HUGO CHAVEZ, HUMANITARIAN AND DEMOCRAT
bY jOHN pILGER
"ICH
"
11/10/05I
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 clichés 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.
Chávez 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 Bolívar,
born in Venezuela, who brought the ideas of the French
Revolution to societies cowed by Spanish absolutism.
Bolívar, 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 Sánchez 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
Rodríguez, "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.
First published in the New Statesman - www.newstatesman.co.uk
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