[Theme song: (to the tune of "You are my Sunshine.") "You are my moonshine, my only moonshine, You make me giddy when days are dull. You'll never know dear, how high you get me. Please please keep my moonshine jug full." (fade out)]
Abruptly the season just changed. Seven months of sunshine yielded to a drenching downpour. There was some warning: gathering clouds in the afternoons, sudden cool gusts of wind, deep thunderous rumbles and apocalyptic flashes across the night sky. The change brings relief. But like the dry season, the rains will eventually wear out their welcome too, making us long again for the sun. Farmers use the dry time to burn off their fields for planting. Along with clouds of dust that rise off the many unpaved roads around Cochabamba, the smoke hangs heavy, clouding the valley, coating every surface. These early rains are life-giving, restoring the burned grasses, transforming the slopes of the Andes from dull brown (unlike the burnished gold of California) to vibrant green again. But the rains will eventually cause the rivers to flood their banks and inundate the streets, pouring rocks and earth down the mountains and making a dangerous mess. Asi es la vida. We move from thirst to saturation then back again as balance eludes us.
Half our family left last night for a journey across three continents. Such a departure is always harder for those left behind. It will be the longest separation we have endured in our years together. An experiment in independence. Each child will be the only child of a single parent for almost two months. Each parent will have no other adult to consult about daily decisions. Will the novelty of these altered family dynamics prove amusing until we reunite at Christmas? Or like the weather will it finally prove tedious? Vamos a ver.
Word has come - as it often does these days, via internet - that Bill Rogers has died. He and I were close for some years and I considered him a mahatma: a great spirit. Like Scaramouche, he was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. I first got to know Bill 25 years ago in a small Mexican Pacific coast fishing and beach town that was much more primitive then than now. It was surprising to see him in that raw, wild place, a large long-haired man in a wheelchair, often pushed and helped in those days by his sexy diminutive girlfriend, Karin.
We really bonded during an Easter boat trip in 1983. During Semana Santa in Mexico, everyone goes to the beach, making it crowded and crazy. Visitors also included the fishermen who ordinarily made their camps on islands some four hours from shore. To avoid the crowds, we hired a panga - the long (25 to 30 feet?) open boats local fishermen use - with a guide to take six of us out to Isla Isabel, deserted during Holy Week. Four of us lifted Bill's wheelchair into the panga from the beach. It was tricky. He was heavy and couldn't help us in any way. His chair barely fit in the center of the boat. It seemed adventuous for anyone to foray out into the ocean in such a small boat, let alone a paraplegic whom none of us would be able to save from drowning if anything happened. Was he brave or crazy? Yes and yes. We had a quantity of psylocibin mushrooms, from which the ladies cooked up a delicious electric quiche to enhance the experience. Snorkeling off the island was especially delightful. And wild Bill did manage to put on a mask and stick his head in the clear water for a look. He was always un hombre muy listo, up for anything.
We spent four or five nights on Isla Margarita, a protected sanctuary for two huge species of birds, the frigates and the boobies. The frigates (tejiras in Spanish, because their tails resemble scissors) nest in the short stumpy trees on the island. The boobies (0r bobos) lay their eggs on the ground. There was abundant fresh water there. We brought some supplies, including (not quite enough) alcohol, but depended on our fishing to supply our meals. Swimming in the daytime, fires at night. A lovely, hilarious interlude. After that trip we were friends. I saw him in several of his California homes or apartments over the years and at one point rented an apartment from him next to his house in Bonsall, where I spent a wonderful winter.
Bill broke his neck at 19, bodysurfing at Huntington Beach. He would have drowned except for the lifeguards who pulled him out. He spent a couple of years in the hospital before he could get around at all. It was excruciating for him, losing his physical capacities and all feeling from his mid-chest down. He suffered many physical complications and operations over the years. He had only partial use of his hands and arms. But he did tell me once that his injury was the best thing that ever happened to him. Because it woke him up. He overcame his initial depression and desire to die. And he got into transcendental meditation.
He went to Maharishi International University in Iowa, where he met Karin. And he traveled as a favorite courtier with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi around the United States and Europe. Bill would go in and out of the strict TM discipline for the rest of his life, but he would never lose his veneration of the Maharishi or his belief in his wisdom. As crazy as he was - and he was - Bill always maintained a strong element of spirituality in his makeup. His great capacity for laughter was a vital part of that. He loved to laugh and I loved to laugh along with him.
Bill was a schemer and a scammer, always planning some sure-fire off-beat means to riches, or else some spiritual coup, or some cominbation of the two. One time the police raided his house, guns drawn, to seize his computer because he was involved in illegal on-line sports betting. He later sold computer-generated astrological readings. He tried with varying success to help addicts beat their urges through meditation, diet and conversation.
Improbably, I lucked into two all-expenses-paid tickets to Superbowl 20 in New Orleans. Bill was the perfect person to take, a huge sports fan and fun companion. So we partied our way through the French Quarter and into the Superdome. The game itself was a blowout: the Chicago Bears chewed up and spit out the New England Patriots. But we were having way too much fun to care. In search of psychic and physical equilibrium, Bill veered from a strict dietary and abstemious regimen to wild over-consumption of booze and illegal substances. But these were only phases and facets of his steadfast quest for happiness and spiritual truth.
His last years were marred by pain that was difficult to control. He was bed-ridden and often drugged out. I visited him a few times until he told me to stop. He made it to 60, living twice as long as a paraplegic than he had in normal health. I am grateful to have known Bill. His friendship enriched my life. His story and his generous, luminous being enlarged my understanding of courage and pleasure and what life is all about. He was far more alive and intrepid than many healthier but more timorous souls. Rather than complain or bemoan his unfair fate, he chose to take as much joy from life as possible.
Bill Rogers was indeed a great spirit. I'm sorry he's gone but really glad he was here.
Friday, October 31, 2008
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Watching a Steven Seagal Movie on a Venezuelan Bus
The plot doesn't matter.
Nothing matters.
The massive, expressionless Seagal
plows like a deadly freighter
through oceans of flying Asian bodies,
countless disposable Ornamentals
groaning and dying
as the green flanks of the Andes
flash past our darkening windows.
Some movies go straight to video,
others, direct to Third World transportation.
The U.S. jettisons lame surplus entertainment
the way we dump tumor-causing pesticides
that fail our minimum standards.
Somebody else will suck it up.
That's globalization with a vengeance.
On the ferry from Isla Margarita
full of families with young children
the lounge TVs blasted out
The Amityville Horror - murder
and demonic possession on Long Island.
"Basura pura," said one woman.
Absolute rubbish. Yes, but hard to escape.
What must folks here think of the country
that sends them all this toxic waste?
Where a so-called religious leader
publicly advocates assassinating their president?
Venezuelans call the U.S. president "sangriento":
Bloody Bush. Maybe they figure
he's seen too many bad movies.
And now he's starring in one,
a political Steven Seagal - mumbling, oblivious, lethal.
Bodies are falling around him,
disposable humanity of several nations
including our own. But only darkness is visible
now. We need a different sort of show.
Nothing matters.
The massive, expressionless Seagal
plows like a deadly freighter
through oceans of flying Asian bodies,
countless disposable Ornamentals
groaning and dying
as the green flanks of the Andes
flash past our darkening windows.
Some movies go straight to video,
others, direct to Third World transportation.
The U.S. jettisons lame surplus entertainment
the way we dump tumor-causing pesticides
that fail our minimum standards.
Somebody else will suck it up.
That's globalization with a vengeance.
On the ferry from Isla Margarita
full of families with young children
the lounge TVs blasted out
The Amityville Horror - murder
and demonic possession on Long Island.
"Basura pura," said one woman.
Absolute rubbish. Yes, but hard to escape.
What must folks here think of the country
that sends them all this toxic waste?
Where a so-called religious leader
publicly advocates assassinating their president?
Venezuelans call the U.S. president "sangriento":
Bloody Bush. Maybe they figure
he's seen too many bad movies.
And now he's starring in one,
a political Steven Seagal - mumbling, oblivious, lethal.
