Red Pepper » Latin America

Perspectives on Latin America

louise — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 11:22:24 +0000

Photo: World Bank Photo Collection: Young boy works with his family tending potatoes

The series has been initiated by Argentinian intellectual Essex Univeristy Professor, Ernesto Laclau. The meeting aims to give a sympathetic view of the left-wing transformation of contemporary Latin America, and to do so within easy reach of Parliamentarians. This year the meeting took place in the presence of Alicia Castro, Ambassador of Argentina to the UK. The speakers were Ernesto Laclau, Dr Francisco Panizza ((LSE), author of the well-received ‘Contemporary Latin America: Development and Democracy beyond the Washington Consensus’, and innovative researcher Dr Sara Motta (Nottingham University). Leading Parliamentary fighter for global justice Jeremy Corbyn MP was Chair. Laclau opened the discussion by recounting the historical interaction between democracy and liberalism, comparing Latin America and Europe: In Europe the early chasm between the two was partially bridged by the advances of the 19th Century, but in Latin America this gap was never closed. Indeed democracy and liberalism have often been antagonistic in Latin America.

By the late 19th Century, Latin America had liberal political systems which were not democratic at all. Demands of the masses were never institutionally absorbed and political systems were dominated by land-owning oligarchies. This continued until the 1930s Depression, when there was an accumulation of democratic demands which the system could not absorb, leading to a political crisis across Latin America and the advent of populist governments – a populist rupture – typified by the Peron governments in Argentina after World War 2. This political instability has only very recently been stabilised with the present set of national-popular governments elected since the 1990s. They respect democracy but are very different from the liberal democracies of Europe. The European left wrongly dismisses populism as demagogic manipulation of the mob, argued Laclau. In fact, populism mobilises those at the bottom of the system against the power elites.

Asked about the distinction between European social democracy and contemporary Latin America, Ernesto Laclau suggested that Latin America is becoming a beacon, a model of what Europe and the world should be doing about the present massive economic crisis. Europe is doing everything wrong, he insisted, in pursuing neoliberal adjustment. Latin America has avoided the worst of the crisis simply because it has not followed the advice of the IMF. Neoliberalism is collapsing everywhere, to the point where governments must completely change orientation.

Such change is emerging: In France, Melenchon’s audience in the French Socialist Party is increasing. Die Linke is progressing in Germany, while in the Netherlands the Dutch Socialist Party has established itself as a leading party in that Country. In Greece the present govt could soon lose power to Syriza. Ernesto quoted Eric Hobsbawm saying Blair is Thatcherism in trousers, and Stuart Hall saying we need to Latin Americanise Europe! Good advice! Jeremy Corbyn noted Europe and China are building trade with Latin America – in the UK policy is dominated by the Malvinas issue – in terms of the extractive industries, and expressed concern as this is unsustainable long-term.

Francisco Panizza acknowledged the economic advance of Latin America, but cautioned against it being too dependent on a commodity boom of exports, especially to China. It is vital therefore, he argued to go beyond the traditional international division of labour. He stressed the importance of the development of Latin American education, so that there are more internationally recognised universities, and an expansion of primary education. At present there is often a huge gap between public and private education.

He urged a rise in the pay, conditions and competitiveness of domestic small and medium sized enterprises in Latin America. He also argued for the importance of developing the capacities of the state to achieve the most important objective: the enhancement of citizenship, economically, socially, politically. This is what democracy is about. There has been great progress but it is a work in progress. 170m people are still in poverty in Latin America.

Jeremy responded by insisting that growth on its own is not the solution without redistribution. Mal-distribution in Mexico is the worst on the continent and getting worse.

Francisco said he likes the concept of ‘pre-distribution’ i.e. better education, social and health services, better paid jobs and working conditions, and social networking. It is for these that we need the enhancement of the state.

Sara Motta emphasised the experience and the voices of those at the grass-roots who are often excluded from the narrative of politics, such as the single mother, the indigent peasant, the illiterate street vendor. We need more humility with regard to how we frame what is going on politically. There are multiple re-imaginings of going beyond neoliberalism, going well beyond asking how we make the market work. We should construct forms of work, community, social reproduction and family, she argued, which move beyond casual social relationships. In turn this requires a focus on the invisible work done by those excluded, which is essential to re-imagining the political. Hence the grass roots is not forgotten or misrepresented as delinquent, uneducated, non-political, or indeed manipulated. Grass roots politics occurs around social reproduction: food, shelter, health, child-care, water-rights, land. It is built through long struggle in communities, with non-dominant educational forms: Forms which don’t treat people as empty vessels to be filled, but which offer people different possibilities. Solidarity is this dialogue.

Jeremy asked if there is a very different experience, of the poor vis a vis the state, in Latin America as compared to Europe? The European left has promoted things such as health and social service provision by the state, whereas this is hardly the case for most of Latin American history.

Finally Ambassador Alicia Castro to commented on the discussion. She noted that there can be very different understandings of terms such as ‘liberal’, ‘populist’ and so on, since different countries have very different traditions. She was a long time in Venezuela (she was Argentine Ambassador to Venezuela before taking up that role in the UK), and is very enthusiastic about the Bolivarian revolution there. She described it as a fascinating laboratory. Chavez says the people know where they are today but don’t know where they will be tomorrow. Argentina has a very different history from Venezuela, so this is one example of why we shouldn’t treat Latin America as an homogeneous bloc.

In the present crisis, however, Europe can take many lessons from Latin America. In Argentina we suffered greatly from the neoliberal crisis of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Our unions had to fight privatisation. Now nobody in Argentina can say we should follow IMF recommendations. We are very positive about what is happening today in Argentina and Latin America. We are young republics, living through our ‘medieval’ times! She said. We must be free to live them in our own style. We have a rich and flexible approach to culture. We are free to re-examine our values. On a recent league table of the happiest countries, the first 20 were in Latin America. Venezuela is 5th while the USA is 171st! This is the USA which tells us what to do – criticising our nationalisation of oil companies, for example.

She said the Malvinas is very important for us as a region. It is about water, fisheries and oil. Oil exploration is not feasible without proper relations with continental Latin America, as any problem could cause an ecological disaster. So we are dealing with many issues. For us, Malvinas is a legacy of empire, and we advocate a proper dialogue with the UK. The international community recognises the controversy over the sovereignty of the Malvinas, so the UK can’t take the attitude that there is nothing to discuss There will be a referendum in March 2013, in which Falkland-Malvinas islanders will vote on their political status. The islanders are British. We don’t want to take away their Britishness. Britain invaded the islands in 1833, so what is not British is the territory. The transformation of Latin America over the past decade means we are clear about our unity, sovereignty, and hence the need for dialogue.

Jeremy was very clear his position on the Falklands-Malvinas is very different from the Labour Party’s. He met representatives of the Nobel laureates who have written an open letter calling for dialogue, which is a very important document. A solution will not be found without dialogue, and the history of the 1982 war was one of a deeply unpopular UK prime minister who cleverly spotted an opportunity to whip up jingoism to help her win the 1983 election in the UK. Some leading Labour figures were very confused but Tony Benn was clear on the real issues of fisheries and oil.The help given by Pinochet during the Falklands war was rewarded by the UK, even though the former was presiding over a bloodbath in Chile almost as big as that in Argentine. Hopefully the Labour Party will follow the example of the Nobel laureates.

Francisco said he doubted there would be enthusiasm for another war in the South Atlantic, after the UK and the world saw the great movement against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Ambassador Castro said the 1982 Falklands War was a stupid cruel war with an unpopular military junta trying to save itself after killing at least 30,000 Argentinians in South America’s biggest dirty war. She asked why the UK treats Argentina’s President Kirchner as though she is like the junta which used to rule that country.

