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.

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?

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.

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.

Holding the two meetings together meant that Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh attended the SCO for the first time. The SCO, Russian and China ’s Eurasian security organization, has become a key counterweight to US hegemony in the world, and Russia and China are eager to have India upgrade its position of observer to member. This summit appeared to have coaxed India a step closer, as the SCO security agenda has shifted its emphasis to the growing security threat from Afghanistan, which satisfies the more pro-US India.

But the headline-stealer was the BRIC summit. While the US plays its tiresome geopolitical games on Russia ’s eastern borders, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev was busy charting a new economic and political reality in the heart of Eurasia. “The artificially maintained unipolar system,” he lectured, is based on “one big center of consumption, financed by a growing deficit and . . . one formerly strong reserve currency.” At the root of the global financial crisis, he concluded, is that the US makes too little and spends too much. Especially upsetting for Russia is its continued military largesse to Georgia , the missile shield in Eastern Europe and its invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. “The summit must create the conditions for a fairer world order,” he read out, as Presidents Hu Jintao of China, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil and the Indian prime minister looked on approvingly.

China backs Russia’s two big gripes with the US: “The security of some states cannot be ensured at the expense of others, including the expansion of military-political alliances or the creation of global or regional missile defense systems,” the joint Chinese-Russian statement says. Chinese leader Hu Jintao also joined Medvedev in denouncing US plans to militarize outer space: “Russia and China advocate peaceful uses of outer space and oppose the prospect of it being turned into a new area for deploying weapons . . . The sides will actively facilitate practical work on a draft treaty on the prevention of the deployment of weapons in outer space, and of the use of force or threats to use force against space facilities.”

Iranian President Ahmadinejad, fresh from trouncing his pro-Western rival in presidential elections, dotted the “I’s at the SCO meeting, taking a leaf from Venezuela ’s Hugo Chavez: “The international capitalist order is retreating. It is absolutely obvious that the age of empires has ended and its revival will not take place.”

But there was more than colorful rhetoric in all this, despite the pooh-poohing of Western pundits, who deride the SCO and BRIC as a collection of misfits and wannabes. The BRICs have put the US dollar on notice, and are already finding alternatives as a means of clearing accounts. Medvedev called for the IMF to include the Russian ruble and the Chinese yuan in the basket of currencies used to value its financial products. But that is just for starters. Chinese Central Bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan says the goal is now to create a reserve currency “that is disconnected from individual nations.”

Even more ominous for the threadbare dollar, though perfectly sensible in the computer age, is the revival of stone-age barter on a big scale, which bypasses the need for any reserve currency at all. Brazil ’s biggest trading partner, once the US, is now (surprise) China , and they are using barter deals to settler their accounts, bypassing the dollar altogether. Two weeks ago China reached an agreement with Malaysia to denominate trade between the two countries in yuan.

As dollars are the world’s default reserve currency today, the US government can churn them out at will to paper over its massive foreign debt and budget deficit, effectively letting it steal other countries assets legally and forcing countries everywhere to finance its military spending. China , Russia , Brazil and now India are well aware of this, have had enough, and have the international heft to do something about it. For them, the US is the ultimate rogue nation. How else to characterize a country that insists other countries follow one set of laws — on war, debt repayment and treatment of prisoners — but ignores them itself? The US is now the world’s largest debtor yet has curiously avoided the pain of “structural adjustments” that the IMF imposes on other debtor economies, refusing to cut its bloated military budget or increase taxes meaningfully. “The world economy should not remain entangled, so directly and unnecessarily, in the vicissitudes of a single great world power,” said Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Brazil’s minister for strategic affairs.

The US can never “repay” the $4 trillion debt it owes foreign governments, their central banks and the wealth funds set up precisely to dispose of the global dollar glut. “ America has become a deadbeat — and indeed, a militarily aggressive one,” notes Michael Hudson. The problem is how to contain it. Rumblings are coming not only from fringe peaceniks. Yu Yongding, a former Chinese central bank advisor now with China ’s Academy of Sciences, advises US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner that the US should save by cutting back on its military spending. “US tax revenue is not likely to increase in the short term because of low economic growth, inflexible expenditures and the cost of ‘fighting two wars’.”

The BRICs are trying to organize their affairs so that they are no longer the unwilling recipients of dollars. No matter what they think of the US, they hasten to insist they don’t want to see the US dollar collapse, since they hold most of their own reserves in dollars. But they are beginning to withdraw the life-support system the US has been relying on since Nixon completed the transition from a gold-based reserve currency to a purely paper one in 1971.

Just to emphasize how serious the situation is, according to the Financial Times, the top 5 financial institutions by market capitalization in 1999 were, in order, Citigroup (US), Bank of America (US), HSBC (UK), Lloyds TSB (UK), Fannie Mae (US). The top 5 as of 2009 are Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, China Construction Bank, Bank of China, HSBC (UK), and JPMorgan Chase (US). From 0:3 to 3:1 for China, now officially the world’s second largest economy after the US — a rout.

Just as countries are beginning to rediscover age-old barter, fixed, pegged and dual exchange rates are also being considered, mechanisms once derided as passé. In the face of continued US overspending, de-dollarization will force countries to return to nationally determined fixed exchange rates and dual exchange rates — one exchange rate for commodity trade, another for capital movements and investments.

The world is discarding its sixty-year old framework, though the historic meetings in Yekaterinburg elicited only a collective yawn from most media. “Between the BRIC countries, there is really little in common,” said Yevgeni Yasin, head of research at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. “Each of them has its own destiny, its own special character, and it will be much more difficult for them to agree among themselves than separately with Western countries.” China depends on manufactured exports to the US and Europe. Russia sells oil, natural gas and other natural resources. Brazil relies on agricultural exports, while India’s growth has been largely based on its domestic market.

However, Jeng Fengin at the Chinese Institute of Modern-Day International Relations is less blasé: “The financial crisis has given a much-needed boost to the fledgling partnership between Brazil, Russia, India and China and helped our voice to be heard everywhere.” President of the Brazil-Russia Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Tourism Gilberto Ramos warned skeptics that the BRIC countries are all powers of a truly continental scope and have very much in common, both geographically and macro economically.

In case Obama hasn’t noticed, Eurasia is coalescing, not around littler Georgia and big brother Poland, with their pretensions as forward bases for the mighty US empire, but around China, Russia and India. He would do well to remember Yekaterinburg is not only famous for its Russian past, but for Gary Powers, the US spy shot down in 1960, a fitting metaphor for how Russia and China are taking aim at the US-dominated international financial order.

Inside Iran, advocates for reform and human rights have long pleaded for the U.S. government to keep out of Iranian affairs. After the CIA organized the coup that overthrew Iran’s democracy in 1953, Washington kept the Shah in power for a quarter century. When I was in Tehran four years ago, during the election that made Mahmoud Ahmadinejad president, what human rights activists most wanted President Bush to do was shut up.

But Bush played to the same kind of peanut gallery that is now applauding the likes of Sen. John McCain. The Bush White House denigrated the 2005 election just before the balloting began — to the delight of the hardest-line Iranian fundamentalists. The ultra-righteous Bush rhetoric gave a significant boost to Ahmadinejad’s campaign.

Denunciations and threats from Washington are the last thing that Iran’s reform advocates want. And Iranians certainly don’t need encouragement from Uncle Sam to do what they can to bring about democratic change.

John McCain doesn’t get it. And neither does Hugo Chavez.

Of course, Chavez has practical reasons for his warmth toward Ahmadinejad. (Practitioners of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” usually do.) While sharing Washington as a common adversary, their oil-rich countries have the makings of a world-shaking energy bloc. And they’re on similar pages with well-founded antipathies toward institutions like the World Trade Organization, the IMF and the World Bank.

But human rights — whether food, shelter and healthcare or freedom of speech, press and elections — should not be matters of winks and nods.

As voting began in Iran on June 12, Chavez praised Ahmadinejad as “a courageous fighter for the Islamic Revolution, the defense of the Third World, and in the struggle against imperialism.”

Nine days later, with a bloody crackdown on Iranian protesters gaining momentum, Chavez declared that “Ahmadinejad’s triumph was a triumph all the way.” The Venezuelan president condemned those “trying to stain Ahmadinejad’s triumph and through that weaken the government and the Islamic revolution.”

I’m among millions of progressive North Americans who admire much of what Chavez has been doing for economic equity and social justice in Venezuela. But that admiration is no reason to be quiet when Chavez makes common cause with repression in Iran.

Meanwhile, in the United States, we have nothing to be smug about. The day after President Obama toughened his criticisms of Iran’s rulers at his June 23 news conference, a venerable human-rights organization named the Quixote Center was noting that more than 1,200 people had sent letters and faxes asking the Obama administration “to denounce the violent repression of peaceful protests organized in response to the U.S.-Peru Free Trade Agreement” — a massacre of indigenous people in the Peruvian Amazon.

What happened during that massacre on June 5? “A hundred people were wounded by gunshot, and between 20 and 25 were killed,” the Center for International Policy reports.

“The Obama administration,” the Quixote Center noted, “remains silent on the massacre in Peru.”

But the fact of some hypocrisy from President Obama does not change the fact of some idiocy from President Chavez.

On Wednesday (June 24), the Associated Press reports, “Chavez reiterated his support for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a close ally, and said he is ‘completely sure’ Ahmadinejad fairly won re-election on June 12.”

For good measure, Chavez ascribed the protests in Iran to Washington and its allies. “He said protests and violence that have rocked Iran since the contested vote appear part of a recurring strategy by U.S. and European intelligence agencies to destabilize enemy governments.” Chavez declared: “From my point of view, that’s what’s happening in Iran.”

It seems to be beyond the vision of both Hugo Chavez and John McCain to see that vast numbers of Iranian people, fed up with repression, are able to grasp the historical moment on their own while opposing the regime. The last thing they need or want is “help” from the U.S. government as they struggle for a democratic future.

