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NEWS & LETTERS, JUNE 2003
Lead Article
Movements for freedom in Latin America challenge U.S.
by Mitch Weerth Since the Iraq war ended the Bush Administration has
turned its attention to Latin America again, this time with a renewed confidence
that its logic of tagging all social movements as “terrorist” that need to
be taught to kowtow to America’s military might will garner no significant
opposition. Bush’s jewel at this moment is Colombia, a country
that provides him with a special opportunity to carry out his militaristic
vision for the region. Colombia’s right-wing president, Alvaro Uribe, was in
Washington on April 30 to pick up his check for $100 million--a payoff for
joining the “coalition of the willing,” even though no material aid for the
Iraq war came from Uribe’s regime. More than $2 billion in military aid has flowed into
Colombia over the past few years from the U.S., ostensibly to fight drug
trafficking. As one would expect, this aid has only increased the horrors
flowing from Colombia’s 40 year old civil war: already this year 50 leaders of
different indigenous communities have been asassinated, either by government
forces, paramilitary groups organized by landowners, or the so-called Marxist
revolutionaries, the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia). In 2002 the country suffered 3,366 political
asassinations, 735 “disappeared,” 184 union organizers murdered, and 353,000
displaced due to the violence, all in a country of 42 million people. Colombia is starting to look a lot like the
Israel-Palestine conflict, insofar as neither Uribe, Bush, the FARC nor
paramilitaries appear the slightest bit interested in anything but endless war. Colombia also represents more to the U.S. than a solid
military outpost in South America, replete with oil. It also carries a crucial
IDEOLOGICAL role, for so long as the war drags on, it is easy for the U.S. to
claim that radicals opposed to neoliberalism--in this case ones who claim to be
Marxist, the FARC--are terrorists that need to be contained. The FARC, after all, does engage in terrorism--not in
the sense of being a threat to the U.S., as Bush would have us believe, but
certainly against any union or campesino leader that does not recognize them as
being the “foco” of a future government. Therefore, so long as the U.S. is able to identify any
opposition to its draconian economic plans for the region with a purely
destructive, endless war, it has achieved its central purpose: to squelch any
confidence in an alternative to capitalism. OPPOSITION TO NEOLIBERALISM What worries Bush and Uribe the most, however, is the
growing opposition to war and neoliberalism from within Colombia. For the past
year, for example, a women’s movement has been developing that is opposed to
all sides in the armed conflict. In March and April of this year, there have been several
large protests that have led to conferences of indigenous groups that have met
to issue manifestos against the war, for respect for rights to land and the
right to organize without being shot at from all sides. What also must be frightening for the warmongers is that
the movement against privatization of city services, which began in the
mid-1990s in the city of Cali, achieved a presence last year in the House
of Representatives in the person of Alexander Lopez Maya. He was elected as part
of the Polo Democratico, an attempt to counter the two-party monopoly on
politics. Despite being one of only a few within the government to
be challenging Uribe, his presence there is significant because his opposition
to privatization comes from a rich experience. As head of Cali’s public services union, SINTRAEMCALI,
he led several occupations of municipal buildings in the late 1990s that saved
city services from being sold off, an ongoing movement that continues to inspire
much international solidarity. CRISIS IN ECUADOR In Ecuador and Bolivia, where the U.S. has taken a
renewed interest militarily, though not on the level of its “Plan Colombia,”
there is also growing opposition from below. In both places the U.S. has gone
out of its way to justify greater military activity by making repeated
allegations--never backed up by facts--that “drug running terrorists,” once
pushed out of Colombia, must be pursued into the rest of the Andean region. In reality, it is the persistence of the revolts, both
within Ecuador and Boliva, coupled with the instability of the regimes that
attempt to coopt them, that drives U.S. militarism in the region. In Ecuador, where the U.S. has recently increased its
military presence at existing bases and is attempting to establish a new base in
the Galapagos islands, President Lucio Gutierrez’s four-month-old government
is unravelling. This is due in part to the fact that since coming to power he
has sought to divide the movement of indigenous groups that once supported him. The main grouping of indigenous peoples in Ecuador,
CONAIE, which was responsible for getting Gutierrez elected on an
anti-International Monetary Fund platform, has been sidelined since in favor of
a previously unknown entity, FEDEPICNE (Frente de Defensa de los Pueblos
Indigenas, Campesinos, y Negros del Ecuador). From the latter group Gutierrez is recruiting into his
administration leaders who are less antagonistic to his post-election love
affair with IMF policy. In response, Quechua leaders are already calling on his
economic team to resign, and within CONAIE discussions are currently taking
place to consider a full break with Gutierrez and the beginning of street
protests against his rule. If this happens, it will be very important to watch
where this movement goes in the coming months, now that there no longer seem to
be any illusions on the part of the indigenous movement regarding Gutierrez’s
once vitriolic attacks on neoliberalism. NEW MOVEMENTS IN BOLIVIA It is in Bolivia, however, where one of the largest
proletarian revolts in many years has occured. On Feb. 12-13 a spontaneous
revolt broke out against a new IMF-imposed 12.5% income tax hike. It was set off
when the military fired on a peaceful march organized to oppose the tax. High school students from Ayacucho joined with
university students, workers, and members of the police--and their wives--in La
Paz, El Alto,and several other cities to ransack every government, bank, or
officebuilding that represented the imposition of IMF policy and privatization
over the past 15 years. The military resorted to putting snipers on rooftops to
quell the revolt, which resulted in 33 dead and hundreds injured. Though the rebellion was short lived, it underlines just
how intense the opposition to neoliberal restructuring has become. It is not
surprising that this would happen in Bolivia, considering the length of time
themovements have been developing there, and their diversity. There is the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), which
originated among the lowland Chapare region coca growers’ unions, headed by
Evo Morales who won 23% of the vote in the June 2002 presidential election.
Felipe Quispe is also a prominent movement leader, head of the highland Aymara
party, the MIP. Oscar Olivera, who led the battle in Cochabamba in 2000 against
the privatization of water, also continues to play a prominent role today. Thus all of the battles that have been waged since 1985,
when the imposition of neoliberal policies began to be implemented with
devastating effects on living standards, are being carried over to today. This is a situation that is obviously not lost on the
Bush administration. In an interview on March 29 Evo Morales refered to his
country as one that is “...militarily occupied by the U.S. The [Drug
Enforement Agency], for example, commands the [Bolivian] repressive forces in
the Chapare region. "The Bolivian Armed Forces receive instruction and
depend strategically and logistically on the [U.S.] Southern Command. Then the
U.S. military comes in repeatedly for exercises it calls ‘civic actions.’ We
repeatedly condemn this behavior, but the majority in our Congress have treated
it as normal practice.” It is a sad commentary on American diplomacy to witness
the extent to which every political relationship the U.S. government has with
Bolivia is at the same time a military one. The ambassador David Greenlee, for
example, is a former CIA chief and acted as a “political adviser” to the
U.S. Southern Command in the 1990s. The Bush administration knows full well that its
economic policies are having a devastating effect on life in Latin America and
are breeding revolt. It would be a mistake, however, to conclude from this,
as some solidarity activists in the U.S do, that the neoliberal model is in its
“final death throes.” The experience of Ecuador, where the supposedly radical,
anti-IMF Gutierrez declared he wanted to be Bush’s “best friend” the
minute he took office, shows once again how eager “leaders” are to use
leftist rhetoric to attempt to coopt a movement. As long as activists, both here and in Latin America, fail to develop a deeper theoretical dimension as the only way to see through such tricks, capitalism has a long future in store for us. |
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