That Cuba feeling

admin — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 10:00:37 +0000

A CND march at Aldermaston
On 14 October 1962, a US Air Force U-2 reconnaissance plane flew over Cuba taking photographs of the ground below. The next day, Central Intelligence Agency analysts examined the pictures – and concluded that they showed the construction of a launch site for Soviet missiles, confirming their suspicions that Moscow was creating a nuclear forward base in the Caribbean.
Thus began the Cuban missile crisis – a 13-day standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union that brought the world closer to all-out nuclear war than at any time before or since.
US president John F Kennedy spent the best part of a week working out how to respond. He was still smarting from the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs, the unsuccessful US-backed Cuban-exile invasion of the island in 1961 to overthrow Fidel Castro’s by then pro-Soviet revolutionary regime, and he resisted pressure from hawks to launch an immediate invasion. But the strategy he eventually adopted was high-risk. The US imposed a naval blockade on Cuba and promised not to invade if Moscow withdrew its missiles – but backed up the offer with a secret ultimatum threatening immediate invasion if it did not comply, with the only sweetener a secret promise to withdraw US nuclear missiles from Italy and Turkey.
Both superpowers put their military forces on full alert, and for a week it seemed to the whole world that nuclear Armageddon was imminent. Nikita Khrushchev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, denounced the naval blockade in fiery language; the United Nations security council met in emergency session and resolved nothing; a Soviet surface-to-air missile shot down an American U-2 over Cuba…
But then Khrushchev blinked. Out of the blue, he agreed to Kennedy’s deal: no Soviet missiles in Cuba, no American missiles in Turkey or Italy. At the time, because the US withdrawal of missiles from Turkey and Italy was not made public, it looked like a straightforward Soviet climbdown – and Khrushchev’s authority in domestic Soviet politics took a blow from which it never recovered: he was ousted two years later. Kennedy won, but he did not live long to savour his victory – he was assassinated in November 1963 – and the hubris that the successful resolution of the crisis instilled in the American establishment played a disastrous role in escalating US intervention in Vietnam.
Britain and CND
Britain was not an actor in the missile crisis. Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government was kept in the dark by the Kennedy administration in its early stages. Macmillan privately expressed polite concern to Kennedy that the US might be going too far in ratcheting up the confrontation with the Soviets – he was worried most of all by the implications for West Berlin, which he feared could be subjected to another Soviet blockade or even invasion – but in public he gave robust support to the Americans.
For the British people, though, the problem was not the future of Berlin but what appeared to be the strong possibility of nuclear war. Newspaper circulations soared as, day by day, tension mounted.
But the crisis didn’t benefit the movement for nuclear disarmament. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), founded in early 1958 with the support of the Labour left and its weekly papers, the New Statesman and Tribune, had enjoyed a spectacular political success in 1960, when its lobbying of trade unions and constituency Labour parties led to the Labour conference adopting a policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament, against the histrionic opposition of the party leader, Hugh Gaitskell. But Gaitskell and his allies had overturned unilateralism at the next year’s conference – and the CND leadership subsequently found itself without a viable political strategy and facing a barrage of criticism from activists for putting all its energies into Labour. By 1962, its influence was on the wane.
There was still life in the peace movement. CND’s Easter 1962 annual march from the Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Research Establishment to London attracted 150,000 to its closing rally, its biggest ever crowd. But the impact of the Cuban crisis was demobilising. On one hand, it showed the futility of demonstrating – and on the other it showed that the leaders of the superpowers were not in the end prepared to launch a nuclear war. Activists drifted away from the movement; the nuclear powers agreed a Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963 that seemed to indicate there was hope of multilateral nuclear disarmament by negotiation; and by 1964, when Labour won a general election under Harold Wilson, the movement for British unilateral nuclear disarmament was part of the past. Its activists moved on, to housing campaigns, workplace militancy and opposition to the US war in Vietnam.
The second wave
CND kept going as a small pressure group with a few thousand members through the 1960s and 1970s, a forlorn survivor that few thought would again play a significant role. Meanwhile, international nuclear diplomacy ground on. The Partial Test-Ban Treaty was followed by the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty, which committed non-nuclear states to remaining non-nuclear and nuclear states to keeping nuclear know-how to themselves (though its impact was limited because India, Pakistan and Israel refused to sign and subsequently developed their own nuclear weapons). The two superpowers negotiated interminably, reaching significant agreements on limiting strategic nuclear forces and anti-ballistic missile systems in 1972 (SALT-1 and the ABM treaty) and a further agreement on strategic arms in 1979 (SALT-2), though it was not ratified by the US Congress.
But then everything changed. What had seemed to be an inexorable process of winding down the cold war – the 1970s saw not only nuclear arms agreements but also the Helsinki accords guaranteeing borders in Europe and respect for human rights – suddenly went into reverse. In December 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Days later, Nato announced that it would be deploying new American intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe – cruise and Pershing 2 – if Moscow did not withdraw its own new-generation intermediate-range missiles from Europe.
The Nato announcement thrust nuclear arms into the political limelight for the first time since the Cuba crisis. One man in particular made the running in Britain, the historian E P Thompson. He wrote a furious polemical piece for the New Statesman; followed it with a pamphlet for CND, Protest and Survive, excoriating the government’s asinine advice on how to cope with a nuclear war; then, with Ken Coates, Mary Kaldor and others, launched the European Nuclear Disarmament Appeal, a manifesto for a ‘nuclear-free Europe from Poland to Portugal’. By summer 1980 – when the Thatcher government announced that it would be replacing Britain’s ageing Polaris submarine-launched ballistic missiles with American Trident SLBMs – anti-nuclear protest groups had sprung up throughout Britain and CND was a mass movement again. Labour adopted a non-nuclear defence policy at its autumn 1980 conference; the next month Michael Foot, a founder member of CND, became Labour leader. In 1981, feminist pacifists established a peace camp outside the US base at Greenham Common in Berkshire, where the first batch of cruise missiles would be based.
For the next six years, the movement against nuclear arms was central to politics in Britain. It was huge: at its height in 1983‑84, CND estimated that it had 100,000 national members and perhaps 250,000 in affiliated local groups, and its demonstrations were massive, with 300,000 turning out in London in 1983. The movement was also much more sophisticated than in its first wave: there was no serious argument between advocates of working through the Labour Party and proponents of direct action; and END provided it with leadership that could not easily be dismissed as pro-Soviet or hard-left (though the Tory government did its very best to persuade voters otherwise).
But Labour lost the 1983 election; cruise arrived in Britain in 1984; and work started on the Trident submarines. Meanwhile, Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet leader and soon made it clear that he wanted an end to the new cold war. Under Neil Kinnock, who succeeded Foot as Labour leader in 1983, Labour stuck to a non-nuclear defence policy through the mid-1980s – but after Labour lost again in 1987, with a new détente apparently in the air and the peace movement much less vocal, he wavered. Gorbachev and US president Ronald Reagan agreed a deal to remove all intermediate-range nuclear weapons from Europe, codified in the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty signed in December 1987. Kinnock declared that the agreement changed everything and announced the abandonment of the non-nuclear defence policy. It took two attempts to get it through Labour conference, but by the time the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 Labour was fully signed up to retaining British nuclear arms to resist a threat that had ceased to exist. The dwindling band of peaceniks pointed at the emperor’s new clothes, but no one took any notice.
Disarmament stalls
The INF treaty was signed nearly 25 years ago, and it should have inaugurated an era of nuclear disarmament – particularly after the implosion of the Soviet bloc and Soviet communism between 1989 and 1991. At first it seemed to have done so. In 1991, the US and the Soviet Union signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START-1), and the result, combined with the effect of the INF treaty, was a significant reduction of US and Soviet (after 1991, Soviet successor states’) stockpiles of nuclear warheads. The global total halved by 2000, from 70,000 in 1987.
But the disarmament momentum soon ran out. Russia balked at further reductions of its nuclear weaponry; the US cooled on the whole disarmament process; and the smaller nuclear powers – Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel – either refused to engage or made minimal gestures towards denuclearisation. START-1’s successor, START-2, was signed but not implemented and replaced by an interim Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT).
Meanwhile, it became clear that nuclear weapons were not central to the international crises of the time – Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, the break-up of Yugoslavia, the bloody conflicts in Africa, the rise of al-Qaida, 9/11 and its aftermath – and that insofar as nuclear weapons were an issue the key problem was that the anti-proliferation regime was not working. Iran and North Korea were close to joining India, Pakistan and Israel as nuclear powers – and neither they, nor the Indians, Pakistanis or Israelis, were prepared to disarm.
US-Russian nuclear arms negotiations have continued: the START process was revived and concluded with a new treaty in 2010, when US president Barack Obama and Russian president Dmitry Medvedev agreed to deep cuts in strategic arsenals. Both Russia and the US have since reduced the number of actively deployed nuclear warheads to 2,000 apiece. But the stockpiles remain frighteningly large. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the US retains in reserve nearly 6,000 and Russia more than 8,000. The total global warhead count in 2011 was around 20,000 – not quite as many as at the time of the Cuba crisis, but not far off.
The nuclear threat now
British anti-nuclear-arms campaigners didn’t give up after 1987. Some went off to create think-tanks, others put their efforts into making CND an alternative foreign policy pressure group. During the 1991 Gulf war, the campaign formed the core of the anti-war movement. Almost simultaneously, however, came a calamitous collapse of membership and an austerity drive that closed down Sanity, CND’s monthly magazine. The organisation never quite went under, but it returned to the margins. Whereas in 1991 it had set the agenda for opposition to the military intervention against Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, a decade later it was reduced to a minor supporting role in the organised opposition to the US and UK military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Nuclear arms are still there, but the politics of nuclear arms has changed. The future of Britain’s own bomb is more at risk from government budget cuts than it ever was from CND-inspired Labour opposition; and the threat of nuclear war no longer appears to come from a suicide pact between Washington and Moscow. For the past decade or more, the most likely sources of Armageddon have been India and Pakistan, Israel and Iran, and North and South Korea – all standoffs that no one in Britain can realistically hope to influence. That Cuba feeling, that we’re powerless to effect change, is back again, and it’s difficult to see how we can get rid of it.