Rumblings about the impossibility of closing Guantanamo were being heard even as Obama took office. It appears there’s no place to send the prisoners, most of whom are innocent of anything other than fighting invaders, if that. Congress does not want to allow them to come to stay in equally notorious US jails, where overcrowding, violence, drugs and AIDS are endemic. Nor is Congress willing to fork over any money to close Guantanamo. Of course this is nonsense. Venezuela’s president offered to take them all, but Obama dare not accept any favors from someone so principled, lest his house of cards come tumbling down.

As for the tribunals, Obama faces two deadlines: his 120-day review of the tribunals has now ended, and on 27 May the trial of Ahmed Al-Darbi, a Saudi accused of plotting to attack a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, was scheduled to begin, and it appears it now will, but under slightly improved conditions, including restricting hearsay evidence. The tribunals now must move quickly in a race against the clock before Guantanamo is scheduled to be closed next January. If the prison is indeed closed and the trials are still going on then, the detainees will have to be brought to the US, where they will receive greater legal rights.

About 20 of the 241 detainees currently at Guantanamo will now be tried by military tribunals along with 13 already in the works. The rest of the detainees must either be released, transferred to other nations or tried by civilian prosecutors in US federal courts. It’s also possible that some could continue to be held indefinitely without trial as prisoners of war, though government officials insist they will now receive full Geneva Conventions protections.

The decision to persist with the tribunals was immediately attacked by critics. “It’s disappointing that Obama is seeking to revive rather than end this failed experiment,” said Jonathan Hafetz of the American Civil Liberties Union. “There’s no detainee at Guantanamo who cannot be tried and shouldn’t be tried in the regular federal courts system.”

How did this sorry state of affairs come about so soon after all the fanfare?

Obama stressed to families of victims of the USS Cole attack when he met them in February that he would not free “potential jihadists”, but when Binyam Mohamed, suspected in a plot to set off a “dirty bomb” inside the US, was repatriated to Britain and released, this was greeted by a hysterical outcry in the US, ignoring the fact that Mohamed was determined to be innocent by the world’s oldest upholder of due process. The pressures on Obama to hold the Bush course are immense, with former vice president Richard Cheney brazenly attacking him as a wimp on US television.

Then there’s Obama’s decision to block the court-ordered release of more torture photos. He was for the pictures being released before deciding last week he was against it, apparently convinced by military officials the photos would increase danger for US troops.

Dawdling, of course, just confirms the view of the rest of the world, especially among Muslims, that Obama is not the principled liberal they were led to expect, that he is afraid to make a clean breast of the past atrocities, that he is merely a politically correct Bush lite. The irony being that, contrary to Cheney’s ravings, it is his very indecisiveness that increases the danger for US troops.

The legal intricacies of Guantanamo vs. US incarceration and jurisdiction are less sensational than the torture pictures. But the likelihood of many Muslims actually seeing the latest shots of US troops in Iraq sodomizing those who resist them is remote. In any case, the pictures were originally intended for possible publication by the torturers themselves. This startling revelation was made by Seymour Hersh in 2004 when he exposed the logic behind the officially-condoned US strategy of sexual torture. The idea was to use blackmail to encourage victims to work for the occupiers as spies, threatening to publish the photos unless the victims agreed to collaborate with the occupiers. A government consultant revealed to Hersh, “I was told that the purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could insert back in the population.”

The strategy, of course, failed spectacularly, and the photos — old and new — are being consumed primarily by jingoistic Americans reveling in such scenes of violence inflicted on the “enemy”, inured to the monstrosity of this by their regular diet of media violence and Islamophobia. Already the “blocked” photos are being leaked all over the net, making Obama’s last minute efforts a fool’s errand.

How such unconscionable behavior became official US policy is fascinating. American pilots were trained during the “first” Gulf War by watching pornographic films, according to the Washington Post at the time. In order to better subjugate Arab Iraq, according to Joseph Massad, “American imperial military culture super-masculinizes not only its own male soldiers, but also its female soldiers who can partake of the feminization of Iraqi men.” The pornographic pictures are merely the logical outcome of this strategy to subdue the so-called enemy, constructed by diabolical Pentagon strategists. The 2003 invasion updated this strategy, though with unintended consequences, as new technology allowed simple soldiers to produce their own DVDs of their sadistic frolics.

This stark reality is inverted in Washington, as interpreted by Obama’s envoy of peace to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, who told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about US media efforts in Pakistan: “Concurrent with the insurgency is an information war. We are losing that war.” Rather than acknowledging past sins, however, he advocates even more TV and radio propaganda supporting the US wars. Holbrooke is referring to the $100 million propaganda campaign launched by the Bush regime in Iraq in 2005 by a Washington-based PR firm to plant administration propaganda in the Iraqi news media and to pay Iraqi journalists to write favorable stories about the occupation.

So it appears withholding the Abu Ghraib photos is really part of the US government media war, just as the question mark over Guantanamo is really part of the military plans to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan come hell or high water. And that these policies are not up for discussion. The reversal of Obama’s key policies after only a few months does not bode well for him or the US.

Perhaps withholding the photos is also connected with the appointment of Stanley McChrystal as head of the military in Afghanistan, which should brace itself for more Abu Ghraib-style action. McChrystal cut his teeth in Iraq, where he directed the Joint Special Operations Command’s special operation teams, which carry out assassinations and terrorize local populations opposed to the occupation. McChrystal was a favorite of Rumsfeld and Cheney. He was a direct participant in overseeing torture, according to a report by Esquire and Human Rights Watch in 2006.

Just about everyone but the US officials conducting their war on terrorism realize by now that it is this very policy that is producing more and more jihadists, and will continue to produce them until Obama, or some future less timid president, declares an end to this campaign of terror being conducted by the US itself, with its allies dragged kicking and screaming behind it.

This is no time for Obama to be indecisive. Guantanamo must be closed and remaining prisoners must be tried in US courts or repatriated. If that’s a problem, he can always take up Chavez’s offer. And patch up relations with him and Castro in the process. Hell, why not give back Guantanamo to Cuba as a peace offering while he’s at it? The important thing is not to blink while he’s doing what’s right, or else the jackals of war will chew him to shreds.

The latest fear among Democrats is that the gulf between them and the Republicans is widening, even as Democratic policies are gaining support among the people. Huh? They should take a leaf from FDR’s book, to fear nothing but fear alone. Let the Republicans march into the wilderness. Take control of US politics for the next two decades by following truly popular, socially just policies. Americans are not imperialists at heart. They will follow you. And be sure to close Guantanamo.

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

Evo Morales on a Hunger Strike

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

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

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

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

Summit of the Americas: Cuba, Obama and Chavez

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

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

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

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

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

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

Latin America Changes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is more detail on a few specific countries:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freddy was a diminutive 70 year old who maintained that he was 59 until Amelia and I presented him with mathematical contradictions stemming from the age of his oldest child. He denied that the triumph of the Cuban rooster was indicative of broader regional trends—despite the recent triumph of a constitutional amendment authorizing Venezuelan officials to run for indefinite reelection—and surmised that the Cuban rooster simply controlled the media.

As for social programs involving Cuban doctors, Freddy claimed that Hugo Chávez’ Misión Barrio Adentro was an attempt at foreign infiltration of Venezuela under humanitarian guise, as well as a means of perpetuating the cycle of discrimination against the non-poor. Amelia and I pointed out that:

   1. the Barrio Adentro staff in Belén was convinced that our request for free ultrasounds of various parts of our bodies was a maneuver concocted by the CIA.
   2. this did not prevent them from attending to us, thus perpetuating a cycle of discrimination in which medical supplies were denied to Cuba by the US such that they could be used on Amelia and me by Cuban doctors in Venezuela.

Posada Don Manuel, Belén’s sole option for accommodations, consisted of approximately a dozen rooms and a parking lot, all contained within a high wall with a white sliding gate. Over vodka and insects in the parking lot on our first night in town, Freddy lamented the number of rooms that were still only half-finished after a decade of work, and attributed the delay to the fact that construction of the posada had overlapped with construction of the Bolivarian state. I had heard similar complaints from my father’s relatives in Cuba, who claimed to have been attempting to repaint their bathroom for the past 50 years; lack of access to paint did not seem to be an issue at the posada in Belén, where the inside of the surrounding wall had been divided into colorful panels devoted to a variety of subjects.

Two of the panels featured Simón Bolívar looking off into the distance with accompanying quotes. Others advertised the town’s claims to fame (handmade cheese and cockfighting), its official religion (Catholic), and its primary tourist attractions (Posada Don Manuel). The specification of religious orientations was justified by Freddy:

FREDDY: Chávez no es cristiano.

The cockfighting panel, meanwhile, was substantiated by the arrival to the posada of a gallero whose T-shirt, hat, belt buckle, and keychain depicted roosters in various poses. He was toting a live rooster in a carrying case that also depicted a rooster, and informed us that there would be a cockfight the following day, 1 March, at a nearby arena. Freddy attempted to resume his position at the center of the conversation by announcing once again that he was 59.

When Amelia and I arrived to the arena the next morning, we were immediately ushered through a crowd of beer drinkers into a corner where two men were attaching artificial spurs to a rooster’s legs with adhesive tape. A single poster of Chávez holding a Palm Sunday cross hung on the wall, and most of the red baseball caps present featured cockfighting slogans rather than slogans of the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela.

Once the rooster had been prepared for the fight, Amelia and I were ushered back through the beer drinkers to the fighting ring and advised to refrain from placing bets based on which rooster we thought was prettier. We were otherwise incorporated into the action when Amelia got to draw a numbered beer cap out of a sack in order to determine the order of battle, and when we had a bloodied rooster thrust in front of our faces so that we could observe how one of his artificial spurs had fallen off.

