Chávez leads revolution in Latin America

Liberalism is reeling in much of the world. China has market communism. The British Labor Party has long since sold out. And the Democratic Party in America is barely to the left of the right-wing Republican Party.
But amid the gloom, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela is leading a revolution in South America. His fellow revolutionaries are: President Evo Morales of Boliva, President Michelle Bachelet of Chile, President Lulu da Silva of Brazil and Romón Vásquez of Uruguay.
Where once the Latifundia (rich landowners), the military, the Catholic Church and the United States ruled Latin America, today much of the continent is being run for the benefit of the people.
Chávez personifies the Bolivarian revolution. His hero: Simón Bolivar. Bolivar, the liberator of Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru in the 19th century. Z Magazine described the tenets of the revolution: “natural resources are for the benefit of all citizens, the state is the guardian and promoter of civic and social human rights and citizens are fundamental protagonists in political life.”
Naturally, the Chávez revolution makes him the enemy of a reactionary United States under President Bush. Bush gave a speech in 2002 declaring that the United States has the right to overthrow any government it sees as a threat to the United States.
Nothing new about that. America engineered the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala and Allende in Chile. (All democratically elected leaders.) Meanwhile, America has supported such vicious dictators as Bastista in Cuba, Somoza in Nicaragua, Marcos in the Philippines and Pinochet in Chile.
The United States says Venezuela is increasingly anti-democratic, oppressive and destablizing.
Destablizing? No. Unifying. Three-quarters of South America, 355 million people, have left-leaning governments today. They are standing up to the gringos. They love the Chávez nationalism and his opposition to free market economics and privatization. They are saying bastante (enough)!
As Nick Miroff wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this year: “A leftward surge has united Latin America to a degree that T-shirt icon Che Guevara could only dream of…Che’s ill-fated insurgency ended with his death in the jungles of Bolivia in 1967 but his vision of a single, unified socialist continent” now appears less utopian.
The Chávez trump card: oil. He is able to give aid to leftist allies in Bolivia and Cuba, badly hurt by the U.S. embargo and blockade. He is able to provide discounted oil to Caribbean and Central American countries. He gives cheap home heating oil to the poor in Massachusetts and the Bronx. He donates oil to Indian villages in Alaska.
The Chronicle’s Robert Collier reported from Caracas recently: “Chávez is spending billions of dollars on anti-poverty programs…public works projects are everywhere…medical clinics…are within reach of almost everyone in this nation of 25 million people…Illiteracy has been completely eliminated…Another initiative that could change the lives of millions of Venezuelans is a program aimed at increasing land ownership.”
While Chávez is undiplomatic, his blunt talk is spot on. He rightly says:
• The Bush invasion and occupation of Iraq are criminal, illegal and immoral…Bush is imperialistic…He has devoted his White House tenure to military aggression…He heads “a terrorist administration”…America “has bombarded cities, used chemical weapons and napalm, killed women and children…That’s terrorism.”
The media, as usual, aid the Bush administration in its effort to demonize Chavez. NBC’s David Gregory interviewed “experts” calling Venezuela a threat to the United States. He did not air the strong opposing view.
Extra! magazine, which monitors the media, noted that at the end of the year 95 percent of 100 press commentaries on Venezuela were hostile. It points out that these commentaries “serve as little more than a campaign of indoctrination against a political project that challenges U.S. political domination of South America…the press demonstrates a degree of political uniformity that any would-be dictator would surely envy.”
As columnist Robert Scheer has written: “when totalitarian nations like China and Saudi Arabia play ball with U.S. business interests, we like them just fine. But when Venezuela’s freely elected president threatens powerful corporate interests, the Bush administration treats him as an enemy.”
It was ever thus. The United States has launched 50 invasions in 12 Latin America nations since 1846, most of them to maintain economic hegemony.
Chávez is showing the world that historic U.S. economic and gunboat diplomacy will no longer be tolerated. He seeks to put an end to U.S. domination, exploitation and pillage of Latin America.