A Time to Unite and March Together

Fidel Castro
September 6, 2009
(Translation by Socialist Voice)

“The establishment of seven U.S. military bases in Colombia poses a direct threat to the sovereignty and integrity of the other peoples of South and Central America with which our national heroes dreamed of creating the great Latin American homeland.”

U.S. Air Base at Manta, Ecuador to be eliminated when its 30 year lease expires in 2009
(Photo: Defendamerica.mil)

This Reflection is addressed not to the governments but to the fraternal peoples of Latin America.

Tomorrow, August 28, the summit of UNASUR [Union of South American Nations] will convene in Argentina, and its significance cannot be overlooked. The conference must analyze the granting of seven military bases in Colombian territory to the U.S. superpower. The two governments kept their preparatory discussions a rigorous secret, so that the accord could be presented to the world as a fait accompli.

In the early morning hours of March 1, 2008, the Colombian Armed Forces – trained and equipped by the United States – attacked with precision bombs a guerrilla group which had entered a remote area of the Ecuadorian territory. At dawn, airborne elite Colombian troops occupied the small camp, killed the wounded and carried off with them the dead body of guerrilla leader Raul Reyes.

Apparently, he had been meeting with young visitors from other countries who were interested in the experience of the guerrillas engaged in armed struggle since the death of Liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán more than 50 years ago. Among the victims were college students from Mexico and Ecuador; they were not carrying weapons. It was a brutal action in Yankee style. The government of Ecuador had not received any advance notice of the attack.

This event was a humiliating action against the small and heroic South American nation engaged in a democratic political process. Suspicion is strong that the U.S. air base of Manta [in Ecuador] had supplied information and cooperated with the aggressors. President Rafael Correa made the brave decision to demand the return of the territory occupied by the Manta military base, in strict compliance with the terms of the military agreement with the United States, and recalled his ambassador from Bogotá.

photo on the left: Demostration Against the air field in Colombia

Seven U.S. bases in Colombia
The concession of territory for the establishment of seven U.S. military bases in Colombia poses a direct threat to the sovereignty and integrity of the other peoples of South and Central America with which our national heroes dreamed of creating the great Latin American homeland.

The Yankee imperialism is a hundred times more powerful than the colonial empires of Spain and Portugal, and a complete stranger to the origin, customs, and culture of our peoples.

It is not a matter of narrow chauvinism. “Homeland is humanity,” as Martí stated, but never under the domination of an empire which has imposed a bloody tyranny on the world. This is demonstrated beyond question in our own hemisphere by the hundreds of thousands of Latin American compatriots who were killed, tortured, and secretly murdered in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and other countries of Our America through the past five decades by coups d’état and other actions promoted or supported by the United States.

Cynical pretexts
As I analyze the arguments of the United States to try to justify the granting of military bases in Colombian territory, I can only characterize its pretexts as cynical. The U.S. claims that these bases are needed to aid the struggle against drug trafficking, terrorism, arms trafficking, illegal migration, the possession of weapons of mass destruction, nationalist outbursts, and natural disasters.

This powerful country is the largest drug purchaser and consumer on the planet. An analysis of the paper money circulating in the U.S. capital, Washington, has shown that 95 per cent of the bills have been in the hands of drug consumers. The U.S. is the largest market for and the main supplier of weapons to organized crime in Latin America, the same weapons that have killed tens of thousands of people every year south of its own borders.

It is the largest terrorist state that has ever existed. It dropped bombs on the civilian cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and caused the death of millions of people with such imperialist wars as those carried out against Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and other countries located thousands of miles away. What is more, it is also the largest producer and holder of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons of mass destruction.

The Colombian paramilitary, many of them former members of the Armed Forces, are part of their reserves and are the drug-traffickers’ best allies and protectors.

The so-called civilian personnel that would accompany the troops in the Colombian bases are, as a rule, expertly trained former American soldiers hired by such private companies as Blackwater, widely known for its crimes in Iraq and elsewhere in the world.

A country with self-respect needs no U.S. mercenaries, troops, or military bases to fight drug trafficking, protect the people in case of natural disasters or to provide humanitarian cooperation to other peoples.

Cuba is a country that does not have a drug problem or high rates of violent deaths – in fact the rate of such deaths decreases every year.