Bodies are falling around him,
disposable humanity of several nations
including our own. But only darkness is visible
now. We need a different sort of show.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
In the Heart of the Heart of the Continent
Your first impression of Cochabamba depends on where you’re coming from. Flying up out of Santa Cruz, in the hot green eastern Bolivian lowlands, Cochabamba looks high and dry. About 8000 feet above sea level, the valley of Cochabamba lies seven or eight thousand feet below the eastern crest of the Andes. The lack of humidity assaults your skin and sinuses. Nights and mornings are chilly.
But if you’re coming down from La Paz, the world’s highest capital city at 12,500 feet, and its even higher El Alto airport, Cochabamba appears lush, with trees and fields of commercial crops, including flowers. The weather feels mild and the air, bracingly oxygen-rich, a relief from the sharp, thin atmosphere of the higher Andes, where hallucinogenic snowy peaks hover above the unlikely urban sprawl.
In Bolivia, geography is destiny. In this country of ecological and political extremes, Cochabamba occupies a centrist position, a middle way. If Bolivia is in many ways the beating heart of South America, Cochabamba is in a sense the heart of that heart. But, despite its aura of moderation, the city finds itself in a rhetorical and sometimes violent crossfire between the highland and lowland cultures. That topographical tension, which began centuries before the current reign of Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, is but one of many ethnic and economic divisions in this country.
Cochabamba is a pivotal department (as the states are called here), key to the balance of power and to whether or not Bolivia will transform into a more egalitarian, participatory democracy, as Morales proposes, or retain its traditional, hierarchical structure that has kept the indigenous Bolivian majority deep in poverty for centuries.
A few days after my arrival in Cochabamba in August 2006, the streets filled with tumult. Demonstrators marched through the city center, shouting and waving flags, adding mayhem to the already chaotic downtown traffic patterns. What an amazing coincidence, I thought, that I should land in the midst of this seismic political upheaval. When I asked taxi drivers what all the excitement was about, they shrugged. For them, such a public outpouring was just one more obstacle to avoid, another headache. How they could be so indifferent to this historical moment, I wondered. But I was greener then than the flanks of the Andes in the rainy season.
As the cabbies knew, and I later learned, there was nothing exceptional about those demonstrations. They were the typical actions of some aggrieved group seeking some form of justice: higher wages, better living or working conditions, more public services. In the United States, most policy deliberations occur outside the public eye, and protest is a limited, somewhat suspect, strategy. Many Americans seem reticent, if not apathetic, toward public policies with which they disagree. Protestors are confined to certain areas by police and promptly arrested if they venture beyond them or try to block a public thoroughfare.
Bolivian democracy frequently plays out in the streets. Such routine, raucous manifestations of need and desire reflect in part the lack of responsive institutions – judicial or legislative – to which Bolivians can appeal. Perhaps because public venting is a kind of social safety valve, the police usually make no effort to inhibit demonstrators. On the contrary, protesters here can hold motorists, and sometimes the entire city, for ransom. The best organized paros or strikes, are forecast in local media before they happen. This allows wary citizens to make plans – to stock up on food and figure alternatives for schoolchildren – before the streets become blocked.
Sometimes paros happen without warning. You head out to work or school or the grocery store and run into a blockaded street. It can happen fast. You get to the store okay but can’t get back. The best organized bloqueos use busses and cars to block the roads. More spontaneous or humble efforts simply employ rocks and tree branches or even human bodies to achieve their goal. A paro civico is a citywide blockade that tries to achieve urban paralysis, the better to get quick attention for their cause.
Police do not try to remove these blockades. If there is any official presence at all, police may warn motorists not to try to run these blockades, since any interference at these highly-charged flash points can meet with violence. Resourceful drivers learn to pursue complicated detours around such obstructions, which may lead down obscure dirt roads or into traffic jams in far flung rutted fields.
Blockading an entire city to get attention for a cause may smack of desperation. Necessity is a mean mother. Those who exist on the edge of economic catastrophe have few options when push comes to shove. Or, in Bob Dylan’s words: “When you got nothin’ you got nothin’ to lose.” Such tactics may appear crude and desperate to some foreign eyes. But compared to the rampant apathy and alienation in the United States, Bolivian democratic practice appears dynamic and socially pervasive.
Not long after our arrival in Cochabamba we met an American woman who warned us to stock up on food, a generator and other emergency supplies in case blockades might trap us in our house for long periods. Even then her warning struck us as somewhat over the top. But her husband is one of half a dozen agents in the Cochabamba office of the Drug Enforcement Agency. U.S. government employees endure a constant bombardment of “advisories” from the U.S. Embassy and aggressive/defensive tactical security advice from their employers. When the autonomy vote took place in Santa Cruz in May, the Embassy sent out countrywide “advisories” and put the DEA in lockdown. The agents had to spend the weekend in their homes.
During the Christmas season, we drove through the neighborhood where that DEA family lived, an exclusive, privileged zone, with homes behind high stone walls topped with spikes or barbed wire. The neighborhood of Manfred Reyes Villa, who was then Prefect of Cochabamba and later voted out of office by a recall referendum. We were wondering which house might belong to the DEA family when we saw huge wooden driveway doors, only slightly smaller than those which hid King Kong. A Christmas wreath, perhaps six feet in diameter, hung on the door. And beside the wreath stood a uniformed guard in a flak jacket, holding a machine gun. Not exactly “Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men,” but fairly emblematic of the official U.S. presence in Bolivia.
When we looked at places to rent, we noticed that many homes displayed a map of Bolivia dated 1859. It took us awhile to realize why. For Bolivians to whom size matters, those were the good old days. Since then Bolivia has fought – and lost – territorial wars with four of its neighbors (Brazil, Peru, Chile and Paraguay). Most painfully, by losing the War of the Pacific in 1884, Bolivia gave up its sea coast to Chile. Now the Bolivian Navy is reduced to patrolling Lake Titicaca, which is itself divided with Peru, thanks to another conflict. (A cab driver in Lima told me a lame, predictable joke about that war: “We got the titi and they got the caca.”).
These days Bolivia is a battleground for two ongoing, intersecting struggles, one national, the other international. The internal conflict is the latest incarnation of the age-old tension between the highland and lowland cultures. A fundamental – but now unspeakable – aspect of this tension is the racism of mestizos against indigenous peoples, barely concealed behind political and economic arguments. This struggle has acquired a new urgency because of two factors: the election of Evo Morales to the presidency and the recent dramatic prosperity of the lowland departments.
Raised in the Andean highlands outside the city of Oruro, Evo Morales is of Aymara descent. The Aymara and Quechua peoples are the dominant indigenous ethnic groups in highland Bolivia and Peru. Their cultures and languages predate the Incan empire. Like many internal migrants in Bolivia, Morales was forced to leave his family farm because of catastrophe. El Nino weather conditions ruined the crops and killed the animals. He moved with his family to the lowland Chapare region of Cochabamba and worked in agriculture. (The city of Cochabamba in the upland valley of the same name, is the capital of the Department of Cochabamba.)
Morales became involved in the politics of coca growing and rose in the 1980s and 90s to become the head of the coca growers’ union. Representing their interests put Morales at odds with the Bolivian national government and their U.S. backers, who wanted to eradicate coca. In 1997 Morales was elected to the national Legislature with a large majority. He objected to the growing militarization of the Chapare in the name of the drug war. In 2002 the Legislature voted to expel him, a move Morales saw as engineered by the United States.
The next chapter of the Morales saga is available for witness in an extraordinary documentary film, Our Brand Is Crisis, directed by Rachel Boynton. A behind-the-scenes look at the 2002 Bolivian presidential election, Boynton’s film offers a sharp portrait of Bolivian-American relations. U.S. political campaign consultants Stanley Greenburg, James Carville and Robert Shrum allowed Boynton incredible access to their deliberations and machinations. They had no doubt they could manipulate their candidate to victory. And they did, but with disastrous consequences.
Former Bolivian president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada (aka Goni) hired Carville and Company (GCS) to help him win back the top office, even though his previous, unpopular presidential tenure had done nothing to alleviate Bolivian poverty or unemployment. A wealthy elitist, Goni spoke Spanish with a heavy American accent that reflected his U.S. upbringing and gained him the nickname “Gringo”. His arrogance was exceeded only by that of his paid political consultants.