Paraguay: A well-rehearsed coup

admin — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 10:00:38 +0000

Finally, after 28 attempts, on 22 June, the Jurassic Paraguayan elite, entrenched in key institutions of the state, managed to impeach democratically elected President Fernando Lugo and force him out of office. In a curious coincidence, his removal took place exactly three years after the ousting of the democratically elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, where a similar ‘constitutional’ method was used. The key political forces behind the coup are organised in the Colorado Party, which ruled Paraguay for 35 years in a regime led by the military dictator Alfredo Stroessner.
On 15 June, a clash between peasants demanding land reform, landowners and police, which led to the death of 11 peasants and six police officers, was the crisis that triggered Paraguay’s elite to enact what appears to have been a well-rehearsed and planned coup. The farm under dispute belongs to Blas Riquelme, a Colorado politician who acquired it during the Stroessner dictatorship.
In 35 years of US-supported dictatorship, Paraguay’s elite managed to turn this South American nation into one of the poorest and least developed in the region. According to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, in 1990, one year after the demise of the Stroessner dictatorship, 42 per cent of the urban population lived below the poverty line.
Stroessner’s removal in 1989 led to some democratisation in a regime that could be best described as ‘Stroessnerism without Stroessner’. The general’s overthrow at the time was reported thus by Associated Press: ‘The rebellion [that led to Stroessner’s toppling] also followed a dispute within the Colorado Party between a militant pro-Stroessner faction and traditionalists who wanted to distance the 100-year old party from the ageing dictator.’ And in case there was any doubt about the true nature of the incoming government, its leader was General Andres Rodriguez, who had been Stroessner’s closest confidant for 35 years and whose daughter married the dictator’s eldest son.
Dictator’s legacy
Stroessnerist continuismo meant that not one of the central issues affecting the national economy were addressed. In fact in many respects things got worse. Rodriguez was succeeded by four presidents, all members of the Colorado Party, and by 2009 the proportion of people living in poverty had gone up to 58.5 per cent. The Colorado party managed to morph the military dictatorship into a regime whose chief characteristics were vast networks of patronage and clientelism, authoritarian enclaves, unbelievable levels of corruption, gross economic mismanagement and a flourishing contraband in arms and drugs.
Furthermore, by 2008 Paraguay was one of the most unequal countries in Latin America with a Gini coefficient of 0.58 (the US is 0.47) and with one of the worst landownership concentrations in the world: 1 per cent own 77 per cent of the cultivable land. As in Honduras, Paraguay’s elite occupied an entrenched and largely unassailable position, in the country’s intensely conservative power structures.
Thus, the 2008 election of the liberation theology bishop Fernando Lugo at the head of the motley coalition of parties Alianza para el Cambio (Alliance for Change) represented a historic break with six decades-long Colorado Party rule and offered the possibility of progressive change to the millions of poor Paraguayans who have been longing for social justice.
Lugo’s programme involved a number of progressive social, economic and political changes, such as land reform and reform of the judiciary and the state sector to reduce uncontrolled corruption. His election was part and parcel of Latin America’s ‘pink wave’, which has seen the rise of progressive governments in most of the region. These are all specific to their own domestic contexts but similar in that they aim at implementing policies that address their countries’ terrible legacy of inequality, injustice and violent oppression – ills that were massively compounded by 30 years of US-inspired neoliberalism. Washington had been quite happy with decades of dictatorship in Paraguay, and Lugo’s election worried the state department’s cold warriors sick.
From Lugo’s inauguration, Paraguay’s highly cohesive and deeply reactionary elite, entrenched in key state institutions, waged a relentless opposition to every single one of the president’s reforms, especially land reform. And they enjoyed ample majorities in congress, the senate, and the supreme court.
Lugo’s coalition, meanwhile, was fractious with segments of it being totally unreliable since they regularly sided with the opposition. This was particularly the case with the vice-president Federico Franco. By 2011 it had become clear that the opposition had been successful in defeating Lugo’s reforms of both the civil service and the judiciary. Any efforts on the part of Lugo to resort to democracy to break the logjam, such as holding a referendum, were manipulated by the opposition, which used the powerful private media to accuse the president of preparing the ground for the establishment of a dictatorship and seeking to personally control the judiciary and annul the power of parliament.
Synchronised events
The frustration over the lack of progress in the land reform programme boiled over into land occupations, of which the incident that led to the coup was one of the many that have marred the Paraguayan countryside since Lugo came to office. The incident was followed by a well synchronised chain of events. A judge, at the request of Blas Riquelme, ordered the dislodgement of the farmers from his occupied estate. The police proceeded to carry out the eviction; although barely 50 people were at the place, there were 18 casualties. Lugo responded by sacking his interior minister. On 21 June Congress voted to impeach Lugo who, in a travesty of a trial, was given 24 hours to prepare his defence.
On 22 June, Lugo was impeached and Federico Franco sworn in as the new president.
It is noteworthy that the Vatican was the first state to recognise Lugo’s replacement. Before Lugo’s impeachment the Catholic hierarchy had called upon him to resign ‘in order to restore peace and order in the country.’
The coup has been widely condemned in Latin America with the Union of South American Nations (Unasur) playing the central role in defending democracy in Paraguay. Paraguay has already been suspended from Unasur and the Mercosur trading bloc. Most countries in the region have withdrawn their ambassadors. All eyes are now on whether the Organisation of American States (OAS) will follow suit. The US has been unusually quiet about the breakdown of the constitutional order in Paraguay and, unlike the rest of Latin America, has not condemned Lugo’s ousting and has refused to characterise it as a coup. In the context of its waning regional influence, the ousting of Lugo in Paraguay, adjacent to Bolivia’s huge reserves of gas, has huge geopolitical implications.
The ousting of Manuel Zelaya in Honduras in 2009, and now of Lugo in Paraguay, should be seen in the context of powerful reactionary forces that, with the crucial support of the US, have organised coup attempts in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador as well as continued destabilisation efforts against these and other countries in the region.
As the mainstream media is fond of explaining conflict in the region as the struggle between authoritarian, left-wing governments and beleaguered democratic forces (as they do particularly with Venezuela), a word on the nature of Paraguay’s oligarchy is necessary. Under Stroessner, Paraguay became a sanctuary for Nazis, former dictators, and drug traffickers. And Lugo has named Horacio Cartes, a rich businessman, as the leading light behind the coup. On Cartes, the Economist has reported that ‘Leaked cables from the state department in Washington, dating from 2007 and 2010, reported claims that he and his bank were responsible for “80 per cent of money-laundering in Paraguay” on behalf of drug traffickers.’
Paraguayans decided to democratically elect Lugo as their president; the country’s oligarchy, entrenched in institutions of the Stroessner dictatorship, undemocratically ousted him. This represents not just a setback for Paraguay but for democracy in the region as a whole.
Dr Francisco Dominguez is head of the Centre for Brazilian and Latin American Studies, Middlesex University. The statistics in this article, and more, can be obtained in Peter Lambert’s ‘Undermining the new dawn: opposition to Lugo in Paraguay’ in Dominguez, Lievesley and Ludlam (eds) Right-Wing Politics in the New Latin America (Zed, 2011)

Argentina: Que se vayan todos! – They all must go!

