As indicated by the title, it quickly develops into a more general documentary about the tide of left-wing governments that has swept across Latin America in the last decade.

Stone also spends time (although perhaps not enough) elucidating the US government’s more favoured weapon of choice in the region – economic control via the International Monetary Fund. What the film could have added, but didn’t, is that the IMF’s stated proposals are as fraudulent as their purpose. What is marketed as free trade is in fact a mixture of liberalisation and protectionist policies designed in the interests of the framers.

Nonetheless it is the parochial interests of the US, juxtaposed with Chavez’s Bolivarian commitment to independence, that are emphasised repeatedly. Considerably less emphasis (perhaps with a view to not alienating a liberal US audience) is given to Chavez’s vocal denunciations of global capitalism in general and the initial steps the country is taking towards a socialist alternative. One cannot be too critical on this point.

Many other countries of the region are distancing themselves from Washington and it is the story of Latin American independence and integration – the ‘left tide’ sweeping the continent – that occupies Stone’s attention in the second half of the film. The most informative interview, aside from Chavez, is with Nestor Kirchner, the former president of Argentina. Kirchner discusses the 2005 Summit of the Americas conference at which Latin American countries were able to defeat the US’s economic plans for the region.

‘We acted collectively and in coordination,’ Kirchner explains. ‘It was one of the most important steps ever taken in the region.’ Sustained coordination and solidarity is essential if Latin America is to continue on the path towards genuine independence.

The film is not without its faults. To begin with it is rather too preoccupied with its presidential interviewees, and rather less interested in the social movements that brought them into power. (Others might see this as one of the film’s strengths, as there is no other film that has taken this approach, while there are many documentaries about the different social movements in Latin America.)

Stone’s efforts to bond with Paraguay’s president come across as patronising, and in the case of current Argentinian president Christina Kirchner downright sexist: ‘How many sets of shoes do you have?’ Nonetheless the film does a commendable job of shedding light on a dynamic process underway in Venezuela and in other Latin American countries – one that the western media systematically ignores or misrepresents.

‘The media will always try to criminalise the fight against neoliberalism, colonialism and imperialism,’ explains the president of Bolivia, Evo Morales. With South of the Border, Stone has provided a welcome antidote to Morales’ lament.

South of the Border is released in UK cinemas on Friday 30 July. southoftheborder.dogwoof.com

Particularly controversial has been the issue of land reform. Bolivia has one of the most unequal rates of land ownership in the world, with one per cent of landowners owning two-thirds of the country’s farm land. It is no surprise, then, that Morales’s proposed reforms have provoked the ire of Bolivia’s landed elites. In the richer provinces, these elites began orchestrating violence against indigenous people in alliance with crypto-fascist paramilitary youth mobs. Among their demands are regional autonomy and a greater share of oil and gas profits – concessions that Morales is unwilling to give. At the time of writing, the worst of the violence seems to have subsided and talks between the government and opposition have resulted in Bolivia’s Congress approving a referendum on a new constitution early next year. But the underlying conflict is unlikely to be easily resolved and could flare up again at any time.

Conflict of interests

In Civil War is not a Stupid Thing, the political economist Christopher Cramer critically reflects upon the prevailing ideology surrounding conflict in the ‘third world’. He argues that historically the west has looked upon conflict in these places as a ‘deviant aberration from a more normal world of liberal peace, best exemplified by Northern prosperity and stability’. For Cramer, in the past few years this prejudice has been integrated into a neoliberal analysis that emphasises the immediate economic costs to societies of conflict, with these two assumptions combining to support the notion that conflict is ‘development in reverse’.

A cursory look at the British media’s reporting of the crisis in Bolivia supports Cramer’s thesis. Both the Guardian and the Independent observed that Bolivia was beginning to resemble a ‘failed state’. The Daily Telegraph’s Daniel Hannan chided the Bolivian government for placing ideology before compromise, accusing ‘Morales’s palaeo-socialism’ of ‘shrinking the economy’, thereby having the effect that ‘Bolivians are poorer, angrier and more violent than I have ever known them – they deserve better than this’. The Financial Times, meanwhile, harboured doubts about the ability of ‘increasingly politicised institutions to support entrepreneurialism and economic growth’. The message is clear: conflict is antiquated, a distraction from the more civilised business of money making.

It woould be ironic if the west’s detached attitude to events in Latin America were to be explained in part by neoliberal notions, given that the current global neoliberal order had its bloody birth in Latin America – in Chile in 1973. In the wake of the US-sponsored coup that overthrew Salvador Allende’s democratically-elected government, economists from Milton Friedman’s Chicago School rammed through radical neoliberal reforms. Chile served as a laboratory for radical ideas that would later be adopted by the west, with Margaret Thatcher an infamous admirer of the military dictator General Pinochet’s ‘restructuring’ of Chilean society.

