] is incompatible with the inter-American system” by the revolutionary leadership team headed by Fidel Castro which came to power when the Cuban Revolution triumphed on January 1, 1959. The Cuban revolutionaries established a government which was supported enthusiastically by the overwhelming majority of the Cuban people, particularly among industrial workers, peasants, Black Cubans, and youth of all social classes. The Cuban government had solidified that support by carrying out sweeping, revolutionary measures on agrarian reform and land redistribution; workers rights and entitlements such as pensions, maternity leave, trade-union representation, and so on; universal access to free medical care; radical rent and utility cost reductions; massive programs to eliminate illiteracy and establish access to excellent education free of charge for all; the smashing of racist Jim Crow segregation laws and practices; the promotion of laws and policies that greatly elevated the status and emancipation of women; and the eradication of US-based Mafia networks which organized the island’s vast prostitution, gambling, and narcotics rackets.

Naturally these measures did not go down well with the social and class forces in Cuba that had benefited and profited from the social relations of the pre-revolutionary order that was being uprooted nor, of course, with US business and financial interests that utterly dominated every aspect of the Cuban economy. As in every genuine Revolution, Cuban society became highly polarized along social and class lines. Although a distinct, clear minority, there were still hundreds of thousands of Cubans whose “way of life” was disrupted and swept away by the Revolution driven by and in the interests of the overwhelming majority who were oppressed, degraded, and exploited…and who had now risen up in a united, clench fist of revolutionary mobilization and action.

The Cuban landowning class, bourgeoisie, and large layers of the professional and middle classes – most of whom chose to ensconse to Miami and the United States — became the social base for the US-organized attempts to overturn the revolutionary order in Cuba. (Of course, not every landlord, capitalist, or middle-class professional opposed the Cuban Revolution and not every worker, peasant, and Black Cuban supported it. But it is an indisputable fact that this was the general, overwhelming tendency.)

The revoked 1962 OAS resolution also cited Cuba’s alliance with the former Soviet Union and allied Eastern European regimes as the revolutionary Cuban government sought to defend the triumphant Revolution against direct US military aggression after the defeat of the US-organize Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban counter-revolutionary mercenaries. This was a period of intense counter-revolutionary activity organized from the United States and vertically directed by the White House, CIA, and State Department. Every day assassination plots were being organized, terrorist incursions planned and implemented, and plans for economic sabotage carried out. Large bureaucracies employing hundreds of operatives were established just for the purpose of planting false stories in the press, spreading vile rumors and disinformation (so-called psychological operations or “psy-ops”). Miami was the nerve center and after the debacle of the Bay of Pigs it suffered a nervous breakdown.

The 1962 OAS expulsion of Cuba was part of Washington’s attempt to re-establish political cover and credibility for new direct aggression – this time without the leading edge of its mercenary Cuban proxies – by US forces. This period culminated later in 1962 with Cuba acceeding to Soviet pressure to secretly install nuclear weapons on Cuban territory in the hope of deterring the US invasion they knew was in place and impending. Upon discovery, Washington organized a naval quarantine of Cuba and threatened to engage Soviet naval vessels entering Cuban waters, a sequence of events that nearly led to direct military strikes and an invasion of Cuba by the United States, not to speak of devastating nuclear exchanges between the United States and the Soviet Union and untold millions of deaths. The crisis was resolved when the Soviet leadership removed the nuclear weapons from Cuba, the Kennedy Administration agreed, in a secret protocol, to remove US nuclear missiles from Turkey that were an equivalent distance from the Soviet Union, and an alleged, informal pledge that the United States would not invade Cuba.

US government documents declassified since the 1962 “Missile Crisis” reveal that Washington policymakers fully understood that a US invasion would meet truly massive popular Cuban resistance – the entire population was armed to the teeth and in a state of full territorial mobilization – that would in the first days and weeks lead to 10,000 or more US casualties. It was this reality – as much as any supposed “statesman-like cool” – that restrained President Kennedy from ordering an invasion and negotiating, without the participation of the Cuban government, a mutually agreeable settlement with an equally anxious and politically-diplomatically outmaneuvered Soviet government which had overplayed its hand.

From then until now Washington has focused on isolating and subverting Cuba through attempts to implement a death-inducing economic and financial blockade, supplemented with terrorist attacks and economic sabotage launched from US soil by CIA-trained Cuban-American cunter-revolutionaries (including as revealed in 1976 US Senate Hearing the introduction of biological agents to destroy Cuban agricultural production).

The resolution passed by acclamation at San Pedro Sula overturned the 1962 expulsion of Cuba from the Washington-dominated body following the 1959 Cuba Revolution. It took Washington three years after the triumph of the Revolution to muster the support among the various capitalist governments of Latin America and the Caribbean to boot out the revolutionary Cuban government. Over the next decade-and-a-half succeeding Administrations – Democratic and Republican – and the Democratic Party-controlled Congress, promoted policies that established vicious right-wing military dictatorships throughout Latin America (Brazil 1964; Dominican Republic 1965 following a US invasion; Uruguay and Chile 1973; Argentina 1976; Bolivia with numerous coups and counter-coups from 1964-82) adding to the already longtime family-military tyrannies backed by Washington (Duvalierist Hait; Somocista Nicaragua; El Salvador; and so on.

