Latin Americans have spent the past few years finding their voices.
Now they may have the strength to defy their northern neighbour.
I
was dropped at Paradiso, the last middle-class area before La Vega
barrio, which spills into a ravine as if by the force of gravity. Storms
were forecast and people were anxious, remembering the mudslides of
1999 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 Hugo 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 MVR (Movement for the Fifth Republic), 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 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 cliches 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, 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 fewer than
nine elections. Compare that with the fifth of the British electorate
that reinstalled an authentic autocrat in Downing Street.
Chavez 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
BolIvar, born in 1783 in Venezuela, who brought the ideas of the French
Revolution to societies cowed by Spanish absolutism. BolIvar, 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 Bush
announced the latest misery in the name of liberty in the form of a Free
Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) treaty. This would finally allow the
United States to impose its ideological “market”, neoliberalism, on all
of Latin America. It was the natural successor to Bill Clinton’s North
American Free Trade Agreement, which has turned Mexico into a US
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 neoliberal laboratory. The poorest of the
poor were charged up to two-thirds of their pittance-income even for
rainwater.
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 International Monetary Fund (IMF), tin collapsed, along with 30,000
jobs. When the coca leaf replaced it – chewing it 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 US 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 such as 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 Sanchez 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. Presidential elections are scheduled
for 4 December and the opposition MAS (Movement to Socialism) may well
turn out the old order. The leader is an indigenous former coca farmer,
Evo Morales, whom the US 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 Federation of Neighbourhood Associations, 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 in 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 President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is
barely marking time in Brazil; the other is the priority he has given to
an IMF economic agenda, rather than to 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, an indigenous
movement marched through every one of Colombia’s 32 provinces demanding
an end to “an evil as great as the gun”: neoliberalism. 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 anarchist,
Marcel, showed me the clinic where Cuban doctors gave his girlfriend
critical emergency treatment. (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 Rupert Murdoch, who backed the failed attempt
to depose Chavez in April 2002. What is different is the proliferation
of lively community radio stations which played a crucial part in
Chavez’s rescue then 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 RodrIguez, “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.
