[Mb-civic] FW: Pilger / The Rise Of America's New Enemy / Nov 11

Sun Nov 20 08:22:13 PST 2005



>From: ZNet Commentaries <sysop at zmag.org>
>To: chiosceola at hotmail.com
>Subject: Pilger / The Rise Of America's New Enemy / Nov 11
>Date: Sun, 13 Nov 2005 18:59:26 -0800 (PST)
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>Today's commentary:
>http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005-11/11pilger.cfm
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>==================================
>
>ZNet Commentary
>The Rise Of America's New Enemy November 11, 2005
>By John Pilger
>
>I was dropped at Paradiso, the last middle-class area before barrio La 
>Vega, which spills into a ravine as if by the force of gravity. Storms were 
>forecast, and people were anxious, remembering the mudslides that took 
>20,000 lives. "Why are you here?" asked the man sitting opposite me in the 
>packed jeep-bus that chugged up the hill. Like so many in Latin America, he 
>appeared old, but wasn't. Without waiting for my answer, he listed why he 
>supported President Chavez: schools, clinics, affordable food, "our 
>constitution, our democracy" and "for the first time, the oil money is 
>going to us." I asked him if he belonged to the MRV, Chavez's party, "No, 
>I've never been in a political party; I can only tell you how my life has 
>been changed, as I never dreamt."
>
>It is raw witness like this, which I have heard over and over again in 
>Venezuela, that smashes the one-way mirror between the west and a continent 
>that is rising. By rising, I mean the phenomenon of millions of people 
>stirring once again, "like lions after slumber/In unvanquishable number", 
>wrote the poet Shelley in The Mask of Anarchy. This is not romantic; an 
>epic is unfolding in Latin America that demands our attention beyond the 
>stereotypes and clichÃ©s that diminish whole societies to their degree of 
>exploitation and expendability.
>
>To the man in the bus, and to Beatrice whose children are being immunised 
>and taught history, art and music for the first time, and Celedonia, in her 
>seventies, reading and writing for the first time, and Jose whose life was 
>saved by a doctor in the middle of the night, the first doctor he had ever 
>seen, Hugo Chavez is neither a "firebrand" nor an "autocrat" but a 
>humanitarian and a democrat who commands almost two thirds of the popular 
>vote, accredited by victories in no less than nine elections. Compare that 
>with the fifth of the British electorate that re-installed Blair, an 
>authentic autocrat.
>
>ChÃ¡vez and the rise of popular social movements, from Colombia down to 
>Argentina, represent bloodless, radical change across the continent, 
>inspired by the great independence struggles that began with SimOn 
>BolÃvar, born in Venezuela, who brought the ideas of the French Revolution 
>to societies cowed by Spanish absolutism. BolÃvar, like Che Guevara in the 
>1960s and Chavez today, understood the new colonial master to the north. 
>"The USA," he said in 1819, "appears destined by fate to plague America 
>with misery in the name of liberty."
>
>At the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001, George W Bush 
>announced the latest misery in the name of liberty in the form of a Free 
>Trade Area of the Americas treaty. This would allow the United States to 
>impose its ideological "market", neo-liberalism, finally on all of Latin 
>America. It was the natural successor to Bill Clinton's North American Free 
>Trade Agreement, which has turned Mexico into an American sweatshop. Bush 
>boasted it would be law by 2005.
>
>On 5 November, Bush arrived at the 2005 summit in Mar del Plata, Argentina, 
>to be told his FTAA was not even on the agenda. Among the 34 heads of state 
>were new, uncompliant faces and behind all of them were populations no 
>longer willing to accept US-backed business tyrannies. Never before have 
>Latin American governments had to consult their people on pseudo-agreements 
>of this kind; but now they must.
>
>In Bolivia, in the past five years, social movements have got rid of 
>governments and foreign corporations alike, such as the tentacular Bechtel, 
>which sought to impose what people call total locura capitalista - total 
>capitalist folly - the privatising of almost everything, especially natural 
>gas and water. Following Pinochet's Chile, Bolivia was to be a neo-liberal 
>laboratory. The poorest of the poor were charged up to two-thirds of their 
>pittance-income even for rain-water.
>
>Standing in the bleak, freezing, cobble-stoned streets of El Alto, 14,000 
>feet up in the Andes, or sitting in the breeze-block homes of former miners 
>and campesinos driven off their land, I have had political discussions of a 
>kind seldom ignited in Britain and the US. They are direct and eloquent. 
>"Why are we so poor," they say, "when our country is so rich? Why do 
>governments lie to us and represent outside powers?" They refer to 500 
>years of conquest as if it is a living presence, which it is, tracing a 
>journey from the Spanish plunder of Cerro Rico, a hill of silver mined by 
>indigenous slave labour and which underwrote the Spanish Empire for three 
>centuries. When the silver was gone, there was tin, and when the mines were 
>privatised in the 1970s at the behest of the IMF, tin collapsed, along with 
>30,000 jobs. When the coca leaf replaced it - in Bolivia, chewing it in 
>curbs hunger - the Bolivian army, coerced by the US, began destroying the 
>coca crops and filling the prisons.
>
>In 2000, open rebellion burst upon the white business oligarchs and the 
>American embassy whose fortress stands like an Andean Vatican in the centre 
>of La Paz. There was never anything like it, because it came from the 
>majority Indian population "to protect our indigenous soul". Naked racism 
>against indigenous peoples all over Latin America is the Spanish legacy. 