Goni entered the race with several significant ‘negatives.’ First, he was old, 72 (John McCain’s age). Second, in his first presidential term, from 1993 to 1997, he had promised to create 500,000 jobs, but didn’t deliver. Worse, his ‘capitalization’ program was seen as selling off the national patrimony to enrich foreigners. As GCS strategist Jeremy Rosner informed Goni early on: “Over half the electorate can’t stand you…” Goni did not look surprised to hear this. The American consultants told Goni what to say, how to dress and even how to walk and talk. While they honed Goni’s image, they also ran a series of negative ads against his main competitor, Cochabamba Mayor Manfred Reyes Villa. They raised doubts about Reyes Villa’s military connections and the source of his wealth. How did a former army captain turned city mayor get so very rich?
The third presidential contender, Evo Morales, was a distant longshot for the office until he got some unintended help. U.S. Ambassador Manuel Rocha called Morales a liar for claiming the United States wanted to assassinate him. This public American scolding lifted Morales dramatically in the polls. Goni wondered aloud to the press if the ambassador might not be on Evo’s campaign payroll.
Evo’s rise and Manfred’s fall created a photo finish. In the end Goni won the presidency with 22.5 percent of the vote, to 20.9 for Evo Morales and 20.8 for Manfred Reyes. As Carville admits in the film, the result might have been different had the election been a day earlier or later. Though he had claimed throughout the campaign to have “an emergency plan” to rescue the Bolivian economy, Goni never produced one. Six months after the election, Evo Morales led a large protest against Goni’s government. When Goni tried to raise taxes a month later, even on the poor, the country exploded in violence.
Boynton asked Rosner if he did not think it a dangerous idea to elect a man to the presidency who lacked public support. Though clearly stunned by the disintegration of public order in the early months of Goni’s reign, Rosner insisted: “This guy had the best formula” for helping the people. He admitted to feeling “frustrated” with Goni’s failure, but dismissed Morales as an “irresponsible populist.” Beyond the chatter about focus groups and the political posturing of candidates and their advisers, the hard life of the impoverished Bolivian majority continues on with no relief in sight.
After fourteen months in office, during which more than one hundred Bolivians died in anti-government violence, Goni resigned and fled the country, back to the site of his father’s political exile and his own childhood in suburban Washington, D.C. Bolivia continues to seek his extradition; the U.S. continues to refuse. A Bolivian court has also demanded the extradition of Goni’s Defense Minister, Carlos Sanchez Berzain, wanted for genocide in the “Black October” massacre of sixty anti-government protestors. Sanchez Berzain lives in Miami where he works with ex-ambassador Manuel Rocha. Jeremy Rosner could only conclude that “There are conditions that ultimately democracy can’t deal with.” Goni’s vice president, Carlos Meza, took over until new national elections were held in December 2005. Evo Morales won the presidency then with 54 percent of the vote.
At the end of the film, we learn that Carville and his associates continue to advise political campaigns worldwide. Clearly, they don’t care whom they represent, as long as they’re paid. After Carville’s performance in the 2008 Democratic primaries – featuring remarks about Judas and cojones – and his meddling in the politics of places he knows little about, the less we hear from and about him the better.
Two months after Goni’s election, Manuel Rocha was replaced as U.S. ambassador to Bolivia by David Greenlee, a man equally hostile to Evo Morales. Greenlee was succeeded in 2006 by Philip Goldberg, whom Morales accused of orchestrating support for his political opponents. Morales finally expelled Goldberg in September. Relations between Bolivia and the United States continue to be tense.
On June 9, a protest against the U.S. refusal to extradite Goni’s former Minister of Defense, Carlos Sanchez Berzain, turned violent. Marchers brought their protest to the U.S. embassy in LaPaz, where police subdued them with tear gas. Ambassador Goldberg returned to Washington for “consultations” about embassy security. In July, USAID was kicked out of the Chapare region at the request of the coca growers, who complained that American aid projects always came with strings attached, usually intended to eradicate coca crops.
Rocha’s televised anti-Morales rant resembled the frequent anti-Chavez rhetoric of George W. Bush and Condoleeza Rice. In both cases, gringo opposition has energized and legitimized the person they are trying to demonize. The vocal antagonism of the Bush regime has been a godsend to Hugo Chavez, allowing the Venezuelan demagogue a focus for his fiery, at times quixotic, crusade for a new socialism in Latin America. Morales too has gained great stature inside and outside Bolivia from the hamfisted, Manichean American attacks on his brand of populism. Chavez has made a great show of rallying to the side of Morales, his Bolivian ally against the yanqui imperialists.
Conspiracy theorists here see the hand of Chavez behind every move Morales makes. In similar fashion, the United States is rumored to be funding and nurturing all the forces of opposition to the Morales regime. There is no doubt that Venezuela and the United States are exploiting the internal divisions within Bolivia for their own ends. But to what extent the Bolivian political drama is a battle of surrogates for outside countries is not clear. Bolivians naturally resent this interference.
The United States always claims to stand for freedom. But U.S. support for the murderous Uribe regime in Colombia undermines American lip service to human rights.
Nor can Latin Americans forget the violent U.S.-backed overthrow and murder of the democratically elected President Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. They also remember the U.S.-backed coup against the democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954. And now memories of other U.S. interventions, including those in Panama, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic, are resurfacing thanks to the Bush-Cheney reactivation of the U.S. Navy’s Fourth Fleet to patrol Latin American waters.
Gunboat diplomacy and big stick intimidation hardly create favorable conditions for inter-American dialogue. Such bullyboy tactics bespeak a lack of vision and ideas, a hallmark of the Bush-Cheney years, not to mention respect for our neighbors. Paranoia is not a viable foreign policy. It only solidifies opposition to U.S. proposals and alienates the rest of the hemisphere. Problem: Everyone in Latin America already knows this; most citizens of the United States neither know nor care.
But if you’re coming down from La Paz, the world’s highest capital city at 12,500 feet, and its even higher El Alto airport, Cochabamba appears lush, with trees and fields of commercial crops, including flowers. The weather feels mild and the air, bracingly oxygen-rich, a relief from the sharp, thin atmosphere of the higher Andes, where hallucinogenic snowy peaks hover above the unlikely urban sprawl.
In Bolivia, geography is destiny. In this country of ecological and political extremes, Cochabamba occupies a centrist position, a middle way. If Bolivia is in many ways the beating heart of South America, Cochabamba is in a sense the heart of that heart. But, despite its aura of moderation, the city finds itself in a rhetorical and sometimes violent crossfire between the highland and lowland cultures. That topographical tension, which began centuries before the current reign of Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, is but one of many ethnic and economic divisions in this country.
Cochabamba is a pivotal department (as the states are called here), key to the balance of power and to whether or not Bolivia will transform into a more egalitarian, participatory democracy, as Morales proposes, or retain its traditional, hierarchical structure that has kept the indigenous Bolivian majority deep in poverty for centuries.
A few days after my arrival in Cochabamba in August 2006, the streets filled with tumult. Demonstrators marched through the city center, shouting and waving flags, adding mayhem to the already chaotic downtown traffic patterns. What an amazing coincidence, I thought, that I should land in the midst of this seismic political upheaval. When I asked taxi drivers what all the excitement was about, they shrugged. For them, such a public outpouring was just one more obstacle to avoid, another headache. How they could be so indifferent to this historical moment, I wondered. But I was greener then than the flanks of the Andes in the rainy season.
As the cabbies knew, and I later learned, there was nothing exceptional about those demonstrations. They were the typical actions of some aggrieved group seeking some form of justice: higher wages, better living or working conditions, more public services. In the United States, most policy deliberations occur outside the public eye, and protest is a limited, somewhat suspect, strategy. Many Americans seem reticent, if not apathetic, toward public policies with which they disagree. Protestors are confined to certain areas by police and promptly arrested if they venture beyond them or try to block a public thoroughfare.
