The Crisis in Honduras and the Bolivarian Dynamic

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The Crisis in Honduras and the Bolivarian Dynamic

By Emile Schepers
8-03-09, 10:05 am

The Bolivarian dynamic consists of a number of interlocking class-struggle processes:

• Increasingly sophisticated and successful mass mobilizations against both imperialism and ruling oligarchies, and involving peasants, workers, indigenous people, students, slum dwellers, students and other sectors. These mobilizations differ in their specific composition from one country to another, with indigenous people being a major component in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, and other combinations in other countries.

• The coming to power (and staying in power) on the basis of these mobilizations of left-wing governments which more or less explicitly define themselves as socialist, or moving in a socialist direction. Such are the governments headed by Hugo Chávez in Venezuela (elected 1998), Rafael Correa in Ecuador (elected 2006) and Evo Morales in Bolivia (elected 2006), plus the government of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua (elected 2006), which has some specific characteristics. Newly elected governments in Paraguay (elected 2008) and El Salvador (elected 2009) may eventually move in a “Bolivarian” direction. Manuel Zelaya in Honduras was elected as the candidate of the rather conservative Liberal Party in 2005, but developed a progressive program that grew more explicit as the high cost of oil began crushing his country, and he saw that only Venezuela via Petrocaribe was willing to sell him oil on reasonable terms. He received the support of the “Bolivarian” unions and mass organizations of his country once he began to introduce progressive reforms, and he was working closely with such mobilizations in Honduras at the time he was overthrown on June 28. These “Bolivarian” mobilizations have been occurring even where the government is still right wing, for example in Peru where large scale mobilizations, with an especially large mobilization of Amazonian indigenous people, challenging the right-wing regime of APRA’s Alan García. In some countries this mass mobilization process is less strong, for example, Mexico and Guatemala.

• The agreement between left-wing governments in power and the mobilized mass forces to re-found the national state, through constitutional conventions which give much more scope to direct public input into decision making at all levels, and with a conscious effort to open up possibilities of socialist advances while marginalizing traditional elites of landowners, bankers, businessmen and the old-style Latin American military brass. Of course, the elites fight back tooth and nail, but so far the combination of left-wing presidents and mobilized masses is winning in most countries.

• An anti-imperialist stance by both governments and mobilized social bases, which has as its purpose the separation of the “Bolivarian” countries, separately and as a group, from the imperialist world order headed by the United States and the other wealthy countries, and the construction of a new system in the Americas in which horizontal integration and solidarity among countries replaces domination by international monopoly capital and US military, political and ideological hegemony. An important part of this anti-imperialist stance has been to stand by socialist Cuba in word and deed.

• A rejection of the “Washington Consensus” of corporate dominated trade and neo-liberal macroeconomic policies. Neoliberalism involves a commitment to free trade (actually not free, but rigged in favor of wealthier countries and big corporations), privatization of the economy (so as to give foreign corporate investors more fields of activity from which to extract profits), austerity in public services and repression to force people to accept this program. Under the Washington Consensus, development loans and credits from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as well as foreign aid directly from the United States and some other wealthy countries are only available if the neo-liberal package is agreed to. Further, under the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO), poorer countries are forced to accept disadvantageous trade deals, which often oblige them to change their labor, environmental and other laws so as to favor wealthy foreign corporate investors. These are the things that both the masses and the governments in the Bolivarian countries reject.

• The creation of new international bodies and relationships to enable the Bolivarian countries to replace the sources of trade and aid lost by defecting from the Washington Consensus system, and to help each other with development without onerous strings attached. The umbrella body for this new system of cooperation and solidarity is ALBA, the Bolivarian Alliance (formerly Alternative) for the People of Our America, at this writing including Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua and several of the smaller English speaking Caribbean countries: Antigua, Dominica and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. ALBA started off with an agreement in 2004 between Cuba and Venezuela in which Venezuela provided Cuba with low priced oil in exchange for Cuban aid in developing Venezuela’s health care and school systems. Since then it has grown to the point that it has basically defeated US efforts to build the Free Trade Area of the Americas into a hemispheric trading bloc based on “Washington Consensus” principles and domination by US corporate interests. Under the general rubric of ALBA come projects like Petrocaribe, Venezuela’s system of providing oil on good credit terms to ALBA members and others; Bancosur, a regional bank to provide development loans and credits without the onerous neoliberal conditions attached to aid from the IMF and International Fund; and the SUCRE, a projected common currency for the Latin American countries. So far, ALBA and Petrocaribe are going full blast, Bancosur is in its start-up phase of getting contributions of capital from the member countries, and the SUCRE is still on the drawing boards.

http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/8857/