Latin America 2011

One of the world’s most prominent intellectuals, Noam Chomsky, has accused the Guardian/Observer newspaper of "extreme dishonesty" in its write-up of an interview he gave on Venezuela.

A Nicaragua Network delegation has highlighted the US Agency for International Development's funding of Nicaraguan groups to provide training in "democratisation" and media skills.

by Seumas Milne

Twenty years ago, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War came to a close, we were told that we were witnessing the end of history, the triumph of the free market, the emergence of a unipolar world and the death of socialism – in fact, the end of any systemic alternative to neoliberal capitalism at all.

Two decades on, that all looks pretty foolish. Four things in particular have changed the picture fundamentally. The first has been the war on terror, the strategic defeat of the US in Iraq and Afghanistan and the failure of its attempt to impose its will by force on the Arab and Muslim world. The second has been the rise of China. The third has been the crash of 2008 and the discrediting of the neoliberal economic model. And the fourth, and most underestimated shift, has been the progressive tide that has swept Latin America.

All four elements are closely interconnected. But crucial to this whole process has been the fact that Latin America was the first region of the world to experience the full force of neoliberalism – during the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile in the 1970s – and also the first to revolt against it, in the wake of the financial crisis of 1998. That led in turn to the wave of change which swept the old elites from politics and brought to power a succession of radical socialist and social-democratic governments, from Ecuador to Brazil, Paraguay to Argentina: challenging US domination and neoliberal orthodoxy, breaking down social and racial inequality, building independent regional integration and taking back resources from corporate control.

For decades, Latin America was mired in US-backed rightwing dictatorships, and socialist Cuba stood alone. The transformation of the past decade is symbolised for me by the fate of Che Guevara’s killer, Sergeant Mario Teran. On 9th October 1967, Guevara faced a shaking Teran in La Higuera, Bolivia, and told him: “Shoot coward, you’re only killing a man”. The moment is the climax of Stephen Soderbergh’s film Che, and in real life it marked the defeat of the attempt to spread the Cuban revolution in Latin America. But forty years later, the blind, reviled Teran had his sight restored by Cuban doctors, paid for by revolutionary Venezuela in the radicalised Bolivia of Evo Morales.

That’s part of a programme that has seen 1.5 million free eye operations carried out in 33 countries in Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa, courtesy of the Cuban and Bolivarian revolutions. It’s an emblem of the humanity of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s legacy – but also of the passing of the Cuban torch to a new generation of Latin American revolutionaries and progressives. And the radical change they are making in Latin America is multidimensional.

First of all it has a social and class dimension: at the cutting edge, Venezuela has halved poverty, massively expanded free health and education and boosted public ownership and control – echoed across the continent. Second, it has a democratic core, reflected in the constitutional transformation and experiments in direct democracy in a string of Latin American countries. Then there is the ethnic dimension, seen in the political awakening of the indigenous population of the entire region and symbolised by the previously unthinkable election of Morales, an Aymara Indian, as president of Bolivia.

On top of that there is the regional dimension, made clear by the powerful new drive towards autonomous Latin American economic integration. And finally, there is the vital international dimension, played out in the ejection of US military bases, such as the Manta airbase in Ecuador, and the assertion of an independent foreign policy by almost every state across the region, notably including Brazil.

But most important of all, there has been the global impact: Latin America has shown that there can be systemic alternatives, that a 21st century socialism can be constructed, that people make their own history – and another world is not only possible, but is being created right now.

Of course none of these advances are settled or irreversible. Some are more radical than others. There are, naturally, many internal weaknesses and challenges in all the countries where progressive change is taking place. And the process is threatened from both within and without.

In particular the US, which has long dominated Latin America, was distracted fighting its war on terror in the Arab and Muslim world while this movement of transformation was gaining strength. But now, even under the Obama administration, the US foreign policy establishment has made clear that it is committed to rollback, building new bases in Colombia, potentially to intervene again across the region.

Despite Obama’s warning that it risked creating a “terrible precedent”, the 2009 coup in Honduras was allowed to stand with US support – or, as Hillary Clinton put, “managed to a successful conclusion”. Honduras was a signal that the democratic and radical tide could be turned back, and was followed by the failed coup against Rafael Correa in Ecuador.

That’s one reason why the Latin American left needs international solidarity. Such support should include pressure on the British government and the European Union to oppose any anti-democratic backlash or foreign intervention against a movement for social justice that any decent person should be able to back, along with the demand that our media report fairly what’s actually going on in the region.

But we also need to learn from what is taking place in Latin America. Of course these are diverse societies which face some very different problems from our own. But the common sense about the bankruptcy of neoliberal capitalism that was first recognised and acted on in Latin America has now gone global.

There are direct lessons now for countries such as Ireland and Greece from Argentina’s debt default in the early years of the last decade – and its subsequent economic expansion. But the wider question for us is whether some of the progressive and socialist change that has delivered for the people of Latin America in the last decade can be generated here, in this part of the world as well.

On Tuesday 5 July 2011, the UK and Cuba signed a formal declaration to strengthen bilateral cooperation between the two countries.