Bolivian democracy frequently plays out in the streets. Such routine, raucous manifestations of need and desire reflect in part the lack of responsive institutions – judicial or legislative – to which Bolivians can appeal. Perhaps because public venting is a kind of social safety valve, the police usually make no effort to inhibit demonstrators. On the contrary, protesters here can hold motorists, and sometimes the entire city, for ransom. The best organized paros or strikes, are forecast in local media before they happen. This allows wary citizens to make plans – to stock up on food and figure alternatives for schoolchildren – before the streets become blocked.
Sometimes paros happen without warning. You head out to work or school or the grocery store and run into a blockaded street. It can happen fast. You get to the store okay but can’t get back. The best organized bloqueos use busses and cars to block the roads. More spontaneous or humble efforts simply employ rocks and tree branches or even human bodies to achieve their goal. A paro civico is a citywide blockade that tries to achieve urban paralysis, the better to get quick attention for their cause.
Police do not try to remove these blockades. If there is any official presence at all, police may warn motorists not to try to run these blockades, since any interference at these highly-charged flash points can meet with violence. Resourceful drivers learn to pursue complicated detours around such obstructions, which may lead down obscure dirt roads or into traffic jams in far flung rutted fields.
Blockading an entire city to get attention for a cause may smack of desperation. Necessity is a mean mother. Those who exist on the edge of economic catastrophe have few options when push comes to shove. Or, in Bob Dylan’s words: “When you got nothin’ you got nothin’ to lose.” Such tactics may appear crude and desperate to some foreign eyes. But compared to the rampant apathy and alienation in the United States, Bolivian democratic practice appears dynamic and socially pervasive.
Not long after our arrival in Cochabamba we met an American woman who warned us to stock up on food, a generator and other emergency supplies in case blockades might trap us in our house for long periods. Even then her warning struck us as somewhat over the top. But her husband is one of half a dozen agents in the Cochabamba office of the Drug Enforcement Agency. U.S. government employees endure a constant bombardment of “advisories” from the U.S. Embassy and aggressive/defensive tactical security advice from their employers. When the autonomy vote took place in Santa Cruz in May, the Embassy sent out countrywide “advisories” and put the DEA in lockdown. The agents had to spend the weekend in their homes.
During the Christmas season, we drove through the neighborhood where that DEA family lived, an exclusive, privileged zone, with homes behind high stone walls topped with spikes or barbed wire. The neighborhood of Manfred Reyes Villa, who was then Prefect of Cochabamba and later voted out of office by a recall referendum. We were wondering which house might belong to the DEA family when we saw huge wooden driveway doors, only slightly smaller than those which hid King Kong. A Christmas wreath, perhaps six feet in diameter, hung on the door. And beside the wreath stood a uniformed guard in a flak jacket, holding a machine gun. Not exactly “Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men,” but fairly emblematic of the official U.S. presence in Bolivia.
When we looked at places to rent, we noticed that many homes displayed a map of Bolivia dated 1859. It took us awhile to realize why. For Bolivians to whom size matters, those were the good old days. Since then Bolivia has fought – and lost – territorial wars with four of its neighbors (Brazil, Peru, Chile and Paraguay). Most painfully, by losing the War of the Pacific in 1884, Bolivia gave up its sea coast to Chile. Now the Bolivian Navy is reduced to patrolling Lake Titicaca, which is itself divided with Peru, thanks to another conflict. (A cab driver in Lima told me a lame, predictable joke about that war: “We got the titi and they got the caca.”).
These days Bolivia is a battleground for two ongoing, intersecting struggles, one national, the other international. The internal conflict is the latest incarnation of the age-old tension between the highland and lowland cultures. A fundamental – but now unspeakable – aspect of this tension is the racism of mestizos against indigenous peoples, barely concealed behind political and economic arguments. This struggle has acquired a new urgency because of two factors: the election of Evo Morales to the presidency and the recent dramatic prosperity of the lowland departments.
Raised in the Andean highlands outside the city of Oruro, Evo Morales is of Aymara descent. The Aymara and Quechua peoples are the dominant indigenous ethnic groups in highland Bolivia and Peru. Their cultures and languages predate the Incan empire. Like many internal migrants in Bolivia, Morales was forced to leave his family farm because of catastrophe. El Nino weather conditions ruined the crops and killed the animals. He moved with his family to the lowland Chapare region of Cochabamba and worked in agriculture. (The city of Cochabamba in the upland valley of the same name, is the capital of the Department of Cochabamba.)
Morales became involved in the politics of coca growing and rose in the 1980s and 90s to become the head of the coca growers’ union. Representing their interests put Morales at odds with the Bolivian national government and their U.S. backers, who wanted to eradicate coca. In 1997 Morales was elected to the national Legislature with a large majority. He objected to the growing militarization of the Chapare in the name of the drug war. In 2002 the Legislature voted to expel him, a move Morales saw as engineered by the United States.
The next chapter of the Morales saga is available for witness in an extraordinary documentary film, Our Brand Is Crisis, directed by Rachel Boynton. A behind-the-scenes look at the 2002 Bolivian presidential election, Boynton’s film offers a sharp portrait of Bolivian-American relations. U.S. political campaign consultants Stanley Greenburg, James Carville and Robert Shrum allowed Boynton incredible access to their deliberations and machinations. They had no doubt they could manipulate their candidate to victory. And they did, but with disastrous consequences.
Former Bolivian president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada (aka Goni) hired Carville and Company (GCS) to help him win back the top office, even though his previous, unpopular presidential tenure had done nothing to alleviate Bolivian poverty or unemployment. A wealthy elitist, Goni spoke Spanish with a heavy American accent that reflected his U.S. upbringing and gained him the nickname “Gringo”. His arrogance was exceeded only by that of his paid political consultants.
Goni entered the race with several significant ‘negatives.’ First, he was old, 72 (John McCain’s age). Second, in his first presidential term, from 1993 to 1997, he had promised to create 500,000 jobs, but didn’t deliver. Worse, his ‘capitalization’ program was seen as selling off the national patrimony to enrich foreigners. As GCS strategist Jeremy Rosner informed Goni early on: “Over half the electorate can’t stand you…” Goni did not look surprised to hear this. The American consultants told Goni what to say, how to dress and even how to walk and talk. While they honed Goni’s image, they also ran a series of negative ads against his main competitor, Cochabamba Mayor Manfred Reyes Villa. They raised doubts about Reyes Villa’s military connections and the source of his wealth. How did a former army captain turned city mayor get so very rich?
The third presidential contender, Evo Morales, was a distant longshot for the office until he got some unintended help. U.S. Ambassador Manuel Rocha called Morales a liar for claiming the United States wanted to assassinate him. This public American scolding lifted Morales dramatically in the polls. Goni wondered aloud to the press if the ambassador might not be on Evo’s campaign payroll.
Evo’s rise and Manfred’s fall created a photo finish. In the end Goni won the presidency with 22.5 percent of the vote, to 20.9 for Evo Morales and 20.8 for Manfred Reyes. As Carville admits in the film, the result might have been different had the election been a day earlier or later. Though he had claimed throughout the campaign to have “an emergency plan” to rescue the Bolivian economy, Goni never produced one. Six months after the election, Evo Morales led a large protest against Goni’s government. When Goni tried to raise taxes a month later, even on the poor, the country exploded in violence.
Boynton asked Rosner if he did not think it a dangerous idea to elect a man to the presidency who lacked public support. Though clearly stunned by the disintegration of public order in the early months of Goni’s reign, Rosner insisted: “This guy had the best formula” for helping the people. He admitted to feeling “frustrated” with Goni’s failure, but dismissed Morales as an “irresponsible populist.” Beyond the chatter about focus groups and the political posturing of candidates and their advisers, the hard life of the impoverished Bolivian majority continues on with no relief in sight.
After fourteen months in office, during which more than one hundred Bolivians died in anti-government violence, Goni resigned and fled the country, back to the site of his father’s political exile and his own childhood in suburban Washington, D.C. Bolivia continues to seek his extradition; the U.S. continues to refuse. A Bolivian court has also demanded the extradition of Goni’s Defense Minister, Carlos Sanchez Berzain, wanted for genocide in the “Black October” massacre of sixty anti-government protestors. Sanchez Berzain lives in Miami where he works with ex-ambassador Manuel Rocha. Jeremy Rosner could only conclude that “There are conditions that ultimately democracy can’t deal with.” Goni’s vice president, Carlos Meza, took over until new national elections were held in December 2005. Evo Morales won the presidency then with 54 percent of the vote.