This is the “past” Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton do not want to be “living in.” And who can blame them? But the present-day economic, social, and political realities in the Americas, the legacy of oppression, grinding exploitation, and obscene social inequality, flows precisely from this “past.” Indeed, how could they not be? Among these present-day realities which the Obama team came up against in San Pedro Sula is the clear and united Hemispheric solidarity with Cuba against Washington’s economic and political war.

The overriding aim of Washington’s Cuba policies is to prevent the extension of the Cuban socialist revolution, especially in the Americas, which overturned capitalist property relations on the island and began to forge a new society and new human beings based on human needs over private profit and solidarity with the oppressed and exploited overwhelming majority of humanity.

This has not changed to this day and has become more compelling and imperative with the ongoing waves of mass popular and anti-imperialist struggle that have shaken Hemispheric politics in the young 21st Century. This is why Washington continues to be willing to put up with Hemispheric and international isolation and embarrassment over its policy toward a small Caribbean island that has had such a huge impact on world politics and whose influence and resonance on the world stage is greater than ever.

Epilogue to San Pedro Sula

A few days after the OAS Ministerial Conference the White House chose, with great fanfare, to announce the arrest of a former State Department employee and his wife on “espionage” charges of giving “classified” US government documents to Cuba. Supposedly the couple had been under “suspicion” for over a decade.

Nine days later the US Supreme Court announced it would not accept an Appeal to review the outrageous injustice of the five Cuban revolutionaries, the Cuban Five – Fernando Gonzalez, Rene Gonzalez, Antonio Guerrero, Gerardo Hernandez, and Ramon Labanino – who have been incarcerated in US prisons for more than a decade for the “crime” of preventing ongoing terrorist attacks against their country from US soil by infiltrating counter-revolutionary Cuban-American organizations involved in such activities. The case of the Cuban Five is emblematic of the entire history of Washington’s response to the Cuban Revolution and, at the same time, the Five Cuban patriots represent the extraordinary and heroic individuals – out of the ranks of ordinary people – that a genuine Revolution produces. The continued denial of freedom for the Cuban Five and the growing awareness and resonance of their cause has become an important part of the deepening political price Washington is paying, and is prepared to pay, to defeat and destroy the example of the Cuban Revolution. It is teaching a whole new generation worldwide about the Cuban Revolution.

Clearly, Washington’s anti-Cuba policy will not go away gently into the night. But the pressures are mounting to end, once and for all, US economic and travel sanctions and for the normalization of US-Cuban relations. The relationship of forces has changed in the Americas. While US imperialism retains great military power, its economic and financial might is increasingly crisis-wracked and its political authority has never been weaker since the origins of the modern US Hemispheric imperial colossus at the very end of the 19th Century. But today Washington can no longer control events in the Americas.

And in Latin America the bitter riddle still rings true: Why are there no coups in Washington DC? Because it doesn’t have a U.S. embassy! Last week, for instance a friend in Caracas said during an on-line chat that he was convinced Obama himself had given the command to the Generals to overthrow Zelaya. We countered that our Chief Executive may be playing a more wily and sinister strategy than that.

Certainly the past 50-plus years of U.S.-Latin American relations make that statement seem naïve. The Bush Administration’s fingerprints on the Venezuelan coup of 2002 and its involvement in the Haitian coup of 2004 through the IRI (International Republican Institute) would provide enough circumstantial evidence to bring an indictment of the U.S. before any international court of law – if it hadn’t likely already paid off the judges, that is.

However, if we assume that the Obama administration is following all previous recent administrations’ policy of genocide, brute force, terror, authoritarian rule and other forms of inhumane repression, we ignore the evidence that we are in a new, more complex and indeed more dangerous moment for the Bolivarian project of Latin American unity. To understand our moment we need to look back three-fourths of a century, to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his “Good Neighbor” policy.

FDR came to power in a time remarkably like our own. The Republicans had just tanked the economy and voters looked to a liberal to ease the pain. North Americans of that moment had disinterestedly observed as the U.S. military spent the first third of the century invading and occupying Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Haiti, Cuba, Panama and the Dominican Republic. After years of battling “insurgents” (or “bandits” as they were often then called), Washington was forced to consider a new course under the new liberal administration.

“In the early 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt promised that henceforth the United States would be a ‘good neighbor,’ that it would recognize the absolute sovereignty of individual nations, renounce its right to engage in unilateral interventions and make concessions to economic nationalists,” Greg Grandin writes in Empire’s Workshop. Grandin goes on to describe what to an anti-imperialist could be called a chilling result: “Rather than weaken U.S. influence in the Western Hemisphere, this newfound moderation in fact institutionalized Washington’s authority, drawing Latin American republics tighter into its political, economic and cultural orbit through a series of multilateral treaties and regional organizations.”