The man doing the thrusting explained that a lost spur eliminated the possibility of victory. Amelia and I asked if the rooster from Tampa had also lost a spur during his confrontation with the Cuban rooster; the man was unsure of the details, but did know that Chávez had lost a spur during his confrontation with the global financial crisis. We recalled other applications of animal terminology to the president of Venezuela by segments of the opposition, and suggested adopting the classification of him as a black monkey as a possible jumping off point for negotiations with Barack Obama, who might sympathize with fellow victims of primate jokes.

Amelia and I lasted for 2.5 fights out of a scheduled 16 and returned to Posada Don Manuel to find Freddy sitting in a chair in front of the wall panel featuring the painting of Posada Don Manuel. When we informed him we had just been at the cockfighting arena, Freddy announced that the poster of the Palm Sunday cross was further evidence of Chávez masquerading as a man of religion—as was the fact that he had read a passage from the Bible during the 20th-anniversary commemoration of the Caracazo uprising on 27 February.

The Caracazo had come about in reaction to policies of President Carlos Andrés Pérez, who had confronted his own economic crisis by donating his spurs to the IMF, and had resulted in the killing and disappearing of untold numbers of citizens by the national armed forces. During his commemoration of the event, Chávez confirmed that the Venezuelan administration at the time had not been based at the Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas but rather at the White House.

Freddy contended that the current Venezuelan administration was based not at the Miraflores presidential palace but rather in a sickbed in Havana, and that governing regimes founded on national diets of rice and beans were destructive to the human body. The dangers of the new pecking order were reinforced a few days later, when Chávez announced from Miraflores the expropriation of a rice plant belonging to a Minnesota-based multinational that had been evading price controls on unmodified food items by modifying them.

In Cambodia they’re once again endeavoring to hold trials to bring some former senior Khmer Rouge officials to justice for their 1975-79 war crimes and crimes against humanity. The current defendant in a United Nations-organized trial, Kaing Guek Eav, who was the head of a Khmer Rouge torture center, has confessed to atrocities, but insists he was acting under orders.¹ As we all know, this is the defense that the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected for the Nazi defendants. Everyone knows that, right? No one places any weight on such a defense any longer, right? We make jokes about Nazis declaring: “I was only following orders!” (”Ich habe nur den Befehlen gehorcht!”) Except that both the Bush and Obama administrations have spoken in favor of it. Here’s the new head of the CIA, Leon Panetta: “What I have expressed as a concern, as has the president, is that those who operated under the rules that were provided by the Attorney General in the interpretation of the law [concerning torture] and followed those rules ought not to be penalized. And … I would not support, obviously, an investigation or a prosecution of those individuals. I think they did their job.”² Operating under the rules … doing their job … are of course the same as following orders.

The UN Convention Against Torture (first adopted in 1984), which has been ratified by the United States, says quite clearly, “An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.” The Torture Convention enacts a prohibition against torture that is a cornerstone of international law and a principle on a par with the prohibition against slavery and genocide.

Of course, those giving the orders are no less guilty. On the very day of Obama’s inauguration, the United Nation’s special torture rapporteur invoked the Convention in calling on the United States to pursue former president George W. Bush and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld for torture and bad treatment of Guantanamo prisoners.³

On several occasions, President Obama has indicated his reluctance to pursue war crimes charges against Bush officials, by expressing a view such as: “I don’t believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” This is the same excuse Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen has given for not punishing Khmer Rouge leaders. In December 1998 he asserted: “We should dig a hole and bury the past and look ahead to the 21st century with a clean slate.”⁴ Hun Sen has been in power all the years since then, and no Khmer Rouge leader has been convicted for their role in the historic mass murder.

And by not investigating Bush officials, Obama is indeed saying that they’re above the law. Like the Khmer Rouge officials have been. Michael Ratner, a professor at Columbia Law School and president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said prosecuting Bush officials is necessary to set future anti-torture policy. “The only way to prevent this from happening again is to make sure that those who were responsible for the torture program pay the price for it. I don’t see how we regain our moral stature by allowing those who were intimately involved in the torture programs to simply walk off the stage and lead lives where they are not held accountable.”⁵

One reason for the non-prosecution may be that serious trials of the many Bush officials who contributed to the torture policies might reveal the various forms of Democratic Party non-opposition and collaboration.

It should also be noted that the United States supported Pol Pot (who died in April 1998) and the Khmer Rouge for several years after they were ousted from power by the Vietnamese in 1979. This support began under Jimmy Carter and his National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and continued under Ronald Reagan.⁶ A lingering bitterness by American cold warriors toward Vietnam, the small nation which monumental US power had not been able to defeat, and its perceived closeness to the Soviet Union, appears to be the only explanation for this policy. Humiliation runs deep when you’re a superpower.

Neither should it be forgotten in this complex cautionary tale that the Khmer Rouge in all likelihood would never have come to power, nor even made a serious attempt to do so, if not for the massive American “carpet bombing” of Cambodia in 1969-70 and the US-supported overthrow of Prince Sihanouk in 1970 and his replacement by a man closely tied to the United States.⁷ Thank you Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Well done, lads.

By the way, if you’re not already turned off by many of Obama’s appointments, listen to how James Jones opened his talk at the Munich Conference on Security Policy on February 8: “Thank you for that wonderful tribute to Henry Kissinger yesterday. Congratulations. As the most recent National Security Advisor of the United States, I take my daily orders from Dr. Kissinger.”⁸

Lastly, Spain’s High Court recently announced it would launch a war crimes investigation into an Israeli ex-defense minister and six other top security officials for their role in a 2002 attack that killed a Hamas commander and 14 civilians in Gaza.⁹ Spain has for some time been the world’s leading practitioner of “universal jurisdiction” for human-rights violations, such as their indictment of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet a decade ago. The Israeli case involved the dropping of a bomb on the home of the Hamas leader; most of those killed were children. The United States does this very same thing every other day in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Given the refusal of American presidents to invoke even their “national jurisdiction” over American officials-cum-war criminals, we can only hope that someone reminds the Spanish authorities of a few names, names like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, Feith, Perle, Yoo, and a few others with a piece missing, a piece that’s shaped like a conscience. There isn’t even a need to rely on international law alone, for there’s an American law against war crimes, passed by a Republican-dominated Congress in 1996.¹⁰

The noted Israeli columnist, Uri Avnery, writing about the Israeli case, tried to capture the spirit of Israeli society that produces such war criminals and war crimes. He observed: “This system indoctrinates its pupils with a violent tribal cult, totally ethnocentric, which sees in the whole of world history nothing but an endless story of Jewish victimhood. This is a religion of a Chosen People, indifferent to others, a religion without compassion for anyone who is not Jewish, which glorifies the God-decreed genocide described in the Biblical book of Joshua.”¹¹

It would take very little substitution to apply this statement to the United States — like “American” for “Jewish” and “American exceptionalism” for “a Chosen People”.

Hell Hath No Fury Like an Imperialist Scorned

Hugo Chávez’s greatest sin is that he has shown disrespect for the American Empire. Or as they would say in America’s inner cities — He’s dissed the Man. Such behavior of course cannot go unpunished lest it give other national leaders the wrong idea. Over the years, the United States has gotten along just fine with brutal dictators, mass murderers, torturers, and leaders who did nothing to relieve the poverty of their population — Augusto Pinochet, Pol Pot, the Greek Junta, Ferdinand Marcos, Suharto, Duvalier, Mobutu, the Brazil Junta, Somoza, Saddam Hussein, South African apartheid leaders, Portuguese fascists, etc., etc., terrible guys all, all seriously supported by Washington at one time or another; for none made it a regular habit, if ever, to diss the Man.

The latest evidence, we are told, that Hugo Chávez is a dictator and a threat to life as we know it is that he pushed for and got a constitutional amendment to remove term limits from the presidency. The American media and the opposition in Venezuela often make it sound as if Chávez is going to be guaranteed office for life, whereas he of course will have to be elected each time. Neither are we reminded that it’s not unusual for a nation to not have a term limit for its highest office. France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, if not all of Europe and much of the rest of the world, do not have such a limit. The United States did not have a term limit on the office of the president during the nation’s first 162 years, until the ratification of the 22nd Amendment in 1951. Were all American presidents prior to that time dictators?

In 2005, when Colombian President Alvaro Uribe succeeded in getting term limits lifted, the US mainstream media took scant notice. President Bush subsequently honored Uribe with the American Presidential Medal of Freedom. But in the period leading up to the February 15 referendum in Venezuela, the American media were competing with each other over who could paint Chávez and the Venezuelan constitutional process in the most critical and ominous terms. Typical was an op-ed in the Washington Post the day before the vote, which was headlined: “Closing in on Hugo Chávez”. Its opening sentence read: “The beginning of the end is setting in for Hugo Chávez.”¹²

For several years now, the campaign to malign Chávez has at times included issues of Israel and anti-Semitism. An isolated vandalism of a Caracas synagogue on January 30th of this year fed into this campaign. Synagogues are of course vandalized occasionally in the United States and many European countries, but no one ascribes this to a government policy driven by anti-semitism. With Chávez they do. In the American media, the lead up to the Venezuelan vote was never far removed from the alleged “Jewish” issue.

“Despite the government’s efforts to put the [synagogue] controversy to rest,” the New York Times wrote a few days before the referendum vote, “a sense of dread still lingers among Venezuela’s 12,000 to 14,000 Jews.”¹³

A day earlier, a Washington Post editorial was entitled: “Mr. Chávez vs. the Jews – With George W. Bush gone, Venezuela’s strongman has found new enemies.”¹⁴ Shortly before, a Post headline had informed us: “Jews in S. America Increasingly Uneasy — Government and Media Seen Fostering Anti-Semitism in Venezuela, Elsewhere.”¹⁵

So commonplace has the Chávez-Jewish association become that a leading US progressive organization, Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA) in Washington, DC, recently distributed an article that reads more like the handiwork of a conservative group than a progressive one. I was prompted to write to them as follows:

Dear People,

I’m very sorry to say that I found your Venezuelan commentary by Larry Birns and David Rosenblum Felson to be remarkably lacking. The authors seem unable, or unwilling, to distinguish between being against Israeli policies from anti-semitism. It’s kind of late in the day for them to not have comprehended the difference. They are forced to fall back on a State Department statement to make their case. Is that not enough said?

