Latin America's Pink Tide, by Aijaz Ahmad Part III
Fire in the plains, fire in the mountains: examining Bolivia's electoral verdict in the political context of the region.
Since Evo Morales was elected, the official inauguration has taken place and he has moved from his modest home in Cochabamba, the city of the "Water Wars" where his Movement Toward Socialism was founded, to the Presidential Palace in La Paz. "I hope to return every month to be in touch," he said before leaving, "people here will need to tell me if I am fulfilling my commitment to help the most needy in the country."
Adjacent to Cochabamba, the third largest city in Bolivia, lies the semi-tropical province of Chipare. Evo had migrated there from the highlands as a child after the tin mines were closed and the miners' unions disbanded to become a herdsman and a coca farmer. "Re-peasantisation" workers with trade union experience converged with more traditional subsistence farmers with their own methods of communal organising, and out of this convergence arose a network of local unions, or syndicates, grouped together into seven federations. Morales rose to national prominence as a leader of these unions and shall be judged by history by how true he remains to these origins. That is the promise he held out in his inaugural address on January 22: "We cannot privatise public needs like water. We are fighting for our water rights, for our right to plant coca, for control over our natural resources. We need to end the radicalism of neoliberalism, not the radicalism of our unions and our movements."
The official inauguration in the capital city was one thing. The more historic one was the other inauguration, when over 50,000 indigenous people from across Bolivia and the rest of the Americas converged on the ancient Indian city of Tiwanaku and conferred on him the "Power of the Original Mandate". Traditionally, that means the power but also the obligation to enforce egalitarian social justice and security for all. Putting it in modern terms, a participant in the traditional ceremony remarked, "socialism is the Original Mandate".
This is the third part of the series on Latin America.
Then came the cabinet appointments, which made The Economist fume. "This Cabinet has as little government experience as Morales himself," the somber journal noted, quite correctly. Take, for example, the new Minister of Justice, 39-year-old Casimira Rodriguez, the first Quechua Indian to hold a Cabinet post in Bolivian history. She was taken from her village and brought to the city of Cochabamba at 13, with the promise that in exchange for her domestic labour she would be provided with board and lodge as well as schooling. Instead, she was confined to her house, forced to work long hours and often abused by her employers. Hardly the sort of beginning that would qualify anyone, let alone a woman, to sit in Morales' Cabinet.
It is an impressive beginning, indeed. But will Morales, taking over the presidency of a poor and dependent country, be able to withstand the pressures? Only time will tell.
Since Morales won in Bolivia, two other elections have taken place in Latin America, in Chile at one end of the continent and in Haiti at the other. Very different in their respective histories, size of economies and levels of development, both are in their own way ravaged countries.
At the ancient ritual that conferred the "Power of the Original Mandate" on Evo Morales at the sacred place of Tiwanaku on January 21.
A Chilean paradox
Chile is barely 16 years away from Augusto Pinochet's brutal military dictatorship which had itself lasted for 17 years, decimating virtually the entire Chilean Left, turning the country into the most remorseless model of neoliberal economic restructuring, and ending only when the two main political parties, the Christian Democrats and the Socialists, came together to give assurances to the Chilean military and bourgeoisie as well as the United States and the World Bank that the neoliberal model shall not be reversed. Some of the devastation suffered by the working class can be glimpsed in the fact that whereas labour received well over half of the income derived from social production under Allende's government before 1973, this share had plummeted to barely 19 per cent by the end of the Pinochet dictatorship. National income has improved considerably in recent years, thanks to high prices for copper (Chile's main mineral export) and for high quality agricultural products, but wage levels remain frozen thanks to the so-called flexible labour markets. Companies and corporations are free to keep a small regular labour force and subcontract as many temporary workers as they want, while the latter receive no social benefits and can be fired on the spot. This kind of subcontracting is now so much the norm in Chile that virtually half of the public workforce employed by the government consists of subcontracted workers.
The election of the Socialist candidate, Michelle Bachelet, with 53 per cent of the vote is a paradoxical development. She is the fist woman to be democratically elected President of a Latin American country. She is a single mother of three, in a country so conservative that divorce is still not legal, and a self-confessed agnostic in an overwhelmingly Catholic nation. In its social dimensions, the election is undoubtedly significant. Furthermore, her father, Air Force General Alberto Bachelet, died in Pinochet's prison and she, an underground militant during the early years of the dictatorship, spent time in one of Pinochet's torture camps, Villa Grimaldi, before being exiled to Europe. Now, the complication here is that many of Chilean Socialists, especially of upper class background, who spent some years in European exile drew close to the right wing of the European social democracy precisely at the point at which these social democrats were making their peace with neoliberalism. Before being elected President, Michelle Bachelet was the Defence Minister in the Cabinet of her Socialist predecessor, Ricardo Lagos. Lagos was a great enthusiast of neoliberal policies in Chile and even took over Indian ancestral lands for privatisation, not to mention the fact that it was under his Presidency and with Bachelet as Defence Minister that Chile contributed troops to the United Nations contingent that took over from the U.S. after the coup in Haiti. Those Chilean troops are still there.
Bachelet was too complicit in neoliberal policies to have spoken out; one shall have to wait and see what she does as President. Much of the Left has kept its distance from her. Only in the end only very reluctantly did the Chilean Communist Party endorse her candidature against the billionaire candidate of the far Right, after issuing its own demands regarding workers' rights, indigenous people's rights and women's rights. On her part, she has sought to distance herself from the U.S. demonisation of Cuba and Venezuela and has expressed the hope of having cordial relations with the Morales government. All in all, Bachelet's election has prevented the rise to power of the far Right in Chile and denied the U.S. the kind of subservient regime it has in Mexico under Vincent Fox. However, she is certainly no part of the "axis of good", as Morales calls the partnership among Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia; her party is not even a shadow of what it used to be in the days of Allende and there is nothing in her recent career to suggest that she will reverse neoliberal policies.