admin — Fri, 04 May 2012 16:46:40 +0000

People gather for a neighbourhood assembly. Photo: Andrew Stern
What is to be done when capital and government abandon the people? It is a question that social movements throughout Europe and the US have begun to raise with a creative political militancy unseen in decades. These are movements characterised by their openness, breadth and, most importantly, their fundamental critique of an economic model that doesn’t serve the world’s majority. But in the face of repression and austerity measures, the question has become not only how to keep such issues on the table but how to make political change and gain ground.
To better understand this moment, we can turn to these movements’ South American predecessor: Argentina 2001, when popular protest put an end to destructive neoliberal policies and drastically changed the political terrain.
A decade later, with unprecedented economic growth and President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s landslide re-election victory, it is easy to forget just how Argentina climbed out of the largest financial default in history. Though many credit former president Néstor Kirchner with creating a new economic model that reined in a private sector run wild, it was the people whose unyielding protests during the 1990s and through the turn of the century would ultimately bring about change.
As the Argentinian historian and political activist Ezequiel Adamovsky wrote in Le Monde Diplomatique, ‘It was the constant threat of looting, targeting of politicians, of rebellion, of occupations, of roadblocks, and those assemblies that disciplined both management and local and international financial sectors, opening an unimagined space for politics.’
From a vacuum of political power and severe economic necessity grew new political formations outside traditional party politics. Hundreds of neighbourhood assemblies came together to meet people’s most basic needs and create spaces for local dialogue. Bartering clubs experimented in alternative economics, and workers of bankrupt businesses began to occupy and run enterprises on their own.
What has happened to that new political space in the past ten years? Why have many of the new political and social formations faded into the background, overshadowed by a ‘centre-left’ government with a well-oiled populist rhetoric? What lessons can social movements around the world take from the Argentinian experience? And what about that experience is not applicable (or perhaps not yet applicable) in places such as Europe and the US?
In taking a closer look at what the people of Argentina were able to accomplish, how they were able to accomplish it, and, most interestingly, the ways they were unable to secure broader change, a picture of a revolution left in midstride emerges: one whose strength has not been lost, only diverted. For a world in which the central debate isn’t merely about austerity measures but a new economic paradigm, the past decade in Argentina could foreshadow the years ahead.
Economic collapse and the piqueteros
The backdrop to Argentina’s rebellion was grimmer and more extreme than even the situation in Greece today (see page 17). Years of neoliberal policies had taken their toll. The official unemployment rate reached 17 per cent in 1996; in reality, it was even higher, with entire communities out of work. The country had no social security net or unemployment centres to help the jobless subsist and find work.
The poor suburbs of Buenos Aires were the hardest hit, along with rural provinces. Entire neighbourhoods were left to fend for themselves without paved roads, electricity, sewage or transport. The major unions were ineffective, striking deals with the neoliberal Menem government to remain docile and failing to organise the growing ranks of unemployed.
‘You saw people deteriorate very quickly,’ says Fabián Pierucci, economist and former piquetero with the Movement of Unemployed in the neighbourhood of Solano. ‘Because how long can people go without eating, without being able to buy their medicine? You saw friends get thin and die like flies.’
From these forgotten neighbourhoods the piquetero (road blockade) movement of the unemployed was born. Living on the outskirts of the city, residents regularly witnessed food and goods they sorely needed trucked past their precarious homes and into the city. Seeing no alternative, they began to blockade major roads with burning tyres to draw attention to their destitution and demand government assistance.
As the economic situation deteriorated in 2001, the piquetero movement began to gain legitimacy among the middle classes, who joined it in the streets in response to additional pension and salary cuts implemented by a government scrambling to avoid the oncoming economic collapse. When bank accounts were frozen at the end of November, the country was on the brink.
Rather than appeasing the unrest and alleviating the burden of a collapsing economy, President Fernando de la Rúa declared a state of siege on 19 December. It was a decision that would spell the end of his presidency. Cacerolazos (noisy street protests), blockades and organised looting broke out throughout the country. Police repression merely fanned the flames of popular resistance, and within 48 hours both the economic minister and president had resigned, the latter being helicoptered away from the presidential palace, the Casa Rosada. Political legitimacy was lost.
Creativity amid crisis
The new year began unlike any other in 2002, with new-found popular power, a sense of inter-class solidarity and innovative propositions for local decision making. From initial city-wide gatherings made up of thousands, assemblies began to be formed in local neighbourhoods. At first meeting in plazas and on street corners, they started to occupy buildings and organise themselves into work committees around press, culture, employment, services, health, political action and community purchases. The assemblies organised neighbourhood surveys to determine local needs. They set up soup kitchens, community gardens, tutoring programmes and radio stations, and continued the protests against the banks by staging direct actions and occupations.
Faced with the lack of cash, clubes de trueque or bartering clubs – which had existed prior to the crash – tripled in number, reaching 5,000, with an estimated four million participants in 2002. Members invented their own forms of currency and began to trade food, goods, and services, creating an alternative economy based on principles of solidarity.
Simultaneously, a movement was growing of workers occupying their then bankrupt and abandoned factories and businesses. As the journalist Marie Trigona explains, ‘Most of the worker takeovers were to guarantee that the owners wouldn’t be able to liquidate assets before filing bankruptcy to avoid paying workers indemnities and back salaries.’ But as the occupations continued, ‘demands steadily grew from a measure to safeguard their jobs to the idea of implementing a system of self-management.’ Knowing that former owners were never going to compensate them or re-invest in the business, workers planned and re-started production themselves under a new cooperative model with equal pay for all – and no bosses.
New values, new identities
It wasn’t simply what Argentinians jump-started after the crisis but how they did it that was so groundbreaking. Guided by principles of autonomy, equal participation and democracy, these new formations were an implicit rejection of the traditional political and business hierarchies.
Neighbourhood assemblies referred to themselves as autoconvocados (self-convoked) and made decisions using a consensus model in which all had equal say and majority voting was often a last resort. There was also a renewed sense of solidarity between classes, as assemblies in middle-class neighbourhoods directed many programmes to the poor and unemployed. In Villa Pueyrredón, in Buenos Aires, the assembly set up daily lunches for the growing number of cartoneros, those who collect and recycle cardboard in return for a small stipend. In a country where inequity often pits the poor against the middle class, this kind of solidarity was unique and critical.
By the same token, solidarity, democracy and autonomy comprised the core values of the recovered factories movement. In contrast to capitalist business models that look to maximise profit at human expense, the cooperatives, in which workers were also owners, did not view layoffs as a tool for balancing the books.
Piqueteros blockaded roads with burning tyres as a protest against unemployment. Photo: Andrew Stern
Fabián Pierucci is a former organiser with the unemployed workers’ movement and a worker at the Hotel Bauen in Buenos Aires, which was occupied and taken over by former employees in 2003. He says that the most important aspect of the fábricas recuperadas (recovered or reclaimed enterprises) such as the Bauen has been the ‘possibility of constructing a new imaginary’ that directly questions the logic of private property. ‘It puts hierarchy into question when organisations like this one can move forward by way of assembly and without the need of employers with their managerial placards who come to administrate.’
Though faced with countless uncertainties, these ‘horizontal’ projects created new forms of social relationships and new identities for many Argentinians. This has led to what the Ezequiel Adamovsky has described as the ‘permanent installation of a new left culture, absent in political traditions of the past’.
The Kirchner effect
It was in this context of intensified political activity that Néstor Kirchner was narrowly elected president in May 2003. Adamovsky describes Kirchner’s election as ‘unthinkable without the political vacuum that 2001 created’. The immediate steps his government took to renegotiate international debt and cut ties with the IMF and World Bank would have been ‘impossible without the underlying detail of people in the streets and the profound questioning of financial institutions’.
Yet for the majority of the movements that sprung up in the late 1990s and throughout the crisis, the Kirchners have been a demobilising and contentious force. For the piquetero and unemployed workers’ movements, the minimal increase in state assistance came to be a dangling carrot with strings attached. Still without broad solutions for unemployment, assistance plans multiplied and were left to the piquetero organisations and political party leaders to distribute, usually in exchange for political loyalty.
‘Nestor Kirchner’s policy consisted of simultaneously enacting strategies to integrate, co-opt, and discipline the piquetero organisations,’ writes sociologist Maristella Svampa. She details how the piquetero movement as a whole became limited to acquiring and maintaining government funds, leaving aside goals of broader social reform. While not all piquetero groups could be co-opted, those that have chosen to ally with the government have been rewarded with economic and organisational resources. Many so-called political leaders responsible for giving out government funds (called punteros) have even begun using their role as distributors in order to turn a profit.
‘The puntero is the same in any neighbourhood,’ says Fabián Pierucci, ‘where a leader from the Workers Party or Kircherist party says, “I’ll give you a plan if you give me money.”’ Disheartened by the decline of the piquetero movement, he reflects on these assistance-based forms of politics. ‘To me the question has to do with what kind of alternative politics one represents, and if reproducing forms of clientelism is the alternative, or if it’s something else.’
Neighbourhood assemblies have also dwindled in the past decade, with some of the largest having disappeared altogether. Initially assemblies were politically diverse due to the diversity of their members and their newness to social activism, but as the immediate crisis passed things began to change.
‘We were neighbours. We didn’t have anything else in common other than our neighbourhood, no kind of ideology,’ says Eva Sinchecay of the Villa Pueyrredón assembly. It was something that turned out to be both a strength and a weakness as assemblies were more independent but became susceptible to the agendas of left groups that used them as a means of recruitment. ‘It began to dissolve,’ says Sinchecay, whose assembly splintered after the uncooperative participation of a communist group.
Much of the middle class who made up the bulk of the neighbourhood assemblies were captivated by Kirchner’s presidency. The rejection of neoliberal economics and opening up of human rights cases against former members of Argentina’s military junta gave many new hope that this government would be different. But by no means have the Kirchners’ reforms been a radical move towards the alternative economic and social relations that the assemblies had once proposed.
‘What we wanted was for them all to leave,’ says Sinchecay, who says she doesn’t identify with any political party. ‘Hardly anything has changed. I’d like to see better distribution of wealth, more education, more healthcare. There is terrible corruption.’
Adamovksy puts the Kirchners into perspective, explaining that ‘as much as some of their followers imagine Kirchnerism as a spearhead for “liberation” or a fight against capital, the government has made it perfectly clear that its goal is a “normal country” with a representative state and “serious capitalism”.’
The recovered enterprises have turned out to be one of the most enduring projects to emerge from the crisis. Since 2001, at least 205 functioning recovered enterprises have formed, running the gamut from chocolate and shoe factories to printing presses and hotels. Rather than laying off workers, three-quarters of these cooperatively-owned businesses have taken them on, paying more than other companies in similar industries. The country’s largest recovered enterprise, Zanon, a tile factory occupied in 2001 and renamed Fasinpat (short for ‘factory without a boss’), currently employs 470 workers in the province of Neuquén.
Tools for the future
These movements have all left their mark on Argentina. Though they may not have achieved all they had hoped, they pushed the boundaries of political imagination and showed the creative capacity of ordinary people in extraordinary situations. Still, for many, specifically those on the independent left like Fabián Pierucci and Eva Sinchecay, the movements missed a historic opportunity for structural change. Despite Argentina’s economic growth, they say the economic model is still based on unstable and short-term factors such as the international price of soy and the exploitation of natural resources.
‘With a globalised economy, you can have all the reserves you want and have the foreign debt under control, but does that mean you are financially autonomous?’ asks Pierucci. ‘How long will the model last? One year, two years, five years?’
Sinchecay, who still helps cartoneros in her community collect cardboard, says the social programmes have been insufficient in combating poverty. ‘We have seen three generations of people without work,’ she laments.
Pierucci believes Argentina has not seen the last of economic crises, and that despite the relative calm another could be on the way. ‘We can’t lose perspective that crisis is cyclical in the economy, and that each time it will be deeper,’ he says.
Despite maybe missing a historical moment, the strength of Argentina’s social protest and its people-based solutions to economic collapse have inspired social movements around the world. Protesters in Greece even adopted the slogan Que se vayan todos! (‘They all must go!’ – referring to politicians), popularised on the streets of Buenos Aires in December 2001.
In many ways, what emerged from Argentina’s collapse could be (and, to a lesser extent, has been) replicated in countries worldwide – occupations, worker-run businesses, neighbourhood assemblies. The extremity of the economic bust and the vacuum of power in Argentina created unique conditions for social movements to prise the country from neoliberal government and give birth to a new politics. But the same spirit of solidarity and possibility can be seen across the world today – and there is much that it can learn from the Argentinian experience.