Threat to all Latin America
The only purpose of these bases for the United States is to place Latin America within reach of its troops in a matter of hours. The top military commanders of Brazil were very upset by the unexpected news of the agreement to establish U.S. military bases in Colombia. The Palanquero base is very close to the Brazilian border.

These bases and those in the Islas Malvinas [Falkland Islands], Paraguay, Peru, Honduras, Aruba, Curacao and others leave not a single location in Brazil and the rest of South America beyond reach of the U.S. Southern Command. Using its most advanced carrier aircraft, it can be on the spot within hours with troops and sophisticated combat equipment.

The best experts on the subject have provided all necessary data to prove the military scope of the Yankee-Colombian accord. This program, including the reactivation of the Fourth Fleet, was designed by Bush and inherited by the current U.S. administration. Some South American leaders are asking due clarification of U.S. military policy in Latin America. Nuclear aircraft-carriers are not required to combat drugs.

The most immediate objective of that plan is to eliminate the Bolivarian revolutionary process and to assure U.S. control over Venezuela’s oil and other natural resources. Moreover, the empire does not accept the competition of new emerging economies in its backyard or the existence of truly independent countries in Latin America. And it counts on the reactionary oligarchy, the fascist Right, and its control over the most important media, both internally and externally. It will never grant support to anything resembling true equity and social justice.

The Latin American migration to the United States is the consequence of underdevelopment, the result of U.S. plundering of our countries and of unequal exchange with the industrialized countries.

Mexico was forcibly removed from Latin America through the Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada. Most of the 12 million illegal immigrants in the USA are Mexicans, as are most of the hundreds who perish every year along the fence separating these nations.

Amid the current international economic crisis, the rate of extreme poverty in Mexico – a country with a population of 107 million – has reached 18 per cent, while more than half of the population lives in poverty.

Martí’s insight
During the life of Marti, the apostle of our independence, his major source of concern was annexation to the United States. After 1889 he became aware that this was the greatest danger for Latin America. He always dreamed of the Grand Homeland, from the Rio Bravo to Patagonia; and he died for it and for Cuba.

On January 10, 1891 he published an essay in the New York Illustrated Review under the title “Our America,” in which he wrote the unforgettable words, “The trees must form ranks to hold back the giant with seven-league boots! It is the time to gather and to march together, as closely united as the veins of silver at the roots of the Andes.”

Four years later, after his landing at Playitas in the eastern province of Cuba, territory held by the insurrectionists, he met on May 2, 1895, with the Herald journalist George E. Bryson, who told him that, in an interview with the celebrated General Arsenio Martinez Campos, the Spanish officer had said that he would rather surrender Cuba to the United States than accept its independence.

Marti was so impressed by the news that on May 18 he sent his Mexican friend Manuel Mercado the renowned posthumous letter where he wrote of “the road that is to be blocked off, and is being blocked off by our blood – the road of annexing our American nations to the brutal and turbulent North, which despises them.”

The following day, heedless of the advice of General Máximo Gomez, who advised that he should stay with the rearguard, he asked his assistant for a revolver and charged on a well-positioned Spanish force. He died in combat.

“I have lived in the monster and I know its entrails,” he wrote in his last letter.

(published in CubaDebate,1 August 27, 2009. Socialist Voice translation based on a translation published in the Cuban newspaper Granma2.)

Venezuela : The Revolution Stumbles

Richard Gott
Comment Is Free
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/24/venezuela-hugo-chavez

Putting a brave face on a major electoral setback [1] early on Monday morning, president Hugo Chavez quoted from a Guardian editorial [2] that had referred to Venezuela's "vibrant democracy". The result of Sunday's regional elections, Chavez suggested, had been "a great victory for the country, for its constitution, and for its political system".

And indeed it was true that his recently created United Socialist Party [3] of Venezuela had won the governorship of 17 states, whereas the conservative opposition to his Bolivarian Revolution had only secured five. Yet the president of the National Electoral Council [4], close to tears, had announced earlier that the Chavez government had lost the city of Caracas and its outer suburb of Miranda, as well as the important western state of Zulia, on the Colombian frontier. Later results showed that the Chavistas had also lost the state of Carabobo and Tachira, as well as the municipality of Sucre (which includes the vast working class town of Petare in the eastern outskirts of the capital).