Haiti, past and present
The elections in Haiti stand in sharp contrast. The country is still reeling under the impact of the coup that the U.S. sponsored there in coordination with France, in 2004. Haiti is a tiny country comprised of half the island of Hispaniola (the Dominican Republic accounts for the other half), the poorest in the Western hemisphere, the fourth poorest in the world, with a literacy rate of 50 per cent and a population three-fourths of which lives on less than a dollar a day while 1 per cent owns half the country's wealth. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Catholic priest deeply committed to liberation theology whom The New York Times has contemptuously called a "left-leaning nationalist," was the first elected President in 200 years of Haitian history, was re-elected in 2000 with over 90 percent of the vote in a voter turnout estimated at around 65 per cent in the countryside and close to 100 per cent in the capital. He was the President elected by the vast impoverished majority, against the Opposition that was powerful in wealth and means of violence but with no roots among the people; a poll taken at the time of the elections of 2000 showed that only 8 per cent of the people of Haiti supported the Opposition.
None of this deterred the U.S., which was closely aligned with the Haitian elite whose interests Aristide was opposing. So, the U.S. immediately began nurturing armed squads comprised of former military and police officers, professional assassins and the criminal gangs that had fled Haiti at the time of Aristide's return to power in 1994. These squads were reassembled with U.S. assistance in the neighbouring Dominican Republic and on US soil itself, in Miami, very much on the pattern of the terrorist "contras" that the U.S. assembled, trained and assisted in El Salvador for counter-revolutionary warfare in Nicaragua against the socialist Sandanista government. The terrorist squads, armed with sophisticated U.S. weapons, entered Haiti in early February 2004 and got dubbed in the Western media as "rebels" and "insurgents," as if there was a genuine home-grown insurgency.
As these squads started terrorising town after town, the U.S. stationed 2,000 marines in three ships off the shores of Haiti and sent them in on the pretext of providing "security". France, the old colonial power in Haiti, which had offended the U.S. by opposing the invasion of Iraq, now rebuilt its bridges with the supreme imperial power and emerged as a firm and vocal ally of the U.S. occupation of Haiti, and sent a contingent of its own troops, again on the pretext of providing "security." Canada, which too had stayed out of the Iraq invasion but has economic interests of its own in the sweatshops of Haiti, moved swiftly to occupy the position of the "most allied ally" that Britain's Tony Blair had occupied in the case of Iraq. It too sent in a contingent of troops. The U.N. Security Council, which had already provided legal cover for the lawless American occupation of Iraq and was preparing for a sizable role for the U.N. there, swiftly authorised the formation of an international security force for Haiti. All this in a matter of three weeks.
The reason why Aristide was so defenceless is ironic. Elected with a huge margin in 1990, he had been overthrown within seven months through a coup d'etat carried out by officers of the Haitian army who had been loyal to the preceding murderous dictatorships of Duvalier and his son, Papa Doc. Upon returning to power in 1994, Aristide had simply disbanded that army, dismissed the police officers allied with it and built a new police force for law and order purposes. This was as much to prevent the possibility of further military takeovers as it was in keeping with Aristide's own deep, spiritually motivated commitment to rebuild Haiti's fractured civil society with as few means of violence as possible. Those disgruntled ex-officers of the army and the police, along with leaders of the assassination squads dating back to the years of the military dictatorship 1991-94, were now leading the armed squads portrayed by the U.S. as "rebels". The police force at the disposal of President Aristide was no match for these former officers and their gangs with their newly acquired U.S. weapons and other supplies.
As the U.S.-sponsored "rebels" surrounded his residence, the U.S. Ambassador demanded from Aristide that he resign his presidency. Aristide refused and was kidnapped, put secretly on a plane and sent off to the Republic of Central Africa, across the Atlantic. There, he somehow got hold of a mobile telephone, spoke to some of his friends in the U.S. and eventually issued an eloquent address "To the Haitian People and the World", delivered in Creole, through a Haitian radio operator. The address began and ended with references to Toussaint L'Ouverture, the legendary black slave who organised the revolutionary movement which overthrew colonial rule and established a republic in Haiti 200 years ago:
"In the shadow of Toussaint L'Ouverture, the genius of the race, I declare that in overthrowing me they have uprooted the trunk of the tree of peace, but it will grow back because its roots are L'Ouverturian.... . during the night of the 28th of February 2004, there was a coup d'etat. One could equally say that it was a geopolitical kidnapping. I can clearly say that it was terrorism disguised as diplomacy.... The Constitution is the source of [Haiti's] life. It's the guarantee of life. Let's stand under the Constitution in solidarity so that it is life that unfolds ..."
George W. Bush is a born-again Christian and owes his election in a considerable degree to the mobilisations organised for him by Evangelical churches. Yet he devotes himself to overthrowing the only government in the world that is headed by an ordained priest. Bush claims to be spreading democracy in the world but his ambassador supervises the overthrow and kidnapping of a president elected by roughly 90 per cent of the vote, while leading western `democracies' - the U.S., France and Canada - provide the armed force to back up the "rebels". Aristide disbands the army that he commands as President of the country because he wants to renounce instruments of violence as he sets out to reconstruct his country after decades of the worst kind of dictatorship that was itself beholden to Western powers. The U.S. picks up and equips precisely those disbanded officers and assassins loyal to the preceding dictatorship, which then spread violence and overthrow a legally constituted government that does not even have its own troops. Having been overthrown by force and shunted off to another continent, Aristide is the one who calls upon his people to stand by the Constitution for peaceful struggle. Finally, it is notable that in the address to his people, Aristide invokes the memory of L'Ouverture inexactly the way Castro invokes the name of Jose Marti or Chavez constantly invokes the name of Bolivar. These are the great names that symbolise the unfinished project of liberation in Latin America and the Caribbean. And if Aristide speaks of "race" in the context of Haiti, where a little country inhabited by descendents of African slaves is subverted and occupied by French and Anglo-U.S. troops, virtually every country in Latin America resounds with demands for `indigenous' rights - the rights of the original inhabitants of the continent in opposition to the power of the elites descended from the colonisers.
