[Reader-list] The importance of Hugo Chavez

[avinash kumar]

An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20040824/d9b06957/attachment.html 
-------------- next part --------------
  
 
 
 Dick Cheney, Hugo Chavez and Bill Clinton's Band:
Why Venezuela has Voted Again for Their 'Negro e Indio' President

Greg Palast

Monday, August 16, 2004 -- There's so much BS and baloney thrown
around about Venezuela that I may be violating some rule of US
journalism by providing some facts. Let's begin with this: 77% of
Venezuela's farmland is owned by 3% of the population, the
'hacendados.'

I met one of these farmlords in Caracas at an anti-Chavez protest
march. Oddest demonstration I've ever seen: frosted blondes in high
heels clutching designer bags, screeching, "Chavez - dic-ta-dor!" The
plantation owner griped about the "socialismo" of Chavez, then jumped
into his Jaguar convertible.

That week, Chavez himself handed me a copy of the "socialist"
manifesto that so rattled the man in the Jag. It was a new law passed
by Venezuela's Congress which gave land to the landless. The Chavez
law transferred only fields from the giant haciendas which had been
left unused and abandoned.

This land reform, by the way, was promoted to Venezuela in the 1960s
by that Lefty radical, John F. Kennedy. Venezuela's dictator of the
time agreed to hand out land, but forgot to give peasants title to
their property.

But Chavez won't forget, because the mirror reminds him. What the
affable president sees in his reflection, beyond the ribbons of
office, is a "negro e indio" -- a "Black and Indian" man, dark as a
cola nut, same as the landless and, until now, the hopeless. For the
first time in Venezuela's history, the 80% Black-Indian population
elected a man with skin darker than the man in the Jaguar.

So why, with a huge majority of the electorate behind him, twice in
elections and today with a nearly two-to-one landslide victory in a
recall referendum, is Hugo Chavez in hot water with our
democracy-promoting White House?

Maybe it's the oil. Lots of it. Chavez sits atop a reserve of crude
that rivals Iraq's. And it's not his presidency of Venezuela that
drives the White House bananas, it was his presidency of the
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC. While in control
of the OPEC secretariat, Chavez cut a deal with our maximum leader of
the time, Bill Clinton, on the price of oil. It was a 'Goldilocks'
plan. The price would not be too low, not too high; just right, kept
between $20 and $30 a barrel.

But Dick Cheney does not like Clinton nor Chavez nor their band. To
him, the oil industry's (and Saudi Arabia's) freedom to set oil prices
is as sacred as freedom of speech is to the ACLU. I got this info, by
the way, from three top oil industry lobbyists.

Why should Chavez worry about what Dick thinks? Because, said one of
the oil men, the Veep in his Bunker, not the pretzel-chewer in the
White House, "runs energy policy in the United States."

And what seems to have gotten our Veep's knickers in a twist is not
the price of oil, but who keeps the loot from the current band-busting
spurt in prices. Chavez had his Congress pass another oil law, the
"Law of Hydrocarbons," which changes the split. Right now, the oil
majors - like PhillipsConoco - keep 84% of the proceeds of the sale of
Venezuela oil; the nation gets only 16%.

Chavez wanted to double his Treasury's take to 30%. And for good
reason. Landless, hungry peasants have, over decades, drifted into
Caracas and other cities, building million-person ghettos of cardboard
shacks and open sewers. Chavez promised to do something about that.

And he did. "Chavez gives them bread and bricks," one Venezuelan TV
reporter told me. The blonde TV newscaster, in the middle of a
publicity shoot, said the words "pan y ladrillos" with disdain, making
it clear that she never touched bricks and certainly never waited in a
bread line.

But to feed and house the darker folk in those bread and brick lines,
Chavez would need funds, and the 16% slice of the oil pie wouldn't do
it. So the President of Venezuela demanded 30%, leaving Big Oil only
70%. Suddenly, Bill Clinton's ally in Caracas became Mr. Cheney's --
and therefore, Mr. Bush's -- enemy.

So began the Bush-Cheney campaign to "Floridate" the will of the
Venezuela electorate. It didn't matter that Chavez had twice won
election. Winning most of the votes, said a White House spokesman, did
not make Chavez' government "legitimate." Hmmm. Secret contracts were
awarded by our Homeland Security spooks to steal official Venezuela
voter lists. Cash passed discreetly from the US taxpayer, via the
so-called 'Endowment for Democracy,' to the Chavez-haters running
today's "recall" election.

A brilliant campaign of placing stories about Chavez' supposed
unpopularity and "dictatorial" manner seized US news and op-ed pages,
ranging from the San Francisco Chronicle to the New York Times.

But some facts just can't be smothered in propaganda ink. While George
Bush can appoint the government of Iraq and call it "sovereign," the
government of Venezuela is appointed by its people. And the fact is
that most people in this slum-choked land don't drive Jaguars or have
their hair tinted in Miami. Most look in the mirror and see someone
"negro e indio," as dark as their President Hugo.

The official CIA handbook on Venezuela says that half the nation's
farmers own only 1% of the land. They are the lucky ones, as more
peasants owned nothing. That is, until their man Chavez took office.
Even under Chavez, land redistribution remains more a promise than an
accomplishment. But today, the landless and homeless voted their
hopes, knowing that their man may not, against the armed axis of local
oligarchs and Dick Cheney, succeed for them. But they are convinced he
would never forget them.

And that's a fact.

Greg Palast's reports from Venezuela for BBC Television's Newsnight
and the Guardian papers of Britain earned a California State
University Journalism School "Project Censored" award for 2002. View
photos and Palast's reports on Venezuela at www.GregPalast.com.