They condemn Chávez likening Israel’s occupation of Gaza to the Holocaust. But what if it’s an apt comparison? They don’t delve into this question at all.

They also condemn the use of the word “Zionism”, saying that “in 9 times out of 10 involving the use of this word in fact smacks of anti-Semitism.” Really? Can they give a precise explanation of how one distinguishes between an anti-Semitic use of the word and a non-anti-semitic use of it? That would be interesting.

The authors write that Venezuela’s “anti-Israeli initiative … revealingly transcends the intensity of almost every Arabic nation or normal adversary of Israel.” Really. Since when are the totally gutless, dictator Arab nations the standard bearer for progressives? The ideal we should emulate. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan are almost never seriously and harshly critical of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians. Therefore, Venezuela shouldn’t be?

The authors state: “In a Christmas Eve address to the nation, Chávez charged that, ‘Some minorities, descendants of the same ones who crucified Christ … took all the world’s wealth for themselves’. Here, Chávez was not talking so much about Robin Hood, but rather unquestionably dipping into the lore of anti-Semitism.” Well, here’s the full quote: “The world has enough for all, but it turns out that some minorities, descendants of the same ones who crucified Christ, descendants of the same ones who threw Bolivar out of here and also crucified him in their own way at Santa Marta there in Colombia …” Hmm, were the Jews so active in South America?

The ellipsis after the word “Christ” indicates that the authors consciously and purposely omitted the words that would have given the lie to their premise. Truly astonishing.

After Chávez won the term-limits referendum with about 55% of the vote, a State Department spokesperson stated: “For the most part this was a process that was fully consistent with democratic process.” Various individuals and websites on the left have responded to this as an encouraging sign that the Obama administration is embarking on a new Venezuelan policy. At the risk of sounding like a knee-reflex cynic, I think this attitude is at best premature, at worst rather naive. It’s easy for a State Department a level-or-so above the Bushies, i.e., semi-civilized, to make such a statement. A little more difficult would be accepting as normal and unthreatening Venezuela having good relations with countries like Cuba, Iran and Russia and not blocking Venezuela from the UN Security Council. Even more significant would be the United States ending its funding of groups in Venezuela determined to subvert and/or overthrow Chávez.

You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught

I’ve been playing around with a new book for awhile. I don’t know if I’ll find the time to actually complete it, but if I do it’ll be called something like “Myths of U.S. foreign policy: How Americans keep getting fooled into support”. The leading myth of all, the one which entraps more Americans than any other, is the belief that the United States, in its foreign policy, means well. American leaders may make mistakes, they may blunder, they may lie, they may even on the odd occasion cause more harm than good, but they do mean well. Their intentions are honorable, if not divinely inspired. Of that most Americans are certain. And as long as a person clings to that belief, it’s rather unlikely that s/he will become seriously doubtful and critical of the official stories.

It takes a lot of repetition while an American is growing up to inculcate this message into their young consciousness, and lots more repetition later on. Think of some of the lines from the song about racism from the Broadway classic show, “South Pacific” — “You’ve got to be taught” …

You’ve got to be taught
from year to year.
It’s got to be drummed
in your dear little ear.
You’ve got to be taught
before it’s too late.
Before you are 6 or 7 or 8.
To hate all the people
your relatives hate.
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

The education of an American true-believer is ongoing, continuous. All forms of media, all the time. Here is Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest military officer in the United States, writing in the Washington Post recently:

We in the U.S. military are likewise held to a high standard. Like the early Romans, we are expected to do the right thing, and when we don’t, to make it right again. We have learned, after seven years of war, that trust is the coin of the realm — that building it takes time, losing it takes mere seconds, and maintaining it may be our most important and most difficult objective. That’s why images of prisoner maltreatment at Abu Ghraib still serve as recruiting tools for al-Qaeda. And it’s why each civilian casualty for which we are even remotely responsible sets back our efforts to gain the confidence of the Afghan people months, if not years. It doesn’t matter how hard we try to avoid hurting the innocent, and we do try very hard. It doesn’t matter how proportional the force we deploy, how precisely we strike. It doesn’t even matter if the enemy hides behind civilians. What matters are the death and destruction that result and the expectation that we could have avoided it. In the end, all that matters is that, despite our best efforts, sometimes we take the very lives we are trying to protect. … Lose the people’s trust, and we lose the war. … I see this sort of trust being fostered by our troops all over the world. They are building schools, roads, wells, hospitals and power stations. They work every day to build the sort of infrastructure that enables local governments to stand on their own. But mostly, even when they are going after the enemy, they are building friendships. They are building trust. And they are doing it in superb fashion.¹⁶

How many young servicemembers have heard such a talk from Mullen or other officers? How many of them have not been impressed, even choked up? How many Americans reading or hearing such stirring words have not had a lifetime of reinforcement reinforced once again? How many could even imagine that Admiral Mullen is spouting a bunch of crap? The great majority of Americans will swallow it. When Mullen declares: “What matters are the death and destruction that result and the expectation that we could have avoided it”, he’s implying that there was no way to avoid it. But of course it could have been easily avoided by not dropping bombs on the Afghan people.

You tell the true-believers that the truth is virtually the exact opposite of what Mullen has said and they look at you like you just got off the Number 36 bus from Mars. Bill Clinton bombed Yugoslavia for 78 days and nights in a row. His military and political policies destroyed one of the most progressive countries in Europe. And he called it “humanitarian intervention”. It’s still regarded by almost all Americans, including many, if not most, “progressives”, as just that.

Now why is that? Are all these people just ignorant? I think a better answer is that they have certain preconceptions; consciously or unconsciously, they have certain basic beliefs about the United States and its foreign policy, most prominent amongst which is the belief that the US means well. And if you don’t deal with this basic belief you’ll be talking to a stone wall.

1. 
   Associated Press, August 1, 2007.
2. Press conference, February 25, 2009, transcript by Federal News Service.
3. Agence France Presse (AFP), January 20, 2009.
4. New York Times, December 29, 1998.
5. Associated Press, November 17, 2008.
6. See William Blum, Rogue State, chapter 10 (”Supporting Pol Pot”).
7. See William Blum, Killing Hope, chapter 20 (”Cambodia, 1955-1973″).
8. Tinyurl
9. Reuters news agency, January 30, 2009.
10. The War Crimes Act (18 U.S.C. 2441).
11. Haaretz, leading Israeli newspaper, January 30, 2009.
12. Washington Post, February 14, 2009, column by Edward Schumacher-Matos.
13. New York Times, February 13, 2009.
14. Washington Post, February 12, 2009.
15. Washington Post, February 8, 2009.
16. Washington Post, February 15, 2009, p. B7.

Friday had been established as the final day of the referendum campaign for both camps, el Sí — supporters of the enmienda — and el No. Amelia and I had first become acquainted with the terms of the struggle 10 days earlier, when we crossed from Colombia into Venezuela during a hitchhiking expedition originating in Quito. From the Venezuelan frontier onward, competing slogans such as “Vota Sí” and “No es No” monopolized the sides of buildings and the rear windshields of cars. The competition sometimes assumed even more straightforward forms, such as “Sí Sí Sí Sí” and “No No No No,” with the Sí campaign enjoying a decided aesthetic advantage based on the fact that the “I” could be dotted with a star.

Amelia and I met our first representative of the No campaign when he picked us up hitchhiking a few hundred meters after passport control. Diego was a 25 year old from the nearby city of San Cristobal who had just purchased a sofa on the Colombian side of the border at a favorable exchange rate. As we had just very unfavorably exchanged dollars into bolivars — due to a refusal to comprehend that the rate on the Venezuelan street was more than twice as favorable as the official rate — Amelia and I congratulated him on his enterprising nature.

Diego denied that opportunities for enterprise existed in a country whose leader insisted on declaring every other day a national holiday. As evidence he explained that the previous day (2 February) had been the 17th anniversary of Chávez’ attempted golpe de estado and that the following day (4 February) was the 10th anniversary of his ascension to power. He failed, however, to address opportunities for enterprise in forced holidays that were financially compensated; his subsequent announcement that chavismo was undemocratic was then slightly contradicted by his declaration that the enmienda would not pass due to the democratic character of the Venezuelan political system. Diego dropped us off in San Cristobal, wagering that Chávez’ conception of George Bush as the devil was slightly contradicted by the fact that the US was the primary recipient of Venezuelan oil.

Having learned while hitchhiking through Colombia that military officials could be tasked with procuring rides for us, Amelia and I approached a checkpoint of the Venezuelan Guardia Nacional outside the city, where the Guardia addressed us in a conspiratorial whisper:

GUARDIA: We are voting for el No.

The Guardia acknowledged that they had at one point been convinced that only el Sí could be associated with el Comandante but had been won over when the Venezuelan opposition — supported by the United States — co-opted a quote by Simón Bolívar regarding the dangers of leaving the same man in power forever. (Not taken into consideration by proponents of the unchanging applicability of historical ideals was whether George Washington had ever been of the opinion that countries should be allowed to govern themselves.)

At the Guardia checkpoint a truck driver named Benjamín was conscripted to transport Amelia and me as far as the state of Barinas, homeland of Chávez. Benjamín began by asserting that Barinas ranches belonging to the Chávez family were not examples of equitable property distribution, but over the course of our six hour drive became increasingly boastful of the fact that it cost him less than a dollar to purchase 83 liters of diesel fuel for his truck. He then moved on to gleefully quizzing us on the price of vegetable oil and flour in our own país.