From one Roosevelt to the next a dramatic change in U.S. foreign policy occurred: The first one (Teddy) used the “Big Stick,” but Franklin traded it for “a goose’s quill” knowing more “great is the hand that holds dominion over/ man by a scribbled name.” FDR’s “Good Neighbor” policy toward Latin America was a frank recognition that dozens of military interventions in the region, in addition to being costly for a country slipping into a depression, had been entirely ineffective.

Roosevelt picked up the idea for the “Good Neighbor” policy from his Republican predecessor and was backed in his efforts by none other than Nelson Rockefeller, who argued that “if the United States is to maintain its security and its political and economic hemispheric position it must take economic measures at once to secure economic prosperity in Central and South America and to establish this prosperity in the frame of hemisphere economic cooperation and dependence.” (Grandin) In other words, opening markets and making trade agreements with Latin America was crucial for the salvation of capitalism in recession and for the maintenance of “dependence.”

Under the “Good Neighbor” policy, Latin America supplied raw materials for the emerging industrial empire to the north which “not only set the U.S. on the road to economic recovery but fortified a block of corporations that provided key support for the New Deal reforms and served as the engine of America’s remarkable postwar boom,” Grandin wrote.

Latin America, on the other hand, was drawn more deeply into a colonial dependence on the United States for the health of its own economies in a relation wherein it provided raw materials but was deprived of the means of development. Most political thinkers, especially in Latin America, saw the “Good Neighbor” policy as “a new strategy of domination” in which “the principal form of imperialist domination on the continent would have, starting at the moment his policy was declared, an essentially economic character.”¹

Nicaragua put the “Good Neighbor” policy to its first test. A bad economy, international pressure against a brutal occupation, and fierce resistance from the patriotic forces led by A.C. Sandino had forced the U.S. to withdraw its occupation forces. But the departure of the U.S. Marines opened the door for Anastacio Somoza, head of the U.S.-trained Nicaraguan National Guard. On February 20, 1934 Somoza had Sandino murdered and quickly took control of the country.

As is now the case in Honduras, the U.S. role in the murder of Sandino and the coup that instituted the Somoza dictatorship was unclear. Although then-U.S. ambassador Arthur Bliss Lane had lunch with Somoza a few hours before the murder, the Nicaraguan was certainly ruthless and power-hungry enough to have organized the killing and the coup on his own. At the very least, however, the “Good Neighbor” acquiesced and FDR’s reported comment on Somoza said it all: “He’s a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”

Fast forward to another Democratic president who comes to power in the U.S. to save the Empire from a burst economic bubble, and decides to revamp relations with Latin America. Obama calls his updated “Good Neighbor” policy “A New Partnership for the Americas.” He previewed it while campaigning in Miami’s Cuban-American community last year.

Playing to that audience, Obama lashed out at “demagogues like Hugo Chavez” who, he said, “have stepped into this vacuum” of the Bush “distraction” from Latin America as a result of the Iraq war. Obama went on to flay Chavez for “his predictable yet perilous mix of anti-American rhetoric, authoritarian government, and checkbook diplomacy that…offers the same false promise as the tried and failed ideologies of the past.” The future U.S. president ended with the recognition that “the United States is so alienated from the rest of the Americas that this stale vision has gone unchallenged, and has even made inroads from Bolivia to Nicaragua.”

To repair this alienation, Obama offered programs pegged to FDR’s “Four Freedoms.” He suggested that together the U.S. and its southern neighbors could work towards freedom from fear, as partners in fighting drug trafficking, gangs and terrorism; towards freedom from want, as they addressed poverty, hunger and global warming, and towards political freedom and democracy.

After taking office, Obama announced major relaxations of the bans on travel and remittances to Cuba. At the April 2009 Summit of the Americas, he carried on the appeal to regional unity. He talked of the U.S. intention to foster “engagement based on mutual respect and common interests and shared values.” He shook hands with Chavez, and Venezuela and the U.S. agreed to restore their ambassadors.

As in so many arenas, though, Obama’s message on Latin America gets clouded by mixed signals. The veteran plotters of the 1980s contra wars–John Negroponte, Otto Reich, Roger Noriega and their ilk–have no place in his administration. But Obama’s ambassador to Honduras, Hugo Llorens, held the Andean desk at the National Security Council during the failed 2002 coup against Chavez, and Jeffrey Davidow, the president’s advisor for the Summit of the Americas, served as ambassador to Chile during the coup against Chile’s Salvador Allende in 1973.

Though the administration recently announced it would not ask Congress to approve the Free Trade Agreement with Panama until it developed a “new framework,” the president very publicly withdrew his opposition to the trade pact with Colombia during the Summit of the Americas.

