The Fanonite

Autonomy proponents in Santa Cruz, Bolivia claim victory as opposition boycotts referendum.

More here

Autonomy referendum pits rich oligarchs in Santa Cruz against poor indigenous majority in highlands

The Real News Network analyst Pepe Escobar says the autonomy referendum in the rich lowland province of Santa Cruz on Sunday is unconstitutional. Escobar says “it’s a dagger in the heart of South American integration. It is a classic battle between a rich white minority and a poor indigenous majority, and its not surprising which side the US government is on.”

More here

Noam Chomsky interviewed by Michael Shank.

Michael Shank: In December 2007, seven South American countries officially launched the Bank of the South in response to growing opposition to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other International Financial Institutions. How important is this shift and will it spur other responses in the developing world? Will it at some point completely undermine the reach of the World Bank and the IMF?

Noam Chomsky: I think it’s very important, especially because, contrary to the impression often held here, the biggest country Brazil is supporting it. The U.S. propaganda, western propaganda, is trying to establish a divide between the good left and the bad left. The good left, like Lula in Brazil, are governments they would’ve overthrown by force 40 years ago. But now that’s their hope, one of their saviors. But the divide is pretty artificial. Sure, they’re different. Lula isn’t Chavez. But they get along very well, they cooperate. And they are cooperating on the Bank of the South.

The Bank of the South could turn out to be a viable institution. There are plenty of problems in the region. But one of the striking things that’s been happening in South America for quite a few years now is that they are beginning to overcome for the first time, since the Spanish invasion, the conflicts among the countries and the separation of the countries. It was a very disintegrated continent. If you look at transportation systems they don’t have much to do with each other. They’re mostly oriented toward the imperial power that was dominant. So you send out resources, you send out capital, the rich tiny elite have their chateaus on the Riviera, and that sort of thing. But they have not much to do with each other.

Read the rest of this entry »

Globalization and terror. The two often go hand in hand. Here my friend toni solo looks at Euro-American efforts to derail the possibility of an emerging alternative.

Efforts by the Bush regime to destabilize and overthrow governments resisting corporate globalization in Latin America, and everywhere else too, will persist whoever wins the next US Presidential election — assuming no attack is launched on Iran and the election does in fact take place. The monolithic plutocracy that runs the United States is supported in those destabilization efforts by the governments of their European and Pacific allies. Analysing a list of the world’s top corporations, leaders in their respective industries, explains why this should be so.(1).

One finds that companies from the United States and its European and Pacific allies account for well over 80% of the total. One can also note that the Latin American, African and Asian corporations in the list are all State owned companies, with the exception of China Mobile and Brazil’s CVRD mining company (privatized from 1997 onwards). The consolidation of monopoly corporate capitalism over the last decade through mergers and acquisitions is certain to continue. So the only chance for less developed countries to defend the rights and needs of their impoverished majorities against the ravages of monster multinational companies is to integrate and to invest in their future together.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s guest editorial is an important piece on Venezuela by Alberto Cruz of CEPRID. As I have always argued, Venezuela’s greater success has been its foreign policy. (Also check out my friend Teresa’s excellent update on the Bolivian right-wing media’s campaign against Evo Morales)

The Venezuelan political process, that people there describe as Bolivarian, is systematically demonized not just by the bourgeois media but also by some supposed progressives. They tend to focus more on the figure of Chavez than on what that deepening social change means for the great mass of people marginalised and oppressed since independence from the Spanish colonial centre so as to exalt the political, economic — and white — elite. The world is full of cases of dubious leadership — not so Chavez, consistently re-elected and supported by a broad swathe of the Venezuelan people — so the great imperial power and its allies are by no means upset when suspicions are thrown up about the Venezuelan President.

So what is going on then? Well, in Venezuela what is happening is nothing less than the hard expression of a class struggle where although, for the moment, the correlation of forces does not clearly favour the people, at least they enjoy a self-evident equilibrium with the oligarchy. And this struggle transcends the country itself, something capitalists all over the world have grasped, especially opinion makers writing out of preconceived prejudices and stereotypes and often from a clear class position stemming from neo-colonialist habits of mind.