Saturday 8 October 2011

The renowned American philosopher and activist, who has written numerous articles and books on US policy in Cuba and Latin America, speaks on the US government's response to losing control in its backyard.

Contact CSC on 020 8800 0155 or office@cuba-solidarity.org.uk for details, venue, time and ticket reservations.

by Len McCluskey, General Secretary of Unite the Union

The continent of Latin America is changing rapidly and the good news is that it is the people of Latin America themselves that are driving this progressive agenda. For the first time the people of the continent are taking control of their own resources and their own destinies, and this model of continental self determination is one we should all applaud and support.

For too many years the vast majority of the Latin America population has been subjugated by a wealthy elite empowered by the multinational corporations predominantly based in the United States. Illiteracy, ill health and overriding poverty was the norm for most people, with any wealth generated quickly being exported northwards to bolster the profit margins of US based corporations.

This social progress and resistance to the global advance of neoliberalism has been lead by the countries of ALBA, (Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas) and includes Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and Nicaragua.

Some of the advances won by the people of these countries are truly remarkable on any scale:

● better life expectancy and infant mortality in Cuba than parts of the US

● the expansion of adult literacy in Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua at a rate seen nowhere else in the world

● international health programmes such as Mission Milagro (Mission Miracle), where nearly 2 million people have had their eyesight improved or restored

● more than 2,000 doctors graduated through the Latin American School of Medicine and 6,000 students are part of this new medical training program that emphasises internationalism and humanism.

● the creation of the ALBA Bank with a capital of $1 billion and a stated aim ‘to boost industrial and agricultural production among its members, support social projects as well as multilateral cooperation agreements among its members’.

So why are the advances of the people in countries such as Cuba and Venezuela not more widely publicised throughout the world? The answer is of course the fear of the good example.

If socialism can be seen to be delivering for the peoples of Cuba and Venezuela, where does this leave the trickle down theories of neo-liberalism that encourages extremes of wealth and argues that if the rich get even richer, some of the excess will trickle down to us? This is the reason that even the soft centre Obama government has not yet been able to reverse the policies of containment and aggression towards progressive Latin America.

First and foremost among this aggressive policy is the nearly 50 year old illegal blockade of Cuba which has been condemned by almost every country of the world at the United Nations. How disgraceful – so much for the rule of law! Initially just a trade embargo, the system has been extended to include third countries so that if a British company does business with Cuba it may find its US subsidiary interests sequestered by the US, even when it’s perfectly legal for an EU firm to do business with Cuba.

Secondly, there is the outrageous case of the Miami 5. Working purely at uncovering terrorist activities against Cuba emanating from Miami –these five brave Cubans went to the US and reported back to the Cuban Government who passed on the details to the FBI. Instead of arresting the terrorists the FBI arrested the five men. Then in a completely unjust trial which has been condemned by Amnesty International, they were imprisoned for long sentences including one receiving double life. So much for the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Now, to add to the terrible injustice and against the normal rights given to the families of prisoners, the US government has refused two of the men’s wives the chance to visit their husbands for over 10 years. My union Unite can feel proud of its work in the campaign to free the 5. We have been pre-eminent in organising major fringe meetings at the TUC Congress and Labour Party Conference to open up the case of the 5 to a wider audience. Under the last Labour Government we arranged for the families of the 5 to meet the most senior Government ministers to make the case for UK support for their claim to the humanitarian right to visit their loved ones in jail.

And what of Venezuela? At the moment it seems doubly blessed – it has socialism and it also has oil. For 12 years, Hugo Chávez has led revolutionary change in Venezuela and has proved inspirational to others in Latin America. Millions of working people are now enrolled in literacy programmes, Cuban medical teams are taking health care into the barrios for the first time, and basic food stuffs are widely available at subsidised prices. Without doubt socialism in Venezuela is making a material difference to working people in all aspects of their lives.

The success of Chávez has been an inspiration to other socialist leaders in Latin America, most notably Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, who are forging ahead with their own socialist visions. Using Venezuela’s oil wealth, Chávez has been at the forefront of the creation of the new economic bloc in the region, ALBA, not based on neo-liberalism as is the US led Free Trade Area of the Americas, but offering support for Latin America, for the Latin American people, based on the principles of social justice. Little wonder that in 2002, the US was implicated in the short lived coup against Chávez.

Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Ecuador and all the ALBA countries, are dangerous for the US because they show an alternative. They show how society can be structured differently, shifting wealth and power away from the rich and powerful and towards working people and their families.

Here in Britain I am proud of the support that Unite and the British trade Union movement has been able to give to support social progress in the region. We work in partnership with Latin American solidarity campaigns for Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua and against the regime of impunity in Colombia.

Their work of the solidarity campaigns has been exemplary. This magazine, Adelante, and the hugely successful annual Latin American conferences, are a real testament to the collective workings of these campaigns and I am proud to be part of that long history of international solidarity.

The power of international solidarity is immense. When workers join hands across nations and oceans, justice will prevail. I hope you will join us.

Venceremos!