Amelia and I enjoyed our first personal encounter with supporters of the enmienda at another Guardia checkpoint in the state of Guárico in central Venezuela. Upon our arrival at their desk the Guardia offered us not only the greeting “¿Cómo va la revolución?” but also two cantaloupes and the monetary denomination required to use the bathroom at a nearby gas station. They outlined their political stance by pointing across the street to a billboard featuring multicolored repetitions of the word Sí, and did not object when Amelia and I utilized their official stamp on our upper arms.

After reaching the coastal city of Barcelona east of Caracas, we were joined by our Lebanese-Palestinian friend Hassan, whose choice of countries in which to vacation was determined in part by Chávez’ willingness to expel representatives of the state of Israel. The three of us were hosted at the Barcelona home of Hassan’s friend Ali, whose insistence that Chávez was his second father was determined in part by the ease with which Ali had acquired Venezuelan residencia; he nonetheless continued to assure his Venezuelan girlfriend that he would be voting no in the referendum.

Most of our time in Barcelona was spent on a street in the center of town with a high concentration of clothing stores and markets run by Lebanese and Syrian immigrants. On this street we acquired such knowledge as that:

1. tahini was also produced in Venezuela, presumably as part of Chávez’ quest to achieve autonomia alimentaria and to combat the notion that Venezuela’s only resource was oil.

2. a great deal of noise was caused by puntos rojos, the innumerable red tents in charge of disseminating information in favor of el Sí.

Three days prior to the referendum, Amelia, Hassan, and I visited one of the local puntos rojos with the intention of acquiring red T-shirts bearing the slogan “¡Uh! ¡Ah! Chávez con el pueblo sí va” — on which the outline of a military beret functioned as the accent over the “A” on Chávez. Although it was at first claimed that there was a national shortage of T-shirts, we eventually persevered thanks to the intervention of a woman with several missing teeth who introduced herself as Del Valle.

Del Valle proclaimed it an absolute necessity that Amelia and I learn to wear our shirts like real chavistas, who had apparently learned to deal with oversized attire by tying the T-shirts in a 1980s-style knot. Once our appearance had been rendered satisfactory, Del Valle commandeered the microphone belonging to the punto rojo and announced with tears in her eyes that three foreign visitors had joined the revolución bolivariana. It was then decided that the next step in our revolutionary education would be flier distribution the following day, a decision which we were forced to review several times given that the punto rojo’s resident DJ did not skimp on decibel levels.

The soundtrack of the punto rojo covered Chávez-related themes in a variety of Latin beats, some of the numbers apparently performed by Chávez himself. The music enabled flier distributors to simultaneously distribute and dance, a combination we were instructed in upon returning to the punto rojo on 13 February, the final day of the referendum campaign.

Most passersby were receptive to our handouts, which stressed different aspects of the proposed enmienda such as that Venezuelans should vote Sí on account of the fact that Chávez loved them. Only a few intended recipients responded with phrases involving the word mierda or implications that the receptive passersby were simply being receptive in order to avoid blacklisting; the DJ meanwhile periodically paused his soundtrack so that punto rojo attendants could perform karaoke to Spanish pop songs.

When we ran out of fliers, we were supplied with business card-size photos of Chávez featuring the referendum question and the advised answer. One of the card recipients was a man who came to be known as “the Communist” based on his membership in the PCV and the fact that we forgot to ask his name; he greeted us with a “¿Como va la revolución?” and accepted a card despite being in the process of distributing a stack of the same cards himself.

The Communist invited Amelia, Hassan, and me to join a section of the PCV in the back of a pickup truck for a quick tour of Barcelona. The itinerary of the quick tour turned out to be as follows:

1. Drive five minutes from center of town. Stop so that Communist can address traffic jam on dangers of being tricked by opposition into staying at home on voting day.

2. Drive five more minutes to barrio Rómulo Gallegos. Stop so that Communist can spend next two hours alternately dancing salsa on side of road and branding passing cars with variations on the word “Sí” in white marker.

3. Listen to same three songs emitted on repeat from pickup truck loudspeakers.

The first song in the cycle somewhat resembled a nursery rhyme and began: “Qué buena, qué buena, qué buena está la enmienda,” before going on to explain that the enmienda had been requested by the pueblo. The other two tunes incorporated the “¡Uh! ¡Ah!” theme, with the catchier of the two stipulating: “Y todos con la enmienda, ¡uh ah! Y Chavez con el pueblo, ¡sí va!”

After the first dozen cycles, Hassan had mastered relevant portions of the Spanish language and Amelia and I had choreographed a simple dance routine in the back of the pickup truck, which we then performed for the next dozen cycles while Amelia intermittently flung Chávez cards through the windows of passing cars. As for the Communist, he and other supporters of the PSUV in possession of white markers continued to hinder the flow of vehicles through Rómulo Gallegos, in confirmation of Barack Obama’s contention that Hugo Chávez constituted an impediment to progress in the region. Freedom of expression was nonetheless upheld, and the driver of one hindered vehicle made a show of wiping the fresh “Sí” from his rear windshield.

Amelia’s and my dance choreography was rendered more difficult when the Communist and half a dozen new cohorts suddenly appeared in the back of the pickup and the truck joined a lengthy caravan of motorcycles, cars, and buses draped in red. As we wound through the barrio, we were cheered on from doorsteps and balconies; aside from a group of spitting children, displays of opposition generally consisted of finger-wagging and amicable declarations of “No.” Non-spitting children meanwhile rushed into the street to collect the Chávez cards that the Communist tossed over the side of the pickup truck.

By the end of the evening, the activity in the back of the pickup had effectively been reduced to limp waves of a red hat by the Communist and the occasional “Allahu Akbar” shouted by Hassan in time with the three-song cycle. When Amelia and I requested the symbolism of this act, he explained that Hezbollah caravans were also repetitive.

Once the caravan had dispersed, we extracted ourselves from the pickup truck and were unable for the rest of the night to speak or comprehend anything that:

1. was not a shout.
2. did not somehow involve the words “uh” and “ah.”

The next morning, the day before the referendum, I went to one of the Arab-run markets in the center of town, now cleared of puntos rojos. The Syrian cashier offered me a papaya shake on the house and informed me that all Venezuelans were “por el no” but that their orientation was masked out of fear. I asked the Syrian if he had gotten this idea from the Diario Región on the counter in front of him — the headline of which read: “¡No voten con miedo!” — and if dancing was a common symptom of fear in Venezuela. He responded that people were liable to do anything under duress, just as Lebanese civilians had been known on occasion to throw flowers and rice at invading Israeli armies.

The Syrian had just returned from a visit to Damascus, where he had noted the prevalence of a certain key chain depicting Bashar al-Assad on one side and Chávez on the other, an arrangement which, according to his analysis, indicated inherent similarities between Bolivarian republics and Syrian Arab republics. In response I brought up a recent hitchhiking incident in which Bolivarianism had been compared to Italian fascism by a truck driver from Napoli.

Further exploration of the wealth of historical analogies made possible by the sizable immigrant population of Venezuela was cut short when a man entered the market from the street and greeted the Syrian with “¿Cómo va la revolución?” before requesting a charitable donation. The Syrian promptly consumed himself with the straightening of a sign on the wall prohibiting the sale of alcoholic beverages from Friday to Monday in honor of the referendum; the question of the status of la revolución was thus deflected to me.

My principal recommendation was that the revolution be accompanied by more than three songs — a proposal that was largely fulfilled the following evening when el Sí triumphed over el No and Chávez sang through part of his celebratory address to the people.

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

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

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

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

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

Iran

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

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

Russia

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

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

Cuba

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

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

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

Iraq

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

Saudi Arabia

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

Haiti

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

Colombia

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

Venezuela

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

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

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

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

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

Bolivia

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

Afghanistan

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

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

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

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

Israel

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

North Korea

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

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

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

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

Kosovo

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

NATO

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

School of the Americas

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

Torture

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

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

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

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi

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

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

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

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

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

Ecuador

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

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

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

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

Venezuela

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bolivia

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

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

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

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

Hasta la Victoria Siempre

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

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

Electoral Systems and Democracy: Substance and Structure

A democratic political system involves at a minimum: (1) Free and equal competition for political office, (2) access to the means of communication, and (3) competing ideas and freedom to act without physical or psychological coercion. Procedures and conditions leading up to elections, which violate these norms, are incompatible with the notion of democracy. The most obvious case is Colombia whose state terror against opposition groups is practiced in every recent election. Electoral processes are necessary but not sufficient conditions to define a democratic system. In other words, there are numerous examples where electoral processes are embedded in institutional structures (oligarchy-controlled mass media) and preceded by political conditions (threats, patronage and corruption), which violate the basic norms of democracy. In other words, we can have non-democratic (authoritarian) as well as democratic electoral systems.

The most common authoritarian features of electoral systems, which deny its democratic character include:

1. Restricted access to the mass media because of monopoly ownership denying freedom of expression and undermining equality of competition.

2. Unlimited spending on electoral campaigns favoring the moneyed classes capacity to monopolize electoral campaign spending and biasing the competition to favor candidates who amass the greatest funds.

3. State violence and repression of opposition parties, candidates and electoral constituencies during the electoral campaign. This nullifies any claims to a legitimate outcome based on ‘an honest vote count’ on election day.

4. Large scale financing by external foreign powers of the internal electoral process, drastically undermining internal competition and distorting free and equal competition. Important organizational and financial links between foreign multinational corporations, intelligence agencies and foundations to domestic parties, personalities and NGOs introduce non-democratic, non-elected actors.

Taking account of these possible structural constraints, we see that there are numerous non-democratic variants of electoral systems. These include:

1. Death-squad electoral systems in which long-term, large-scale state violence against dissident civil society organizations (trade unions, peasant movements and human rights groups) is practiced prior to election day. Colombia is the prime example in which, over the past decade, the military and paramilitary groups murdered over 2500 trade unionists and 4 million, mostly peasants, were driven from their homes and communities.

