Over the past 500 years, colonizing powers of European heritage have used their military might to impose their will on all continents of the world, committing countless large-scale crimes of humanity against the indigenous peoples of those other lands.How wonderful, therefore, that 513 years after Christopher Columbus’s flotilla arrived off the coast of the Americas, in Bolivia an indigenous person, head of an indigenous-based political movement, has been elected President.
I know I should have written about Evo Morales and his Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) before now.
Dominic Tweedie kindly sent me this link, which is to the text (in English) of an important address Evo made on December 24. In it, he builds on his own remarkable experience of organizing the people of his home district, and says:
- When we speak of the “defense of humanity,” as we do at this event, I think that this only happens by eliminating neoliberalism and imperialism. But I think that in this we are not so alone, because we see, every day that anti-imperialist thinking is spreading, especially after Bush’s bloody “intervention” policy in Iraq. Our way of organizing and uniting against the system, against the empire’s aggression towards our people, is spreading, as are the strategies for creating and strengthening the power of the people.
I believe only in the power of the people. That was my experience in my own region, a single province–the importance of local power. And now, with all that has happened in Bolivia, I have seen the importance of the power of a whole people, of a whole nation. For those of us who believe it important to defend humanity, the best contribution we can make is to help create that popular power…
Evo’s inauguration later this month is bound to be a huge fiesta for all his supporters. They include many of the deeply impoverished indigeños and indigeñas of Bolivia, a country that actually has a lot of natural-resources wealth. But even before being inaugurated, Evo has been making a “victory lap” to various countries around the world, including Cuba, Venezuela, Spain, France (where he now is), and South Africa. In all these countries he is able to meet both both heads of government and representatives of popular movements with whom he has already built ties through his involvement over past years in various counter-globalization movements.
Evo’s election, which was achieved on a fairly strongly anti-Washington platform, reminds us that Washington’s influence in Latin America has been waning for quite some time– and most particularly since 9/11. In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, Peter Hakim, the President of a DC-based organization called the Inter-American Dialogue, writes:
- Relations between the United States and Latin America today are at their lowest point since the end of the Cold War. Many observers in the 1980s had hoped that Latin America’s turn toward democracy and market economics, coupled with Washington’s waning emphasis on security matters, would lead to closer and more cooperative ties. Indeed, for a time, the Americas seemed to be heading in the right direction… But much of this progress has since stalled, with U.S. policy on Latin America drifting without much steam or direction.
After 9/11, Washington effectively lost interest in Latin America. Since then, the attention the United States has paid to the region has been sporadic and narrowly targeted at particularly troubling or urgent situations. Throughout the region, support for Washington’s policies has diminished. Few Latin Americans, in or out of government, consider the United States to be a dependable partner…
(Later in that same piece– though you’d have to pay to read it all online– Hakim notes the new inroads that China has been making in some Latin American countries. That reminds me of the euphoria some mainstream US strategic thinkers engaged in a few years back when they started to say that the 2000s would be “the Pacific century.” I guess they forgot that traffic and influence can flow in two different directions across the Pacific.)
Elsewhere in South America, we can note the rise to power in recent years of Presidents Lula da Silva in Brazil, and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. And even the President of Argentina, Nestor Kirchner, has been following some pretty interesting policies designed (I think) to help his country regain its economic indpendence from the Washington-dominated International Financial Institutions (the dreaded IFIs). Just this past Tuesday, Kirchner’s government paid off its last, $9.8 billion payment to the IMF.
That link goes to a recent NYT article, which also says:
- “With this payment, we are interring a significant part of an ignominious past,” Mr. Kirchner said recently, adding that the action would liberate Argentina from a supervisory body that was making “more and more demands that contradict themselves and economic growth.”
The IMF, of course, has been the fountainhead of what Evo Morales calls “neoliberalism”. Throughout the low-income parts of the world, its stringent demands for “structural adjustment” have resulted in the shredding of social safety-nets, the privatization of the basics of life like water or primary health-care, and thereby the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the serious impairment of many millions more.
The NYT article on Kirchner notes that when he took office in May 2003, he did so with less than one fourth of the popular vote– but that recent polls record that he now enjoys the support of 75 percent or more of Argentines. Also, not coincidentally, the Argentine economy has been doing very well. So much for the IMF-backed “Washington consensus” on what constitutes effective economic management in non-western nations, huh?