At the end of the film, we learn that Carville and his associates continue to advise political campaigns worldwide. Clearly, they don’t care whom they represent, as long as they’re paid. After Carville’s performance in the 2008 Democratic primaries – featuring remarks about Judas and cojones – and his meddling in the politics of places he knows little about, the less we hear from and about him the better.
Two months after Goni’s election, Manuel Rocha was replaced as U.S. ambassador to Bolivia by David Greenlee, a man equally hostile to Evo Morales. Greenlee was succeeded in 2006 by Philip Goldberg, whom Morales accused of orchestrating support for his political opponents. Morales finally expelled Goldberg in September. Relations between Bolivia and the United States continue to be tense.
On June 9, a protest against the U.S. refusal to extradite Goni’s former Minister of Defense, Carlos Sanchez Berzain, turned violent. Marchers brought their protest to the U.S. embassy in LaPaz, where police subdued them with tear gas. Ambassador Goldberg returned to Washington for “consultations” about embassy security. In July, USAID was kicked out of the Chapare region at the request of the coca growers, who complained that American aid projects always came with strings attached, usually intended to eradicate coca crops.
Rocha’s televised anti-Morales rant resembled the frequent anti-Chavez rhetoric of George W. Bush and Condoleeza Rice. In both cases, gringo opposition has energized and legitimized the person they are trying to demonize. The vocal antagonism of the Bush regime has been a godsend to Hugo Chavez, allowing the Venezuelan demagogue a focus for his fiery, at times quixotic, crusade for a new socialism in Latin America. Morales too has gained great stature inside and outside Bolivia from the hamfisted, Manichean American attacks on his brand of populism. Chavez has made a great show of rallying to the side of Morales, his Bolivian ally against the yanqui imperialists.
Conspiracy theorists here see the hand of Chavez behind every move Morales makes. In similar fashion, the United States is rumored to be funding and nurturing all the forces of opposition to the Morales regime. There is no doubt that Venezuela and the United States are exploiting the internal divisions within Bolivia for their own ends. But to what extent the Bolivian political drama is a battle of surrogates for outside countries is not clear. Bolivians naturally resent this interference.
The United States always claims to stand for freedom. But U.S. support for the murderous Uribe regime in Colombia undermines American lip service to human rights.
Nor can Latin Americans forget the violent U.S.-backed overthrow and murder of the democratically elected President Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. They also remember the U.S.-backed coup against the democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954. And now memories of other U.S. interventions, including those in Panama, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic, are resurfacing thanks to the Bush-Cheney reactivation of the U.S. Navy’s Fourth Fleet to patrol Latin American waters.
Gunboat diplomacy and big stick intimidation hardly create favorable conditions for inter-American dialogue. Such bullyboy tactics bespeak a lack of vision and ideas, a hallmark of the Bush-Cheney years, not to mention respect for our neighbors. Paranoia is not a viable foreign policy. It only solidifies opposition to U.S. proposals and alienates the rest of the hemisphere. Problem: Everyone in Latin America already knows this; most citizens of the United States neither know nor care.
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Talk About A Revolution
If you believe U.S. media coverage, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is a nutcase dictator and a “negative force” in Latin America, as Condoleeza Rice put it. But most U.S. media exhibit little independence from the official U.S. government line these days. And Bush-Cheney officials, including Rice, have proven highly unreliable, to put it politely, about, well, almost everything. Most media stories about Venezuela and Chavez repeat the same negative clichés, without offering much evidence. So I decided to go and see for myself.
To help prepare for my trip, I watched the DVD documentary, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” Two Irish filmmakers went to have a look at the Chavez regime in 2002, for the same reason I did, to try to find the reality behind all the hype. Kim Bartley and Donnacha O Briain [sic] had been filming Hugo Chavez for months when the April 11 coup ousted him from power. Remarkably, they kept filming as Chavez was arrested and taken away and the grinning coup plotters announced their plans for a new order. They began by dissolving the legislature and the courts.
Even more remarkably, within two days Hugo Chavez was back in power. His loyal soldiers and palace guards had rebelled against their own mutinous commanders and helped him return to office. Huge crowds of demonstrators had surrounded the palace, demanding the return of their elected president. The pretenders fled, except for the formerly jubilant would-be Attorney General, now sulking in a palace cell. It astonished me that Chavez had even survived the coup, let alone reversed it.
The United States does not come off well in the film. Most other nations condemned the illegal usurpation of power. A televised clip shows Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer recognizing the new government, though their time in office had the lifespan of a mayfly. Fleischer said: “We know the action encouraged by the Chavez government provoked this crisis.” But before rumors of the truth had achieved coherence, Bush announced his support for the new regime. Hmm.
One of the first people I met in Caracas clarified some of the mystery about that coup and that lightning U.S. response. Eva Golinger is a lawyer and a citizen of both the United States and Venezuela. She outlined the U.S. government complicity in the coup. They knew about it beforehand and supplied financial support to the coup plotters, before and after the event. Golinger wrote a book about the U.S. involvement, The Chavez Code, based on documents obtained under the Freedom of Information act. She also wrote a sequel, Bush Versus Chavez, about the ongoing U.S. efforts since the coup to destabilize the Chavez regime, up to the present moment.
U.S. intervention in Venezuelan internal affairs is nothing new, as Golinger points out. The CIA has long influenced policy in the country. The United States military traditionally enjoyed a cozy “integration” with the Venezuelan armed forces. Chavez ended that “special” military relationship. He also stopped the enrollment of Venezuelan military officers in the notorious Fort Benning-based School of the Americas, the alma mater of many Latin American tyrants and torturers. But the United States continues to fund anti-Chavez organizations in Venezuela through the National Endowment for Democracy. The U.S. also rewards the dissident media. Almost all private media in Venezuela – and their wealthy owners – vocally oppose the Chavez presidency. Private media also colluded in the 2002 coup, blacking out some televised events and distorting others to help get rid of Chavez.
The U.S. obsession with Venezuela is not mysterious. Venezuela has one of the largest oil reserves of any country in the world and has long been a major supplier of oil to the United States, a close reliable source. But when Bush and Cheney came into office, they began to doubt the reliability of Chavez. He supplied oil to Castro’s Cuba. He revived the semi-moribund Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and helped raise the price of a barrel from nine dollars to nearly thirty. And he visited countries the U.S. found objectionable, like Libya, Iraq and Iran.
Bush and company accused Chavez of consorting with terrorists, though Iraq and Iran were among the founding members of OPEC in 1960 along with Venezuela. Chavez was merely continuing longstanding relations, not suddenly acquiring sinister new friends. And raising the price of oil was good for the Venezuelan economy. But if Chavez is not conspiring with enemies of the United States to mess with the U.S. oil supply or support anti-U.S. terror, then what exactly is his game?
Over at the Ministry of Foreign Relations, officials in the North America section met these kinds of questions with a mixture of smiles and consternation. They find the paranoid suspicions of the Bush government absurd. But the United States is the eight hundred pound gorilla. You don’t want it rolling over on you. These diplomats had to take seriously the U.S. charges of a Chavez conspiracy against the Yankee Empire. First of all, as these young officials pointed out, Chavez did not nationalize the Venezuelan oil industry. That happened in 1976. He simply reorganized it for greater efficiency, getting rid of unnecessary administrators and creating a system of greater accountability to eliminate waste and increase profits.
The new 1999 constitution, approved by 70 percent of Venezuelans, puts the national oil industry firmly under government control. This needed to be stated explicitly because the president who preceded Chavez wanted to privatize oil. The idea now is to accumulate as much capital as possible in the treasury in order to create a new model of government, dedicated to resolve the 80 to 85 percent poverty rate that has persisted in Venezuela for many generations, despite the country’s oil wealth.
Chavez was indeed preparing for war: on poverty, hunger, illiteracy and disease. The oil Venezuela sends to Cuba yields a huge medical return. About fifteen thousand Cuban doctors are working in Venezuela, many in farflung villages and neighborhood clinics where no medical help has ever been seen before. Venezuelan students are enrolling in Cuban medical schools in growing numbers.
