The Uprising Chavez Et Al

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30 | NEW STATESMAN | 4 DECEMBER 2006

As Venezuelans go to the polls, they bring to aclose not just a contest between President HugoChvez and his main challenger, Manuel Rosales,

but a year-long, continent-wide campaign. Thosesharply critical of Washington-backed economicliberalisation have been pitted against those infavour of freer trade with the United States. Its

been a race to the wire, with leftists taking Bo-livia, Chile, Uruguay, Nicaragua and Ecuador,and centrists and conservatives holding Colom-

bia, Peru, Costa Rica and Mexico.Those committed to a vision of globalisation

as it proceeded in the 1990s reduced tariffs,deregulation, tight money and privatisation have worked hard to brush off the importanceof this election cycle. The Wall Street Journalandthe Economist, for instance, repeatedly pointout, correctly, that many of Latin Americas new

leftists, such as Luiz Incio Lula da Silva in Brazilor Michelle Bachelet in Chile, are fiscal moder-ates, and that the firebrand style of Chvez is theexception not the rule for the regions reformers.

Yet, despite policy differences, and largely in-dependently of the outcome of specific elections,Latin America is undergoing a political and eco-nomic realignment. The White House is hopingfor an upset in Venezuela, but even if the impro-

bable happens and Chvez loses, this will onlyslow, not stop, the decline of US influence in thearea that used to be called its backyard.

During the cold war, Washington countedon Latin America to watch its back as it movedabout in the world. Regional governments voteden bloc in favour of the US and against the USSRat the United Nations, while bilateral economictreaties gave US corporations and banks specialpreference, ratifying Latin Americas status as aprovince of the United States within an increas-ingly open world. When a country tried to breakout of this system, the US supported coups thatinstalled more co-operative military regimes,with death-squad auxiliaries eliminating thosewho continued to dissent.

Following the demise of the Soviet Union,

Washington moved away from its reliance onrepressive Latin American proxies, banking in-stead on its ability to project its power through

elections and economic pressure.This worked throughout the 1990s, as heavily

indebted countries governed by centrists, grasp-ing for the carrot of foreign investment, submit-ted to the command of the IMF. Ever mindfulof the punishing stick of currency-market sell-offs, they cut back social spending, privatisednational industries, weakened the power of or-ganised labour, deregulated the financial sector,and did away with trade barriers that protectedlocal manufacturers and peasant producers.

Over the past few years, however roughlysince Chvezs landslide victory in 1998 thesystem has begun to break down. The Washing-ton consensus, as this set of policies came to be

called, proved an absolute disaster.Between 1980 and 2000, the region grew cu-

mulatively by only 9 per cent in per capita terms.Compare that with the 82 per cent expansion ofthe previous two decades, and add to it the finan-cial crises that have rolled across Mexico, Brazil,

Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Argentina overthe past 15 years, sweeping away accumulatedsavings, destroying the middle class, and wreck-ing the agricultural sector, and you will get asense of why voters have turned left .

Efforts to move beyond free-trade orthodoxyhave been aided by the significant stores ofcapital that have been built up in Asia, Europeand the Middle East, which have helped weanLatin America off its dependence on US finance.Likewise, high oil prices have transformed

Venezuela into a regional creditor, with Caracasinvesting its petrodollars not in US banks but ininfrastructure and bonds that help neighbouringcountries break free from the IMF.

When, in 2004, the Argentinian president,Nstor Kirchner, offered the holders of his

LATIN AMERICA

Washington has seen the countries south of itsborder as a backyard where it can bribe, bully andeven choose the rulers. But a new generation ofpopulist leaders is just saying No. Greg Grandin onthe pink revolution that kicked out the Yanquis

Theuprising

Voice of the barrio: Chavistas pour out on to Caracasstreets to hail their hero. Will he fulfil their dreams?

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VENEZUELA lHUGO CHVEZ

Now Chavismo willreally have to deliverA week before the vote, Caracas was a seaof blue as Manuel Rosales supporters listenedto him make his final speech. The next day itbecame an ocean of red as Hugo Chvezsupporters poured out of the barrios to showsolidarity with the president.