In Latin America, Obama faces much more complex and rapidly evolving regional political and economic alliances than did his immediate predecessors. The Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) took its first stand in defense of Bolivia last September; the Organization of American States has spoken with one voice for Zelaya; MERCOSUR and ALBA are weaving economic ties.

These new political realities also provide an opportunity for the U.S. to regain a measure of control over the region. By contrast with conservatives and neo-cons(ervatives), liberal and neo-liberal imperialists prefer trade treaties to “armed treaties,” that is, military force. While Bush preferred leveling Iraq with bombs, Bill Clinton managed to level Mexico with NAFTA. Franklin Roosevelt, with his fast-track authority, negotiated trade treaties with fifteen Latin American countries between 1934 and 1942. Obama could use trade deals to widen the divisions emerging in the region–perhaps fortifying “the U.S. free-trade partnerships and links to Brazil and Chile, knowingly sacrificing a sphere of influence in the hope of establishing ring-fences around the most radical governments,” as Ivan Briscoe suggested in the Foro Europa-America Latina.

Fissures and new poles of power are emerging in opposition to what Professor Napoleon Saltos of the Central University of Quito calls the “Bolivarian Coordinate.” This ideological-political-economic axis is only one possibility. Saltos also points out the possibility of the emergence of a “sub-imperialist” Brazil in competition with the neoliberal U.S.-European imperial axis.

Regional divisions and tensions surfaced dramatically during the September 2008 disturbances in Bolivia. On one hand, the fledgling UNASUR’s resolution of the conflict between the regions loyal to President Evo Morales and those of the Media Luna demonstrated South America’s new independence.

But while the world’s attention was focused on Bolivia’s crisis, another struggle was taking place behind the scenes at the UNASUR meeting in Santiago, Chile. Just days before that gathering, Hugo Chavez verbally attacked Bolivian Defense Minister Luis Trigo, accusing him of not doing enough to defend President Morales. Chavez went on to say that “if something happens to Evo… I won’t just sit here with my arms crossed.”

Many Bolivians took umbrage at this statement and viewed it as inappropriate meddling in their country’s internal affairs. As one friend in Bolivia said privately over a cup of coffee, “I guess Chavez doesn’t remember what happened to the last ‘gaucho’ (cowboy) who tried to save Bolivia,” comparing Chavez to Che.

At the UNASUR meeting, Chavez agitated for sharp statements against U.S. interference in Bolivia, while the “pragmatic” group led by Brazil and Chile preferred to address only Bolivia’s immediate, internal issue. The meeting was held in private, but Chilean Foreign Minister Alejandro Foxley told Bolivia’s daily La Razon that “he feared a failure of the extraordinary summit of the Union of South American Nations due to the demands of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to condemn the United States in the final declaration.”² “There are different perspectives… I want to say that we don’t share his position and we believe that the problems of the region have to be solved in the region. I don’t like making others responsible,” Foxley said.

It was no secret who came out on top at the end of the summit: The “pragmatists” won, with Lula da Silva clearly in charge as the representative of the economic powerhouse of the region. This wasn’t the first time Chavez, a brilliant strategist, sabotaged his own efforts with his lack of diplomacy. He left the summit having not only lost a bid to make a statement against U.S. imperialism, but also having alienated many Bolivians by his harsh criticism of their officials.

While the countries of Latin America continue to welcome Venezuela’s generous aid and subsidized energy, in a context of reduced tension where an ignorant, unpopular, proto-fascist North American president turns his throne over to a charismatic, intelligent leader of African descent, Chavez’s attempts to maintain the polarization between empire and its unofficial colonies so as to push the agenda of Latin American unity forward is in danger of losing steam.

None of this could possibly be lost on Obama. He must know that the U.S. has galvanized opposition in Latin America every time it has undertaken the sort of violent undermining of local autonomy now being carried out in Honduras. He has everything to lose and nothing to gain from this coup in Honduras, especially when he can manage to keep any upstart junior president in line by manipulating trade treaties and cutting deals guaranteed to maintain Latin America in subservience, in short, to divide and conquer.

Yes, it’s obvious that the U.S. hopes to the coup can neutralize Zelaya. Of course Hillary will mince words and use linguistic tricks to avoid the use of the word “coup” to exploit the situation to the max. It’s also clear that Obama will continue to defend the Empire: A tiger that has withdrawn its claws remains a tiger. But if anti-imperialists continue in the simplistic, black-and-white Manichean thinking of the last 50 years, we’ll miss the specific dangers–and opportunities–of the moment.

Here we recall the words of Bertolt Brecht: “There are many ways to kill. You can stick a knife in a person’s belly, take away her bread, not heal him from a disease, stick her in a bad apartment, work him to death, drive her to suicide, send him off to war, etc. Only a few of these things are forbidden in our country.”

By far, the murder by stabbing–or military coup–attracts more attention. That’s why the brazen golpe in Honduras has raised so much speculation about who was holding the knife. The treaty that will ensure that a nation like Honduras starves or remains on its knees tends to attract far less attention.