==========================================================
==========================================================


The Importance of Hugo Chávez: Why He Crushed the Oligarchs

By Tariq Ali 

08/17/08 -- "ICH" The turn-out in Venezuela last Sunday was huge. 94.9
percent of the electorate voted in the recall referendum. Venezuela,
under its new Constitution, permitted the right of the citizens to
recall a President before s/he had completed their term of office. No
Western democracy enshrines this right in a written or unwritten
constitution. Chavez' victory will have repercussions beyond the
borders of Venezuela. It is a triumph of the poor against the rich and
it is a lesson that Lula in Brazil and Kirchner in Argentina should
study closely. It was Fidel Castro, not Carter, whose advice to go
ahead with the referendum was crucial. Chavez put his trust in the
people by empowering them and they responded generously. The
opposition will only discredit itself further by challenging the
results.

The Venezuelan oligarchs and their parties, who had opposed this
Constitution in a referendum (having earlier failed to topple Chavez
via a US-backed coup and an oil-strike led by a corrupt union
bureaucracy) now utilised it to try and get rid of the man who had
enhanced Venezuelan democracy. They failed. However loud their cries
(and those of their media apologists at home and abroad) of anguish,
in reality the whole country knows what happened. Chavez defeated his
opponents democratically and for the fourth time in a row. Democracy
in Venezuela, under the banner of the Bolivarian revolutionaries, has
broken through the corrupt two-party system favoured by the oligarchy
and its friends in the West. And this has happened despite the total
hostility of the privately owned media: the two daily newspapers,
Universal and Nacional as well as Gustavo Cisneros' TV channels and
CNN made no attempt to mask their crude support for the opposition.
Some foreign correspondents in Caracas have convinced themselves that
Chavez is an oppressive caudillo and they are desperate to translate
their own fantasies into reality.. They provide no evidence of
political prisoners, leave alone Guantanamo-style detentions or the
removal of TV executives and newspaper editors (which happened without
too much of a fuss in Blair's Britain).

A few weeks ago in Caracas I had a lengthy discussion with Chavez
ranging from Iraq to the most detailed minutiae of Venezuelan history
and politics and the Bolivarian programme. It became clear to me that
what Chavez is attempting is nothing more or less than the creation of
a radical, social-democracy in Venezuela that seeks to empower the
lowest strata of society. In these times of deregulation,
privatisation and the Anglo-Saxon model of wealth subsuming politics,
Chavez' aims are regarded as revolutionary, even though the measures
proposed are no different to those of the post-war Attlee government
in Britain. Some of the oil-wealth is being spent to educate and heal
the poor.

Just under a million children from the shanty-towns and the poorest
villages now obtain a free education; 1.2 million illiterate adults
have been taught to read and write; secondary education has been made
available to 250,000 children whose social status excluded them from
this privilege during the ancien regime; three new university campuses
were functioning by 2003 and six more are due to be completed by 2006.

As far as healthcare is concerned, the 10,000 Cuban doctors, who were
sent to help the country, have transformed the situation in the poor
districts, where 11,000 neighbourhood clinics have been established
and the health budget has tripled. Add to this the financial support
provided to small businesses, the new homes being built for the poor,
an Agrarian Reform Law that was enacted and pushed through despite the
resistance, legal and violent, by the landlords. By the end of last
year 2,262,467 hectares has been distributed to 116,899 families. The
reasons for Chavez' popularity become obvious. No previous regime had
even noticed the plight of the poor.

And one can't help but notice that it is not simply a division between
the wealthy and the poor, but also one of skin-colour. The Chavistas
tend to be dark-skinned, reflecting their slave and native ancestry.
The opposition is light-skinned and some of its more disgusting
supporters denounce Chavez as a black monkey. A puppet show to this
effect with a monkey playing Chavez was even organised at the US
Embassy in Caracas. But Colin Powell was not amused and the Ambassador
was compelled to issue an apology.

The bizarre argument advanced in a hostile editorial in The Economist
this week that all this was done to win votes is extraordinary. The
opposite is the case. The coverage of Venezuela in The Economist and
Financial Times has consisted of pro-oligarchy apologetics. Rarely
have reporters in the field responded so uncritically to the needs of
their proprietors.

The Bolivarians wanted power so that real reforms could be
implemented. All the oligarchs have to offer is more of the past and
the removal of Chavez.

It is ridiculous to suggest that Venezuela is on the brink of a
totalitarian tragedy. It is the opposition that has attempted to take
the country in that direction. The Bolivarians have been incredibly
restrained. When I asked Chavez to explain his own philosophy, he
replied:

'I don't believe in the dogmatic postulates of Marxist revolution. I
don't accept that we are living in a period of proletarian
revolutions. All that must be revised. Reality is telling us that
every day. Are we aiming in Venezuela today for the abolition of
private property or a classless society? I don't think so. But if I'm
told that because of that reality you can't do anything to help the
poor, the people who have made this country rich through their labour
and never forget that some of it was slave labour, then I say 'We part
company'. I will never accept that there can be no redistribution of
wealth in society. Our upper classes don't even like paying taxes.
That's one reason they hate me. We said 'You must pay your taxes'. I
believe it's better to die in battle, rather than hold aloft a very
revolutionary and very pure banner, and do nothing ... That position
often strikes me as very convenient, a good excuse ... Try and make
your revolution, go into combat, advance a little, even if it's only a
millimetre, in the right direction, instead of dreaming about
utopias.'

And that's why he won.

Tariq Ali's latest book, Bush in Babylon: The Re-colonisation of Iraq,
is published by Verso. He can be reached at: tariq.ali3 at btinternet.com