Venezuela’s hip-hop revolutionaries

admin — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 20:03:37 +0000

Students perform at a hip hop workshop in a barrio (low income neighbourhood) near Charallave, about one hour south of Caracas. Photo: Global Faction/Alborada Films
The Hip Hop Revolución (HHR) movement was founded in 2003 and brings together like-minded young people from across Venezuela. As well as organising several international revolutionary hip-hop festivals in the country, HHR has created 31 hip-hop schools across the country, which teenagers can attend in conjunction with their normal day-to-day schooling.
While filming in Venezuela for our forthcoming documentary on HHR we were told that normally those attending the hip-hop schools learn hip-hop skills for four days per week and have one day per week of political discussion. However, in some schools those attending had decided they preferred the ratio the other way round. Once participants have ‘graduated’ from the course, they are encouraged to become tutors to the next batch of attendees. Most graduates come from low-income backgrounds, and many go on to establish schools in their local areas.
At a hip-hop school we visited near Charallave, about an hour south of Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, one student told us how he had done just that. First, he approached the political leaders in the area, and they agreed that the project was a strong idea. Then he approached the gang leaders in the neighbourhood, and they agreed to make sure the kids got to and from their classes without being hassled. To many of the participants, the hip-hop schools are another element of a new spirit of unity and solidarity in their local communities. In their eyes, hip hop and the political struggle are inextricably linked, and this is their chance to play a tangible part in building the better future they want to grow up in.
HHR took us from the school to a nearby barrio, where music equipment had been set up for a show local HHR members were putting on for the community. As the music started kids came out from their houses; most of them were still dressed in their school uniforms. Entire families came out to their balconies to watch what was going on below.
These hip-hop workshops are a monthly occurrence, so the young people in the area know when to come. Unfortunately, that afternoon it was pouring with rain, which apparently kept many people indoors. Nevertheless, a crowd quickly grew. Many of the kids were very young, and without shoes or a care in the world, they washed their feet in the huge puddles of rainwater. The barrios are at the heart of the HHR movement, and the crowd at the workshop we visited were captivated by the rapping and break-dancing on display.
Our trip to Venezuela also coincided with the inauguration and first ever conference of CELAC, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States. Thirty-three presidents from all of the countries of the Americas (except the US and Canada) were in Caracas for the event. Photo exhibitions displayed on central avenues of Caracas in the days preceding the conference expressed solidarity with the people of Cuba, Libya and Iraq, the workers movement in Argentina, the Palestinian people and the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US among others.
‘CELAC is the most important development in the last 200 years,’ Jamil, a member of HHR, told us. ‘We respect [Venezuelan president Hugo] Chávez because he understands our struggle, but we are always looking to be self-critical in order to keep our revolution moving in the right direction . . .
‘I’m a revolutionary from my heart. Chavez fucks around and flips on us, we’re gonna flip on him. And that’s what I think he expects from us. You know what I mean? That’s why he is so serious with his proposals and with what he does. He has the confidence that he won’t flip on the people. And he understands that capitalism is crumbling. And this is our time, this is our moment, you know, for Latin America, for Venezuela and for us.’
Jody McIntyre and Pablo Navarrete are the directors of a forthcoming film on the Hip Hop Revolución movement. More information: www.alborada.net/alboradafilms

Cuba and the ‘updating of socialism’

admin — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 15:40:33 +0000

Cuba, for many on the left the most enduring socialist experiment in the history of the western world, has once again embarked upon a process of wide-ranging transformation. In an attempt to reverse the stagnation of the economy, the leadership of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) at its sixth congress in April approved a raft of measures that will transform the economic landscape of the country, create a new petit-bourgeois class, open the island to greater foreign investment and fundamentally alter the role and nature of the state. Though the changes might rightly be called reforms elsewhere, in Cuba the process has been euphemistically labelled as ‘updating the Cuban socialist model’.
President Raúl Castro, who first began to exercise the powers of president in an acting capacity in 2006 (officially replacing of his brother Fidel as president in 2008), is one of the most enthusiastic advocates of the changes. He has overseen a process of consensus building, the scale of which has not been seen before. However, the motivation to make the changes is not merely ideological; necessity seems to be the mother of this invention.
In addition to the effects of the US trade embargo, Cuba has been hit by the global economic crisis, a reduction of exports by 15 per cent and the consequences of 16 hurricanes (three in 2008 alone) that have devastated the island since 1998. With the addition of a persistent drought in eastern areas, it is estimated that natural phenomena have caused a loss of almost half the annual GDP.
The Cuban government is simply no longer able to be the sole driver of the economy. With world food prices on an irreversible upward trend, it can no longer afford to provide subsidised food for its 11 million people. Opening the economy to private enterprise is the answer and it raises a number of issues for the worldwide left.
Is Cuba moving slowly towards capitalism? Is it adopting the Chinese model? Or is this an emancipatory process moving Cuba towards a new form of socialism with less paternalism and a more prominent role for the population? More importantly for some, the question arises as to whether or not the Cuban government is capable of overseeing the transformation without some kind of social rupture that might lead to a collapse.
To take the last question first, the possibility of a collapse is remote, although anxiety about the changes and their speed is undoubtedly evident. Foreign media reporting has been alarmist but the changes have in fact been incremental over the past four years. Raúl Castro hit the ground running in 2006 promising ‘structural reforms’ and immediately initiated a consultation process that involved every mass organisation. Some seven million people attended more than 160,000 meetings held across the country to debate and contribute to the process that culminated in the congress in April this year. After the congress, the party published a dossier in which the original proposals, amendments suggested to them and the final composited resolutions were listed for the population to see.
What this means is that although the ramifications of the changes have caused anxiety, they are not traumatic. The restructuring is taking place in calm and ordered fashion. If it works, increased productivity will improve living standards and therefore lessen the prospect of social disturbances.
Fundamental redirection
However, one should not underplay the significance of the measures. They imply a fundamental redirection in the way both the economy is organised and the ideology that underpins it. In short, they spell the end of the centralised Soviet model of social and economic planning and the introduction of ideas that have almost certainly been drawn from the Chinese and Vietnamese experiences.
Under the proposals the state will no longer be the administrator of small-scale, local enterprise and will instead become the regulator – allowing the work to be done by a new petit-bourgeoisie in the form of self-employed workers, privately owned businesses and workers’ cooperatives. Egalitarianism as a goal has been jettisoned in favour of the concept of ‘equality of opportunity’ – an idea with more in common with social democracy than Marxist-Leninism.
In the first part of a new economic strategy, some 500,000 state workers – around a quarter of the current workforce – are to be redeployed into the private sector. The idea is to improve productivity, reduce the state payroll and generate revenues through taxation. The process will be difficult, requiring the introduction of new regulations, supervisory mechanisms, revenue collection measures, credit systems, infrastructure for distribution and adjustment to the welfare system for those unable to find work. This is the phase that is currently under way.
The ultimate target is to redeploy more than one million of the 4.3 million state employees, increasing the proportion of Cubans working in the non-state sector from its current level of 16 per cent to around 25 per cent by the end of 2015.
All areas will be affected, including administration, public services and state-owned enterprises. The months before the congress saw a series of behind-the-scenes consultations involving senior figures from the government, ministries and trade unions. It is significant that it is the CTC trade union confederation that is administering the process of choosing which workers are to be redeployed. Layoff will not mean destitution. The high incomes earned in the existing private sector and the removal of the cap on earnings mean many will prosper. 200,000 workers will not, in fact, lose their current jobs but merely cease to draw a salary from the state and instead start to draw it from the revenues of their enterprise. These new co-ops will pay the state a rent for the property they use and a tax on their earnings. The new regulations also permit them to sell their services to the state, opening the way for all kinds of enterprises, from refuse collection to office cleaning and catering.
Workers are being encouraged to start their own businesses in some 125 new trades and occupations that have been legalised. It is widely assumed that a large number of state employees already have illegal or quasi-legal ‘off the books’ jobs and the expectation is that they will now be able to pursue these activities legitimately full-time. In another significant change, the self-employed will be allowed to employ workers, opening the way for small and medium sized private enterprises (SMEs) in both production and distribution. In addition, state land has been given to some 200,000 citizens to become small farmers, while the prices that the state pays for their produce has been increased to incentivise production.
An internal PCC document anticipates that 465,000 new non-state jobs will be created in 2011, with 250,000 new business permits issued. The rest of the displaced workers are to be absorbed into construction and an expanding state-owned business sector, principally in tourism, oil, biotech and pharmaceuticals.
Following China?
It is here that the next big clue as to where Cuba is heading can be found. The possibilities for foreign investment in property – especially in the construction of golf courses and marinas – were increased significantly by Raúl Castro when he increased the maximum length of a lease on state land from 50 to 99 years. Negotiations are underway with foreign investors for the construction of 16 golf courses across the island and the sale of leases on houses and timeshares in these areas. In addition, for the first time since 1959, foreign investment in agriculture has been allowed, with a deal being made recently for a Mexican agribusiness to start soya production in association with a state‑owned firm.
Is this the Chinese model? It is perhaps inevitable to make comparisons and point to official recognition of the Asian tiger. For example, on 17 November 2008, the daily newspaper Granma published an article entitled ‘China continues demonstrating the validity of socialism’, in which it cited Fidel Castro: ‘China has become objectively the most promising hope and the best example for all of the countries of the third world.’
To be realistic, in terms of territory, population, historical traditions and cultural identity, the differences between Cuba and China are so great that it is simply impossible for the island to copy the development model of the Asian giant. Cuba does not have a massive, impoverished rural peasantry ready to migrate to work for low wages in export-oriented factories in new enterprise zones. Nor is Cuba going to jettison its free education, health and welfare system, as has happened in China. More visibly, major multinational corporations are not evident on the advertising hoardings in Cuba cities as they are in Vietnam and China. It is Che, not Sony, that stares out of the billboards in Havana.
However, as the veteran Cuban diplomat and professor of international relations Carlos Alzugaray Treto has written, various aspects of China’s process are valid for Cuba. He lists these as: prioritising production to achieve socialist ends; accepting that socialism is constructed on the basis of the specific characteristics of each country; adopting market mechanisms under socialist control, and making adjustments constantly as needs arise. However, the most important lesson from China, says Alzugaray, lies in the famous Confucian phrase of Deng Xiaoping: ‘It doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white, what’s important is that it catches rats.’
It is not a question, therefore, of Cuba copying the Chinese model but rather of it adopting a set of pragmatic principles. Whether what results is an ‘updated’ version of socialism or a Cuban variation of state capitalism remains to be seen. However, the most radical outcome might be in the sphere of diplomacy rather than domestic policy, where the cat might catch the biggest rat of all – an end to the US embargo.
The ‘updating’ will increase the demand from the business lobby and the Cuban-American population in the US for an easing of the embargo. Pressure is building on Obama to take steps to further ease restrictions on travel to Cuba by US citizens. If Obama wins a second term, this will become inevitable. Once significant numbers of Americans are allowed to visit, Cuba’s current economic woes will be over and other problems will take their place.
Dr Stephen Wilkinson is director of the Centre for Caribbean and Latin American Research and Consultancy at London Metropolitan University