But despite impressive support for Rosalesmost polls put Chvez way out in front. He

promises to deepen the revolution andencourage more community organisation.

Rosales offers a return to normal relationswith the US and a formal social securitysystem. But his offer to keep the successfulsocialist programmes of the government cutsno ice with the urban poor, who believe Chvehas governed in their interest.

And Rosales is unlikely to peel off supportfrom Chvez supporters. He was a signatory tothe 2002 Carmona decree, which attemptedto legitimise the brief overthrow of Chvez andordered the dissolution of the constitution.Even shanty-town critics of Chvez recognisehim as their legitimate president. Nor did

Rosaless comments to a Miami televisionstation win him the defectors he neededwhen he said that the majority of [Chavezsupporters] are parasites who live off thegovernment and are subsidised by the state.

Already, there are rumours of protestdemonstrations planned for the day after theelection. The opposition will claim that Chvezwon fraudulently. More worrying may be thedivisions within Chavismo itself. Pressuresin the Bolivarian movement will increase andsomething will have to give.

One such stress is within the Unin Nacionade Trabajadores (UNT), the national tradeunion, which until now has been supportiveof the government. Many on the left wantan independent UNT, but it is obviously moreuseful to the government to have the workersuncritical support. After the election, thegloves will be off and the left is expected to winpower in the unions.

But Chvez wants foreign firms to investheavily in Venezuela over the next few years.The last thing he needs is industrial unrest.Steven Mather

4 DECEMBER 2006 | NEW STATESMAN |


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Bolivia and Brazil over energy issues, say, or Agentina and Uruguay over trade. It is havinghard time, however, backing up its divide-andrule strategy with real incentives. The US htried to weaken opposition to the Free Trade Aeas of the Americas by picking off low-hanginfruit such as Paraguay and Peru with bilatereconomic pacts. But the Democrats, now control of Congress, have just declared ththey will block ratification of free-trade treatiwith Peru and Colombia because they fail

protect labour rights. Likewise, the steady dcline of the dollar has reduced the importance the US market. So, when Washington recentthreatened to revoke trade concessions to Agentina and Brazil as punishment for their resitance to regional free-trade agreements, BuenoAires and Braslia refused to budge.

With its political and economic influenin the region waning, the US is at a crossroadIt can either work with Latin American nationalists to develop equitable economic policies, oreturn to the days when it relied on repressivstrongmen to enforce its authority locally. Ththe Pentagon last month announced an increain military aid to Latin America in response t

the rise of the left suggests that it has alreadtaken a step in the wrong direction.lGreg Grandin teaches history at New YorkUniversity. His latest book is EmpiresWorkshop: Latin America, the UnitedStates and the rise of the new imperialism(Metropolitan Books)Comment on this article at www.newstatesman.co

countrys $170bn external debt 30 cents perdollar, many predicted the markets would pun-ish Argentina by withholding future invest-ment. But, with Chinese capital pouring in, andKirchners economic prudence proving a prof-itable bet, such threats are not as persuasive asthey once were. Similar access to alternativesources of investment has allowed not just theleftist governments of Bolivia and Venezuela,

but even a conservative one in Ecuador, to nego-tiate more favourable contracts with multina-

tional energy companies.Co-operation among the regions economiesis also providing Latin America with leverage.Earlier this year, the Montevideo-based LatinAmerican Integration Association reported thattrade among its 12 member nations had grown110 per cent since 2003, a much faster pace thanhad been predicted. In addition, rapidly expand-ing trade with Europe and Asia, particularlyChina, has helped the region gain considerableautonomy from US markets.

With financial independence comes politicalfreedom. Over the past couple of years, govern-ments from across the political spectrum havedemonstrated a steadfast unwillingness to enlist

in Washingtons war on terror. They haverejected the Pentagons efforts to subordinatetheir militaries to US command; opposed theinvasion of Iraq; refused to elect the US-backedcandidate to the leadership of the Organisationof American States (OAS); declined to pass alaw that would have exempted the US from theInternational Criminal Court; and rebuffed calls

to isolate Venezuela. Such dissent was unthink-able during the cold war.