>They were despised or invisible, or curios for tourists: the women in their 
>bowler hats and colourful skirts. No more. Led by visionaries like Oscar 
>Olivera, the women in bowler hats and colourful skirts encircled and shut 
>down the country's second city, Cochabamba, until their water was returned 
>to public ownership.
>
>Every year since, people have fought a water or gas war: essentially a war 
>against privatisation and poverty. Having driven out President Gonzalo 
>SÃ¡nchez de Lozada in 2003, Bolivians voted in a referendum for real 
>democracy. Through the social movements they demanded a constituent 
>assembly similar to that which founded ChAvez's Bolivarian revolution in 
>Venezuela, together with the rejection of the FTAA and all the other "free 
>trade" agreements, the expulsion of the transnational water companies and a 
>50 per cent tax on the exploitation of all energy resources.
>
>When the replacement president, Carlos Mesa, refused to implement the 
>programme he was forced to resign. Next month, there will be presidential 
>elections and the opposition Movement to Socialism (MAS) may well turn out 
>the old order. The leader is an indigenous former coca farmer, Evo Morales, 
>whom the American ambassador has likened to Osama Bin Laden. In fact, he is 
>a social democrat who, for many of those who sealed off Cochabamba and 
>marched down the mountain from El Alto, moderates too much.
>
>"This is not going to be easy," Abel Mamani, the indigenous president of 
>the El Alto Neighbourhood Committees, told me. "The elections won't be a 
>solution even if we win. What we need to guarantee is the constituent 
>assembly, from which we build a democracy based not on what the US wants, 
>but on social justice." The writer Pablo Solon, son of the great political 
>muralist Walter Solon, said, "The story of Bolivia is the story of the 
>government behind the government. The US can create a financial crisis; but 
>really for them it is ideological; they say they will not accept another 
>Chavez."
>
>The people, however, will not accept another Washington quisling.  The 
>lesson is Ecuador, where a helicopter saved Lucio GutiErrez as he fled the 
>presidential palace last April. Having won power in alliance with the 
>indigenous Pachakutik movement, he was the "Ecuadorian Chavez", until he 
>drowned in a corruption scandal. For ordinary Latin Americans, corruption 
>on high is no longer forgivable. That is one of two reasons the Workers' 
>Party government of Lula is barely marking time in Brazil; the other is the 
>priority he has given to an IMF economic agenda, rather than his own 
>people. In Argentina, social movements saw off five pro-Washington 
>presidents in 2001 and 2002. Across the water in Uruguay, the Frente 
>Amplio, socialist heirs to the Tupamaros, the guerrillas of the 1970s who 
>fought one of the CIA's most vicious terror campaigns, formed a popular 
>government last year.
>
>The social movements are now a decisive force in every Latin American 
>country - even in the state of fear that is the Colombia of Alvaro Uribe 
>Velez, Bush's most loyal vassal. Last month, indigenous movements marched 
>through every one of Colombia's 32 provinces demanding an end to "an evil 
>as great at the gun": neo-liberalism. All over Latin America, Hugo Chavez 
>is the modern Bolivar. People admire his political imagination and his 
>courage. Only he has had the guts to describe the United States as a source 
>of terrorism and Bush as Senor Peligro (Mr Danger). He  is very different 
>from Fidel Castro, whom he respects. Venezuela is an extraordinarily open 
>society with an unfettered opposition - that is rich and still powerful. On 
>the left, there are those who oppose the state, in principle, believe its 
>reforms have reached their limit, and want power to flow directly from the 
>community. They say so vigorously, yet they support Chavez. A fluent young 
>arnarchist, Marcel, showed me the clinic where the two Cuban doctors may 
>have saved his girlfriend. (In a barter arrangement, Venezuela gives Cuba 
>oil in exchange for doctors).
>
>At the entrance to every barrio there is a state supermarket, where 
>everything from staple food to washing up liquid costs 40 per cent less 
>than in commercial stores. Despite specious accusations that the government 
>has instituted censorship, most of the media remains violently anti-Chavez: 
>a large part of it in the hands of Gustavo Cisneros, Latin America's 
>Murdoch, who backed the failed attempt to depose Chavez. What is striking 
>is the proliferation of lively community radio stations, which played a 
>critical part in Chavez's rescue in the coup of April 2002 by calling on 
>people to march on Caracas.
>
>While the world looks to Iran and Syria for the next Bush attack, 
>Venezuelans know they may well be next. On 17 March, the Washington Post 
>reported that Feliz RodrÃguez, "a former CIA operative well-connected to 
>the Bush family" had taken part in the planning of the assassination of the 
>President of Venezuela. On 16 September, Chavez said, "I have evidence that 
>there are plans to invade Venezuela. Furthermore, we have documentation: 
>how many bombers will over-fly Venezuela on the day of the invasion... the 
>US is carrying out manoeuvres on Curacao Island. It is called Operation 
>Balboa." Since then, leaked internal Pentagon documents have identified 
>Venezuela as a "post-Iraq threat" requiring "full spectrum" planning.
>
>The old-young man in the jeep, Beatrice and her healthy children and 
>Celedonia with her "new esteem", are indeed a threat - the threat of an 
>alternative, decent world that some lament is no longer possible. Well, it 
>is, and it deserves our support.
>
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