While the 19th century belonged to Europe and the 20th century to the USA, the 21st century belonged to socialism and to the working people of the world. --Hugo Chavez<clips>
...AMY GOODMAN: We return now to Noam Chomsky, who spoke a few days ago in Boston.
NOAM CHOMSKY: I’ll start with last weekend. Important city in South America, Cochabamba, with quite a history.
There was a meeting last weekend in Cochabamba in Bolivia of all the South American leaders. It was a very important meeting. One index of its importance is that it was unreported, virtually unreported apart from the wire services. So every editor knew about it. Since I suspect you didn't read that wire service report, I’ll read you a few things from it to indicate why it was so important.
In last Saturday, the South American leaders agreed to create a high-level commission to study the idea of forming a continent-wide community similar to the European Union. This is the presidents and envoys of all the nations, and there was the two-day summit of what's called the South American Community of Nations, hosted by Evo Morales in Cochabamba, the president of Bolivia. The leaders -- reading just now --agreed to form a study group to look at the possibility of creating a continent-wide union and even a South American parliament.
The result, according to the -- I’m reading from the AP report -- the result left fiery Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, long an agitator for the region, taking a greater role on the world stage, pleased, but impatient -- normal stance. They went on. It goes on to say that the discussion over South American unity will continue later this month, when MERCOSUR, South American trading bloc, has its regular meeting that will include leaders from Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Paraguay and Uruguay. There is one -- has been one point of hostility in South America. That's Peru, Venezuela. But it points out that
Chavez and Peruvian President Alan Garcia took advantage of the summit to bury the hatchet, after having exchanged insults earlier in the year. And that was the only real conflict in South America. So that seems to have been smoothed over.
The
new Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa proposed a land and river trade route linking the Brazilian Amazon Rainforest to Ecuador's Pacific Coast, suggesting that for South America, it could be kind of like an alternative to the Panama Canal.
Chavez and Morales celebrated a new joint project, the gas separation plant in Bolivia's rich gas-rich region. It’s a joint venture with Petrovesa, the Venezuelan oil company, and the Bolivian state energy company. And it continues. Venezuela, as I’m sure you know, is the only -- it which points out -- is the only Latin American member of OPEC and has by far the largest proven oil reserves outside the Middle East, by some measures maybe even incomparable to Saudi Arabia. Well, that’s very important in the general global context. I’ll return to a couple of words about that.
There were also contributions, constructive, interesting contributions by Lula da Silva, Brazil's president, Bachelet of Chile, and others. All of this is extremely important.
This is the first time since the Spanish conquests, 500 years, that there has been real moves towards integration in South America. The countries have been very separated from one another. And integration is going to be a prerequisite for authentic independence. I mean, there have been -- I’m sure you know -- attempts at independence, but they've been crushed, often very violently, partly because of lack of regional support, because there was very little regional cooperation, so you can pick them off one by one. That’s what happened since the 1960s. The Kennedy administration orchestrated a coup in Brazil, the first of which happened right after the assassination was already planned. It was the first of a series of falling dominoes. Neo-Nazi-style national security states spread across the hemisphere. Chile was one of them, but only one finally ended up with reaching Central America, with Reagan's terrorist wars in the 1980s, which devastated Central America, similar things happening in the Caribbean. But that was sort of a one-by-one operation of destroying one country after another. And it had the expected domino effect.
It’s the worst plague of repression in the history of Latin America since the original conquests, which were horrendous. It’s only beginning to be understood how horrendous they were. But integration does lay the basis for potential independence, and that's of extreme significance.
The colonial history -- Spain, Europe, the United States -- not only divided countries from one another, but it also left a sharp internal division within the countries, every one, between a very wealthy small elite and a huge mass of impoverished people. The correlation to race is fairly close. Typically, the rich elite was white, European, westernized; and the poor mass of the population was indigenous, Indian, black, intermingled, and so on. It's a fairly close correlation, and it continues right ‘til the present. The white, mostly white, elites were not -- who ran the countries -- were not integrated with -- had very few interrelations with the other countries of the region. They were Western-oriented. You can see that in all sorts of ways. That's where the capital was exported. That's where the second homes were, where the children went to the universities, where their cultural connections were, and so on. And they had very little responsibility in their own societies. So there’s very sharp division.
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http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/19/1433244(L-R bottom row ) President of Venezuela Hugo Chavez, President of Brazil Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva, President of Bolivia Evo Morales, President of Chile Michelle Bachelet, (L-R top row) Secretary for South American Affairs of Mexico Jorge Chen, Representative of Surinam Robby Ramlakhan, Vice-president of Argentina Daniel Scioli and Foreign Minister of Colombia Consuelo Araujo pose for an official photo at the South American Community of Nations summit in Cochabamba December 9, 2006. REUTERS/Mariana Bazo
Supporters of social unions participate at the closing act of the Social summit for the integration of the nations, simultaneously to the South American summit in Cochabamba, Bolivia December 9, 2006. REUTERS/David Mercado (BOLIVIA)