Cuba in context

Sandra Lewis puts Cuba’s economic reforms against the backdrop of global austerity

Stephen Wilkinson (above) infers that the reforms in Cuba will spell the end of the centralised Soviet model. The state, he says, will no longer directly administrate a bureaucratic centralised economy but will become the regulator of an expanded private sector.
In reality the same centralised system will stay in place in regard to large-scale production, as well as within the governmental structures. Those making the decisions (and responsible for decades of inertia) will maintain their positions – and the ones who will suffer are the working people.
Much of what is taking place in Cuba is clouded by a smokescreen of propaganda. What we are actually witnessing is classic neoliberalism. It must be analysed in the context of global austerity and the theft of resources by those in power.
The truth is that the Cuban economy is bankrupt. The US embargo has certainly compounded the problems, but to treat it as the chief cause of today’s woes is far too convenient.
The government’s plan – like many states these days – is to ‘balance the budget’ by laying off 1.5 million state workers – a quarter of the total. Wilkinson implies that this will not be too traumatic for the Cuban people because the state plans to slowly ‘redeploy’ (to use his euphemism) these laid-off workers into the private sector.
Fortunately the plan is on hold because even the Cuban state realised that, at least right now, it is untenable.
Initially the layoffs were postponed because out of the 200,000-plus permits for ‘private sector’ work, which were made available early last year, two thirds were quickly taken by people already operating the same small businesses on the black market. Hence this new ‘private sector’ mainly comprised the legalising of black market enterprises, many of which had been functioning under the table in Cuba for decades. It therefore left little room for the expected mass of laid-off public workers.
What jobs there are in the private sector – from construction labourer to bathroom attendant – are hardly an easy transition for highly educated professional public sector workers to make. Shoe‑shiners and manicurists are now fully legalised, being brought ‘out of the shadows’ of the black market and getting widespread international press for being the new Cuban ‘petit-bourgeois’. But while the government did postpone the layoffs, it didn’t postpone its investment in large-scale industry and international joint ventures, primarily those related to tourism.
While many were touting the ‘expansion’ of the private sector and the ‘deconstruction’ of the centralised model, the industries that generate the most income for Cuba – tourism, agriculture, pharmaceuticals – remained highly centralised and controlled in the same top-down manner as before. The goal was always the maximisation of profits, even if this meant sacrificing many of the historic gains of the revolution. Advocates of an expansion of workers’ cooperatives and self-management were left sorely disappointed when they realised that those in power had no intention of reforming the centralised model. The plan, it appeared, was to scale down government to maximise profits on the backs of the Cuban workers.
Supporters of a more decentralised cooperative model were certainly involved in all levels of discussion – within the Communist Party as well as outside of its structures. But now that the decision has been made to maintain centralisation by those on high in the party, those who fight for a truly socialist Cuba, where working people enjoy the fruits of their labour, continue to fight for greater worker control of resources both within the party and autonomously.
We have seen recently worldwide resistance to the austerity measures being inflicted upon working people. Cuba is no different in this respect. The strategy of government is, as always, to centralise as much power and wealth into its own hands as it can. It is the goal of many in Cuba to decentralise the state structures – and once again return these resources and institutions into the hands of the Cuban people and to advance the revolution towards a truly liberatory socialism.
Havana Times: www.havanatimes.org
Observatorio Critico Network: observatoriocriticodesdecuba.wordpress.com

Back to Rio

admin — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 22:08:46 +0000

Each year, news about climate change gets more alarming. Greenhouse gas emissions from energy generation reached their highest level ever in 2010, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), with a record 30.6 gigatonnes (Gt) of carbon dioxide pouring into the atmosphere, mainly from burning fossil fuel – a rise of 1.6 Gt on 2009. Early indications suggest that the figure will be even higher this year.
IEA scientists believe that it is now all but impossible to prevent a global temperature rise of less than two degrees Celsius, the threshold for ‘dangerous climate change’. So it is now almost certain that we – or our children and grandchildren – will have to live in a world where food and water supplies are severely disputed, where sea levels will rise massively, flooding the homes of hundreds of millions of people, and where thousands of plant and animal species will be exterminated.
Unless action is urgently taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions dramatically, it could get much worse. As ‘positive feedbacks’ are triggered, the world could face runaway global warming. More than ever before, the earth needs a courageous nation, big enough that its voice cannot be drowned out, to work with social movements and activists to put an end to this senseless slide into self-destruction, caused above all by the inability of corporate capitalism to focus on anything but short‑term profit.
No country seems better placed than Brazil to take on this role. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a charismatic working-class president, recently completed eight years in government, in which he won widespread respect for his success in lifting 20 million Brazilians out of absolute poverty and for his willingness to confront the US and Europe over their financial irresponsibility.
President Lula used his huge prestige in Brazil to get his protégée, Dilma Rousseff, elected as his successor. Dilma, a guerrilla fighter in the 1970s who risked her life in the struggle to create a more just Brazil and was tortured by the military government then in power, is the country’s first woman president.
In June 2012, a big global conference will be held in Brazil. Formally called the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, the event is known as Rio+20 because it is taking place 20 years after the first Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. It is an extraordinary opportunity for Brazil to lead the world in taking stock of where it has gone wrong over the past 20 years and in suggesting new ways forward, outside the tortuous and ultimately doomed UN negotiations.
Reasons to be fearful
Will it happen? Straddling the equator, Brazil has more reason than most nations to fear climate change, with many scientists predicting that tropical countries will be the first to be affected. Its rich farming land, which has turned Brazil into the world’s leading exporter of many crops, is already being affected by serious droughts. It is also suffering from severe flooding, storms and even hurricanes, which is something new for the country. After two severe droughts in five years, of the kind that are supposed to hit the region only once in a hundred years, there is now a real risk that the Amazon basin could change from being an important carbon sink into a net emitter of carbon dioxide, thus making global warming much worse. It is one of those possible positive feedbacks that are worrying scientists so much.
Despite these growing signs of an environment under stress, government policy has been slow to respond. Both Lula and Dilma belong to the Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores – PT), set up by left-wing trade unionists in 1982. Although social welfare has long been a PT concern, the party has failed to grasp the seriousness of the environmental crisis.
When Lula eventually became the country’s president in January 2003, the PT took important policy initiatives on some fronts. Along with its policies to combat poverty, it increased the role of the state in the economy, putting an end to the privatisations and state-sector cutbacks that had occurred under the neoliberal government of Lula’s predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso. But rather than building up the state as an autonomous power that would defend the interests of the people, Lula’s government decided instead to pour huge sums of money into a tiny, carefully selected group of Brazilian companies, so that they could become powerful multinationals, competitive throughout the world.
The big corporations, most of which work closely with foreign multinationals, have pushed ahead with huge projects in mining, ethanol, paper and pulp, oil and gas, hydroelectric power and farming. To provide them with energy, the government is building or planning to build 60 hydroelectric power stations in the Amazon basin. This model of development, which was strongly promoted by Dilma Rousseff when she was minister of mines and energy in Lula’s government, is doing a great deal of harm to ecosystems.
To start with, contrary to widespread belief, hydroelectric power stations are not environmentally friendly, particularly in tropical regions, largely because of the methane, a deadly greenhouse gas that is far more damaging than carbon dioxide, that is emitted from the reservoirs and the turbines. Philip Fearnside, a scientist at the National Institute of Amazonian Research (INPA), found that greenhouse gas emissions from the hydroelectric production of the Curu-Una Dam in Pará state were 3.5 times higher than they would have been if the electricity had been produced by a fossil fuel-burning counterpart.
Then there is the impact of the big projects themselves. As yet, the Brazilian authorities have never managed to prevent a disorderly and environmentally destructive influx of loggers, cattle companies, agribusiness and peasant farmers when it has opened up a region for development, and, despite efforts to protect large areas of forest by creating reserves and parks, few Brazilian environmentalists are confident that they will be any more successful in the future.
Refusing to listen
Will anything change under Dilma? The signs are not good. The government is refusing to listen to the concerns of local people, including indigenous groups, over the construction of the giant Belo Monte hydroelectric power station along the Xingu river in eastern Amazonia. It is now pushing ahead with construction, even though Brazil’s independent state prosecutors and 18 institutions, including the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, have been highly critical of the project. Even the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights at the Organisation of American States has called for work to be suspended, pending further consultations with civil society.
Equally worrying has been the government’s inability to stop the House of Representatives in Brasilia approving a bill that would radically reform the country’s 50-year-old Forest Code, even though the code is widely regarded as an inspiring piece of early environmental legislation. The bill is the brainchild of a deluded leftie, congressman Aldo Rebelo of the Communist Party of Brazil (PC do B). When Lula came to power, the PC do B found itself out in the cold, as the PT aligned itself with centrist and right-wing parties to maintain a majority in congress. Aldo Rebelo’s response was to team up with the communists’ class enemy – the landowners and agribusiness capitalists who form one of the most powerful and virulent lobbies in congress, which has become known as the bancada ruralista.
The bill, which still has to be approved by the senate, would drastically reduce conservation areas and open up fresh swathes of the Amazon to farming. The bill also offers an amnesty to farmers (including, of course, many in the bancada ruralista) who have illegally cleared protected areas. Brazil’s scientists have protested en masse, warning of increased soil erosion, reduction of rainfall and an increase in greenhouse gas emissions.
The response of Rebelo and the rural lobby, however, has been to ignore the scientists, and claim that the protesters are all ‘eco-terrorists’ in the pay of foreign governments, who want to sabotage Brazilian commodity exports. Even before it has been approved, the bill has had a disastrous effect. Deforestation in the Amazon rainforest has soared, because landowners are now confident that protected areas will be reduced and they will be amnestied. Several peasant farmers, including a married couple, have been ambushed and shot dead, apparently by the illegal loggers they were denouncing, who now feel empowered.
There is, however, one encouraging new development – a change in public opinion. The campaign against Belo Monte is gaining momentum, with the involvement of many different social groups. A recent opinion poll carried out by the Folha de S Paulo newspaper found that 85 per cent of the public believed that any change to the Forest Code should give priority to the protection of the forest, even it means a decline in agricultural output. Twelve carnival schools in Rio carried out what they called a desfile-manifesto (roughly translated as a ‘dancing demo’) along Copacabana beach in protest against the changes to the Forest Code and the decision to push ahead with the construction of Belo Monte.
Small beginnings perhaps, but indicative of the way many Brazilians are realising that it is not enough to vote into power a left-of-centre government. Popular pressure must force that government to rule in the interests of everyone, not just big corporations.
Change could happen
Will this new awareness turn Rio+20 into an event that really changes the way Brazil deals with environmental problems, particularly climate change? It could happen. The government is planning scores of activities around the gathering. If these are to be more than greenwash, then activists and NGOs must work with those within government who are sympathetic to their cause – and there are a lot of them – to obtain meaningful advances.
Xingu Vivo Para Sempre, an alliance of indigenous and fishing communities that is fighting to prevent the hydroelectric projects destroying their traditional way of life, clearly believes that Rio+20 gives it an excellent opportunity to shame the government into giving in to their demands. It recently published a press release in which it asked: ‘What moral authority will the government have when, before the whole world represented at Rio+20, it is publicly denounced for the crimes against the environment it has permitted, encouraged or committed?’
Greenpeace Brasil is talking about using the conference to get the Brazilian government to commit to a ‘zero deforestation’ law. A new organisation, Sociedade Civil Brasileira para a Rio+20, has been formed to get social movements and NGOs to take part in what is hoped will be gigantic mobilisations in Rio to call for radical action on climate change and a new approach to development.
Change is underway in Brazil and it should gain momentum from Rio+20. Whether it will force the government to rethink its disastrous pro-development policies quickly enough to prevent catastrophic climate change is, unfortunately, another question. n
Sue Branford is a freelance writer and an editor at the Latin America Bureau (www.lab.org.uk)