Although the former vice-president Jorge Rodriguez won the state of El Libertador, in which two million people live in shanty towns of western Caracas, Venezuela's most important urban centres - Maracaibo, Valencia, and Caracas - are now in the hands of the opposition. This appears to follow the recent trend in Latin America, where the right have won great cities like Buenos Aires in Argentina and Sao Paulo in Brazil. As a result of this unfavourable vote in the urban areas, Chavez has lost the services of important long time colleagues, including Aristobulo Isturiz, Jesse Chacon, and Diosdado Cabello.

Yet in spite of this electoral reverse, this is a country that remains in a state of revolutionary change, a vast upheaval involving politics, culture, patterns of work, or new ways of thinking, the relationship between men and women, the adoption of new technologies, the explosion of community media, the revival of historical memory, and the mobilisation of millions of people to overcome the tedium of daily life.

New schools, new posts for medical assistance, and new cultural centres have been springing up in every shanty town throughout the country. Health and education have been a priority in other Latin American countries in recent years - an area of social transformation which Cuba has long been in the lead - yet only in Venezuela has the prosaic task of providing people with the basic necessities of life been accompanied by this revolutionary awakening of the people to the possibilities of what they themselves can do to achieve improvement, betterment, and change.

Sunday's elections took place in a disciplined atmosphere of suppressed excitement as people rose to the task of bringing out the vote and thereby ensuring the continuity of the revolutionary process, yet as the day wore on a more sombre mood prevailed as people began to contemplate the possibility of defeat.

It is true, of course, that half the population - for reasons of class or race or family upbringing - remains adjacent to this unique revolutionary process, and prefers to remain on the sidelines of history. Yet many Venezuelans, after 10 years of upheaval under the leadership of Hugo Chavez, remain solidly supportive of the project of which they see themselves to be an integral part.

All this is now under threat. The Chavez government was expecting to lose three or four states in Sunday's elections, since the opposition had foolishly called for an electoral boycott at the last regional elections four years ago, but the loss of the principal cities is a huge blow; the analysis of what happened and why has already begun. One failing today seems obvious: although the Bolivarian Revolution [5] has gone a long way towards addressing the problems of health and education throughout the country, a number of specifically urban phenomena have not been adequately tackled. Crime, housing, transport, and rubbish collection are all areas where the Chavista [6] governors have failed to produce results - and their candidates have paid the price.

Opposition politicians, some of whom supported the anti-Chavez coup in 2002, face the challenge of trying to deal with the mess, inherited from way back before the Chavez era. Antonio Ledezma, the new mayor of Caracas [7], has already mentioned the introduction of neighbourhood policing to tackle the crime wave. Yet in a country that remains deeply polarised, the new urban authorities are faced with an superhuman task, while the Chavistas will look on in dismay.

Victory for Venezuela’s Socialists in Crucial Elections – November 2008

James Petras

The pro-Chavez United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) won 72% of the governorships in the November 23, 2008 elections and 58% of the popular vote, dumbfounding the predictions of most of the pro-capitalist pollsters and the vast majority of the mass media who favored the opposition.

PSUV candidates defeated incumbent opposition governors in three states (Guarico, Sucre, Aragua) and lost two states (Miranda and Tachira). The opposition retained the governorship in a tourist center (Nueva Esparta) and won in Tachira, a state bordering Colombia, Carabobo, and the oil state of Zulia, as well as scoring an upset victory in the populous state of Miranda and taking the mayoralty district of the capital, Caracas. The socialist victory was especially significant because the voter turnout of 65% exceeded all previous non-presidential elections. The prediction by the propaganda pollsters that a high turnout would favor the opposition also reflected wishful thinking.

The significance of the socialist victory is clear if we put it in a comparative historical context:

1. Few if any government parties in Europe, North or South American have retained such high levels of popular support in free and open elections.

2. The PSUV retained its high level of support in the context of several radical economic measures, including the nationalization of major cement, steel, financial and other private capitalist monopolies.

3. The Socialists won despite the 70% decline in oil prices (from $140 to $52 dollars a barrel), Venezuela’s principal source of export earnings, and largely because the government maintained most of its funding for its social programs.