There are, in fact, close parallels between the modern histories of Britain and Bolivia. The post-war era in both countries was shaped by popular democratic governments that vastly expanded the public realm. In Britain, the Labour government of Clement Atlee nationalised Britain’s major industries and founded the NHS. In 1952 in Bolivia, the left-wing National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) of Victor Paz Estenssoro nationalised the mines and established national education and healthcare systems. In both countries these reforms remained largely unchanged until the mid-1980s.

Bolivia embraced neoliberal changes in 1985, following the re-election of the MNR – once again headed by Paz. This time, Paz promptly reversed the reforms of 1952, floating the peso, cutting public sector salaries and eliminating food subsidies, price controls and restrictions on foreign commerce. As in Britain, the neoliberal revolution continued through the 1990s with the privatisation of the oil, gas, tin, telecommunications and railway industries.

War on democracy

In Bolivia, the manner in which these reforms were instituted was profoundly undemocratic. Paz had run on a mandate of fiscal responsibility and an allegiance to his ‘nationalist revolutionary’ past. Once in power, though, the New Economic Policy (NEP) was instituted as a presidential decree. The idea was to pass the reforms before trade union and civil and peasant groups had a chance to react. React they did, however, just as the British unions did in response to Thatcher’s reforms, calling a general strike. As Naomi Klein has noted, Paz’s response ‘made Thatcher’s treatment of the miners seem tame’. He declared a state of emergency and rounded up the top 200 union leaders, loaded them on to planes and flew them to remote jails in the Amazon.

The turn to neoliberalism has been a common theme of the past 30 years in much of the world – to the extent that we can now speak of a neoliberal global economic order. In large measure this global revolution has relied upon circumventing national democratic processes. ‘Privatisation’ and ‘liberalisation’, in reality, amount to technical terms for removing critical economic decisions from the realm of public accountability. Democracy is further undermined when national democratic decisions can be vetoed by capital flight as a consequence of international free trade. This is something John Maynard Keynes recognised when he warned that ‘nothing less than the democratic experiment in self-government [is] endangered by the threat of global financial forces.’

In Bolivia, neoliberalism was initially hailed as an enormous success. Prior to Paz’s reforms, inflation had skyrocketed to over 14,000 per cent. Within two years of the reforms it had been brought down to 10 per cent. But as inflation came down, unemployment went up. Bolivia experienced massive lay offs, including 22,000 from the state mines alone, rising to 45,000 by 1991.

Unemployment took its heaviest toll on Bolivia’s fragile industrial sector. Without state backing, factory closures led to 35,000 people losing their jobs. Those that remained in employment did not fare much better, with real wages dropping by 40 per cent. Not only did neoliberalism fail to create jobs, but the dismantling of the central bureaucracy undermined the government’s ability to respond to the damaging effects of joblessness. Many who lost jobs migrated to the east of the country to grow coca, which by the 1980s was Bolivia’s most profitable export.

While ultimate responsibility for the NEP lies with Paz and his ‘emergency team’ of technocrats and business leaders, the reforms were also largely a product of the aggressive influence of international financial institutions, particularly the IMF and World Bank. The NEP was largely designed to court their approval, while the waves of privatisations in the 1990s were on the explicit instructions of the IMF – in fact, the IMF was so impressed with the results that Bolivia was held up as a model for less developed countries around the world.

The Bolivian government’s pandering to the demands of the IMF in the 1990s can be interpreted as a consequence of the devastation wrought on Bolivia’s democracy by the NEP. Having been shut out of the sphere of governance, the public had limited means with which to press the government to act in its interests. The result was a return to an imperial arrangement whereby Bolivia’s elites auctioned off their country’s land and resources to the highest foreign bidders.

The looting of Bolivia reached its nadir in 2000 when the World Bank facilitated the privatisation of the water supply in the city of Cochambamba to a foreign multinational consortium led by London-based International Water Limited (IWL). In exchange Bolivia would receive $600 million of debt relief. The consortium immediately raised water rates by 35 per cent, and in the drive for profit maximisation a law was even briefly passed prohibiting people from collecting rainwater. For the majority of Bolivians, their patience had run out.

Democracy returns

In voting for Morales and his party in 2005, the Movement towards Socialism (MAS), Bolivians voted for democracy. Morales was elected on a platform of facilitating popular participation in the running of the country and the economy through the widening of the public sphere, the representation of social movements in executive office and the introduction of indigenous rights. Nationalisation of key industries ensured that profits stayed in Bolivia and the government had the capacity to govern.