That national health initiative is one of twenty-one “missions” aimed at transforming the lives of impoverished Venezuelans. Basic food subsidies help meet the nutritional needs of the poor. And after two years of an all-out assault on illiteracy, UNESCO declared Venezuela free of that disability, according to my Ministry sources. That gives greater meaning to the government pledge of a free education for all Venezuelans. A 21-year-old woman named Luz Marina, whom I met later in a small northwestern Venezuela town, said she was among the first graduates of a high school in her town that did not exist ten years ago. And she claimed that the rate of university entrance for her classmates was 98 percent.
For Luz Marina, the best part of what the Chavez government calls its “Bolivarian Revolution,” is that women, children and poor country folk, who have traditionally been powerless and voiceless in society, are now included in the vision of a society for all. So the idealistic sentiments I first heard at the Ministry in Caracas – where of course I expected the official line – I heard repeated in one form or another in urban barrios and rural communities wherever I traveled.
Driving out of Caracas I was struck by several things that I would notice over and over again. One was the sheer amount of construction going on. Many buildings are going up and many new roads are being built. Venezuelan highways are modern and well-marked. But they are overwhelmed with traffic. Venezuelans enjoy the cheapest gas in the world, thanks to their government’s subsidy. The price at the pump is about twelve cents a gallon. Talk about reverse sticker shock! The good news: it’s cheap and easy to get around by car and truck in Venezuela. The bad news: everybody’s doing it. Rickety gas-guzzling dinosaurs that would have been junked in the U.S. years or decades ago share the road with mega-trucks and busses old and new. Why take public transport when you can blast around this huge gorgeous country on great roads for almost nothing? The traffic nightmare poses a challenge for Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution.
At the city hall in Carora, a city of just over one hundred thousand in the northwest state of Lara, Mayor Julio Chavez, no relation to the president, explained the revolutionary new system of government that Carora pioneered and the rest of Venezuela has now begun to emulate. Instead of a traditional top-down system, the decision-making power comes from the bottom up, through community councils. Every neighborhood, rural and urban, in the extended municipality, can form these councils. More than five hundred exist in the Carora area alone and roughly 28,000 nationwide.
“One of my objectives from Day One was how to reduce the role of the mayor,” said Mayor Chavez. Funds are made available for local projects from the national and state governments. “I as mayor do not decide how to use these funds. One hundred percent of these budget allocations are decided by community councils.” The mayor must submit his budget requests to the councils.” One road-paving project he asked for was delayed by other priorities the council deemed more urgent.
Through an assembly made up of representatives from the community councils, a new municipal constitution was written, placing the power for political decisions with the grassroots members from all social segments. This is part of what Carora assembly president Miguel Medina called “the new geometry of power.” Another city official said, “We want the people to be the government, not to receive government decisions.” Community Councils set up committees to deal with the issues most important to them, such as building, education, health or culture. All this sounded as idealistic as Frank Capra’s movie, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. And as revolutionary as the musings of those who wrote the U.S. Constitution.
The “process” many Venezuelans refer to, of transforming a nearly feudal state into a truly egalitarian participatory democracy, has energized much of the country with real hope. There is a sense of fluidity and improvisation in Venezuela right now, as barrio by barrio and city by city an entire population struggles to reinvent itself. In the urban neighborhood of Carolita, part of Carora, Community Council President Maricrespo, 66, spoke excitedly of “building this future for our children and grandchildren.” She spoke of fixing up dilapidated homes and building new ones. We met at the local school, which is no longer locked when the children leave and segregated from the community, but has become a hub of activity, hosting cultural programs, a clinic run by a Cuban doctor and a community bank, as well as the community council meetings.
“Our whole municipality has become a school…” said Maricrespo. Besides the ubiquitous building in Venezuela, many citizens did seem to be dedicating their new literacy skills to study. Luz Marina later confirmed that a lot of people were studying these days, especially the women. Out of town, the tiny desert community of San Felix is home to only one hundred fifteen people, but their community council has fifteen committees. The people there raise goats and run a tile-making cooperative, producing roof tiles from mud and water and a large kiln. They had not had any government projects here in forty years. Their first council priority was to build a fence around their school to keep the goats out. San Felix one of several cooperatives I visited, including a cacao co-op on the Caribbean coast that had begun to process the raw materials into chocolate themselves, instead of sending it abroad for others to make the biggest profit.
Creating worker-owned and -run cooperatives of all sorts – bakeries, coffee plantations, farms, factories – is another goal of the Bolivarian Revolution. There is no hierarchy and no boss. Everyone receives the same wage and participates in the business decisions. Like any other business, co-ops that are well managed succeed. Those that aren’t fail. My Venezuelan youth guru, Luz Marina, said the hope was “to incorporate young people intro cooperatives, not into exploitative jobs for Pepsi and McDonald’s. We want to be truly free, not slaves of the transnational corporations, where a few get rich and the majority go nowhere.”
Well…
Okay, by now the infectious enthusiasm of the co-op workers and the giddy hopefulness of the many community council members I’d met, sampling the heady wine of participatory democracy for the first time, had really gotten to me. This so-called Bolivarian Revolution, funded by oil revenue that had suddenly gone bananas, seemed to have real legs. A spirit of hope and possibility appeared to be percolating in the most obscure corners of the republic. I needed to sober up from the intoxicating visions my travels had conjured. It was time to find the biggest naysayer possible, the pragmatic skeptic who could throw cold water on this fevered dream of an inclusive society dedicated to the common good, someone who could reveal the raw, cynical truth behind these naïve longings. And who better to rain on the Chavez parade than the man he beat for the presidency back in 1998?
Henrique Salas Romer, who ran unsuccessfully against Chavez, is the former two-term governor of the prosperous state of Carabobo. He was succeeded in this office by his son, who has served four terms. Officially retired from business and from politics, Salas Romer still maintains a suite of offices in downtown Valencia, another city undergoing a building boom. Born in Venezuela, he attended high school and university (Yale) in the United States. He speaks impeccable English.
Salas Romer began his reality check rather strangely, by comparing Venezuela to Iraq. The two countries were “very similar” in terms of their populations, poverty levels and oil reserves, he said. “Venezuela is a major buyer of arms from Russia,” he added. Then he revealed that he was going to speak at a conference in the United States on the topic: “Hugo Chavez: A Daring Pawn in the New Cold War.” Salas Romer flashed a smile he appears to have worn since his first campaign for governor. My mind raced. Was this man suggesting that the U.S. should invade Venezuela as it had invaded Iraq? Whose “pawn” was Chavez? What “cold war” did he mean?
As I took dutiful, disbelieving notes, this man who might have been president said a number of things I am not sure whether he actually believed, or simply wanted me to believe. For instance, he said that in Venezuela struggles between rich and poor, black and white and left and right simply don’t exist. Now, I haven’t been to every country in the world, but I’ve been to quite a few. And if he’s right, Venezuela would be the only country I’ve ever heard of without class, racial or political tensions.
His more outrageous assertions aside, Salas Romer said the richest people in Venezuela are backing Chavez now, though they won’t admit it, because they are making so much money. Chavez “is no longer the real ruler here, no longer in control of decisions. Despite his control of government institutions, Chavez is a weak ruler…” He said if the price of oil drops, Chavez will not be able to keep the armed forces, the business interests and the poor on his side. About the 2012 elections, in which Chavez is not eligible to run, Salas Romer said: “I don’t think he gets there.” Considering the events of 2002, and the ongoing U.S. machinations, this is a fairly ominous remark.
He spoke at length about the strengthening alliance between Venezuela and the Middle East, and Castro’s search for new allies there after the demise of the Soviet Union. But much of it seemed like a retro Cold War fantasy, unrelated to what was happening in the streets. Salas Romer seemed literally above it all, sequestered in his air conditioned aerie, with pictures of himself on horseback on the walls, perhaps imagining what might have been, or what may someday be for his son, whom he described as having more charisma that he did. Perhaps I’d have found more substantive opposition to Chavez inside the U.S. embassy.