4. The electorate was more selective in its voting decisions regarding Chavista candidates – rewarding candidates who performed adequately in providing government services and punishing those who ignored or were unresponsive to popular demands. While President Chavez campaigned for all the Socialist candidates, voters did not uniformly follow his lead where they had strong grievances against local Chavista incumbents, as was the case with outgoing Governor Diosdado Cabello of Miranda and the Mayor of the Capital District of Caracas. Socialist victories were mostly the result of a deliberate, class interest based vote and not simply a reflex identification with President Chavez.

5. The decisive victory of the PSUV provides the basis for confronting the deepening collapse of world capitalism with socialist measures, instead of pouring state funds to rescue bankrupt capitalist banks, commercial and manufacturing enterprises. The collapse of capitalism facilitates the socialization of most of the key economic sectors. Most Venezuelan firms are heavily indebted to the state and local banks. The Chavez government can ask the firms to repay their debts or handover the keys – in effect bringing about a painless and eminently legal transition to socialism.

The election results point to deepening polarization between the hard right and the socialist left. The centrist social-democratic ex-Chavista governors were practically wiped from the political map. The rightist winner in Miranda State, Henrique Capriles Radonsky, had tried to burn down the Cuban embassy during the failed military coup of April 2002 and the newly elected Governor of Zulia, Pablo Perez, was the hand picked candidate of the former hard-line rightwing Governor Rosales.

While the opposition controlled state governorships and municipal mayors can provide a basis to attack the national government, the economic crisis will sharply limit the amount of resources available to maintain services and will increase their dependence on the federal government. A frontal assault on the Chavez Government spending state and local funds on partisan warfare could lead to a decline of federal welfare transfers and would provoke grassroots discontent. The rightwing won on the basis of promising to improve state and city services and end corruption and favoritism. Resorting to their past practices of crony politics and extreme obstructionism could quickly cost them popular support and undermine their hopes of transforming local gains into national power. The newly elected opposition governors and mayors need the cooperation and support of the Federal Government, especially in the context of the deepening crisis, or they will lose popular support and credibility.

Conclusion

There is no point in expecting the mass media to recognize the Socialist victory. Its effort to magnify the significance of the opposition’s 40% electoral vote and their victory in 20% of the states was predictable. In the post-election period, the Socialists, no doubt, will critically evaluate the results and hopefully re-think the selection of future candidates, emphasizing job performance on local issues over and above professed loyalty to President Chavez and ‘Socialism’. The immediate and most pressing task facing the PSUV, President Chavez, the legislators and the newly elected Chavez officials is to formulate a comprehensive socio-economic strategic plan to confront the global collapse of capitalism. This is especially critical in dealing with the sharp fall in oil prices, federal revenues, and the inevitable decline in government spending. Chavez has promised to maintain all social programs even if oil prices remain at or below $50 dollars a barrel. This is clearly a positive and defensible position if the government manages to reduce its huge subsidies to the private sector and doesn’t embark on any bailout of bankrupt or nearly bankrupt private firms. While $40 billion dollars in reserves can serve as a temporary cushion, the fact remains that the government, with the backing of its majorities in the federal legislature and at the state levels, needs to make hard choices and not simply print money, run bigger deficits, devalue the currency and exacerbate the already high rates of annual inflation (31% as of November).

The only reasonable strategy is to take control of foreign trade and directly oversee the commanding heights of the productive and distributive sectors and set priorities that defend popular living standards. To counter-act bureaucratic ineptness and neutralize lazy elected officials, effective power and control must be transferred to organized workers and autonomous consumer and neighborhood councils. The recent past reveals that merely electing socialist mayors or governors is not sufficient to ensure the implementation of progressive policies and the delivery of basic services. Liberal representative government (even with elected socialists) requires at a minimum mass popular control and mass pressure to implement the hard decisions and popular priorities in the midst of a deepening and prolonged economic crisis.

The fight is not over by any means but Bolivia has entered a new phase

Forrest Hylton

Bolivia's Congress ratified President Evo Morales' draft constitution on Tuesday, beginning a new phase to the president’s quest of empowering Bolivia’s long oppressed indigenous majority. Congress approved holding another referendum scheduled for January 25. Despite this development, Journalist and Author Forrest Hylton believes "the fight is not over by any means but [Bolivia] has entered a new phase."

Forrest Hylton is the author of Evil Hour in Colombia (Verso, 2006), and with Sinclair Thomson, co-author of Revolutionary Horizons: Past and Present in Bolivian Politics (Verso, 2007). He is a regular contributor to New Left Review and NACLA Report on the Americas.