The characterisation of Aristide by The New York Times as a "left-leaning nationalist" was certainly accurate. He was profoundly influenced by liberation theology and had a good rapport with union activists and progressive intellectuals, not to speak of the poor masses of Haiti. On the other hand, Haiti has a great geopolitical significance for the U.S. as an island-state close to, and almost equidistant, from Cuba and Venezuela. It had been historically ruled by a fabulously rich client elite, which had guaranteed the lowest wage rates in the Western hemisphere; Western corporations garnered much profit from plantations and sweatshops while also using Haiti for Western tourism and debauchery. Logically, therefore, Aristide was overthrown by coups twice, in 1991 and then again in 2004. After the 1991 coup, some 3,000 progressive activists and union leaders were assassinated. After the coup of 2004, the U.S./French/Canadian military contingents appointed a client regime and then handed things over to a U.N. force comprised of troops drawn from a group of Latin American countries, notably Lula's Brazil as well as `Socialist' Chile. However, none of it could control the popular rebellion, perpetual fighting and a constant demand for elections.
Insurrectionary masses
The recent elections in Haiti have to be seen in that perspective. At least one aspect of it evokes memories of the Bolivian election. In Haiti, as in Bolivia, the winning candidate is required to win 50 per cent of the vote regardless of how many the other candidates get (story on page 53). Otherwise, there has to be a second balloting and a run-off between the top two candidates. In this case, it became quite clear soon after the voting on February 7 that the candidate who had finished second had received no more than 12 per cent of the vote but final results were not announced until February 16 on the pretext that not all the votes had been counted and the front-runner, Rene Preval, a protege of Aristide who was a favourite of the latter's electoral base, had yet not got 50 per cent. Thousands of Aristide's followers, amounting to perhaps as much as 10 per cent of the electorate, had already been disenfranchised on one pretext or the other and, fearing even more massive electoral fraud in the counting, the masses took to the streets after waiting for a week to demand an honest count. The disarray of the Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) clearly showed that Preval had won the majority but the Council dared not announce the results since what it indicated was that, in short, the masses had won yet again, against all intimidation and manipulation, domestic and foreign. Under the pressure of the masses who simply asked the CEP to be at least minimally accountable to the rules they had set themselves, and who spread panic among the foreign dignitaries masterminding the electoral process, members of the Council and the dignitaries went into a backroom huddle and later announced that they had changed the system of tabulation and acknowledged that Preval had indeed been fully victorious in the very first round. Making the best of a bad situation, Condoleezza Rice announced in distant Washington: "We are going to work with the Preval government." On his part, Chavez called Preval to congratulate him, to suggest that Haiti may join and benefit from his plan to provide petroleum to Caribbean countries at subsidised rates, and to invite Preval to Venezuela; the latter invited Chavez to Haiti in return.
We are not speaking here of another blow for socialism, but simply of the masses of people refusing to submit. Haiti is one of the most wretched corners of this earth, ravaged by histories of slavery, centuries of rapacious dictatorship, foreign intervention and exploitation, illiteracy and ill-health, coups and assassinations, and endemic turmoil for almost two decades. There are foreign troops on the soil, paramilitaries loyal to the ruling class, and well-armed `rebels' equipped by the U.S. just waiting in the wings. The situation is so tenuous for the incoming President that he may or may not have the authority to call Aristide back from exile, or to make any kind of structural change independent of the occupiers and predators.
A political imagination
Although coherent politics is rendered impossible by coups and dictatorships and assassinations, one can see in Haiti something of what punctuates the political imagination of Latin America. The first is a certain commitment to democracy. As in Bolivia, though much less organised and much more unruly than in Bolivia, the insurrectionary masses are constantly in the streets with the single aim of bringing to power leaders they have chosen freely; in short, a commitment to democracy of the sort that Bush preaches but does not practise. This pattern has been repeated in several countries including Argentina and Ecuador, where mass insurrections have thrown out Presidents time and again, and put their successors on notice that they too would have to leave should they not bend at least some of their policies to the popular will. The difference is that mass insurrections are much better organised in these other countries, and are much clearer in their objectives and in opposition to the neoliberal agenda, than in Haiti.
In Argentina, three Presidents came and went this way and Nestor Kirchner managed to stay and gain immense popularity because he rejected the International Monetary Fund (IMF) model, imposed a moratorium on debt payments, forced the creditors to forgo two-thirds of the debt, and drew closer to Chavez who lent close to a billion dollars to Argentina. In Ecuador, Lucio Gutierrez got elected on all the promises that Lula had made, and then betrayed those promises with great alacrity, declaring himself a friend of Bush. Faced with a mass insurrection, he had to flee the presidential palace by helicopter, and his successor, Alfredo Palacio, had to say, through his Interior Minister, Manuel Gandara, that the negotiations with the U.S. on free trade agreements had been suspended, that all mining and oil prospecting contracts were to be reviewed, that Ecuador would distance itself from the U.S.-sponsored Plan Colombia for military action in the neighbouring country, and so on.
Even Chavez, who has made coups and has faced coups made against him, has his moral authority resting now on the fact that an immense mass movement backs him and, again and again, he has organised and won elections and referendums that are recognised as free and fair even by the Carter Centre in the U.S. In Bolivia, where unions and social movements are well organised with immense collective mass base, and where most have lost any faith in political parties of the old variety, whether the ones that represent merely oligarchic power or the ones that claim the earlier leftist heritage, there is a tendency to come together strategically behind the best possible list of candidates, so that the arena of electoral power is not vacated for the far right to occupy. To perhaps a lesser degree but in ways that are thoughtful and innovative, the same is true of such mass movements as the Landless Rural Worker's Movement (MST) in Brazil, which zealously guards its autonomy and room for independent action but also maintains a complex relationship with the Worker's Party (P.T.). The electoral space is not conceived as the space in which power is won decisively, it is also recognised as a space much too crucial not to be conceded to the propertied and ruling opposition.