While it’s crucial that the coup plotters be brought to justice (even if that includes U.S. citizens) and that Manuel Zelaya return to his rightful place as president of Honduras, activists need to pay even closer attention to the silent murder by economic strangulation and/or free trade agreements. We need to ensure, for instance, that Clinton not be allowed to “cut a deal” to have Zelaya returned under “conditions” (as her husband did with Aristide in 1994). We need to lobby for fair trade agreements and not free trade agreements. We need, finally, to support movements in Latin America working toward unity against empire. Zelaya’s return to Honduras, without conditions, will be only one step in our struggle.

1. “Historia de Nicaragua,” 2002, UNAN, Nicaragua).
2. La Razon, Sept. 17, 2008

In a manner reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s New Cold War policies, Obama has vastly increased the military budget, increased the number of combat troops, targeted new regions for military intervention and backed military coups in regions traditionally controlled by the US. However Obama’s roll-back strategy occurs in a very different international and domestic context. Unlike Reagan, Obama faces a prolonged and profound recession/depression, massive fiscal and trade deficits, a declining role in the world economy and loss of political dominance in Latin America, the Middle East, East Asia and elsewhere. While Reagan faced off against a decaying Soviet Communist regime, Obama confronts surging world-wide opposition from a variety of independent secular, clerical, nationalist, liberal democratic and socialist electoral regimes and social movements anchored in local struggles.

Obama’s roll-back strategy is evident from his very first pronouncements, promising to reassert US dominance (‘leadership’) in the Middle East, his projection of massive military power in Afghanistan and military expansion in Pakistan and the destabilization of regimes through deep intervention by proxies as in Iran and Honduras.

Obama’s pursuit of the roll-back strategy operates a multi-track policy of overt military intervention, covert ‘civil society’ operations and soft-sell, seemingly benign diplomatic rhetoric, which relies heavily on mass media propaganda. Major ongoing events illustrate the roll-back policies in action.

In Afghanistan, Obama has more than doubled the US military forces from 32,000 to 68,000. In the first week of July his military commanders launched the biggest single military offensive in decades in the southern Afghan province of Helmand to displace indigenous resistance and governance.

In Pakistan, the Obama-Clinton-Holbrooke regime successfully put maximum pressure on their newly installed client Zedari regime to launch a massive military offensive and rollback the long-standing influence of Islamic resistance forces in the Northwest frontier regions, while US drones and Special Forces commandoes routinely bomb and assault villages and local Pashtun leaders suspected of supporting the resistance.

In Iraq, the Obama regime engages in a farcical ploy, reconfiguring the urban map of Baghdad to include US military bases and operations and pass off the result as “retiring the troops’ to their barracks”. Obama’s multi-billion-dollar investment in long-term, large-scale military infrastructure, including bases, airfields and compounds speaks to a ‘permanent’ imperial presence, not to his campaign promises of a programmed withdrawal. While ‘staging’ fixed election between US-certified client candidates is the norm in Iraq and Afghanistan where the presence of US troops guarantees a colonial victory, in Iran and Honduras, Washington resorts to covert operations to destabilize or overthrow incumbent Presidents who do not support Obama’s roll-back policies.

The covert and not-so-invisible operation in Iran found expression in a failed electoral challenge followed by ‘mass street demonstrations’ centered on the claim that the electoral victory of the incumbent anti-imperialist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was a result of ‘electoral fraud’. Western mass media played a major role during the electoral campaign exclusively providing favorable coverage of the opposition and negative accounts of the incumbent regime. The mass media blanketed the ‘news’ with pro-demonstrator propaganda, selectively presenting coverage to de-legitimize the elections and elected officials, echoing the charges of ‘fraud’. The propaganda success of the US-orchestrated destabilization campaign even found an echo among broad sections of what passes for the US ‘left’ who ignored the massive, coordinated US financing of key Iranian groups and politicos engaged in the street protests. Neo-conservative, liberal and itinerant leftist ‘free-lance journalists’, like Reese Erlich, defended the destabilization effort from their own particular vantage point as ‘a popular democratic movement against electoral fraud.’

The right/left cheerleaders of US destabilization projects fail to address several key explanatory factors:

1. None, for example, discuss the fact that several weeks before the election a rigorous survey conducted by two US pollsters revealed an electoral outcome very near to the actual voting result, including in the ethnic provinces where the opposition claimed fraud.

2. None of the critics discussed the $400 million dollars allocated by the Bush Administration to finance regime change, domestic destabilization and cross border terror operations. Many of the students and ‘civil society’ NGO’s in the demonstrations received funding from overseas foundations and NGO’s – which in turn were funded by the US government.