So I left Venezuela extremely impressed by the Bolivarian Revolution and with the strong hope that it may succeed. It is indeed a process, still far from achieving its goals. But the effort and the optimism of many people I met in many places could make it happen. Formidable obstacles remain. Because this is a peaceful revolution, none of the traditional political structures have been dismantled. So the Bolivarian Revolutionary Mayor Chavez and his community councils co-exist in what must be an awkward relationship with the old Carora City Council. Are the landlords and the oligarchs just going to stand by and put up with all these changes? How will old and new be reconciled? Only time will tell.
None of what I saw in Venezuela appears in U.S. media. Are there no reporters who could take a hard look at Venezuela and tell us what’s really going on there? It’s a big story, an important story, about a country trying to remake itself into a more equitable, more rational society while much of the world is blowing each other to bits. The lack of substantive coverage about Venezuela allows a vacuum where the false and outrageous charges of the Bush administration about conditions there go unchallenged.
Those Bush lies have serious consequences for regional stability and U.S. taxpayers, just as they did in Iraq. The U.S. government wastes millions of our dollars every year to fund opposition groups in Venezuela, with the purpose of deposing Chavez, legally or not. When religious bigot Pat Robertson advocated assassinating Chavez, the Bush-Cheney junta failed to condemn his remarks.
In 2005 a right-wing Washington think tank – Center for Security Policy – published an accusatory, threatening document entitled: “What to do about Venezuela?” The answer, then as now, is keep your bloody hands off the place. The participatory democracy taking root in Venezuela is a beautiful, fragile experiment that may serve as an inspiration for other countries in Latin America and beyond. The United States must not, as one general said about Vietnam, “destroy the country in order to save it.”
*
My heartfelt thanks to Lisa Sullivan and to the Marin Interfaith Task Force on the Americas, who made my time in Venezuela fruitful and fascinating.
To help prepare for my trip, I watched the DVD documentary, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” Two Irish filmmakers went to have a look at the Chavez regime in 2002, for the same reason I did, to try to find the reality behind all the hype. Kim Bartley and Donnacha O Briain [sic] had been filming Hugo Chavez for months when the April 11 coup ousted him from power. Remarkably, they kept filming as Chavez was arrested and taken away and the grinning coup plotters announced their plans for a new order. They began by dissolving the legislature and the courts.
Even more remarkably, within two days Hugo Chavez was back in power. His loyal soldiers and palace guards had rebelled against their own mutinous commanders and helped him return to office. Huge crowds of demonstrators had surrounded the palace, demanding the return of their elected president. The pretenders fled, except for the formerly jubilant would-be Attorney General, now sulking in a palace cell. It astonished me that Chavez had even survived the coup, let alone reversed it.
The United States does not come off well in the film. Most other nations condemned the illegal usurpation of power. A televised clip shows Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer recognizing the new government, though their time in office had the lifespan of a mayfly. Fleischer said: “We know the action encouraged by the Chavez government provoked this crisis.” But before rumors of the truth had achieved coherence, Bush announced his support for the new regime. Hmm.
One of the first people I met in Caracas clarified some of the mystery about that coup and that lightning U.S. response. Eva Golinger is a lawyer and a citizen of both the United States and Venezuela. She outlined the U.S. government complicity in the coup. They knew about it beforehand and supplied financial support to the coup plotters, before and after the event. Golinger wrote a book about the U.S. involvement, The Chavez Code, based on documents obtained under the Freedom of Information act. She also wrote a sequel, Bush Versus Chavez, about the ongoing U.S. efforts since the coup to destabilize the Chavez regime, up to the present moment.
U.S. intervention in Venezuelan internal affairs is nothing new, as Golinger points out. The CIA has long influenced policy in the country. The United States military traditionally enjoyed a cozy “integration” with the Venezuelan armed forces. Chavez ended that “special” military relationship. He also stopped the enrollment of Venezuelan military officers in the notorious Fort Benning-based School of the Americas, the alma mater of many Latin American tyrants and torturers. But the United States continues to fund anti-Chavez organizations in Venezuela through the National Endowment for Democracy. The U.S. also rewards the dissident media. Almost all private media in Venezuela – and their wealthy owners – vocally oppose the Chavez presidency. Private media also colluded in the 2002 coup, blacking out some televised events and distorting others to help get rid of Chavez.
The U.S. obsession with Venezuela is not mysterious. Venezuela has one of the largest oil reserves of any country in the world and has long been a major supplier of oil to the United States, a close reliable source. But when Bush and Cheney came into office, they began to doubt the reliability of Chavez. He supplied oil to Castro’s Cuba. He revived the semi-moribund Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and helped raise the price of a barrel from nine dollars to nearly thirty. And he visited countries the U.S. found objectionable, like Libya, Iraq and Iran.
Bush and company accused Chavez of consorting with terrorists, though Iraq and Iran were among the founding members of OPEC in 1960 along with Venezuela. Chavez was merely continuing longstanding relations, not suddenly acquiring sinister new friends. And raising the price of oil was good for the Venezuelan economy. But if Chavez is not conspiring with enemies of the United States to mess with the U.S. oil supply or support anti-U.S. terror, then what exactly is his game?
Over at the Ministry of Foreign Relations, officials in the North America section met these kinds of questions with a mixture of smiles and consternation. They find the paranoid suspicions of the Bush government absurd. But the United States is the eight hundred pound gorilla. You don’t want it rolling over on you. These diplomats had to take seriously the U.S. charges of a Chavez conspiracy against the Yankee Empire. First of all, as these young officials pointed out, Chavez did not nationalize the Venezuelan oil industry. That happened in 1976. He simply reorganized it for greater efficiency, getting rid of unnecessary administrators and creating a system of greater accountability to eliminate waste and increase profits.
The new 1999 constitution, approved by 70 percent of Venezuelans, puts the national oil industry firmly under government control. This needed to be stated explicitly because the president who preceded Chavez wanted to privatize oil. The idea now is to accumulate as much capital as possible in the treasury in order to create a new model of government, dedicated to resolve the 80 to 85 percent poverty rate that has persisted in Venezuela for many generations, despite the country’s oil wealth.
Chavez was indeed preparing for war: on poverty, hunger, illiteracy and disease. The oil Venezuela sends to Cuba yields a huge medical return. About fifteen thousand Cuban doctors are working in Venezuela, many in farflung villages and neighborhood clinics where no medical help has ever been seen before. Venezuelan students are enrolling in Cuban medical schools in growing numbers.
That national health initiative is one of twenty-one “missions” aimed at transforming the lives of impoverished Venezuelans. Basic food subsidies help meet the nutritional needs of the poor. And after two years of an all-out assault on illiteracy, UNESCO declared Venezuela free of that disability, according to my Ministry sources. That gives greater meaning to the government pledge of a free education for all Venezuelans. A 21-year-old woman named Luz Marina, whom I met later in a small northwestern Venezuela town, said she was among the first graduates of a high school in her town that did not exist ten years ago. And she claimed that the rate of university entrance for her classmates was 98 percent.
For Luz Marina, the best part of what the Chavez government calls its “Bolivarian Revolution,” is that women, children and poor country folk, who have traditionally been powerless and voiceless in society, are now included in the vision of a society for all. So the idealistic sentiments I first heard at the Ministry in Caracas – where of course I expected the official line – I heard repeated in one form or another in urban barrios and rural communities wherever I traveled.
Driving out of Caracas I was struck by several things that I would notice over and over again. One was the sheer amount of construction going on. Many buildings are going up and many new roads are being built. Venezuelan highways are modern and well-marked. But they are overwhelmed with traffic. Venezuelans enjoy the cheapest gas in the world, thanks to their government’s subsidy. The price at the pump is about twelve cents a gallon. Talk about reverse sticker shock! The good news: it’s cheap and easy to get around by car and truck in Venezuela. The bad news: everybody’s doing it. Rickety gas-guzzling dinosaurs that would have been junked in the U.S. years or decades ago share the road with mega-trucks and busses old and new. Why take public transport when you can blast around this huge gorgeous country on great roads for almost nothing? The traffic nightmare poses a challenge for Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution.