The second fascinating aspect of the Haitian situation has to do with the personality of Aristide himself, whose popularity and moral authority has been immense and quite inseparable from his deep commitment to liberation theology, which is perhaps as finely honed as his practice of statecraft. Two of the most illustrious members of the Sandanista Cabinet in Nicaragua were ordained priests, including the great poet Ernesto Cardinal. Even more significant is the case of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), in the Chiapas region of Mexico, which has gained international fame of almost mythic proportions and speaks for the socio-economic and cultural rights of the indigenous people of that region. In fact, the Zapatistas drew heavily on the prior work of progressive Catholics of the area, especially Bishop Samuel Ruiz, and then combined that tendency with the cultural heritage of the indigenous peoples while also working for reforming the traditional culture, especially as regards the role of women in indigenous society and their political struggles. The same is true of many of the present-day leaders in the Paraguyan peasant movement who carry forward the work of an earlier generation of peasant activists mobilised by progressive church people.
That Chavez himself is a devout Christian is perhaps irrelevant since he derives none of his political convictions from religion. However, the indigenous inauguration of Morales - where he received the "Power of the Original Mandate" in the name of the traditional communities - is noteworthy. It signifies the recognition that there is a poetic and spiritual dimension to a modern moral actor, however dissenting that dimension may be within one's own `church'; and this, because politics, as a practical form of ethics, is conceived not just as a future-oriented project but also as an act of redemption in the name of generations that have suffered and gone. So powerful and widespread is this dimension in Latin America that Castro himself once drafted a document on this subject. Without over-generalising it is possible to say that in many of the more vibrant mass movements in that continent one sees a very heady mix of Marxism, liberation theology, indigenous cultural imagination, anti-bureaucratism and anti-elitism, a respect for the ecological environment, a demand for racial equality, and sweeping democratic demands from below. These are quite different from the fetishising of electoral forms which one finds in most discourses of `democracy'. This will for social regeneration in all its aspects is what is sometimes called the "socialism of the 21st century".
Haiti, on the other hand, only shows in extreme form the kind of social misery and poverty - including new forms of poverty specific to the neoliberal era of so-called `globalisation' - which are rampant across the continent. Seventy-five per cent of the Haitian population live below the poverty lines, but figures for Bolivia are 63 per cent, and for Latin America as a whole - including such economic powerhouses as Brazil and Argentina - 44 per cent, and by some estimates as much as 60 per cent. In Bolivia, in fact, per capita income actually declined over the past 25 years, while 20 of those years were spent under IMF conditionalities. In most countries, the combined population of the unemployed and the underemployed (the `informal' sector) now hovers between 50 and 70 per cent. If the closure of tin mines in Bolivia has led to the re-peasantisation of scores of thousands of workers, the `flexible labour market' of Chile has thrown perhaps a majority of the employed into short-term contractual work. If the share of wages in national income fell in Chile from approximately 48 per cent to 19 per cent between 1970 and 1989, it fell from 40 per cent to 16 per cent between 1970 and 1992 in Peru under the neoliberal regime, though it was not under a dictatorship as ferocious as that of Pinochet in Chile. Nor has this generalised immiseration spared the petty bourgeois entrepreneur. In Mexico, for example, an association of such bank-indebted entrepreneurs rapidly amassed a membership of 75,000 by 1999.
This ferocious attack on the livelihood of the workers has meant widespread disarray and destruction of their class organisations. The tin miners' union in Bolivia used to be in the vanguard of the insurrectionary upheavals in the past but it hardly exists now. This accounts for the fact that so many of the insurrectionary movements tend to be based among the undifferentiated mass of rural and/or urban poor, so that mass movements tend to overshadow class actions of the strictly proletarian type. However, the extreme polarisation of society between the super-rich and the immiserated, with downward mobility quite common and acute not only among workers but also among the petty bourgeoisie, gives to these mass movements a popular and multi-class character. Faith not only in the economic but also the political system is fast disappearing in many, though not all, of the Latin American countries, so that mass actions tend to replace the usual containment of popular anger through the electoral system of traditional political parties.
This motion of the masses is what we have tried to capture in our title for this series of articles: "Fire in the Plains, Fire in the Mountains". For the rest, at the level of the situation of the state system in Latin America, remains unstable and varied. The "axis of good" still consists of Cuba and Venezuela, and it is yet to be seen if the Bolivia of Morales will become a durable member of this axis. Three of the dominant countries of the continent - Brazil, Argentina, and Chile - are currently ruled by what The Wall Street Journal calls "the moderate Left" which is, in these times of crisis of the neoliberal model in Latin America, quite acceptable to the bankers, just as European social democracy is acceptable to them.
The fourth major country, Mexico, under Vincent Fox, is wholly in the pocket of the U.S., but may soon join the so-called "pink tide" of the "moderate left" if the left-leaning Andre Manuel Lopez Obrador, who is currently leading the polls by a considerable margin, wins the elections due in July this year. In that event, the Mexican government may come to resemble that of Kirchner in Argentina. That move from the far right to the `pink' middle shall be a great improvement in the overall balance of forces, but Mexico is too deeply entrenched in the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) for the country to be substantially free of the popular Mexican lament: "so far from God, but so close to the United States!" Similarly, Peru and Ecuador may go the way of Bolivia in the forthcoming elections, thanks to their indigenous-driven movements and the popular upsurge. On the other hand, Lula may lose the forthcoming elections to the Brazilian Right, thanks to his compromises with neoliberal global regime and corruption scandals swirling around his government. In the little countries of South America, the U.S. is in a strong position except for Nicaragua, where the Sandanistas are expected to return to governmental power.
Things are in a flux and, as the Chinese say, there is much disturbance in the heavens. Any sober analysis of the Latin American situation requires equal attention to the mass movements arising from below as well as the momentous changes taking place in the rise and fall of governments.