Chile’s winter awakening

James O'Nions — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 10:22:49 +0000

‘March of the penguins’: School students demonstrate in May

While watching the images of the student demonstrations currently taking place in Chile I felt a sense of déjà vu. Santiago, Chile’s capital, is encircled by the Andes mountains, and in winter, when the cold atmosphere causes pollutants to settle at ground level, it is one of the most polluted cities in the world. As a young student growing up in Chile I remember the asphyxiating atmosphere created by the pollution compounded by high levels of tear gas and the cold water cannons with which the police always responded to peaceful student demonstrations.

The same toxic atmosphere is now being inflicted on the current generation of students who are out in the streets demanding structural reforms to the country’s largely privatised education system. This time, however, it looks like police repression will not be enough to stem the discontent that has been simmering for several years and that is now exploding on the streets. The wide array of social movements that have become mobilised, coupled with the wide appeal of the movement’s leadership suggest that a real political transformation may be a serious possibility in Chile.

The immediate trigger for the current uprising has been the students’ demands for a free and state financed education with the movement comprising both school and university students. Since May, some 700 schools have been occupied by secondary school students and almost daily street protests have been taking place ever since. In mid-August around half a million students and their families took part in a demonstration in a park in central Santiago. The students have also managed to connect their struggles with other sectors of Chilean society. A week after the park demonstration, the students joined a national strike declared by Chile’s trade union confederation (CUT), mobilising again half a million people onto the streets of Santiago.

The educational system they are protesting against is one of the most unequal in the world. Less than 50 per cent of students attend state funded schools, which are of poor quality and are starved of funds. University education is the most expensive in Latin America and when family income is taken into consideration, one of the most expensive in the world. Around 84 per cent of expenditure on higher education is borne by students and their families while a meagre 16 per cent is funded by the state. For instance, the University of Chile, the country’s main university, only receives 14 per cent of its budget from the state.

In 2006 there were attempts at reforming the system, when thousands of secondary school students took to the streets in what became known as the ‘penguins’ revolution’ (in reference to the students’ school uniform). While they managed to obtain some minor reforms of the education law created under Pinochet’s dictatorship, their expectations of a more profound reform were betrayed by a government and parliament dominated by centre-right political elites who had a vested interest in maintaining a profit-driven privatised education.

Neoliberal origins

However, discontent in Chile extends beyond dissatisfaction with education and in order to understand this we need to look at the origin of the current economic model. On the 11 September 1973, the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende was overthrown by a US sponsored military coup headed by General Augusto Pinochet. Under a regime characterised by state terrorism, Chile became the world’s first laboratory for testing radical ‘neoliberal’ economic policies devised by right wing economist Milton Friedman’s pupils in Chile, known as the ‘Chicago Boys’. These policies included the wholesale privatisation of state assets in areas such as health, education, public services and sectors of the copper mining industry (a mainstay of Chile’s economy). This resulted in the concentration of wealth in a few hands and the country was transformed from one of the least unequal countries in the continent to one of the most unequal.

It took 17 years before popular protests during the mid-1980s culminated in a plebiscite in 1988, which brought an end to the Pinochet’s dictatorship. But the Chilean elites that had imposed the neoliberal model at the cost of thousands of lives managed to legitimise and consolidate their unjust system, leaving in place an undemocratic constitution (approved in 1980), which ensured the perpetuation of the neoliberal model. The centre-left coalition, Concertacion para la Democracia (Coordination for Democracy) which ruled the country between 1990 and 2010 not only continued but in fact deepened the dictatorship’s free-market model. Although Chile now has the highest per capita income in Latin America (about US$ 15,000 per year), the country is also one of the most unequal. According to the Chilean economist Marcel Claude, at the end of the military dictatorship (1989), the richest 5 per cent of Chileans had an income 110 times higher than the poorest 5 per cent. This trend continued during the next 20 years of democracy and today this same differential is 220 times higher.

The widespread dissatisfaction with the Concertacion’s continuation of the neoliberal model inherited from the dictatorship and the slow pace of political reform of Pinochet’s 1980 Constitution, especially among the young, resulted in a feeling that politicians of all shades had become the main obstacle to changing the political system. This disillusionment with politics was a primary factor that led to the erosion of the Concertacion’s electoral base and their ultimate defeat in the January 2010 presidential election, which was won by the rightwing billionaire businessman Sebastián Piñera.

Government by billionaire

However, in just over a year and a half, Piñera’s government has been unable to revive the fortunes of the neoliberal camp. He initially used to his advantage, Chile’s highly concentrated private media (which is beholden to the country’s political and economic elites), to stage-manage and obtain political capital from major events which have occurred during his presidency. An example of this was the worldwide coverage of the rescue of the 33 trapped miners almost exactly one year ago. The predominant media narrative presented the government led-rescue operation as a personal triumph for President Piñera himself. Following this crisis his personal poll ratings climbed to 63 per cent. But a recent opinion poll in July, after the start of student protests, put Piñera’s popularity at 26 per cent while the opposition coalition, the Concertacion, had a dismal approval rating of just 16 per cent.

Contrast this with the support the students enjoy: an approval rating of 72 per cent. Students, in large part, do not vote in national elections, as a form of protest against the neoliberal consensus of the political elites that they feel do not represent them. But in organising the current protests, students have mobilised their circle of friends and family and used the internet as a means of broadening the base of the movement. Initially the mainstream media largely ignored the protests but as these have grown in numbers and have managed to incorporated wide sectors of the population during the months of July and August, the media has been forced to report on the students’ demands.

Global echoes

Chile’s protests are similar to those seen in Spain, Greece and the Middle East, in that they represent a wave of discontent with the social consequences of neoliberal capitalism. Unlike the riots we saw recently in the UK however, the demands of the Chilean students are of a highly political nature. In Britain the average citizen does not yet make out the deep causes which underlie the looting that took place during the riots, instead attributing it to ‘mindless criminality’. In Chile, the protests are legitimised by wide sectors of society. For example, one man who had his car destroyed during one of the student protests declared that he supported the protests because his daughter was a college student involved in a just cause.