As left historians Forrest Hylton and Trevor Sinclair elegantly put it in their book Revolutionary Horizons: ‘The election of Evo Morales did not bring about a revolution. It was a revolution that brought about the government of Evo Morales.’

Prior to the 2005 election, popular mobilisation had already brought down two presidents and vetoed the accession of a third. The toppling of these governments was not led by MAS; rather the MAS leadership trailed a popular mobilisation led by indigenous groups, trade unions and federations of coca growers.

It was out of this coalition that the proposals for nationalisation, constitutional reform and economic and political restructuring emerged. MAS itself was a political organisation founded by civil groups in the 1990s to articulate popular demands. In his inauguration speech Morales appealed to these groups saying ‘Control me. If I can’t advance, push me, brothers and sisters. Correct me constantly, because I may err.’

Morales was reliant on these groups during the crisis. That Morales’s supporters continue to resist the opposition’s campaign of violence is testament to their overwhelming national support and ability to mobilise to defend the government’s legitimacy.

While the British media openly discussed the possibility of a civil war, Morales’s popularity has risen since the 2005 election, including in the richer provinces. It is this support that pressured opposition members in Congress to ratify a new draft of the Bolivian constitution on 21 October. A national referendum on whether or not to make the document official is scheduled for 25 January next year.

It is significant that Bolivia’s latest crisis coincided with the 35th anniversary of the coup in Chile. It is also worth reminding ourselves that it is doubtful whether the Chile coup would have succeeded without international complicity. The parallels have not gone unnoticed in Latin America as neighbouring countries have queued up to pledge support to Morales and condemn the violence. Argentine president Christina Kirchner warned: ‘If we don’t act now, in 30 years we may be watching documentaries [about Bolivia] like those we see today about Salvador Allende.’ Her statement contained a veiled reference to the US government, whose shadow looms large over the crisis. In September, relations between the US and Bolivia became openly hostile when Morales expelled the US ambassador, accusing him of subverting Bolivia’s democracy by colluding with opposition groups.

A revolution without borders

In the 1980s, the US waged a war against a democratic revolution in Nicaragua. During the revolution, Tomas Borge, a founding member of the Sandinistas, stated his desire for a ‘revolution without borders’. What he meant was that he hoped the revolution could serve as a model for other societies. In the context of the cold war, the US government and its backers in the media did not need to resort to a sophisticated neoliberal analysis to distort the meaning of Borge’s words; it was enough to report that Nicaragua was intent on spreading a permanent ‘Soviet-style’ revolution across the western hemisphere.

The reality is that the distortion was intended to conceal something far more threatening – what Oxfam rather shrewdly described at the time as ‘the threat of the good example’. Bolivia’s experiment with democracy is an example for all of us. At a time in which neoliberalism has hollowed out our democracy while simultaneously propelling us down a path of economic and ecological disaster, the stakes could not be higher. Showing solidarity with Bolivia at this time is undoubtedly important for the people there. It might be just as important for us. n

At this point it is worth looking at some of the criticism Rory Carroll’s reporting of Venezuela has come in for in recent months. For example, in a response to criticisms that Carroll’s coverage of Venezuela lacked objectivity, the Guardian‘s readers’ editor, Siobhain Butterworth, defended Carroll by arguing the Guardian is not required to be impartial. Carroll for his part acknowledged that he was ‘not a champion of impartiality’. Emphasising the polarising nature of Venezuelan politics, he instead saw it as his task ‘to steer a course between’ the two opposing sides.

Since Chavez became president of Venezuela in 1999, relations between the US and Venezuela have steadily deteriorated, especially after George W Bush became US president in January 2001. However, this latest confrontation arguably marks an all-time low in relations between the two countries. With both the US and Venezuela being given their respective voices in Carroll’s two aforementioned articles, this provides us with an opportunity to test whether Carroll’s articles measure up to the standards he has set himself.

When weighing up the strength of any allegations there are two main things to consider. The first is the available evidence to back up the allegations. The second is prior plausibility. I will deal with each in turn.

The evidence?

In his first article Carroll stresses that Chavez, ‘did not offer evidence of wrongdoing by the ambassador or any] other US officials\’. Furthermore, for Carroll there is \’scant\’ evidence that military officers detained by the Venezuelan government were involved in a plot either. The \’scant\’ evidence he is referring to (but curiously does not mention) is [taped phone conversations of retired military generals broadcast on Venezuelan television last on the night of 10 September.