3. The charge of electoral fraud was cooked up after the results of the vote count were announced. In the entire run-up to the election, especially when the opposition believed they would win the elections – neither the student protesters nor the Western mass media nor the freelance journalists claimed impending fraud. During the entire day of voting, with opposition party observers at each polling place, no claims of voter intimidation or fraud were noted by the media, international observers or left backers of the opposition. Opposition party observers were present to monitor the entire vote count and yet, with only rare exception, no claims of vote rigging were made at the time. In fact, with the exception of one dubious claim by free-lance journalist Reese Erlich, none of the world’s media claimed ballot box stuffing. And even Erlich’s claims were admittedly based on unsubstantiated ‘anecdotal accounts’ from anonymous sources among his contacts in the opposition.

4. During the first week of protests in Tehran, the US, EU and Israeli leaders did not question the validity of the election outcome. Instead, they condemned the regime’s repression of the protestors. Clearly their well-informed embassies and intelligence operative provided a more accurate and systematic assessment of the Iranian voter preferences than the propaganda spun by the Western mass media and the useful idiots among the Anglo-American left.

The US-backed electoral and street opposition in Iran was designed to push to the limits a destabilization campaign, with the intention of rolling back Iranian influence in the Middle East, undermining Tehran’s opposition to US military intervention in the Gulf, its occupation of Iraq and, above all, Iran’s challenge to Israel’s projection of military power in the region. Anti-Iran propaganda and policy making has been heavily influenced for years on a daily basis by the entire pro-Israel power configuration in the US. This includes the 51 Presidents of the Major America Jewish Organizations with over a million members and several thousand full-time functionaries, scores of editorial writers and commentators dominating the opinion pages of the influential Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times as well as the yellow tabloid press.

Obama’s policy of roll back of Iranian influence counted on a two-step process: Supporting a coalition of clerical dissidents, pro-Western liberals, dissident democrats and right-wing surrogates of the US. Once in office, Washington would push the dissident clerics toward alliances with their strategic allies among pro-Western liberals and rightists, who would then shift policy in accordance with US imperial and Israeli colonial interests by cutting off support for Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, Venezuela, the Iraqi resistance and embrace the pro-US Saudi-Iraq-Jordan-Egypt clients. In other words, Obama’s roll-back policy is designed to relocate Iran to the pre-1979 political alignment.

Obama’s roll back of critical elected regimes to impose pliant clients found further expression in the recent military coup in Honduras. The use of the high command in the Honduras military and Washington’s long-standing ties with the local oligarchy, which controls the Congress and Supreme Court, facilitated the process and obviated the need for direct US intervention—as was the case in other recent coup efforts. Unlike Haiti where the US marines intervened to oust democratically elected Bertrand Aristide, only a decade ago, and openly backed the failed coup against President Chavez in 2002, and more recently, funded the botched coup against the President-elect Evo Morales in September 2008, the circumstances of US involvement in Honduras were more discrete in order to allow for ‘credible denial’.

The ‘structural presence’ and motives of the US with regard to ousted President Zelaya are readily identifiable. Historically the US has trained and socialized almost the entire Honduran officer corps and maintained deep penetration at all senior levels through daily consultation and common strategic planning. Through its military base in Honduras, the Pentagon’s military intelligence operatives have intimate contacts to pursue policies as well as to keep track of all political moves by all political actors. Because Honduras is so heavily colonized, it has served as an important base for US military intervention in the region: In 1954 the successful US-backed coup against the democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz was launched from Honduras. In 1961 the US-orchestrated Cuban exile invasion of Cuba was launched from Honduras. From 1981-1989, the US financed and trained over 20,000 ‘Contra’ mercenaries in Honduras which comprised the army of death squads to attack the democratically elected Nicaraguan Sandinista government. During the first seven years of the Chavez government, Honduran regimes were staunchly allied with Washington against the populist Caracas regime.

Obviously no military coups ever occurred or could occur against any US puppet regime in Honduras. The key to the shift in US policy toward Honduras occurred in 2007-2008 when the Liberal President Zelaya decided to improved relations with Venezuela in order to secure generous petro-subsidies and foreign aid from Caracas. Subsequently Zelaya joined ‘Petro-Caribe’, a Venezuelan-organized Caribbean and Central American association to provide long-term, low-cost oil and gas to meet the energy needs of member countries. In more recent days, Zelaya joined ALBA, a regional integration organization sponsored by President Chavez to promote greater trade and investment among its member countries in opposition to the US-promoted regional free trade pact, known as ALCA.

Since Washington defined Venezuela as a threat and alternative to its hegemony in Latin America, Zelaya’s alignment with Chavez on economic issues and his criticism of US intervention turned him into a likely target for US coup planners eager to make Zelaya an example and concerned about their access to Honduran military bases as their traditional launching point for intervention in the region.

Washington wrongly assumed that a coup in a small Central American ‘banana republic’ (indeed the original banana republic) would not provoke any major outcry. They believed that a Central American ‘roll back’ would serve as a warning to other independent-minded regimes in the Caribbean and Central American region of what awaits them if they align with Venezuela.

The mechanics of the coup are well-known and public: The Honduran military seized President Zelaya and ‘exiled’ him to Costa Rica; the oligarchs appointed one of their own in Congress as the interim ‘President’ while their colleagues in the Supreme Court provided bogus legality.

