Page 2 of 2 THE ROVING
EYE Bush, OPEC and Chavez of
Arabia By Pepe Escobar
Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) or
bilateral free-trade agreements (FTAs).
Chavez enjoys ample to total support from
Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Chile,
Nicaragua, Cuba and now Ecuador. Correa's recent
electoral victory in Ecuador rang the same themes:
against corrupt elites; against US-imposed FTAs;
in favor of "socialism for the 21st century" (a
key Chavez theme); and
crucially a desire for
Ecuador - the fifth-largest oil producer in Latin
America, and major exporter of crude to the US -
to get back into OPEC, which the Andean country
had quit in 1992. This would mean, of course, more
support for Chavez within OPEC.
The only
US military (air) base in South America happens to
be in Manta, Ecuador. It's part of Plan Colombia
and is supposed to be active in the "war on drugs"
(Plan Colombia is actually more worried about
Chavismo than drugs). The lease expires in 2009.
Correa - a sharp, US-educated economist - said,
"We won't close the base in 2009, but the United
States would have to allow us to have an
Ecuadorian base in Miami in return."
It's the water, stupid Meanwhile, Lula's strategic advisers have
recommended Brazil to propose in 2007 a South
American version of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization - as a dissuasive shield against,
what else, US designs especially on water. No
wonder: South America holds the largest
fresh-water reserves on the planet, a lot of oil,
and an extremely rich biodiversity. Chavez had
already proposed a similar plan last July, but
only including the five Mercosur member countries.
South America's NATO would inevitably be on a
collision course with the US national-security
doctrine.
To help implement its agenda,
the US still relies on the School of the Americas
- an assassins' den that since 1946 has trained
more than 61,000 Latin American soldiers in
everything from counterinsurgency to, yes, torture
techniques. Everyone in South America remembers
the infamous Operation Condor, which was in
essence a Pinochet-controlled assassination
machine of intellectuals and leftists.
In
2001 the Pentagon decided to re-christen the
assassins' den as a Western Hemisphere Institute
for Security Cooperation, but this is the same old
counterinsurgency university. Brazil and
Venezuela, years ago, and later Argentina, Uruguay
and Bolivia, stopped sending "students", but
scores of tiny Central American states still do.
As much as all over Latin America people
have not forgotten the rape-and-pillage US
strategy of supporting the Pinochets of the world,
the Arab nation as a whole won't forget what
interests lie behind Bush's Greater Middle East.
It's easy to see why a Sunni Arab Iraqi or
a Lebanese Shi'ite is seduced by Chavez of Arabia.
It's a question of true sovereignty and
self-determination - and of course it has to do
with oil. Venezuela has become a tremendous
"threat" to US strategic interests in essence
because Chavez nationalized oil giant PDVSA
(Petroleos de Venezuela SA).
The logic of
getting a better deal for the key national
resource and as a direct consequence improving the
quality of living of the most deprived sectors of
the population by investing in health and
education is simply anathema to the Washington
Consensus: a few years ago this was a "communist"
thing, now it's branded by cowed corporate media
as "populism", a "destabilizing influence" or,
even worse, "totalitarianism".
Meet
'totalitarianism' For an alleged communist
hell on Earth, Venezuela is quite well behaved.
Economic fundamentals and the right to private
property remain intact. Chavez knows he needs
taxes to finance social projects. In 2005,
Venezuelan gross domestic product grew a whopping
9.4% - and the same may happen in 2006. Bilateral
trade with the US was $40 billion in 2005 and
growing. The - white, plutocratic, "I love Miami"
- elite represents less than 5% of the population.
They don't have many reasons to complain. So it's
back to racism: after all, Chavez is a mestizo.