Part I - Fire in the Plains, Fire in the Mountains
Part II - Fire in the Plains, Fire in the Mountains
Part IV - Colombia's Lethal Concoction
Since Evo Morales was elected, the official inauguration has taken place and he has moved from his modest home in Cochabamba, the city of the "Water Wars" where his Movement Toward Socialism was founded, to the Presidential Palace in La Paz. "I hope to return every month to be in touch," he said before leaving, "people here will need to tell me if I am fulfilling my commitment to help the most needy in the country."
Adjacent to Cochabamba, the third largest city in Bolivia, lies the semi-tropical province of Chipare. Evo had migrated there from the highlands as a child after the tin mines were closed and the miners' unions disbanded to become a herdsman and a coca farmer. "Re-peasantisation" workers with trade union experience converged with more traditional subsistence farmers with their own methods of communal organising, and out of this convergence arose a network of local unions, or syndicates, grouped together into seven federations. Morales rose to national prominence as a leader of these unions and shall be judged by history by how true he remains to these origins. That is the promise he held out in his inaugural address on January 22: "We cannot privatise public needs like water. We are fighting for our water rights, for our right to plant coca, for control over our natural resources. We need to end the radicalism of neoliberalism, not the radicalism of our unions and our movements."
The official inauguration in the capital city was one thing. The more historic one was the other inauguration, when over 50,000 indigenous people from across Bolivia and the rest of the Americas converged on the ancient Indian city of Tiwanaku and conferred on him the "Power of the Original Mandate". Traditionally, that means the power but also the obligation to enforce egalitarian social justice and security for all. Putting it in modern terms, a participant in the traditional ceremony remarked, "socialism is the Original Mandate".
This is the third part of the series on Latin America.
Then came the cabinet appointments, which made The Economist fume. "This Cabinet has as little government experience as Morales himself," the somber journal noted, quite correctly. Take, for example, the new Minister of Justice, 39-year-old Casimira Rodriguez, the first Quechua Indian to hold a Cabinet post in Bolivian history. She was taken from her village and brought to the city of Cochabamba at 13, with the promise that in exchange for her domestic labour she would be provided with board and lodge as well as schooling. Instead, she was confined to her house, forced to work long hours and often abused by her employers. Hardly the sort of beginning that would qualify anyone, let alone a woman, to sit in Morales' Cabinet.
It is an impressive beginning, indeed. But will Morales, taking over the presidency of a poor and dependent country, be able to withstand the pressures? Only time will tell.
Since Morales won in Bolivia, two other elections have taken place in Latin America, in Chile at one end of the continent and in Haiti at the other. Very different in their respective histories, size of economies and levels of development, both are in their own way ravaged countries.
A Chilean paradox
Chile is barely 16 years away from Augusto Pinochet's brutal military dictatorship which had itself lasted for 17 years, decimating virtually the entire Chilean Left, turning the country into the most remorseless model of neoliberal economic restructuring, and ending only when the two main political parties, the Christian Democrats and the Socialists, came together to give assurances to the Chilean military and bourgeoisie as well as the United States and the World Bank that the neoliberal model shall not be reversed. Some of the devastation suffered by the working class can be glimpsed in the fact that whereas labour received well over half of the income derived from social production under Allende's government before 1973, this share had plummeted to barely 19 per cent by the end of the Pinochet dictatorship. National income has improved considerably in recent years, thanks to high prices for copper (Chile's main mineral export) and for high quality agricultural products, but wage levels remain frozen thanks to the so-called flexible labour markets. Companies and corporations are free to keep a small regular labour force and subcontract as many temporary workers as they want, while the latter receive no social benefits and can be fired on the spot. This kind of subcontracting is now so much the norm in Chile that virtually half of the public workforce employed by the government consists of subcontracted workers.
The election of the Socialist candidate, Michelle Bachelet, with 53 per cent of the vote is a paradoxical development. She is the fist woman to be democratically elected President of a Latin American country. She is a single mother of three, in a country so conservative that divorce is still not legal, and a self-confessed agnostic in an overwhelmingly Catholic nation. In its social dimensions, the election is undoubtedly significant. Furthermore, her father, Air Force General Alberto Bachelet, died in Pinochet's prison and she, an underground militant during the early years of the dictatorship, spent time in one of Pinochet's torture camps, Villa Grimaldi, before being exiled to Europe. Now, the complication here is that many of Chilean Socialists, especially of upper class background, who spent some years in European exile drew close to the right wing of the European social democracy precisely at the point at which these social democrats were making their peace with neoliberalism. Before being elected President, Michelle Bachelet was the Defence Minister in the Cabinet of her Socialist predecessor, Ricardo Lagos. Lagos was a great enthusiast of neoliberal policies in Chile and even took over Indian ancestral lands for privatisation, not to mention the fact that it was under his Presidency and with Bachelet as Defence Minister that Chile contributed troops to the United Nations contingent that took over from the U.S. after the coup in Haiti. Those Chilean troops are still there.
Bachelet was too complicit in neoliberal policies to have spoken out; one shall have to wait and see what she does as President. Much of the Left has kept its distance from her. Only in the end only very reluctantly did the Chilean Communist Party endorse her candidature against the billionaire candidate of the far Right, after issuing its own demands regarding workers' rights, indigenous people's rights and women's rights. On her part, she has sought to distance herself from the U.S. demonisation of Cuba and Venezuela and has expressed the hope of having cordial relations with the Morales government. All in all, Bachelet's election has prevented the rise to power of the far Right in Chile and denied the U.S. the kind of subservient regime it has in Mexico under Vincent Fox. However, she is certainly no part of the "axis of good", as Morales calls the partnership among Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia; her party is not even a shadow of what it used to be in the days of Allende and there is nothing in her recent career to suggest that she will reverse neoliberal policies.