Latin American governments from the left to the right condemned the coup and called for the re-instatement of the legally-elected President. President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton, not willing to disown their clients, condemned unspecified ‘violence’ and called for ‘negotiations’ between the powerful usurpers and the weakened exile President – a clear recognition of the legitimate role of the Honduran generals as interlocutors.

After the United Nations General Assembly condemned the coup and, along with the Organization of American States, demanded Zelaya’s re-instatement, Obama and Secretary Clinton finally condemned the ousting of Zelaya but they refused to call it a ‘coup’, which according to US legislation would have automatically led to a complete suspension of their annual ($80 million) military and economic aid package to Honduras. While Zelaya met with all the Latin American heads of state, President Obama and Secretary Clinton turned him over to a lesser functionary in order not to weaken their allies in Honduran Junta. All the countries in the OAS withdrew their Ambassadors…except the US, whose embassy began to negotiate with the Junta to see how they might salvage the situation in which both were increasingly isolated – especially in the face of Honduras’ expulsion from the OAS.

Whether Zelaya eventually returns to office or whether the US-backed junta continues in office for an extended period of time, while Obama and Clinton sabotage his immediate return through prolonged negotiations, the key issue of the US-promoted ‘roll-back’ has been extremely costly diplomatically as well as politically.

The US backed coup in Honduras demonstrates that unlike the 1980’s when President Ronald Reagan invaded Grenada and President George Bush (Papa) invaded Panama, the situation and political profile of Latin America (and the rest of the world) has changed drastically. Back then the military and pro-US regimes in the region generally approved of US interventions and collaborated; a few protested mildly. Today the center-left and even rightist electoral regimes oppose military coups anywhere as a potential threat to their own futures.

Equally important, given the grave economic crisis and increasing social polarization, the last thing the incumbent regimes want is bloody domestic unrest, stimulated by crude US imperial interventions. Finally, the capitalist classes in Latin America’s center-left countries want stability because they can shift the balance of power via elections (as in the recent cases in Panama, Argentina) and pro-US military regimes can upset their growing trade ties with China, the Middle East and Venezuela/Bolivia.

Obama’s global roll-back strategy includes building offensive missile bases in Poland and the Czech Republic, not far from the Russian border. Concomitantly, Obama is pushing hard to incorporate Ukraine and Georgia in NATO, which will increase US military pressure on Russia’s southern flank. Taking advantage of Russian President Dimitry Medvedev’s ‘malleability’ (in the footsteps of Mikail Gorbechev) Washington has secured free passage of US troops and arms through Russia to the Afghan front, Moscow’s approval for new sanction against Iran, and recognition and support for the US puppet regime in Baghdad. Russian defense officials will likely question Medvedev’s obsequious behavior as Obama moves ahead with his plans to station nuclear missiles 5 minutes from Moscow.

Roll-Back: Predictable Failures and the Boomerang Effect

Obama’s roll-back strategy is counting on a revival of right-wing mass politics to ‘legitimize’ the re-assertion of US dominance. In Argentina throughout 2008, hundreds of thousands of lower and upper-middle class demonstrators took to the streets in the interior of the country under the leadership of pro-US big landowners associations to destabilize the ‘center-left’ Fernandez regime. In Bolivia, hundreds of thousands of middle class students, business-people, landowners and NGO affiliates, centered in Santa Cruz and four other wealthy provinces and heavily funded by US Ambassador Goldberg, Agency for International Development and the National Endowment for Democracy took to the streets, wrecking havoc and murdering over 30 indigenous supporters of President Morales in an effort to oust him from power. Similar rightist mass demonstrations have taken place in Venezuela in the past and more recently in Honduras and Iran.

The notion that mass demonstrations of the well-to-do screaming ‘democracy’ gives legitimacy to US-backed destabilization efforts against its democratically-elected adversaries is an idea promulgated by cynical propagandists in the mass media and parroted by gullible ‘progressive’ free-lance journalists who have never understood the class basis of mass politics.

Obama’s Honduran coup and the US-funded destabilization effort in Iran have much in common. Both take place against electoral processes in which critics of US policies defeated pro-Washington social forces. Having lost the ‘electoral option’ Obama’s roll back looks to extra-parliamentary ‘mass politics’ to legitimize elite effort to seize power: In Iran by dissident clerics and in Honduras by the generals and oligarchs.

In both Honduras and Iran, Washington’s foreign policy goals were the same: To roll back regimes whose leaders rejected US tutelage. In Honduras, the coup serves as a ‘lesson’ to intimidate other Central American and Caribbean countries who exit from the US camp and join the Venezuelan-led economic integration programs. Obama’s message is clear: such moves will result in US orchestrated sabotage and retaliation.