2. Imperial-collaborator electoral regimes in which there is a mass infusion of political financing by European/US state entities to incumbent regimes and parties to counter growing mass popular opposition. Nicaragua, El Salvador and Dominican Republic are prime examples of electoral regimes, which have experienced ‘externally controlled political processes’.

3. Oligarchic electoral systems are the most common type of authoritarian systems, many emerging from the crisis of military dictatorship of the 1970-80’s. They resulted from a political pact between economic oligarchs, political party elites and the military. The usual pattern is a two-party or modified three-party political system or coalition where the parties compete for the vote in order to represent competing ruling class interests. Mexico, Chile, Uruguay and Brazil represent this type of oligarchic electoral system.

Electoral Systems in Flux

Authoritarian electoral systems are not static: Old oligarchic parties collapse and new ones emerge. Some oligarchic parties begin by adopting populist postures to gain office and then pursue and deepen oligarchic ties, co-opting and corrupting the emerging insurgent social leaders and aborting the democratic process. Authoritarian electoral systems are subject to the pressure of non-electoral parties and movements to modify or reform repressive practices and the privileging of economic inequalities.

Equally significant in challenging oligarchic electoral systems, major economic crises and political uprisings can displace oligarchic regimes and lead to the emergence of plebian-based democratic movements. Regimes can emerge, which attempt to ‘mediate’ or ‘balance’ between the mass democratic movements and oligarchic ruling classes. In recent years, mass popular movements and uprisings have led to the overthrow of oligarchic electoral regimes. Such events have taken place in Bolivia, Argentina and Ecuador. In addition, established oligarchic electoral regimes have been defeated because of mass mobilizations in Venezuela, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay. As a result, some of the authoritarian political constraints have been temporarily reformed, while the economic ruling classes remain intact. The inequalities in economic resources and access to the mass media remain in place or are, at best, merely modified.

In other words, in recent years a process of democratizing the electoral system has been underway. However this process is not linear, homogenous or irreversible. Promising democratic beginnings via mass mobilizations have been cut short or even reversed once the democratic ‘reformers’ take office. Democratic reformers frequently retain the repressive state apparatus, limiting changes in authoritarian structures and repressive practices. In summary, electoral politics, and not democracy, resulted from the transition between military to civilian rule.

Over the past eight years the democratization of electoral politics advanced with the breakdown of the neo-liberal political-economic system, the rise of popular mass movements and the defeat of abortive oligarchic uprisings designed to restore strict authorization rule.

Venezuela represents the most exemplary case of a sustained effort to democratize electoral politics. Venezuela, during the Chavez Presidency (1999-2008), represents a unique case of an effort to combine the democratization of electoral politics with the socialization of the economy, deepening and extending democratic politics into the sphere of the economy.

Venezuela: The Transition to Democracy

Venezuela is the one country in Latin America that best exemplifies the transition from oligarchic electoral politics to democracy. During the preceding 40 years (1959-1998) the country was ruled by a two-party elite (Democratic Action and Social Christian – COPEI), which competed to represent the petrol-rentier oligarchy, powerful importers, and the real estate-financial speculative elite. The two parties were dominated by a predator political class, which pillaged the public treasury. The economic collapse during the infamous decade of 1989-1998 resulted in a 10-fold increase in poverty, which led to the mass uprising and state massacre of 1989 known as the ‘Caracazo’. This, in turn, paved the way for the election of President Chavez in 1999. President Chavez took the first steps toward reforming the authoritarian electoral system through a referendum and subsequent new constitution. Chavez’s opposition to Washington’s imperial ‘War on Terror’ was part of a foreign policy designed to end US tutelage and affirm Venezuela’s national sovereignty. The colonial oligarchy sought to regain power and return the country to its authoritarian past via a US-backed civil-military coup in April 2002. The coup was defeated. Chavez was restored to power by a popular uprising backed by loyalist military officials. The President dismissed the coup participants within the government and arrested their civilian collaborators. As a result, authoritarian organizations in civil society and the state were weakened. A subsequent lockout was led by an elite group of petroleum executives who sought to sabotage the economy and overthrow the elected president. They were defeated by a joint effort of the Government and the petrol workers. This victory further weakened the colonial oligarchs in the strategic oil industry. The defeat of the strategic pillars of authoritarian electoral power led to the effective nationalization of the petroleum industry. Through these victories President Chavez strengthened the process of democratization of the state and civil society.

Under the leadership of President Chavez the petroleum industry became more responsive to the social needs of the majority of its citizens. Under democratic leadership the PDVSA (the national oil company) financed a vast number of citizen educational programs enhancing democracy. With a powerful electoral mandate after his re-election and vast increases in public revenues through public ownership and high world oil prices, President Chavez pursued policies, which encouraged citizen participation through elected community councils providing a new dimension to the process of democratization. Democratizing the electoral process and dismantling the oligarchic electoral system took several directions:

1. The encouragement, promotion and financing of a vast array of neighborhood cooperatives, peasant organizations and trade unions, which increased the power and political influence of the working class and informal workers. Freed from upper class patronage and control, the new social organizations equalized the effective role of the poor in the political process. Greater freedom and equality provided essential ingredients in the strengthening of democratic politics.

2. The weakening of the linkages between the oligarchic political and economic elites and the military/Pentagon diminished the power of the authoritarian state over civil society. Electoral outcomes were less subject to the intervention by undemocratic imperial agencies. Conversely the new mass organizations increased the importance of internal democratic processes. While the US and EU continued to channel funds into opposition oligarchic NGOs this is countered by domestic mass social movements and social programs funded by these democratically elected public institutions.

3. Publicly financed television stations and the proliferation of popularly controlled community radio stations have broken the oligarchy’s media monopoly. The result is more pluralistic, balanced and diverse sources of information. Better-informed citizens can make more rational political decisions.

4. Freedom of speech has been greatly enhanced by the proliferation of political forums not controlled by the oligarchy. More diverse opinion leaders have greater access to more organized groups and media outlets than ever before.

5. Civil society has been enriched by the growth of multiple trade unions and community-based groups. Competing voter lists in social movements have greatly increased internal democracy in civil society organizations. Electoral competition within civil society has been greatly enhanced. Civil society has been strengthened in relation to the state. The democratization of civil society movements has strengthened public debate and the electoral processes.

Continuing Obstacles to Democratization

In contrast to past oligarchic electoral regimes, Venezuela has moved decisively toward the consolidation of its democratic transition.

Nevertheless, numerous and serious authoritarian impediments to the full consolidation of democracy still exist. Principally, they are found in the continuation of vast concentrations of oligarchic wealth and ownership of strategic banking, mass media, real estate, agricultural lands, distribution networks and the manufacturing sectors. Concentrated private economic ownership and wealth results in vast social inequalities, which translate into the continuation of political inequalities in the form of unequal competition for political influence, despite the government’s and civil society’s countervailing power.

To consummate and complete the process of democratization requires the equalization of socio-economic conditions in society and the introduction of democratic reforms in the state and within publicly owned enterprises.

The full realization of democracy requires the implementation of a socialist transformation in which elections take place in the work place and through a program of re-distribution of wealth, land and financial resources.

Democratic Socialism and the Re-Election Amendment

On February 15, 2009 Venezuelans will vote on a constitutional amendment, which will permit the electorate to re-elect an incumbent President without term limits. In the past, many democratic analysts were opposed to ‘presidential re-election’ for several reasons. According to their critique: 1. Re-election was a method used by dictators to provide pseudo-legitimacy to regimes, which repressed democratic freedoms of speech, assembly, and access to mass media. 2. Re-election allowed incumbent regimes to utilize the state apparatus to engage in fraud and violence, perpetuating authoritarian oligarchic rule and undermining free and equal competition. 3. Re-election allowed the incumbent president to monopolize the mass media and deny the opposition equal access to campaign resources. 4. Repeatedly re-elected presidents concentrated and accumulated state power while weakening popular social organizations in civil society and strengthening the links between the state and the oligarchic civic and economic organizations.

These were legitimate criticisms of presidential re-election in past historical contexts, but are not applicable to the case of Venezuela today.

The historical record of the past decade and the present realities in Venezuela today demonstrate that democratic principles and practices have deepened and extended following each election and re-election of Hugo Chavez. For example: 1. The mass media are much more diverse; access is more equal and there is a greater variety of competing socio-economic paradigms under debate. 2. Civil society contains a greater number of free and independent competing and organized social classes than ever in the history of Venezuela. Between 1999-2009 competing neighborhood groups with diverse social perspectives have flourished. 3. Electoral campaigns and procedures are less subject state corruption, intervention and violent manipulation than ever before. 4. Citizen participation and defense of democratic freedoms was never more widespread and intense as was witnessed by the massive popular mobilization defeating the US-oligarchy-military coup of April 2002, and the restoration of the elected President (Chavez), the Congress and the Venezuelan constitution. 5. The nationalization of foreign and oligarchy controlled strategic enterprises has made key economic enterprises subject to legislative and executive oversight by elected public representatives. 6. The re-election of President Chavez has resulted in politics which lower socio-economic inequalities, increased social expenditures for the poor, the working class and peasantry thus increasing their stake in democratic institutions, their interest in electoral campaigns and provided them with greater time and resources to participate in social and political organizations.

Contrary to previous historical experiences, in Venezuela under President Chavez, there is a positive correlation between his re-election and the extension and deepening of democratic institutions and practices as well as a richer civic culture. In the 40 years prior to the Chavez presidency (1959-1998) during which re-election was prohibited, the alternating Presidents perpetuated a profoundly authoritarian oligarchic electoral system which effectively disenfranchised the mass of low-income voters, offering few choices and subjecting them to a corrupt party patronage system.

The key is to view re-election versus single-term presidencies in their historical context and in terms of the political practices and pragmatic consequences of each. For example, the ‘re-election’ of Alvaro Uribe means the perpetuation of death squads and forced dispossession of millions of peasants. The limits on re-election of presidents in Mexico has not altered highly authoritarian rule, vast inequalities, foreign control of all strategic sectors of the economy and the power of the capitalist class to replace one oligarch for another.