Haiti, past and present
The elections in Haiti stand in sharp contrast. The country is still reeling under the impact of the coup that the U.S. sponsored there in coordination with France, in 2004. Haiti is a tiny country comprised of half the island of Hispaniola (the Dominican Republic accounts for the other half), the poorest in the Western hemisphere, the fourth poorest in the world, with a literacy rate of 50 per cent and a population three-fourths of which lives on less than a dollar a day while 1 per cent owns half the country's wealth. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Catholic priest deeply committed to liberation theology whom The New York Times has contemptuously called a "left-leaning nationalist," was the first elected President in 200 years of Haitian history, was re-elected in 2000 with over 90 percent of the vote in a voter turnout estimated at around 65 per cent in the countryside and close to 100 per cent in the capital. He was the President elected by the vast impoverished majority, against the Opposition that was powerful in wealth and means of violence but with no roots among the people; a poll taken at the time of the elections of 2000 showed that only 8 per cent of the people of Haiti supported the Opposition.
None of this deterred the U.S., which was closely aligned with the Haitian elite whose interests Aristide was opposing. So, the U.S. immediately began nurturing armed squads comprised of former military and police officers, professional assassins and the criminal gangs that had fled Haiti at the time of Aristide's return to power in 1994. These squads were reassembled with U.S. assistance in the neighbouring Dominican Republic and on US soil itself, in Miami, very much on the pattern of the terrorist "contras" that the U.S. assembled, trained and assisted in El Salvador for counter-revolutionary warfare in Nicaragua against the socialist Sandanista government. The terrorist squads, armed with sophisticated U.S. weapons, entered Haiti in early February 2004 and got dubbed in the Western media as "rebels" and "insurgents," as if there was a genuine home-grown insurgency.
As these squads started terrorising town after town, the U.S. stationed 2,000 marines in three ships off the shores of Haiti and sent them in on the pretext of providing "security". France, the old colonial power in Haiti, which had offended the U.S. by opposing the invasion of Iraq, now rebuilt its bridges with the supreme imperial power and emerged as a firm and vocal ally of the U.S. occupation of Haiti, and sent a contingent of its own troops, again on the pretext of providing "security." Canada, which too had stayed out of the Iraq invasion but has economic interests of its own in the sweatshops of Haiti, moved swiftly to occupy the position of the "most allied ally" that Britain's Tony Blair had occupied in the case of Iraq. It too sent in a contingent of troops. The U.N. Security Council, which had already provided legal cover for the lawless American occupation of Iraq and was preparing for a sizable role for the U.N. there, swiftly authorised the formation of an international security force for Haiti. All this in a matter of three weeks.
The reason why Aristide was so defenceless is ironic. Elected with a huge margin in 1990, he had been overthrown within seven months through a coup d'etat carried out by officers of the Haitian army who had been loyal to the preceding murderous dictatorships of Duvalier and his son, Papa Doc. Upon returning to power in 1994, Aristide had simply disbanded that army, dismissed the police officers allied with it and built a new police force for law and order purposes. This was as much to prevent the possibility of further military takeovers as it was in keeping with Aristide's own deep, spiritually motivated commitment to rebuild Haiti's fractured civil society with as few means of violence as possible. Those disgruntled ex-officers of the army and the police, along with leaders of the assassination squads dating back to the years of the military dictatorship 1991-94, were now leading the armed squads portrayed by the U.S. as "rebels". The police force at the disposal of President Aristide was no match for these former officers and their gangs with their newly acquired U.S. weapons and other supplies.
As the U.S.-sponsored "rebels" surrounded his residence, the U.S. Ambassador demanded from Aristide that he resign his presidency. Aristide refused and was kidnapped, put secretly on a plane and sent off to the Republic of Central Africa, across the Atlantic. There, he somehow got hold of a mobile telephone, spoke to some of his friends in the U.S. and eventually issued an eloquent address "To the Haitian People and the World", delivered in Creole, through a Haitian radio operator. The address began and ended with references to Toussaint L'Ouverture, the legendary black slave who organised the revolutionary movement which overthrew colonial rule and established a republic in Haiti 200 years ago:
"In the shadow of Toussaint L'Ouverture, the genius of the race, I declare that in overthrowing me they have uprooted the trunk of the tree of peace, but it will grow back because its roots are L'Ouverturian.... . during the night of the 28th of February 2004, there was a coup d'etat. One could equally say that it was a geopolitical kidnapping. I can clearly say that it was terrorism disguised as diplomacy.... The Constitution is the source of [Haiti's] life. It's the guarantee of life. Let's stand under the Constitution in solidarity so that it is life that unfolds ..."
George W. Bush is a born-again Christian and owes his election in a considerable degree to the mobilisations organised for him by Evangelical churches. Yet he devotes himself to overthrowing the only government in the world that is headed by an ordained priest. Bush claims to be spreading democracy in the world but his ambassador supervises the overthrow and kidnapping of a president elected by roughly 90 per cent of the vote, while leading western `democracies' - the U.S., France and Canada - provide the armed force to back up the "rebels". Aristide disbands the army that he commands as President of the country because he wants to renounce instruments of violence as he sets out to reconstruct his country after decades of the worst kind of dictatorship that was itself beholden to Western powers. The U.S. picks up and equips precisely those disbanded officers and assassins loyal to the preceding dictatorship, which then spread violence and overthrow a legally constituted government that does not even have its own troops. Having been overthrown by force and shunted off to another continent, Aristide is the one who calls upon his people to stand by the Constitution for peaceful struggle. Finally, it is notable that in the address to his people, Aristide invokes the memory of L'Ouverture inexactly the way Castro invokes the name of Jose Marti or Chavez constantly invokes the name of Bolivar. These are the great names that symbolise the unfinished project of liberation in Latin America and the Caribbean. And if Aristide speaks of "race" in the context of Haiti, where a little country inhabited by descendents of African slaves is subverted and occupied by French and Anglo-U.S. troops, virtually every country in Latin America resounds with demands for `indigenous' rights - the rights of the original inhabitants of the continent in opposition to the power of the elites descended from the colonisers.