In response to this independence movement,the White House has tried to sell the idea thatthere are two lefts in Latin America: a respon-sible one it is willing to work with and an irre-sponsible one that is a threat to democracy. Itgets help from commentators such as Jorge Cas-taeda, who divides Latin America between badpopulists and good reformers, and lvaro VargasLlosa, who writes about a carnivorous and a

vegetarian left.Yet such a simplistic split does not hold. Forone thing, it is the supposed red-meat left thathas had the most economic success. Growth in

Venezuela and Argentina is off the charts, withimpressive declines in poverty and unemploy-ment, while Chile and Brazil are experiencingsluggish performance.

And the good reformers themselves dontbuy it. Leaders from Lula, Bachelet and Moralesto Kirchner and Chvez share a commitment tointegration, diversification and policies that spurnot just growth, but fairness. It is this commonagenda that led Bachelet, responding to the Bushadministrations attempt to use her moderation

to criticise Chvez, to defend Venezuela as acountry working to eradicate poverty and elim-inate inequality. It is also what led Lula to makehis first post-re-election trip abroad to Caracas,where he announced his support for Chvezsthird-term campaign.

There are real conflicts among Latin Americannations that Washington could exploit: between

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LATIN AMERICAs

CUBA lFIDEL CASTRO

A chapter in the history of American terrorismCuba, which once saw its purpose as spreading worldwide revolutionarystruggle, has been the rogue state that the United States can hold

up as a warning of its zero tolerance of dissent in Latin America.After the 1959 Cuban revolution, the CIAs plots to assassinate FidelCastro ranged from exploding cigars, through poisoned diving suits, to

toxic fountain pens. The biggest adventure was the1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.

The US government was reluctant to rollout a sequel to this farce, and hardlineexiles fought for isolation instead, targetingbusinesses that dealt with Havana.Between 1968 and 2000, 68 attacks tookplace in Miami alone. Targets included theCuban Museum of Art, a nightclub thathad booked a Cuban singer, and MiamisCatholic Archdiocese (for co-ordinating

hurricane relief efforts for Cuba). Many ofthose responsible had passed through CIAtraining in the early Sixties. As one Cuban

exile, Luis Posada Carriles, put it:The CIA taught us everything.

They taught us explosives;how to kill, bomb; trained usin acts of sabotage.

Another leader of thebombing campaigns was

Orlando Bosch, who began his

career by firing a bazooka at a Polish freighter bound for Havana. Heis credited with masterminding at least 30 bombings of Cuban or

soft-on-Castro targets. Declassified intelligence from 1976, when GeorgeBush Sr was head of the CIA, implicates Bosch and Posada in the bombingon 6 October that year of a plane operated by Cubana, the national airlinewith the loss of all 73 lives. A source overheard Posada saying we aregoing to hit a Cuban airplane days before the plane was blown up. TheCIA did not alert its Cuban enemies.

Bosch and Posada were later arrested in Venezuela. Bosch spent yearsin prison awaiting trial, but then, amid charges of impropriety, he wasreleased. Posada simply escaped. He was rewarded with a job for USundercover forces in central America. In the mid-1980s, he workedcovertly in El Salvador, supplying Contra rebels in Nicaragua. In 1998, hetold the New York Times he had been responsible for bombings in Havanathat had killed one Italian tourist. Then, in 2005, he turned up in Miamiand held a press conference to plead his innocence of the plane bombing

Posada was arrested, but only for entering the US illegally. Now at adetention centre in El Paso, Texas, he denies participating in the Cubanaatrocity and the Havana bombings but chuckles about his manyattempts to kill Castro. He is baffled that the Americans would lock himup when he has worked loyally for them for so long. You can see his point.Bosch remains free, pardoned by Bush Sr in 1990 on condition that hedesist from acts of violence.

Meanwhile Cuba, despite frequently condemning the 11 September2001 attacks, is on the US list of state sponsors of terrorism. In 2002, itwas accorded membership of the expanded axis of evil.lDollan Cannell

REUTERS/CLAUDIA

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The Uprising Chavez Et Al