Any examination of Latin American and Central American history suggests that these countries have been freest to develop their own resources and social polities with the U.S. was distracted. They did pretty well in the 1940s and also in the Vietnam era.
Folks reading here may be interested in Jim Shultz’ Blog from Bolvia. Shultz writes in English for those of us linguistically impoverished and lives in Cochabamba, the Bolivian city which led the revolt against water privatization a couple of years ago.
Our relationship with South America is incredibly depressing. My wife is half-Cuban and has Venezuelan cousins; my grandfather spent eight years in Brazil. My grandfather (with politics to the right of Al Haig) thought that every single kid in this country should learn Spanish (yes, I know that Brazil is Portuguese). We’re in the same time zones (having worked in distributed companies, I can tell you that matters a lot), we don’t speak too many different languages; if we could bring ourselves to stop screwing up their economies and their governments, we could have a delightfully prosperous time. Who needs “the Pacific”?
I look at guys like Chavez and Morales, and just keep hoping that they don’t screw up. It’s hard to tell how much they like power, versus how much they like running a country well.
Greetings on a lovely cool rainy African Sunday morning in Johannesburg. A great post above and thanks for the mention.
It might be of interest to some of the JWN/TJF crowd to know that Evo Morales’ big tour is reportedly financed by something called the Club de Madrid who intend that Evo will meet with a range of political forces with experience of “transitions”. The Johannesburg Star’s Peter Fabricius wrote an article about it which I have put up at http://amadlandawonye.wikispaces.com/Morales+to+SA%2C+Roelf+Meyer+did+it%2C+Fabricius%2C+The+Star .
(I’m sorry I don’t know how to do links properly on here.)
Dominic, thanks for putting that link in there. I should get somethng about it up onto the other blog (when I have time!)
Personally I’m not too fussed if you put humungous great links onto here. But learning how to do classy (shorter) ones is probably a good skill, in general. One good way to figure this is to look at the raw HTML of any piece of text with good embedded links and see how they’re constructed.
Another is just to do this:
1. Type a “less than” mark, a simple a, a space, then href=”.
2. Immediately, type the targeted URL followed by a second quotation mark, then a “greater than” mark.
3. Type whatever word or words you want to use to carry your link.
4. Type “less than”, then /a, then “greater than”.
Personally I like embedded links much more than tinyurls). But if you want to go the tinyurls route, just go to tinyurl.com and do it there.
I tend to agree with Janinsanfran. This era of Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales has a kind of “Prague Spring” feel to it. I hope it won’t end the same way, but I fear it may. I’m convinced that US influence in the Middle East is waning rapidly, and pretty soon the oil & gas interests are going to force the government to refocus on “opportunities” closer at hand.
These waves are not new. They are a throwback to the 70s, when the Anti American and class warfare ideology peaked with Soviet funding. Fidel is way too poor to fund it, but with Chavez suddenly there are some petrodollars to buy influence. The acceptance of Venezuela in Mercosur was plain bribery, no other logic.
I hope South America finds a less destructive way of converging on its preferred social and growth models. Last time it costed 20 years of misery.
I personally believe that the natural South American alignment should be more with Europe than with the US.
David
I do think there is a tendency in the USA to apply stereotypes, “profiling”, and “chartism” to any and all situations, and that you lose a lot thereby. (By “chartism” I mean the propensity to draw graphs and read “cycles” into them).
This unique and sensational world tour of Evo Morales, the indigneous peasant President-elect of Bolivia, is a good example. Everything about it is extraordinary.
Just take this for example, from an article in the Times of India, about Evo’s fabulously liberating dress-sense:
“In his diplomatic debut in Europe this week, leftist Bolivian president-elect Evo Morales has made waves fashionably as well as politically.
“Morales, the first Indian elected president in Bolivia, unsettled many at home and abroad by breaking protocol and visiting Spanish King Juan Carlos wearing a striped, multicoloured sweater, local media said on Friday.”
It’s sad if people can’t enjoy the newness and wonderfulness of things when they happen. This is the first indigenous head of state in the Americas, North and South, for hundreds of years. It seems that it is only the North Americans who don’t get it – don’t see that this is a special time, a time for joy and excitement.
Hey, I do, Dominic! (Isn’t that how I led the post?)
Sorry, Helena, and I apologise to all other Norte Americanos who share the joy of Evo’s unique victory.
I think I was reacting to David’s dismissive opening sentence: “These waves are not new”.
I just thought, when I read that: What a sad person.