The characterisation of Aristide by The New York Times as a "left-leaning nationalist" was certainly accurate. He was profoundly influenced by liberation theology and had a good rapport with union activists and progressive intellectuals, not to speak of the poor masses of Haiti. On the other hand, Haiti has a great geopolitical significance for the U.S. as an island-state close to, and almost equidistant, from Cuba and Venezuela. It had been historically ruled by a fabulously rich client elite, which had guaranteed the lowest wage rates in the Western hemisphere; Western corporations garnered much profit from plantations and sweatshops while also using Haiti for Western tourism and debauchery. Logically, therefore, Aristide was overthrown by coups twice, in 1991 and then again in 2004. After the 1991 coup, some 3,000 progressive activists and union leaders were assassinated. After the coup of 2004, the U.S./French/Canadian military contingents appointed a client regime and then handed things over to a U.N. force comprised of troops drawn from a group of Latin American countries, notably Lula's Brazil as well as `Socialist' Chile. However, none of it could control the popular rebellion, perpetual fighting and a constant demand for elections.
Insurrectionary masses
The recent elections in Haiti have to be seen in that perspective. At least one aspect of it evokes memories of the Bolivian election. In Haiti, as in Bolivia, the winning candidate is required to win 50 per cent of the vote regardless of how many the other candidates get (story on page 53). Otherwise, there has to be a second balloting and a run-off between the top two candidates. In this case, it became quite clear soon after the voting on February 7 that the candidate who had finished second had received no more than 12 per cent of the vote but final results were not announced until February 16 on the pretext that not all the votes had been counted and the front-runner, Rene Preval, a protege of Aristide who was a favourite of the latter's electoral base, had yet not got 50 per cent. Thousands of Aristide's followers, amounting to perhaps as much as 10 per cent of the electorate, had already been disenfranchised on one pretext or the other and, fearing even more massive electoral fraud in the counting, the masses took to the streets after waiting for a week to demand an honest count. The disarray of the Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) clearly showed that Preval had won the majority but the Council dared not announce the results since what it indicated was that, in short, the masses had won yet again, against all intimidation and manipulation, domestic and foreign. Under the pressure of the masses who simply asked the CEP to be at least minimally accountable to the rules they had set themselves, and who spread panic among the foreign dignitaries masterminding the electoral process, members of the Council and the dignitaries went into a backroom huddle and later announced that they had changed the system of tabulation and acknowledged that Preval had indeed been fully victorious in the very first round. Making the best of a bad situation, Condoleezza Rice announced in distant Washington: "We are going to work with the Preval government." On his part, Chavez called Preval to congratulate him, to suggest that Haiti may join and benefit from his plan to provide petroleum to Caribbean countries at subsidised rates, and to invite Preval to Venezuela; the latter invited Chavez to Haiti in return.
We are not speaking here of another blow for socialism, but simply of the masses of people refusing to submit. Haiti is one of the most wretched corners of this earth, ravaged by histories of slavery, centuries of rapacious dictatorship, foreign intervention and exploitation, illiteracy and ill-health, coups and assassinations, and endemic turmoil for almost two decades. There are foreign troops on the soil, paramilitaries loyal to the ruling class, and well-armed `rebels' equipped by the U.S. just waiting in the wings. The situation is so tenuous for the incoming President that he may or may not have the authority to call Aristide back from exile, or to make any kind of structural change independent of the occupiers and predators.
A political imagination
Although coherent politics is rendered impossible by coups and dictatorships and assassinations, one can see in Haiti something of what punctuates the political imagination of Latin America. The first is a certain commitment to democracy. As in Bolivia, though much less organised and much more unruly than in Bolivia, the insurrectionary masses are constantly in the streets with the single aim of bringing to power leaders they have chosen freely; in short, a commitment to democracy of the sort that Bush preaches but does not practise. This pattern has been repeated in several countries including Argentina and Ecuador, where mass insurrections have thrown out Presidents time and again, and put their successors on notice that they too would have to leave should they not bend at least some of their policies to the popular will. The difference is that mass insurrections are much better organised in these other countries, and are much clearer in their objectives and in opposition to the neoliberal agenda, than in Haiti.
In Argentina, three Presidents came and went this way and Nestor Kirchner managed to stay and gain immense popularity because he rejected the International Monetary Fund (IMF) model, imposed a moratorium on debt payments, forced the creditors to forgo two-thirds of the debt, and drew closer to Chavez who lent close to a billion dollars to Argentina. In Ecuador, Lucio Gutierrez got elected on all the promises that Lula had made, and then betrayed those promises with great alacrity, declaring himself a friend of Bush. Faced with a mass insurrection, he had to flee the presidential palace by helicopter, and his successor, Alfredo Palacio, had to say, through his Interior Minister, Manuel Gandara, that the negotiations with the U.S. on free trade agreements had been suspended, that all mining and oil prospecting contracts were to be reviewed, that Ecuador would distance itself from the U.S.-sponsored Plan Colombia for military action in the neighbouring country, and so on.
Even Chavez, who has made coups and has faced coups made against him, has his moral authority resting now on the fact that an immense mass movement backs him and, again and again, he has organised and won elections and referendums that are recognised as free and fair even by the Carter Centre in the U.S. In Bolivia, where unions and social movements are well organised with immense collective mass base, and where most have lost any faith in political parties of the old variety, whether the ones that represent merely oligarchic power or the ones that claim the earlier leftist heritage, there is a tendency to come together strategically behind the best possible list of candidates, so that the arena of electoral power is not vacated for the far right to occupy. To perhaps a lesser degree but in ways that are thoughtful and innovative, the same is true of such mass movements as the Landless Rural Worker's Movement (MST) in Brazil, which zealously guards its autonomy and room for independent action but also maintains a complex relationship with the Worker's Party (P.T.). The electoral space is not conceived as the space in which power is won decisively, it is also recognised as a space much too crucial not to be conceded to the propertied and ruling opposition.