Approval of the constitutional amendment allowing for the re-election of President Chavez is essential for the continuation of the democratic process and social welfare of Venezuelans. Because of President Chavez’ audacious and courageous defense of world peace and humanitarian justice, his re-election is especially important in the face of imperial wars and genocidal colonial wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and elsewhere.

Approval of the amendment will result in the continuation of vital socio-economic reforms, which provide free education, health and subsidized food for the vast majority of Venezuelans.

Particularly in a time of worldwide capitalist recession/depression, only a democratic-socialist government will give highest priority to protecting social welfare programs over and against bailing out bankers, industrialists and export elites. All alternative capitalist candidates in Venezuela would follow the practice of the North American, European and Asian rulers of cutting social programs to save the ruling class.

The re-election of President Chavez would facilitate the democratization of the economy through nationalization and socialization. The defeat of the re-election amendment would abort and reverse the process leading to the privatization of strategic economic sectors, which would lead to foreign capitalists arbitrarily making all key economic decisions. The privatization of the mass media would lead to oligarchic monopolies, eliminating the diversity of political views.

Conclusions

With the onset of the world recession/depression, the collapse of the neo-liberal model and the incapacity of capitalist economists to offer any viable alternative, there is all the more reason to re-elect President Chavez who backs a socialist, publicly directed and controlled economy, which protects and promotes the domestic market and productive system.

At a time of Israel’s genocidal war, backed by the US and at a time when newly-elected Obama doubles military spending and troops for wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and possibly Iran, the world looks to President Chavez as the world’s foremost humanitarian leader, the outstanding defender of freedom, peace and self-determination. The approval of the re-election amendment is not only a vote for Venezuelan democracy but equally a vote in defense of the billions of oppressed Third World people who regard President Chavez as their principled leader: The only President who refuses to support Bush-Obama’s imperial ‘war on terror’. The only President who ousted Israel’s ambassador in righteous repudiation of Israel’s genocidal assault on the people of Gaza.

Much more is at stake on February 15, 2009 than a constitutional amendment and the re-election of a president. With the outcome rides the future of democracy and socialism in Venezuela and the hopes and aspirations of hundreds of millions who look to President Chavez as an example in their revolutionary struggle to overthrow militarists and depression-racked capitalist states.

Jorge looks the part in his red hat and t-shirt, embroidered with the slogan Ahora Venezuela es de Todos (roughly: Now Venezuela is For Everybody). I ask him what if his phone rang while he was in the designer, ultra-posh Centro San Ignacio? He shrugs confidently, “It’s a free country”. With 95% of the media in opposition, Jorge makes his point. “I’m sure they [the opposition] have King Juan Carlos of Spain’s ‘why don’t you just shut up!’” he smiles, and we all laugh at the memory. “People actually ran into the street to celebrate that,” he admits. An amusing anecdote from a city now used to massive demonstrations. Polarization and funny ringtones, Venezuela today could be characterized by this.

With shifting balances of power, ideological evolution in the US and new global rules for finance due to be drawn up, busy months of meetings lie ahead for the G20 states. For many, that Hugo Chavez will not be present is a great pity and to scores more a great relief. In throwing its own alternative into the geopolitical arena, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela has become a central figure in Latin American politics but at a cost: it has suffered a bitter domestic “divorce,” the repercussions of which continue to fester. As with any rupture, there are two sides to every story. I have come to hear both.

We pull our jeep up in a cul-de-sac of the San Juan barrio beside a new clinic, the elevation grants us spectacular views of the valley that is Caracas. I’m spending the day with four bright young people from the Corazon Adentro Misión Socialista (Heart Inside Socialist Mission). Their vision is to engage citizens in collective combat against inequality by developing culture as a force for socialist change, also to give the underprivileged an outlet for their creative talents. It is a permanent, ongoing program with cultural events or “happenings” occurring throughout the city 365 days of the year, with a special focus on the ranchos. It is 0930 on Saturday and the barrio is sunny and calm, belying its reputation as one of the “harder” slums. I ask Xiomara C. what does she mean, though “hard” is often self-explanatory.

“We can’t get in up there,” she say’s pointing up to not far from where we stand. I pick out a group of young men watching us from one of the shadowy, serpentine stairs that define the barrio. “It’s ‘controlled’ by gangs, last week one of our team was intercepted by armed youths, they didn’t hurt her but menacingly told her to go away. This red shirt is worth something,” she grins “we do get the respect of some gangs and on occasion they afford us their ‘protection’” She confirms this “protection” is not a pseudonym. On one occasion a spectator was shot dead during an act as he stood amongst the children, but such events are rare. “Many of the youngsters have kids too and appreciate what we’re doing. We’ll get in up there eventually,” she adds with a determined smile. Xiomara works mainly in Petare, situated to the east of the city: it is Latin America’s most populous shanty-town with almost a million inhabitants and made up of over 380 distinct barrios.

“Wake up!” shouts a local volunteer through a megaphone to the breeze-block houses crammed all around us, “come see the clowns and jugglers, there’s a magician coming too, get up before the rains hit,” she bellows out. At the far end of the valley dark clouds are gathering, pushing our way. Under an unforgiving sun we tidy up a disused basketball court and carry chairs down many steps for the audience we hope will show. With weed whackers in hand, others clear a green space and the nurses sweep out an old dressing-room.

“When the mothers bring their kids down for the spectacle, we give vaccinations to those who haven’t yet got them,” says Jorge, and he asks me if I’ve had mine. “The Revolution has reduced infant mortality a great deal in ten years,” he adds proudly (18.2% decrease from 1998-2006). The jabs are for hepatitis, polio and tetanus. There is a respectable turnout of women and kids and thankfully the tropical thunderstorm headed our way defies all logic and veers away. Xiomara winks and says she had a word with the man upstairs. I consider making a joke about the Chavez controlling the weather, but I know better, if he did he have these ranchos too. On our way out, San Juan has woken up and there are groups of young men drinking beer out in the narrow streets, it is noon and Ivan E. makes a comment of concern.

Pressing on, we cross western Caracas’s never-ending expanse of extemporized housing, reaching close to the clouds and passing through a “Colombian” rancho of dire poverty. The shockingly flimsy abodes are surrounded by debris and rubbish, yet the vivid hillside vegetation is stunning, tropical flowers and lush grasses provide another contrast in this city of extremes. There is unusual quiet in the jeep as we roll gently by; the only building of note is an army outpost with the soldiers safely grouped together on the veranda clutching automatic rifles. They recognise the jeep, our team’s red shirts and give us an imperceptible nod.

I almost ask Ivan what makes it Colombian around here but stop short; I know “Colombian” and “illegal” are synonymous here. As if reading my mind, he volunteers, “They have buses coming from Colombia that don’t even mention Caracas anymore on the destination, nowadays they specify the barrios.” Immigration has been an issue here since the 50’s when millions of hopeful workers began to pour in and the ‘Tale of Two Cities’ was born. Ivan reckons the population has grown by two million since 1998; most have landed here in the ranchos.

Crossing the Caracas fault line with its seismically wrinkled topography we finally arrive at the aptly named Barrio Nuevo Horizonte. I am transfixed by some breathtaking views and a rainbow arching the new highway viaduct far below. Only up here in the hills have I seen kids running around being kids, an often perilous luxury (stray bullets often hit children) denied those back in the city. We are given a warm welcome by the locals and the staffers of the tiny community centre. We are served some delicious chupe, though I am not enjoying it. My concern is that there is nothing to stop the six young men eyeing me from the steep alleyway outside from “express” kidnapping me or worse. This is a new phenomenon down in the city, people are grabbed from cars, doorsteps or wherever and then the ransom call comes. 80% of the 450 reported cases since January were resolved though the police generally get informed after the fact. A child pushes a visitor’s book under my nose and suddenly this small act banishes all my fears, I sign and look up. The ‘Revolution” are watching me with a clear and steadfast regard, I can see there is pride here in the barrio. This dramatic change of consciousness is what has shaped the last decade for the people of Venezuela.

The Cuban musicians show up and play to a small crowd of women and children. Many more listen from the windows around and above. The band wraps up with Chan Chan just as dusk beckons and the rancho magically transforms into a coruscating wonderland of lights.

“Such a nice change from the sounds of gunfire,” a mother says, leading her children away. Like most of the Ministry workers with us, Xiomara is from a tough barrio. She explains to me why there are long metal tubes lined up against the houses. “We’re improving the sewage system, until now it’s been largely improvised,” she adds pointing to a stack of cement bags. “A lot of stairs have been repaired.” This barrio retrofit is done in conjunction with the locals who lend a hand with their not inconsiderable DIY expertise. “It’s about generating barrio culture, empowerment and avoiding the handout mentality. We build the future together” she says proudly but her smile quickly vanishes “if all this was to end…” she trails off.

December 6, 2008 will mark a decade since Hugo Chavez swept to power in a landslide democratic victory. Much has since been documented about this socialist icon, the truth no doubt generously interspersed with innuendo, propaganda and hidden agendas. Having lived in Venezuela from ’94-’98 it seemed a logical moment to return to Caracas, take stock and analyse what has happened in the intervening years. History tells us they have been eventful years indeed: 12 elections and one defeat for the Bolivarian Republic, a new constitution, catastrophic mudslides, a failed coup, huge oil revenues to leverage sweeping reforms and an overwhelming tide of immigration into the capital. Externally, China had become a major player in the oil stakes, ready and willing to gain on any trade deal that might be the US’ loss.