I was also thinking of the Jim Shultz Blog from Bolivia link that janinsanfran gave, which takes the NYT to task for inventing a “chilliness” in Evo’s visit to Spain.
Evo touches down at Johannesburg International Airport some time tomorrow and will be driven from there to Pretoria.
Nobody will tell us the ETA so we can’t organise a crowd to welcome him. We are slightly gutted about this but still happy that he will be here and will meet our leaders.
Dominic, the waves are not new. The degree of Indian blood purity doesn’t an ideology make. BTW, there were plenty of other before him with Indian blood, like Chavez himself, and Noriega in Panama.
The thing to celebrate in South America is the functioning of their democracies, not the winners themselves.
David
Peru’s current president, Alejandro Toledo, is indiginous. He’s already been then for five years.
We shouldn’t have to turn to personality cults to deal with inequality. This “Prague Spring” rhetoric lionizes the dictator Castro and feeds into the authoritarian style of Chavez’s rhetoric. I don’t want to have to make Chavez the caudillo of the continent I am from in order to solve poverty. We can’t become Chavez’s sheeple.
People like David and Inkan1969 are what the late, great Brendan Behan used to call “the begrudgers”.
I don’t envy anybody. What I don’t want is to become one of Chavez’s pod people against my will. Inflammatory rhetoric and unquestioning worship of “big men” like Chavez and Castro destroy your soul. We cannot embrace these in order to bring about social justice.
I’m Peruvian, born in Lima and with most of my family still living in various cities around the nation. We still have the right to call ourselves South American without having to become Chavez drones.
US relations with Latin America are as good as they have ever been.
Wage remittances from the USA, combined with near non-enforcement of restriction of employment of illegal immigrants, offers far more financial assistance to the Western Hemisphere than all trade reforms, multilateral aid, or NGO programs combined. Were the US to “get serious” about the region, the programs would probably do more harm than good. The region’s underlying problems of low growth and inadequate job creation defy any formula or plan from outside.
Evo’s biggest problem is Santa Cruz, not Washington. How to get the prosperous lowland (gas, soybeans) region to subsidize his destitute highlanders? The risk is that Washington or Brazil might instantly recognize a “Republic of Santa Cruz,” were the lowlanders to decide to part ways.
Dominic, I served with Brendan Behan, I knew Brendan Behan, Brendan Behan was a friend of mine. Dominic, you are no Brendan Behan. (Prolonged shouts and applause)
(from the 1988 vice presidential debate transcripts)
Time to stir up a hornet’s nest again.
Chavez, Castro, et al exist because too many of the propertied elites of Latin America hate their own citizens. I’ve lived in the Philippines, though it took years for me to move enough to the Left to understand what I saw. Like Latin America, the P.I. was feudalized by the Spanish, then overcome by the free-market Americans, who thought they were being “liberal” by converting the landlords to “entrepreneurs”. It’s a lie, and a disaster. Every country whose wealthy hate their own common people deserves civil war. No exceptions. The Russian boyars, the Chinese landlords, the Cuban fatcats in bed with US gangsters, the Filipino rich who send their money to New York and their kids to Andover, they all viewed themselves as a separate race from their poor. People like that cannot rule justly, and must be destroyed, no matter how bad the replacements might be.
And before defenders of capitalism tell me how the enlightened Orange Revolution yuppies sponsored by covert US funds just love their nigras, look at their record in Latin America the last 15 years. If they don’t actively hate the campesinos like the landlords do, it’s because they’re too busy watching Bloomberg on their dishes to know the campesinos exist. It is the USA that is breeding a new master race mentality among the rich everywhere on Earth. America itself hates the poor so much now that we sacrificed the Ninth Ward to divert funds to the War, and we’ve already consigned Black New Orleans to the memory hole. We’re becoming like El Salvador, not vice versa.
So don’t tell me how bad Chavez is until you come up with an alternative to this, the true, inevitable final form of capitalism, the Global War on the Poor.
super390, your exposure to the sun in Philipines may have damaged some neurons. The last round of left subversion in South America wasn’t exactly campesinos. It was urban and educated. Typical centers were universities and hospitals. Some of these countries have elected leftist governments today (Brasil, Chile, Uruguay, now Bolivia, and Argentina though peronism defies left to right placement). They are far from revolutionary and rather pragmatic when time comes to run a country.
Chavez bravado has little to do with class warfare and everything to do with the natural gas they found in Bolivia.
Cheers,
David