The second fascinating aspect of the Haitian situation has to do with the personality of Aristide himself, whose popularity and moral authority has been immense and quite inseparable from his deep commitment to liberation theology, which is perhaps as finely honed as his practice of statecraft. Two of the most illustrious members of the Sandanista Cabinet in Nicaragua were ordained priests, including the great poet Ernesto Cardinal. Even more significant is the case of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), in the Chiapas region of Mexico, which has gained international fame of almost mythic proportions and speaks for the socio-economic and cultural rights of the indigenous people of that region. In fact, the Zapatistas drew heavily on the prior work of progressive Catholics of the area, especially Bishop Samuel Ruiz, and then combined that tendency with the cultural heritage of the indigenous peoples while also working for reforming the traditional culture, especially as regards the role of women in indigenous society and their political struggles. The same is true of many of the present-day leaders in the Paraguyan peasant movement who carry forward the work of an earlier generation of peasant activists mobilised by progressive church people.
That Chavez himself is a devout Christian is perhaps irrelevant since he derives none of his political convictions from religion. However, the indigenous inauguration of Morales - where he received the "Power of the Original Mandate" in the name of the traditional communities - is noteworthy. It signifies the recognition that there is a poetic and spiritual dimension to a modern moral actor, however dissenting that dimension may be within one's own `church'; and this, because politics, as a practical form of ethics, is conceived not just as a future-oriented project but also as an act of redemption in the name of generations that have suffered and gone. So powerful and widespread is this dimension in Latin America that Castro himself once drafted a document on this subject. Without over-generalising it is possible to say that in many of the more vibrant mass movements in that continent one sees a very heady mix of Marxism, liberation theology, indigenous cultural imagination, anti-bureaucratism and anti-elitism, a respect for the ecological environment, a demand for racial equality, and sweeping democratic demands from below. These are quite different from the fetishising of electoral forms which one finds in most discourses of `democracy'. This will for social regeneration in all its aspects is what is sometimes called the "socialism of the 21st century".
Haiti, on the other hand, only shows in extreme form the kind of social misery and poverty - including new forms of poverty specific to the neoliberal era of so-called `globalisation' - which are rampant across the continent. Seventy-five per cent of the Haitian population live below the poverty lines, but figures for Bolivia are 63 per cent, and for Latin America as a whole - including such economic powerhouses as Brazil and Argentina - 44 per cent, and by some estimates as much as 60 per cent. In Bolivia, in fact, per capita income actually declined over the past 25 years, while 20 of those years were spent under IMF conditionalities. In most countries, the combined population of the unemployed and the underemployed (the `informal' sector) now hovers between 50 and 70 per cent. If the closure of tin mines in Bolivia has led to the re-peasantisation of scores of thousands of workers, the `flexible labour market' of Chile has thrown perhaps a majority of the employed into short-term contractual work. If the share of wages in national income fell in Chile from approximately 48 per cent to 19 per cent between 1970 and 1989, it fell from 40 per cent to 16 per cent between 1970 and 1992 in Peru under the neoliberal regime, though it was not under a dictatorship as ferocious as that of Pinochet in Chile. Nor has this generalised immiseration spared the petty bourgeois entrepreneur. In Mexico, for example, an association of such bank-indebted entrepreneurs rapidly amassed a membership of 75,000 by 1999.
This ferocious attack on the livelihood of the workers has meant widespread disarray and destruction of their class organisations. The tin miners' union in Bolivia used to be in the vanguard of the insurrectionary upheavals in the past but it hardly exists now. This accounts for the fact that so many of the insurrectionary movements tend to be based among the undifferentiated mass of rural and/or urban poor, so that mass movements tend to overshadow class actions of the strictly proletarian type. However, the extreme polarisation of society between the super-rich and the immiserated, with downward mobility quite common and acute not only among workers but also among the petty bourgeoisie, gives to these mass movements a popular and multi-class character. Faith not only in the economic but also the political system is fast disappearing in many, though not all, of the Latin American countries, so that mass actions tend to replace the usual containment of popular anger through the electoral system of traditional political parties.
This motion of the masses is what we have tried to capture in our title for this series of articles: "Fire in the Plains, Fire in the Mountains". For the rest, at the level of the situation of the state system in Latin America, remains unstable and varied. The "axis of good" still consists of Cuba and Venezuela, and it is yet to be seen if the Bolivia of Morales will become a durable member of this axis. Three of the dominant countries of the continent - Brazil, Argentina, and Chile - are currently ruled by what The Wall Street Journal calls "the moderate Left" which is, in these times of crisis of the neoliberal model in Latin America, quite acceptable to the bankers, just as European social democracy is acceptable to them.
The fourth major country, Mexico, under Vincent Fox, is wholly in the pocket of the U.S., but may soon join the so-called "pink tide" of the "moderate left" if the left-leaning Andre Manuel Lopez Obrador, who is currently leading the polls by a considerable margin, wins the elections due in July this year. In that event, the Mexican government may come to resemble that of Kirchner in Argentina. That move from the far right to the `pink' middle shall be a great improvement in the overall balance of forces, but Mexico is too deeply entrenched in the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) for the country to be substantially free of the popular Mexican lament: "so far from God, but so close to the United States!" Similarly, Peru and Ecuador may go the way of Bolivia in the forthcoming elections, thanks to their indigenous-driven movements and the popular upsurge. On the other hand, Lula may lose the forthcoming elections to the Brazilian Right, thanks to his compromises with neoliberal global regime and corruption scandals swirling around his government. In the little countries of South America, the U.S. is in a strong position except for Nicaragua, where the Sandanistas are expected to return to governmental power.
Things are in a flux and, as the Chinese say, there is much disturbance in the heavens. Any sober analysis of the Latin American situation requires equal attention to the mass movements arising from below as well as the momentous changes taking place in the rise and fall of governments.
Part I - Fire in the Plains, Fire in the Mountains
Part II - Fire in the Plains, Fire in the Mountains
Part IV - Colombia's Lethal Concoction
posted by Alice at
Sunday, March 12, 2006
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