Carroll also reports in the first article that the Bolivian government had expelled its US ambassador for 'allegedly backing opposition groups engaged in bloody clashes with police and government supporters'. Carroll does not address the weight of these allegations in this article, but it is clear that he is sceptical of their validity.

In an audio interview he gave a little over a month ago he stated that the idea of US interference with Bolivia is merely 'a standard line from Evo Morales which he has repeated from his big ally Venezuela's president Hugo Chavez. So he frames ... the opposition ... [as] almost stooges of Washington and that they are reflecting the interests of the United States. I think this plays well with his own hard core supporters but I think generally in Bolivia people realise that this is very much an internal affair.’

Readers might at this point want to compare Carroll’s analysis with that of Benjamin Dangl, another Latin America-based editor. Nonetheless, Carroll (perhaps rightly) remains suspicious of evidence that emanates exclusively from Venezuelan and Bolivian government sources. The question is: does he apply an equal standard to the allegations made by the US government?

The answer is no, and Carroll employs a number of discursive devices to convey this. The first is to dispel the notion that the US allegations were in any way a counter claim. He quotes a US state department spokesman who dismissed the allegations as ‘reflecting] the weakness and desperation of these leaders\’. (In contrast Carroll describes Chavez in the same article as \’embarrassed\’ by the [Maletinazo scandal.) Then he supplements this quote with his own assertion that the US's allegations were indeed separate from the events of the preceding days:

'Separately, the US treasury accused three members of Chávez's inner-circle of materially assisting the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), leftist guerrillas who traffick cocaine and are considered terrorists by the US and EU.'

Carroll employs the phrase 'materially assisting' FARC presumably in order to give the impression of tangible evidence possessed by the US government, albeit evidence which Carroll himself is not privy to. What Carroll can provide however are the names of Chavez's 'inner circle' alleged to be involved with FARC along with particularly incriminating circumstantial evidence:

'Hugo Carvajal Barrios and Henry Rangel Silva are senior intelligence officials and Ramón Rodríguez Chacin was interior minister until this week when he unexpectedly resigned, citing personal reasons.'

Equally Carroll could have provided names of the military officers alleged to have been plotting against the Venezuelan government - among them Ruperti Sanchez Caceres and Helimenas Jose Labarca Soto - but he chose not to.

Readers well acquainted with Carroll's reporting will know that he has a certain preoccupation with the Venezuelan president. In less than two years of reporting on Venezuela, Carroll has written an astonishing 79 articles with Chavez's name in the headline alone. It is predictable then that the allegations against the US are presented by Carroll as yet another example of Chavez's quirky and paranoid persona; the latest in a long running feud between the 'self styled revolutionary' (as Carroll repeatedly refers to him) and 'the superpower' he calls 'the empire'.

Of course the allegations did not emanate from Chavez at all, but from Venezuelan intelligence services. According to the New York Times Venezuelan military prosecutors are already in the process of questioning the officers concerned. This Carroll is willing to concede, but lest we should draw our attention away from Chavez for a moment, he is quick to remind us that (after all) they are 'his intelligence services'.

In stark contrast to the personalisation of the Venezuelan allegations, Carroll shows a reluctance to even attribute the US claims to the US government as a single entity. Instead we are provided with the conclusions by separate and perhaps even disparate elements of the US government. Carroll had already implied that there was sufficient distance between the US treasury and the State Department for us to consider their claims 'separately'. However should we be in any doubt regarding the credibility of the treasury's claims, Carroll quickly backs them up with the conclusions of ... well ... err ... another member of the US government:

'US drugs czar, John Walters, repeated claims that Venezuela and Bolivia were taking over from Colombia in the export of cocaine. 'Venezuela is becoming a real super-highway for cocaine,' said Walters. There had been a 'four-fold' increase in the flow through Venezuela in five years.'

We are not given a link to the data cataloguing this four-fold increase, but then isn't Walters' word good enough? He is the drugs czar after all - he should know.

Journalists afflicted with the same degree of paranoia as Chavez might entertain the idea that there is some cohesion in the activities between the different departments of the US government. Indeed investigations by Eva Golinger reveal that the US allegations might not have stemmed from the treasury at all, but the Pentagon. In May of this year she reported that:

'[The] Pentagon has been seeking evidence that intimately relates President Chávez and his government with the FARC. Top secret documents from the Department of Defense (that we have declassified under FOIA) evidence that the Pentagon has been unable to find proof of a clandestine, subversive relationship between the Venezuelan government and the FARC. The sources used in some Pentagon documents that attempt to show such a relationship are completely unreliable, since they are mass media outlets from Venezuela and Colombia, such as Globovisión, Caracol, El Universal and El Nacional – all of whom are aligned with the opposition to Chávez.’