The student movement has been diverse, creative and surprisingly ideological. This has been due in no small measure to the clarity and charisma of its leaders which belong to a generation free from both the fear instilled in their parents by the Pinochet regime and the sterility of the compromises they engaged in during the Concertacion government. Camilla Vallejos, the 23-year-old president of the Student Union at the University of Chile recently said: ‘We do not want to improve the present system. We want a profound change, to stop seeing education as a consumer good, to see education as a right where the state provides a guarantee.’ Student leaders have also proved to be remarkably resilient and have remained defiant in the face of police repression and threats to their personal safety. In response to threats against Vallejo from a Piñera government supporter disseminated through Twitter, she was forced to seek police protection.

Radical and strategic

The student demands are highly strategic in nature, requiring a wholesale change in the economic and political model that goes well beyond simply reforming the education system. This is because they realise that unless the distribution of wealth in the country is tackled through tax reforms and the re-nationalisation of the mining industry, the state will not have the necessary resources to invest in education. In order to gather support the students have managed to coordinate their demands with a wide network of social movements ranging from environmental activists, workers of Chile’s strategic copper industry, and citizens organised in local assemblies (Asambleas Ciudadanas).

There is also a strong relationship between the environmental protests regarding the building of the HidroAysén hydroelectric project in Patagonia earlier this year and the student movement. And it is very likely that in the near future new relationships will be created between the demands of the Mapuche indigenous people, the public sector workers, the casualised workers in the mining industry (subcontratados), and those that owe money to banks and retail outlets (personal debt levels in Chile are amongst the highest in the world). In all these cases it is the oppressive power structures created by privatised conglomerates that are seen as the main cause of the problem.

So, as the Chilean winter comes to an end, the students’ struggles in the streets of Santiago are now giving way to a spring renewal in which a vast social movement representing the majority of Chilean society is expressing itself. Their aim is to build a truly participatory democracy. Whatever course current events take, Chile will no longer be the same. The students’ protests have managed to awaken the consciousness of vast sectors of the population about the need for a profound change in the country. What even a few months ago was considered impossible is now firmly on the agenda.

However, despite its strength, the success of this movement is far from assured. Today’s demands in education, health, social and political rights, have no solution under the current constitution so the path to success lies in moving towards a Constituent Assembly to draft a new constitution via a referendum, a route successfully followed by progressive governments backed by social movements in Latin America.

Youth rises against bloodshed in Mexico, armed with poetry and art

Andy — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 22:08:33 +0000

The on-going US/Mexican ‘War on Drugs’ has been well documented, with over 40,000 lives lost in the bloodshed. Now, following the murder of a famous poet’s son, the youth are taking to the streets. They are fighting back against politicians and gangs alike, with music and words, peacefully asserting: “Enough! No More Blood”.

On Monday 29 March, seven bodies were found in a car at the side of a highway in Cuernavaca, the capital of Morelos State. They had been tortured and killed by asphyxiation. After four years of “the war on drugs”, people are used to such news, and to hearing soon after that the victims were linked to organized crime – no further investigation needed.

This case was different. One of the victims, Juan Francisco Sicilia, was the son of the well-known poet and a journalist, Javier Sicilia. He belonged to a social and cultural class with enough strength to pressure the authorities and prevent them washing their hands of the case. The criminalisation of the seven was quickly halted and the case is now undergoing further investigation.

The swift action has raised concerns over official statistics. What of the 153 young people assassinated in Cuernavaca over the past three years, officially presumed to be, “connected to the drugs trade”? How many were falsely incriminated? How many had been forced to work for dealers, or murdered for refusing to? How many parents were unable to speak out, or had no platform to be heard?

With these questions in mind, a new wave of protesters, led by intellectuals and artists suddenly touched by death, are speaking out for everyone, marching under the slogan: “We are all Francisco Sicilia”.

Demonstrations sprung up in the main square in Cuernavaca within a day of the murders, with 300 coming to register their sadness and anger. On 6 April, 40,000 took to the streets. Regular marches have spun out across the state and the movement has spread through the nation and abroad within weeks. In France, US, Spain and Argentina people have already marched in solidarity with Mexico. More are planned elsewhere. “¡Ya Basta!” (“Enough!”) they shout, appropriating the Rius graphic campaign, “¡No more Blood!”

Art, music and poetry for peace

Arts have played a key role in the demonstrations, with young performers and musicians expressing their frustration and desperation through poetry, music, dance, photography and video. In the square in Cuernavaca, one after another, they rise to recite protest poetry and sing songs of martyrs. They have shaped their work to serve the protest, adjusting lyrics and performances to demand peace, even though they speak of anger and confusion:

Somebody died yesterday and I came here without knowing why.

Not knowing if it is empathy that moves me,

or sadness, or hope, or fear, or sarcasm, or black humour.

I myself do not have the courage to shoot

with a coup de grace,

he who I label

writ on his forehead:

“murderer”.

- From the poem by Leonardo De On On Vide, read in the Square, “The son of a friend died yesterday”

A forum of musicians repeats a line in various guises, which has become a mantra in the Square: “Who has taken your life away? Who has taken your like away? Who has taken your life away?…”

Wamazo, a percussionist group, performs as a firing squad in front of the Government Palace. The singer shouts in a military style: “Ready. Aim. Fire!” They group turns their back to the public and, facing the Palace, begin shooting their “bullets of sound”, shouting: “Shoot the protesters! Shoot the denouncers”.

The approach is not only a satirical refusal to fight fire with fire, the methodology that sums up the “war”. It is also a form of protection. The protesters know that they are not indicting easily defined enemies. They accuse politicians and organized criminals, who often collude or collide, alike.

In an angry, emotional “open letter to criminals and politicians” published in the national news magazine Proceso, Scilia makes the point explicitly. His call to the gangs is the first time a direct, public dialog has been opened between citizens and organized crime:

“We are fed up of you, politicians… because you only have the imagination to use violence; weapons; insults and with that, a profound disrespect for education, culture, opportunities and honest work.

And of you, criminals, we are sick of your violence, your loss of honour, your cruelty […] Long ago you had codes of honour… you have become less than human, not animal – animals don’t even do what you do – but sub-human, demonic.”

While Scilia appeals to politicians to re-evaluate their approach and think more deeply about the social context that has given rise to the trade, a position widely shared by the protestors, his appeal to gangs to return to their “codes of honour” seems perverse. Many more feel that such an suggestion is deeply problematic. The resounding feeling is that an end – not a limit – to all violence is the only answer.

A well-positioned and educated youth, suddenly aware that they are no longer safe, has begun a desperate movement to peace, born from indignation and fear over the death of a close friend of many protesting. They have been awoken to an ugly reality and are acting quickly. The challenge now is to keep the movement alive and to help it grow to invite and include other, less-protected sectors of society, where a well-founded fear of retribution for demonstrating is as hard to break as the shaky complacency that previously silenced others. As the numbers marching rapidly increases and the No More Blood campaign imagery spreads, it seems that finally, the challenge is being met.

Venezuela’s Bolivarian Process at Twelve

Andy — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 22:06:58 +0000

February 2011 marked 12 years since Hugo Chavez first assumed the presidency in Venezuela, following a landslide election victory that swept the country’s discredited traditional parties out of power. Since then, Chavez has presided over a radical process of reforms that has been increasingly both vilified by the mainstream media and subject to controversy among the ‘western’ left.

Where is Venezuela going after more than 12 years of having the Chavez government in power? Finding answers that actually engage with some of the major initiatives taking place in the country, such as the community councils, and that transcend the simplistic evaluations offered in the mainstream media that focus virtually all developments in Venezuela around the figure of Chavez are not easy to find. Yet one recent comprehensive and considered assessment has been offered by Gregory Wilpert, author of ‘Changing Venezuela by Taking Power’, which deserves to be read widely and debated by those on the left. For Wilpert, Venezuela has made significant progress in the past 12 years of Chavez’s presidency towards creating a more egalitarian, inclusive, and participatory society. However, he warns of important shortcomings and highlights the factors and obstacles that might explain the persistence of these shortcomings.

Venezuela’s foreign policy and what this says about the nature of the Chavez government has once again been in the media spotlight in relation to events in Libya. Prior to the foreign military intervention in favour of the rebels in Libya’s civil war, a number of leftwing commentators criticised Chavez for what they perceived to be his support for Gaddafi’s government in the conflict. A number of these commentators had trouble separating the actual position of the Venezuelan government with mainstream media misrepresentations of it, and one had to turn to informed and independent media sources for clarification on the issue. However, while Chavez and his government will continue to generate debate and controversy on all sides of the political spectrum, the two articles that follow focus on developments in Venezuela itself.

Venezuela: Putting People First

In the first Jennie Bremner, Assistant General Secretary of the British trade union Unite, argues that the Chavez government, despite suffering from the deep global recession that has led other government’s such as the UK’s to drive through savage cuts to public services and welfare spending, has instead chosen the path of building a fairer and more equal society through investing in people and public services.

The Path for Venezuela Cannot be Neoliberalism or Stalinism

In the second provocatively titled piece, originally published by Venezuela biggest selling daily newspaper ‘Ultimas Noticias’ and translated into English by the Transnational Institute (TNI), Venezuelan sociologist, Edgardo Lander argues that Venezuela’s ‘Bolivarian’ process is caught between a fundamental contradiction: popular demands for democratic participation against tendencies towards hierarchical decision-making and a concentration of power.

We welcome your comments on any of these articles.

More information: www.venezuelanalysis.com / www.alborada.net