Wealth redistribution is working. The
minimum wage rose no less than 327% under Chavez,
and is now about $250 a month (Brazil's, for
instance, when readjusted in 2007, will be less
than $180). When Chavez came to power in 1999,
55.4% of Venezuelans were considered poor; now
they are 39.7%. More people are working in the
formal economy than in the informal. And in
human-development terms, according to the United
Nations Development Program, Venezuela is climbing
the charts and is now in 72nd place.
One
of the key - and very complex - objectives of the
Bolivarian Revolution is to organize an
alternative production model. Chavez started by
solidifying some state enterprises in strategic
areas - in oil, electricity, telecom,
transportation, food distribution. At the same
time he has been turbocharging so-called "basic
enterprises", cooperatives and the so-called
"social production enterprises". The Bolivarian
Revolution is all about the building up of a more
egalitarian society.
We gotta take him
out Late last month, respected
Venezuelan-American lawyer Eva Golinger published
a remarkable book - Bush vs Chavez: La guerra
de Washington contra Venezuela, ie
"Washington's War Against Venezuela" (Monte Avila
Editores, Caracas) - detailing the extent of the
"strategic threat" posed to the US by the
Bolivarian Revolution. For the moment the book has
not yet been translated into English.
Golinger tells how the US is financing no
fewer than 132 Venezuelan opposition groups; how
the US is exercising "diplomatic terrorism" - via
threat of sanctions - for non-cooperation in the
"war on drugs", for instance, which is not true;
and for non-cooperation in the "war on terror",
which has led to Venezuela being forbidden to buy
weapons made in the US or incorporating any
US-made parts.
Surrealistically, Venezuela
has been lumped with other "terrorist" nations
(according to Washington thinking) even though it
was never officially depicted as a state
sponsoring terrorism. According to Golinger, "They
did that because they wouldn't be able to get away
with classifying Venezuela as a terrorist nation
within the world community - just yet."
Harassment is non-stop. The current
Republican-dominated US Congress has issued a
report charging that Chavez smuggles Islamic
terrorists from the Middle East to Margarita
Island, trains them in Spanish, gives them a new
ID and sends them to Mexico, where they cross the
border and enter the US presumably to concoct a
new version of the attacks of September 11, 2001.
And most of all there's the extensive
military front. Evidence of US Central
Intelligence Agency involvement in the April 2002
coup against Chavez can be found on the Internet.
Nowadays, Golinger details what the US military
base in Curacao is up to: the relentless pressure
on the Curacao government for a strategic refinery
leased to Venezuela to be sold to the US, the
possibility of a US missile attack on Venezuela
staged from Curacao, the secret US base being
built in Colombia near the Venezuelan border for
conducting espionage, the nefarious underground
activities of a heady mix of Colombian
paramilitaries and US Special Forces, attempts to
push FARC (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia) into Venezuela so the mix can wreak
havoc inside the country, and a detailed analysis
of Plan Balboa, which is in fact the Pentagon
invasion-of-Venezuela plan.
According to
Golinger, "More than having an invasion, they're
going to try and assassinate Chavez. And that's
where the paramilitaries come in, because that's
what their mission is. A paramilitary leader I
spoke to told me that. They're already here. There
are more than 3,000 in the region of Caracas
alone."
No wonder Washington is so
furious. South America is now the only region in
the world where progressive ideas shine - and have
a chance to multiply. The United States, the
European Union and East Asia are narcotized by
neo-liberalism - and immersed in an intellectual
void. Russia offers Gazprom plus truculence. The
Middle East is being devastated by the Bush-Cheney
system. Afghanistan is a black void sucking
Pakistan once again. And the "international
community" still does not give a damn about
Africa.
South America is bristling with
hope - with ideas of unity in diversity, a
collective "Enough!" to foreign exploitation, a
belief that another world system is possible.
Plutocracies are weary. The Pentagon may be
proceeding "full speed ahead" with plans of
militarization and all-out intervention in South
America. But Chavez of Arabia won't go quietly -
and sooner rather than later other kindred spirits
are inevitably bound to rise all over the global
South.
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