At the city hall in Carora, a city of just over one hundred thousand in the northwest state of Lara, Mayor Julio Chavez, no relation to the president, explained the revolutionary new system of government that Carora pioneered and the rest of Venezuela has now begun to emulate. Instead of a traditional top-down system, the decision-making power comes from the bottom up, through community councils. Every neighborhood, rural and urban, in the extended municipality, can form these councils. More than five hundred exist in the Carora area alone and roughly 28,000 nationwide.
“One of my objectives from Day One was how to reduce the role of the mayor,” said Mayor Chavez. Funds are made available for local projects from the national and state governments. “I as mayor do not decide how to use these funds. One hundred percent of these budget allocations are decided by community councils.” The mayor must submit his budget requests to the councils.” One road-paving project he asked for was delayed by other priorities the council deemed more urgent.
Through an assembly made up of representatives from the community councils, a new municipal constitution was written, placing the power for political decisions with the grassroots members from all social segments. This is part of what Carora assembly president Miguel Medina called “the new geometry of power.” Another city official said, “We want the people to be the government, not to receive government decisions.” Community Councils set up committees to deal with the issues most important to them, such as building, education, health or culture. All this sounded as idealistic as Frank Capra’s movie, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. And as revolutionary as the musings of those who wrote the U.S. Constitution.
The “process” many Venezuelans refer to, of transforming a nearly feudal state into a truly egalitarian participatory democracy, has energized much of the country with real hope. There is a sense of fluidity and improvisation in Venezuela right now, as barrio by barrio and city by city an entire population struggles to reinvent itself. In the urban neighborhood of Carolita, part of Carora, Community Council President Maricrespo, 66, spoke excitedly of “building this future for our children and grandchildren.” She spoke of fixing up dilapidated homes and building new ones. We met at the local school, which is no longer locked when the children leave and segregated from the community, but has become a hub of activity, hosting cultural programs, a clinic run by a Cuban doctor and a community bank, as well as the community council meetings.
“Our whole municipality has become a school…” said Maricrespo. Besides the ubiquitous building in Venezuela, many citizens did seem to be dedicating their new literacy skills to study. Luz Marina later confirmed that a lot of people were studying these days, especially the women. Out of town, the tiny desert community of San Felix is home to only one hundred fifteen people, but their community council has fifteen committees. The people there raise goats and run a tile-making cooperative, producing roof tiles from mud and water and a large kiln. They had not had any government projects here in forty years. Their first council priority was to build a fence around their school to keep the goats out. San Felix one of several cooperatives I visited, including a cacao co-op on the Caribbean coast that had begun to process the raw materials into chocolate themselves, instead of sending it abroad for others to make the biggest profit.
Creating worker-owned and -run cooperatives of all sorts – bakeries, coffee plantations, farms, factories – is another goal of the Bolivarian Revolution. There is no hierarchy and no boss. Everyone receives the same wage and participates in the business decisions. Like any other business, co-ops that are well managed succeed. Those that aren’t fail. My Venezuelan youth guru, Luz Marina, said the hope was “to incorporate young people intro cooperatives, not into exploitative jobs for Pepsi and McDonald’s. We want to be truly free, not slaves of the transnational corporations, where a few get rich and the majority go nowhere.”
Well…
Okay, by now the infectious enthusiasm of the co-op workers and the giddy hopefulness of the many community council members I’d met, sampling the heady wine of participatory democracy for the first time, had really gotten to me. This so-called Bolivarian Revolution, funded by oil revenue that had suddenly gone bananas, seemed to have real legs. A spirit of hope and possibility appeared to be percolating in the most obscure corners of the republic. I needed to sober up from the intoxicating visions my travels had conjured. It was time to find the biggest naysayer possible, the pragmatic skeptic who could throw cold water on this fevered dream of an inclusive society dedicated to the common good, someone who could reveal the raw, cynical truth behind these naïve longings. And who better to rain on the Chavez parade than the man he beat for the presidency back in 1998?
Henrique Salas Romer, who ran unsuccessfully against Chavez, is the former two-term governor of the prosperous state of Carabobo. He was succeeded in this office by his son, who has served four terms. Officially retired from business and from politics, Salas Romer still maintains a suite of offices in downtown Valencia, another city undergoing a building boom. Born in Venezuela, he attended high school and university (Yale) in the United States. He speaks impeccable English.
Salas Romer began his reality check rather strangely, by comparing Venezuela to Iraq. The two countries were “very similar” in terms of their populations, poverty levels and oil reserves, he said. “Venezuela is a major buyer of arms from Russia,” he added. Then he revealed that he was going to speak at a conference in the United States on the topic: “Hugo Chavez: A Daring Pawn in the New Cold War.” Salas Romer flashed a smile he appears to have worn since his first campaign for governor. My mind raced. Was this man suggesting that the U.S. should invade Venezuela as it had invaded Iraq? Whose “pawn” was Chavez? What “cold war” did he mean?
As I took dutiful, disbelieving notes, this man who might have been president said a number of things I am not sure whether he actually believed, or simply wanted me to believe. For instance, he said that in Venezuela struggles between rich and poor, black and white and left and right simply don’t exist. Now, I haven’t been to every country in the world, but I’ve been to quite a few. And if he’s right, Venezuela would be the only country I’ve ever heard of without class, racial or political tensions.
His more outrageous assertions aside, Salas Romer said the richest people in Venezuela are backing Chavez now, though they won’t admit it, because they are making so much money. Chavez “is no longer the real ruler here, no longer in control of decisions. Despite his control of government institutions, Chavez is a weak ruler…” He said if the price of oil drops, Chavez will not be able to keep the armed forces, the business interests and the poor on his side. About the 2012 elections, in which Chavez is not eligible to run, Salas Romer said: “I don’t think he gets there.” Considering the events of 2002, and the ongoing U.S. machinations, this is a fairly ominous remark.
He spoke at length about the strengthening alliance between Venezuela and the Middle East, and Castro’s search for new allies there after the demise of the Soviet Union. But much of it seemed like a retro Cold War fantasy, unrelated to what was happening in the streets. Salas Romer seemed literally above it all, sequestered in his air conditioned aerie, with pictures of himself on horseback on the walls, perhaps imagining what might have been, or what may someday be for his son, whom he described as having more charisma that he did. Perhaps I’d have found more substantive opposition to Chavez inside the U.S. embassy.
So I left Venezuela extremely impressed by the Bolivarian Revolution and with the strong hope that it may succeed. It is indeed a process, still far from achieving its goals. But the effort and the optimism of many people I met in many places could make it happen. Formidable obstacles remain. Because this is a peaceful revolution, none of the traditional political structures have been dismantled. So the Bolivarian Revolutionary Mayor Chavez and his community councils co-exist in what must be an awkward relationship with the old Carora City Council. Are the landlords and the oligarchs just going to stand by and put up with all these changes? How will old and new be reconciled? Only time will tell.
None of what I saw in Venezuela appears in U.S. media. Are there no reporters who could take a hard look at Venezuela and tell us what’s really going on there? It’s a big story, an important story, about a country trying to remake itself into a more equitable, more rational society while much of the world is blowing each other to bits. The lack of substantive coverage about Venezuela allows a vacuum where the false and outrageous charges of the Bush administration about conditions there go unchallenged.
Those Bush lies have serious consequences for regional stability and U.S. taxpayers, just as they did in Iraq. The U.S. government wastes millions of our dollars every year to fund opposition groups in Venezuela, with the purpose of deposing Chavez, legally or not. When religious bigot Pat Robertson advocated assassinating Chavez, the Bush-Cheney junta failed to condemn his remarks.
In 2005 a right-wing Washington think tank – Center for Security Policy – published an accusatory, threatening document entitled: “What to do about Venezuela?” The answer, then as now, is keep your bloody hands off the place. The participatory democracy taking root in Venezuela is a beautiful, fragile experiment that may serve as an inspiration for other countries in Latin America and beyond. The United States must not, as one general said about Vietnam, “destroy the country in order to save it.”
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My heartfelt thanks to Lisa Sullivan and to the Marin Interfaith Task Force on the Americas, who made my time in Venezuela fruitful and fascinating.
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