Transcript of interview by Bolivia Rising

Bolivia approves draft constitution
Producer: Zaa Nkweta

ZAA NKWETA, TRNN: Bolivia's Congress ratified President Evo Morales' draft constitution on Tuesday, beginning a new phase to the president's quest of empowering Bolivia's long-oppressed indigenous majority.

EVO MORALES, BOLIVIAN PRESIDENT (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): If regional governors reject all of these modifications, these civil committees will turn into the enemies of regional autonomy. If there shall be any civil authority or governor who rejects this document, they would be an enemy of the country because they would be rejecting the nationalization of our natural resources.

NKWETA: Bolivia's Congress also approved holding a referendum on the new constitution, scheduled for January 25. The Real News spoke to author and historian Forrest Hylton.

~~~

NKWETA: So welcome to The Real News, Forrest.

FORREST HYLTON, JOURNALIST AND HISTORIAN: Thanks for having me, Zaa.

NKWETA: So Bolivia has ratified the draft constitution. What do you make of this?

HYLTON: It's a major victory for Evo Morales as president of Bolivia, for MAS as the governing party of Bolivia. And La Paz is currently filled with tens of thousands, perhaps more than 100,000 people of indigenous background, workers and peasants and miners, celebrating what they understand to be their Constitution. And there's a lot in the fine print, in fact, that reflects negotiations between Morales and the right-wing opposition prefects, and particularly the political parties that represent them. But people aren't worried about the fine print right now. They feel that this is a big victory in terms of moving the country forward politically and at least establishing a framework that's agreed on by all sides for government and, hopefully, the rule of law.

NKWETA: What do you think were some of the critical turning points that got us to this point?

HYLTON: The international intervention from UNASUR, the discussions of this issue in the General Assembly at the United Nations by President Fernández de Kirchner, and the way that Brazil intervened very decisively in favor of the democratically elected government of Evo Morales, the extent to which the United States has become entirely isolated from the rest of the hemisphere. And Evo Morales is at the same time very strong right now; and after the referendum in August, which saw a 13 percent gain for him, he was able to translate that into international legitimacy, and that international legitimacy eventually forced the right to make concessions that it really never wanted to make. It never wanted to see Evo Morales and his government get the credit for passing the new constitution, and a new constitution and a constitutional assembly was a key part of the agenda of October, which is basically what set the framework for Evo Morales's government. It's what brought Evo Morales to power. And it refers to October 2003, when right-wing President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada was overthrown through a mass popular insurrection. So this really represents in some ways a closure of that process that was initiated when people began to demand a new constitution and a new constitutional assembly through mass direct action in the streets, which was capable of overthrowing two presidents.

NKWETA: Do you believe that the grassroots organizations that the opposition used to push Morales, do you believe that these have been abated?

HYLTON: Well, I mean, it's unlikely, I think, that we've seen the last of them altogether, but the increasingly central protagonism that they have taken on in the last, you know, couple of years or so, particularly in the last year, I think, is something that has now come to a close; I think it'll really fade into the background. And they might be mobilized as necessary, but I think the kind of constant mobilization that we've been seeing that has led to the deaths and ultimately to the massacre in Pando in September, I think [inaudible] with the forging of this kind of new consensus. And the key concession that MAS and Evo Morales had to make was on land, the idea that none of the expropriation of unproductive land would be retroactive, so the people who have legal title to their land, if they're using it productively, are not in danger of using any of it. This is the key issue for these folks down in the eastern lowlands, because their representatives in the prefectures and the civic committees are huge landowners, and they belong to kind of a caste of landowning families. And so the Constitution doesn't explicitly take them on, and up until now that was a point that MAS was really unwilling to negotiate on, and it was perhaps the key grievance of the folks in the lowlands. A lot of the debate took place over hydrocarbons and the distribution of gas resources between the nation and the different regions within it. But in fact this question of land has been fundamental at every point, and it was really the tensest point of friction between the government and the opposition. Now that's really been taken care of, and I think there will be much more live-and-let-live.

NKWETA: Is the fight over?

HYLTON: I wouldn't say it's over by any means, but I think we've really probably entered a new phase, and I think things are likely to be quite a bit calmer in Bolivia in the next year than they have in the past.