Read the rest of this entry »

 From Venezuela to Bolivia, the victory denied Che is becoming a reality 40 years after his passing.

LA HIGUERA, Bolivia — It was a long fight, but the Cubans have finally conquered this forlorn Andean hamlet, four decades after Ernesto “Che” Guevara was executed in the adobe schoolhouse here.

Cuban physicians provide healthcare, Cuban educators oversee literacy classes, and the Cuban-donated library features Che-as-superhero comic books. A monumental bust of the beret-topped revolutionary who helped Fidel Castro seize power in Cuba dominates the central plaza.

“Great men like Che never die,” said Ubanis Ramirez, one of hundreds of Cuban doctors and teachers imported by leftist Bolivian President Evo Morales, whose office features a likeness of Guevara crafted from coca leaves. “His lesson is with us always.”

Sympathizers from across the globe will make the trek to this remote corner of Bolivia this week to mark the 40th anniversary of the capture and killing of Guevara, militant leftist icon and global brand, the radical chic face adorning countless T-shirts, posters, album covers and tattoos.

Today, the ideological legacy of this peripatetic militant may loom larger than ever in Latin America, abetted by the election of a “Pink Tide” of leftist governments from Nicaragua to Argentina. Socialism is in, the Cubans are on the march, and Che is the defiant embodiment of it all.

To his critics, Guevara was a trigger-happy megalomaniac whose bloody example led thousands to their deaths in futile uprisings that only hardened military repression from Guatemala to Chile.

But to the legions of devotees who subscribe to his personality cult, Guevara is forever the doomed idealist, the poetry- loving guerrillero and “most complete human being of our age,” in the words of Jean-Paul Sartre.

“Our side is moving forward, and we don’t have to go to the mountains and fight like Che did anymore,” said Osvaldo Peredo, who heads Bolivia’s Che Guevara Foundation and lost two brothers in guerrilla wars, one fighting alongside Che.

Cuban doctors and petro- dollars from Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela are the new arsenal in a nonviolent insurrection that Guevara, committed to armed struggle, could never have envisioned.

“Finally, Che’s dream is coming true,” said former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Casteñeda, a Guevara biographer who casts Che more as wayward fanatic than inspired visionary. “Cuba’s export of revolution is finally succeeding in many countries in Latin America, thanks to Chavez and his oil.”

A legendary guerrilla leader in the Cuban Revolution that ousted dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959, Guevara stumbled in his 1960s struggles. Virtually exiled from Cuba after differing with Castro and Cuba’s Soviet patrons, he suffered an ignominious defeat alongside anti-U.S. rebels in Congo before meeting his demise in a secluded Bolivian canyon at the end of a quixotic 11-month campaign.

But, 40 years later, Guevara has scored big in the contested battleground of memory, emerging as a kind of secular saint, freeze-framed at age 39 between the Summer of Love and the abyss of 1968. Hollywood sees box-office cachet in Che: Director Steven Soderbergh is filming a new biopic starring Che look-alike Benicio Del Toro.

“Today Che is associated in the collective conscience with values — his ethics, his principles, his willingness to lose his life for an ideal,” biographer Pacho O’Donnell wrote recently in the Argentine weekly Veintitres.

Guevara, a physician with no formal military training, was also something else, critics say: prolific executioner, dogmatic totalitarian and co-designer of the Cuban police state and indoctrination apparatus.

His detractors contend that his short life may appear to his admirers more James Dean than Chairman Mao, but his politics were more Comrade Stalin than Mahatma Gandhi.

“What’s left is a kind of idealistic, romantic aura,” said Jorge Lanata, an Argentine journalist who has written about Guevara. “It’s more culture than political.”

Guevara, keen to ignite “many Vietnams,” chose impoverished Bolivia in part because of its proximity to his Argentine homeland, where he hoped to jump-start an insurgency. Today’s Cuban volunteers in Bolivia live by the credo “Seremos como El Che! (We will be like Che!)” the communist island’s signature chant.