Through its backing of the military coup, Washington reminds all the countries of Latin America that the US still has the capability to implement its policies through the Latin American military elites, even as its own armed forces are tied down in wars and occupations in Asia and the Middle East and its economic presence is declining. Likewise in the Middle East, Obama’s destabilization of the Iranian regime is meant to intimidate Syria and other critics of US imperial policy and reassure Israel(and the Zionist power configuration in the US ) that Iran remains high on the US roll-back agenda.

Obama’s roll-back policies in many crucial ways follow in the steps of President Ronald Reagan (1981-89). Like Reagan, Obama’s presidency takes place in a time of US retreat, declining power and the advance of anti-imperialist politics. Reagan faced the aftermath of the US defeat in Indo-China, the successful spread of anti-colonial revolutions in Southern Africa (especially Angola and Mozambique), a successful democratic revolt in Afghanistan and a victorious social revolution in Nicaragua and major revolutionary movements in El Salvador and Guatemala. Like Obama today, Reagan set in motion a murderous military strategy of rolling-back these changes in order to undermine, destabilize and destroy the adversaries to US empire.

Obama faces a similar set of adversarial conditions in the current post-Bush period: Democratic advances throughout Latin America with new regional integration projects excluding the US; defeats and stalemates in the Middle East and South Asia; a revived and strengthened Russia projecting power in the former Soviet republics; declining US influence over NATO military commitments , a loss of political, economic, military and diplomatic credibility as a result of the Wall Street-induced global economic depression and prolonged un-successful regional wars.

Contrary to Obama, Ronald Reagan’s roll back took place under favorable circumstances. In Afghanistan, Reagan secured the support of the entire conservative Muslim world and operated through the key Afghan feudal-tribal leaders against a Soviet-backed, urban-based reformist regime in Kabul. Obama is in the reverse position in Afghanistan. His military occupation is opposed by the vast majority of Afghans and most of the Muslim population in Asia.

Reagan’s roll back in Central America, especially his Contra-mercenary invasion of Nicaragua, had the backing of Honduras and all the pro-US military dictatorships in Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and Brazil, as well as rightwing civilian government in the region. In contrast, Obama’s roll-back coup in Honduras and beyond face democratic electoral regimes throughout the region, an alliance of left nationalist regimes led by Venezuela and regional economic and diplomatic organizations staunchly opposed to any return to US domination and intervention. Obama’s roll-back strategy finds itself in total political isolation in the entire region.

Obama’s roll-back policies cannot wield the economic ‘Big Stick’ to force regimes in the Middle East and Asia to support his policies. Now there are alternative Asian markets, Chinese foreign investments, the deepening US depression and the disinvestment of overseas US banks and multi-nationals. Unlike Reagan, Obama cannot combine economic carrots with the military stick. Obama has to rely on the less effective and costly military option at a time when the rest of the world has no interest or will in projecting military power in regions of little economic significance or where they can attain market access via economic agreements.

Obama’s launch of the global roll-back strategy has boomeranged, even in its initial stage. In Afghanistan, the big troop build-up and the massive offensive into ‘Taliban’ strongholds has not led to any major military victories or even confrontations. The resistance has retired, blended in with the local population and will likely resort to prolonged decentralized, small-scale war of attrition designed to tie down several thousand troops in a sea of hostile Afghans, bleeding the US economy, increasing casualties, resolving nothing and eventually trying the patience of the US public now deeply immersed in job losses and rapidly declining living standards.

The coup, carried out by the US-backed Honduran military, has already re-affirmed US political and diplomatic isolation in the Hemisphere. The Obama regime is the only major country to retain an Ambassador in Honduras, the only country which refuses to regard the military take-over as a ‘coup’, and the only country to continue economic and military aid. Rather than establish an example of the US’ power to intimidate neighboring countries, the coup has strengthened the belief among all South and Central American countries that Washington is attempting to return to the ‘bad old days’ of pro-US military regimes, economic pillage and monopolized markets.

What Obama’s foreign policy advisers have failed to understand is that they can’t put their ‘Humpty Dumpty’ together again; they cannot return to the days of Reagan’s roll-back, Clinton’s unilateral bombing of Iraq, Yugoslavia and Somalia and his pillage of Latin America.

No major region, alliance or country will follow the US in its armed colonial occupation in peripheral (Afghanistan/Pakistan) or even central (Iran) countries, even as they join the US in economic sanctions, propaganda wars and electoral destabilization efforts against Iran.

No Latin American country will tolerate another US military putsch against a democratically elected president, even national populist regimes which diverge from US economic and diplomatic policies. The great fear and loathing of the US-backed coup stems from the entire Latin American political class’ memory of the nightmare years of US backed military dictatorships.

Obama’s military offensive, his roll-back strategy to recover imperial power is accelerating the decline of the American Republic. His administration’s isolation is increasingly evidenced by his dependence on Israel-Firsters who occupy his Administration and the Congress as well as influential pro-Israel pundits in the mass media who identify roll-back with Israel’s own seizure of Palestinian land and military threats to Iran.

Roll back has boomeranged: Instead of regaining the imperial presence, Obama has submerged the republic and, with it, the American people into greater misery and instability.