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profiteering corporate news monopolies cannot understand, or, rather, what they understand only too well and are suppressing. (They don't want us to get any ideas.) The grass roots. The community organizers. The workers on transparent elections. Decades of work, to bring the majority to power at last, after centuries of brutal oppression, often inflicted by US-backed dictators.
This great sea change in Latin America cannot be decapitated. Oh, they have tried, in many ways--especially in regard to Chavez, because he is such a great spokesman for Latin American self-determination. But what they didn't count on there was the Chavistas! Ordinary people. Millions of ordinary people. As well as thousands of leaders--some of them highly educated and experienced in government, and many of them not, a few even illiterate, never had a school in their neighborhood, never had a chance, but who nevertheless could help organize their community. What they didn't count on was passion for democracy in Venezuela--and indeed throughout South America.
I'm always tempted to call it a miracle--because it is so mind-bogglingly amazing to me, that countries that always seemed to be run by "banana republic" rules, and that have suffered so much violence and interference, could recover so fast, and turn so abruptly toward democracy and humanitarian values. But it hasn't really been all that abrupt. We here in the north are just now seeing the RESULTS of decades of grass roots work, of people who never gave up hope--seemingly powerless people, working at every level of society to achieve this profound change. And we're just learning of the once-future leaders of this revolution who never gave up hope as well, people like Michele Batchelet, now the first woman president of Chile, whose father was tortured to death by Pinochet, and who herself suffered torture and exile; people like Evo Morales, now the first indigenous president of Bolivia, who was raised in the mountains on a cocoa farm; people like Hugo Chavez, whose family was so poor they couldn't afford a baseball and a baseball bat, who was tempted by violent revolution as a young officer, seeing the injustice, fascism and brutality of the Venezuelan elite of that time, spending time in jail for his rebellion, thinking it all through, and abandoning the past of South America--fascism and bloody revolt--for the future of South America: constitutional government, democracy, majority rule.
What kept all these leaders' hopes alive? What prevented despair? Tortured, exiled, poor, in jail. Well, I know that, with Chavez, his popularity really began when he was in jail. He was considered a hero! So, partly, it was the people who buoyed him up. But also it was his own soul, in response to theirs, telling him to look to the future, not the past. The future of empowerment of the majority. The future of a progressive society in which everyone has a chance, in which all are cared for. Violence will not get you there. Democracy will.
I don't know what moved Morales, but Bolivia was in turmoil prior to his election. The focus of the leftist revolution there was Bechtel Corp.'s privatization of the water in one Bolivian city. As no sooner had they taken over the water supply, then they started jacking up the price of water to the poorest of the poor--even charging poor peasants for collecting rainwater! Big demonstrations followed--an uprising--and the Bolivians basically threw Bechtel out of their country, and elected Morales, who campaigned with a wreath of coca leaves around his neck--symbol and sacred plant of the Andes Indians, and symbolic of Morales' opposition to the murderous US "war on drugs" (war on poor peasants and leftists). Morales is a 100% Andes Indian. Just prior to his inauguration, ten thousand Andes Indians came down out of the mountains to invest him as their leader in a special ceremony.
"Something is happening here, and you don't know what it is..."--as Bob Dylan sang. Chavez is part indigenous, as is the new president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa--who speaks the local indigenous language, and spent time in the mountains as a teacher. There are indigenous uprisings occurring all over Latin America--and very often the focus is the ENVIRONMENT. People who are living the old lifestyle--living off the land, following indigenous customs and teachings--perceive environmental pollution and destruction before anyone else does. They feel it keenly. They see it. They live it. They suffer from it directly. They are our "canaries in the coal mine." And they are on the move--mobilizing, doing amazing things--in many places, in the Amazon, in Peru, in Ecuador, in Venezuela, in Brazil.
Part of what is happening is coming from them--from a deep spiritual connection to the land. And the leaders we are seeing, who get press here, are the RESULT. The leaders are not the instigators of reform so much as they are the agents of reform. To stop environmental devastation you have first to get control of the reigns of government. You have to have a government that has not sold out to global corporate predators, a government that is LOCALLY controlled, and responsive to the needs and will of the people.
I first began to notice this political transformation back in 2003, when I helped organize the protests in Cancun against the WTO. I had been involved in globalisation issues before that, in the Seattle 1999 protests. But at Cancun, what happened is that the third world countries came forward, led by Brazil, in a 20-country revolt against WTO policy, secretiveness, lack of democracy and domination by the northern and western powers. I was rather amazed by this. ("Something is happening here, and you don't know what it is..."). But then I began to be more aware of the worldwide campesina movement--small farmers--hundreds of thousands of them, organized on a worldwide basis, from many countries. The small farmers, like the indigenous (and, also, often one and the same), are directly feeling the impacts of pesticide use, of genetically modified seeds and crops, of deforestation, of bad minerals mining, of polluted water or lack of water, and of the dumping of US and other Ag products on their markets, to drive them out of business. In South Korea. In Jamaica. (--two stunning examples of dumping.) In Peru (bad mining). In Brazil (deforestation). In Mexico (loss of farm land). And in ALL third world countries.
But what I didn't begin to grok until Cancun 2003 is that THEY were undergoing a very profound POLITICAL change, from the bottom up--which is reflective of devastation that global corporate predators have inflicted, first of all on the indigenous, and second, on everyone else, with the proliferation of sweatshops, and with the ruination of third world economies by World Bank/IMF policy (the World Bank loans money to the rich elite who are running the country, on onerous terms, the rich rip it off the money and leave the poor to pay the debt; the IMF demands cuts to social programs, and to labor and environmental protections, as terms of repayment, and the country can then never recover--schools, medical care, everything suffers, wages fall, and the country's natural resources are stolen.)
The third world has had it with these policies. They are in revolt. And they are electing governments that REFLECT that grass roots, indigenous revolt. So, Hugo Chavez may be an ikon to the Bush/US State Department, and a target of US-taxpayer funded coups and other plots. But there is absolutely nothing that the US State Department can do to stop tens of thousands of Venezuelans from pouring into the streets, and peacefully stopping the goddamned coup, with sheer numbers, and with sheer determination to have lawful, constitutional, democratic government. Like "V," you know.
And, for all its brutality and evil plots, the US State Department (now completely controlled by global corporate predators) cannot stop indigenous people from loving Mother Earth, and acting to defend her. And these people have a lo-o-o-o-o-ong view of things. They've been in one place for ten thousand years. They know the earth in ways that we urban dwellers can never know it. They have somehow survived every effort to exterminate them, to re-enter the consciousness of western civilization as our teachers, our saviors and our leaders. It is THEY who are transforming Latin America.
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"The time of the people has come." --Evo Morales
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