“All my life we communist pioneers pledged to be like Che,” said Jose Valledaris, 45, a Cuban engineer who was watering shrubbery inside the Guevara mausoleum at a former military airstrip in nearby Vallegrande, where the bodies of Guevara and six fellow combatants were dumped in a ditch 40 years ago and buried. “Now I’m here, in the footsteps of Che.”

A renovated laundry shack behind the nearby Señor de Malta Hospital has become one of the most venerated stops on the “Che tour.” It was here that the triumphant Bolivian military displayed Guevara’s body as a war trophy atop a concrete washtub, and Freddy Alborta photographed the Christ-like figure of the pale, posthumous Che, his eyes wide open — an iconic image distributed worldwide. Che pilgrims scrawl memorial graffiti on every available cranny.

“Man is nothing more than his ideas,” someone wrote in French.

Another added in Italian: “He who speaks to the heart never dies.”

Someone else in Spanish: “We await your orders, comandante!“

A decade ago, remains apparently belonging to the rebel were disinterred and taken to Cuba, although questions remain about whether the bones were Guevara’s.

In an ironic twist, the press has reported that among the Bolivians benefiting from eye surgery by Cuban doctors is none other than Mario Teran, the Bolivian soldier who executed Guevara.

“Four decades after Mario Teran attempted to destroy a dream and an idea, Che returns to win yet another battle,” reported Granma, the Cuban Communist Party newspaper. “Now an old man, Señor Teran can, once again, appreciate the colors of the sky and the forest, enjoy the smiles of his grandchildren and watch football games.”

Here in La Higuera, Guevara’s image is as ubiquitous as in any college dormitory. Impoverished villagers hawk Che memorabilia and seek tips via guide services or the repetition of dubious Che anecdotes.

Around here, there’s no business like Che business.

“I don’t know much about Che, but he attracts tourists, and that’s a good thing,” said Limbert Arteaga, 29, mayor of the nearby town of Pucara, who was overseeing a health fair featuring tuberculosis screening by Cuban physicians. “I know he was a good man. He tried to help others.”

Some villagers are even willing, for a modest gratuity, to display their home altars to Santo Ernesto, a sight that probably would have appalled Guevara, an atheist.

“We ask Che that nothing bad will happen to us,” said Manuel Cortez, 62, who lives a few yards from the schoolhouse where Guevara was killed, now a museum. “We have faith in Che.”

Today’s Che lovefest is a marked departure from the state of affairs 40 years ago, when villagers expressed suspicion and mystification. In his diary of the Bolivian campaign, Guevara writes that he was despondent about the hostility of the locals he had come to liberate, so distinct from the peasants of Cuba’s Sierra Maestra.

“The campesino masses don’t help us in anything and instead they betray us,” an exasperated Guevara wrote a week before he was killed.

By the time he and the bedraggled remnants of his guerrilla band arrived here, hundreds of commandos trained by U.S. Green Berets were hot on his trail. He was captured Oct. 8 after being wounded in the foot during a firefight in a dense ravine known as El Churo, about two miles away. He weighed about 100 pounds after months of privations. A bullet had disabled his carbine and punched a hole in his trademark beret.

“He was completely demoralized, nothing like the photo of the heroic guerrilla,” said retired Bolivian Gen. Gary Prado, the captain of the squad that captured Guevara. “He was dying of hunger, dirty, disheveled. It made you sorry to see him.”

Contradicting the notion that Guevara vowed never to be captured alive, Prado says the rebel willingly surrendered, seeming relieved. “I’m Che Guevara and I’m worth more to you alive than dead,” he told his captors, according to Prado.

He was shackled and marched to the schoolhouse.

The next day, President Rene Barrientos, a U.S.-trained general, decided Guevara would be summarily executed. The volunteer warrant officer, Teran, fired the fatal shots sometime after 1 p.m., according to accounts.

Guevara’s widely reported but probably apocryphal last words: “Fire, coward, it is a man you are going to kill!”

The autopsy cited eight bullet wounds, but none to the face that would soon be flashed across the globe.

Ernesto Guevara, saint to some, devil to others, bohemian, adventurer and implacable foe of capitalism, was dead. And the myth of the immortal Che was born.