The fact remains that in spite of the different ways in which Carroll presents the two opposing sets of claims, both are strictly government claims and cannot be divorced from the political dynamics operating between the two countries. In this respect evaluating the prior plausibility of the allegations is especially important.

Prior plausibility?

Saturday’s article is by no means the first time that Carroll has reported links between the Venezuelan government and FARC. In previous articles he has attempted to explain these ties as ideological. On numerous occasions he describes the affinity between Chavez and FARC as \’no secret\’ , presumably in the hope that if he says it confidently enough no one would contest it. Nonetheless this will come as a surprise to many people, particularly as Chavez has explicitly appealed to FARC to give up their armed struggle. However while Chavez might espouse conciliation between Colombia’s warring sides, Carroll remains under no illusion regarding Chavez’s extremism, referring to him as ‘a social democrat turned US-bashing communist revolutionary’ and a ‘self-described communist’. This latter allegation drew the attention of David Wearing of UKWatch, who reported the following on his blog:

‘I emailed Carroll to ask for a direct quote … and he suggested I’d find one in a transcript of the presidential inauguration speech. I found the transcript. No quote. When challenged with this in a subsequent email, Carroll insisted that Chavez had called himself a communist ‘on television’ and that ‘millions of Venezuelans’ heard him. Yet still couldn’t summon up a quote.

‘Then a few months later, in an article on Che Guevara co-written by Carroll (4/9/07), we were quietly told that these days ‘Not even Mr Chávez, the reddest tinge in the pink tide, advocates communism’. Interesting that just a few months previously Carroll had repeatedly insisted in print and in correspondence with me that Chavez had publicly ‘declared himself a communist’ and that ‘millions of Venezuelans’, and Carroll, had heard him. Needless to say that I found this episode puzzling, to put it generously.’

Intriguing indeed. On this note we turn our attention to evaluating the plausibility of Chavez’s allegations. It is here that Carroll’s reporting borders on the farcical. In attempting to provide some context to the Chavez’s allegations, he notes that ‘Venezuela’s president has made previous claims about other alleged conspiracies, which were never substantiated.’ Carroll then goes on to suggest that Chavez’s claims are just populist rhetoric:

‘The timing of yesterday’s rhetoric prompted some to suspect political theatre designed to distract voters. Chavez faces important municipal and regional elections in November with inflation at 30%, Latin America’s highest, and a spate of damaging headlines about violent crime and crumbling hospitals.’

What Carroll quite preposterously fails to mention however is that just six years ago the US did support a coup against Venezuela’s democratically elected government. In April 2002 the presidential palace was surrounded by tanks, Chavez was arrested and promptly ousted from office and replaced with the leader of Venezuela’s business sector lobby group. The coup lasted only 47 hours however. In one of the more remarkable stories of popular direct action, Chavez’s supporters responded by surrounding the presidential palace themselves, ultimately forcing the conspirators to back down and re-installing Chavez as president. US involvement in the coup is now well known. However in reading through Carroll’s articles on Venezuela, I was moved to doubt whether Carroll actually knew about this crucial detail. How else could one explain this extract?

‘No one wants a return to the era of CIA-backed coups and rightwing dictatorships [of the 1970s] but there is, say policymakers, a yearning for a productive engagement with Washington that was sorely missed during the distracted Bush administration [my emphasis].’

I was partially relieved then when I finally found an acknowledgement that the coup had taken place. Back in June 2007 Carroll notes:

‘The Bush administration tacitly backed a coup that briefly ousted Mr Chávez in 2002 and has made no secret of its distaste for a leader who has thrown an economic lifeline to Fidel Castro’s Cuba.’

Does tacit support cover over $20 million dollars of tax-payers money given to anti-Chavez groups and plans to target the arrest of Chavez as well as 10 other senior officials? On this point I am prepared to give Carroll the benefit of the doubt. The strict definition of tacit is ‘understood without being openly expressed’. Perhaps the word Carroll meant therefore was clandestine.

The reality is that Carroll has never intended to steer an even course between the Chavez government and its opponents. He has been far more concerned with titillating his readers by slandering the Venezuelan government. In the same piece in which the Guardian defended Carroll’s journalism, Butterworth notes that

‘[Carroll] considers Chávez’s personality to be part of the story. [He told me]‘”I try to give a sense of how bizarre and funny some things are…You have to get the tone right… the average reader knows when a piece is observational and can see for himself what is opinion.”‘

Readers can judge for themselves whether or not Carroll is getting the tone right. If by tone he meant misrepresentation, selectivity and bizarre omissions, it would appear, to this reader at least, that Carroll is fast becoming the butt of his own joke.

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