Recalling briefly the period ’94, from Chavez’ release from jail (for a failed coup against president C.A. Perez in ‘92) to ’98, we can find a paradise in social, political and economic meltdown. Perez wound up under house arrest (corruption), the incumbent presided over a coalition of 17 parties/independents and the IMF was called in to bail out the banks. Chronic Poverty reached new depths and capital flowed out of the country. Pepsi changed to Coke overnight and homicide stats went from the usual morbid to outright horrific. The oligarchs and expats who managed to reconcile living in this near-anarchy could still have a splendid time in amongst the contrasts. Caracas’ pricey restaurants and chic nightspots rivalled the best in Europe, stunning beaches, pristine jungles, Andean idyll and the ancient Tepuys more than made up for the lack of cultural offerings. Most of these jewels lay beyond the financial reach of the average working Venezuelan. In the cities student riots became so regular that Tuesdays became known as Revolution Day. Fatalism had reached such a nadir that jokes such as to be shot for a pair of Nike’s was considered a natural death, appeared on the front pages of national newspapers. At least the famed Caraqueño sense of humour seemed bulletproof.

The first thing that struck me upon my return to Caracas was the traffic. What was once daunting is now epic: a relentless cacophony of horns, engines and alarms combine to provide a wearying soundtrack to a city that is under siege to the automobile. The gleaming cable car being built into the San Augustine barrio looks impressive but it’s not operational yet. One get’s the feeling that if this urban nightmare is not resolved soon, the tenuous link with normality could be broken altogether. The skyline reflects a building boom with many new commercial centres amongst the high rises, including the posh Centro San Ignacio and Centro Sambil. The leafy Las Mercedes neighbourhood now boasts huge car showrooms along its gridlocked avenues and as ever, cutting edge boutiques and bars down the side streets.

Someone has been spending money.

The temples of consumption bear testament to the near decade long windfall of petrodollars and the increase in variety is significant. However, money spenders will notice tucked in amongst the shops are the ubiquitous Bolivarian labour rights offices, a powerful psychological reminder of change. Government murals with red silhouettes of the president proclaiming the value of unity through hard work can be seen from the ranchos to the city proper. Grand murals from the SENIAT (Integrated Customs Administration and Tax Services) remind citizens of the importance of paying taxes, the function of taxation and employers are reminded of their statutory obligations, unthinkable a decade ago. This major shift away from the US influenced ideology to a more European-like system of free education, health and social services with national insurance is the bedrock of the Bolivarian Republic. Passing a once famous Italian restaurant I remark how it must have fallen by the wayside to Paco, a Galician immigrant from the fifties. “Not at all,” he says, “they were shut down for not respecting workers rights!”

Caracas and politics are inseparable. When canvassing opinions about the Bolivarian government the response is swift; issues uttered first off are corruption and insecurity. To imagine a government without corruption in a continent where it is endemic might be stretching the imagination, but this was one of Chavez’ great promises, tackling graft and delinquency. Left wing pilfering always seems worse than when the right caves into allurement but there is no doubt this matter wounds the president’s reputation deeply. Whilst the party faithful will dispute allegations of venality, there is almost universal agreement about El Hampa (insecurity).

“It’s true there have been big changes in ten years…,” Omar, 35, a taxi driver from Petare tells me with a smile, “…our kids get three meals a day in school, some groceries are subsidised and I can get a local doctor (Cuban) if my boy gets a sore tummy, but it’s not enough. Things have gotten too dangerous, we often block the road with our cars to protest the murders of our colleagues, it’s very bad”. Omar’s sentiments are echoed by many others. In last week’s municipal elections the opposition candidate in Petare scored a win right in the Revolution’s heartland, down in part to frustration with incomplete and unfulfilled promises, but mainly safety. Over the past fifteen years violent crime has become ingrained in the psyche of Caraqueños. In the upmarket enclaves electric fences are now an ugly accessory atop the spiked railings once deemed sufficient and private security is still big business. “It’s a source of deep stress,” says Eduardo P., 45, who fits coffee machines and fridges for cafés and bars. “You get stuck in traffic for hours and worry about getting home too late, before the malandros (thugs) set out, though in reality, you could get hit anywhere, anytime.”

But Eduardo is not all critical. “You have to recognise the good things Chavez has done, he’s had great ideas. Millions have overcome their illiteracy thanks to the Robinson Mission, my brother got a national bank loan for his goat cheese farm down on the coast, he’d never have got that before.” I ask him why he’s anti-Chavista then. “I think he’s lost the plot, you know…,” he winks. “Back in ’98 he had a golden opportunity, he should have engaged the opposition not alienate them, and many of his people are opportunist and corrupt, who do you think goes to all these new shops? I don’t know about him but the others…” Eduardo went on to compare the Chavez entourage to the oligarchs of the past and indulged in some salacious rumours before ending with “when Chavez is gone the positive aspects of his time will have to be continued, we expect that from the opposition, we’ll even improve on them. He’s been a very important phase in this country’s development.”

Adolfo B. who voted “red” in ’98 is a professor of economics at a private university in Caracas, evokes harsh condemnation. “The importance of private institutions has been eroded; unilateral action of fundamental economic matters is being taken with neither expertise nor experience. Most of our capable people have been driven out and inefficiency is rife in the government.” He is clearly exasperated: “He seems more concerned with trivial stuff like changing the shield on the flag because Bolivar’s horse used to veer to the right, now it goes to the left. Now we celebrate Indigenous Resistance Day instead of the 1492 landings (el Día de la Raza). Too much symbolism, he’s only interested in holding onto power.” I ask him if he thinks the president will hang on until 2013 when his mandate expires; he shrugs and admits it’s a long shot. “The people are eating their savings, petroleum infrastructure is failing and oil prices are dropping, inflation is around 35% and we still import most our food. We’re in a pressure cooker.”

Bearing in mind the current global financial crisis bewailing the West, perhaps judging a developing country socialist or not, by its current macroeconomic success might seem unfair. Nevertheless, a quick glance some figures is helpful. Thanks to oil, the Venezuelan GDP rose from 85.8 billion USD ’97 to 184.5 billion USD in 2007. Real income increased by 137% from 2003-07 and though the poor are living better, problems such as housing and social mobility remain.

I did not visit the interior so I cannot speak of any infrastructural progress or agrarian reforms.

The scale of the challenge facing the Bolivarian Revolution back in ’98 left no illusions, a decade later both the opposition and pro-Chavez groups can point to failures and successes. The ramifications of last weekend’s local elections will be critical for Hugo Chavez, whether he can ride the challenge of a reinvigorated and young opposition (or how they will react to his recurring proposal to expand presidential term limits), time will tell. The scourge of drugs threatens to undo the successes in the barrios and Caracas’ urban chaos is a genuine environmental emergency.

Ultimately the most durable legacy of this period will lie in the sweeping social reforms and the eradication of a once blanket indifference towards the neglected majority. That may yet be an example, not just to developing countries but to the crisis-hit wealthier nations of the world at large.

The Bolivarian University is housed in the former oil ministry building and now serves 8,000 students throughout Venezuela. The University (Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela), is symbolic of the democratic socialist changes occurring throughout the country. Before the election of Hugo Chavez as president in 1998, college attendance was primarily for the rich in Venezuela. Today over one million, eight hundred thousand students attend college, three times the rate ten years ago. “Our university was established to resist domination and imperialism,” reported Principal (president) Marlene Yadira Cordova in an interview November 10, “We are a university where we have a vision of life that the oppressed people have a place on this planet.” The enthusiasm for learning and serious-thoughtful questions asked by students I saw that day was certainly representative of a belief in the potential of positive social change for human betterment. The University offers a fully-staffed free healthcare clinic, zero tuition, and basic no-cost food for students in the cafeteria, all paid for by the oil revenues now being democratically shared by the people.

Bottom up democracy in Venezuela starts with the 25,000 community councils elected in every neighborhood in the country. “We establish the priority needs of our area,” reported community council spokesperson Carmon Aponte, with the neighborhood council in the barrio Bombilla area of western Caracas. I interviewed Carmon while visiting the Patare Community TV and radio station—one of thirty-four locally controlled community television stations and four hundred radio stations now in the barrios throughout Venezuela. Community radio, TV and newspapers are the voice of the people, where they describe the viewers/listeners as the “users” of media instead of the passive audiences.

Democratic socialism means healthcare, jobs, food, and security, in neighborhoods where in many cases nothing but absolute poverty existed ten years ago. With unemployment down to a US level, sharing the wealth has taken real meaning in Venezuela. Despite a 50 percent increase in the price of food last year, local Mercals offer government subsidized cooking oil, corn meal, meat, and powered milk at 30-50 percent off market price. Additionally, there are now 3,500 local communal banks with a $1.6 billion dollar budget offering neighborhood-based micro-financing loans for home improvements, small businesses, and personal emergencies.

“We have moved from a time of distain [pre-revolution—when the upper classes saw working people as less than human] to a time of adjustment,” proclaimed Ecuador’s minister of Culture, Gallo Mora Witt at the opening ceremonies of the Fourth International Book Fair in Caracas November 7. Venezuela’s Minister of Culture, Hector Soto added, “We try not to leave anyone out… before the revolution the elites published only 60-80 books a year, we will publish 1,200 Venezuelan authors this year…the book will never stop being the important tool for cultural feelings.” In fact, some twenty-five million books—classics by Victor Hugo and Miguel de Cervantes along with Cindy Sheehan’s Letter to George Bush—were published in 2008 and are being distributed to the community councils nationwide. The theme of the International Book Fair was books as cultural support to the construction of the Bolivarian revolution and building socialism for the 21st century.

In Venezuela the corporate media are still owned by the elites. The five major TV networks, and nine of ten of the major newspapers maintain a continuing media effort to undermine Chavez and the socialist revolution. But despite the corporate media and continuing US taxpayer financial support to the anti-Chavez opposition institutions from USAID and National Endowment for Democracy ($20 million annually) two-thirds of the people in Venezuela continue to support President Hugo Chavez and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela. The democracies of South America are realizing that the neo-liberal formulas for capitalism are not working for the people and that new forms of resource allocation are necessary for human betterment. It is a learning process for all involved and certainly a democratic effort from the bottom up.