CORREA WINS IN ECUADOR; CHAVEZ WINS AGAIN IN VENEZUELA; THE ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT


La Guardia, Isla de Margarita, Venezuela, Friday, December 08, 2006
Correa wins in Ecuador

At the first round of presidential voting in October, progressive candidate Rafael Correa was running second behind the right-wing banana millionaire, Álvaro Noboa. After another six weeks of campaigning, Noboa’s lead had been slashed and the Ecuadorian people had swept Correa into office for four years with a roughly twenty point lead.

You get the man, you get the plan! Not only did Ecuadorians pick a new face, - Correa is as handsome and photogenic a politician in his forties as you could hope for -, the voters had also chosen a programme as well.

Noboa was all pro-American and neo-liberal policies. But Correa caught public awareness and discontent with the old order of things. He took a leaf from Chavez’s book promising to re-negotiate the royalty agreements with international oil (Ecuador is now a major oil exporter), swearing to use the new money to end poverty, malnutrition and ignorance in Ecuador, to invest in the country’s infrastructure and to realign Ecuador’s international relations away from a focus on the U.S.A. and towards regional autonomy even to the point of free trade with neighbouring countries and possibly even political union.

To increase the ready cash available for his spending plans he will be telling the IMF that Ecuador intends to restructure the repayment schedule on the enormous amounts of foreign debt. He plans to reorient Ecuador’s foreign policy to a “Bolivarian” one, i.e. abandonment of the anyway now moribund talks with Washington on “Free Trade for the Americas” (FTAA) in favour of trade liberalisation with Venezuela, Columbia, Bolivia, Peru, Brazil, Argentina and perhaps other Latin Americans as well. If Washington does not get this message (and it may well not do so since it is in a quagmire in the Middle East and anyway continues to view Latin America with the same level of ignorance and arrogance that it showed in Iraq) Washington should finally get it when Correa closes the US airbase base in Ecuador, the only US base in South America and an affront to many Ecuadorians.

I wrote an article about the Ecuadorian federal election. It was published last week by “Independent Voice” in Canada and can be read in the December web edition at www.independentvoice.ca. I may be allowed to pander to my vanity and also post it here on this blogsite in the next few days.

Chavez wins again in Venezuela

The US State Department was and is warning Americans not to visit Venezuela. Washington, clearly, does not like Hugo Chavez and misses no opportunity to paint Chavez as a “communist”, a “Castro-ist” and a “dictator”. Donald Rumsfeld even once likened Chavez to Hitler. Chavez has been at the receiving end of massive US-sponsored efforts to overthrow him since he was popularly elected (the evidence for this comes from US Government sources and not just from Chavez’s published opinions).

After being elected in 1998, Chavez called a constitutional convention which recommended allowing 6-year presidential terms instead of 4 and permitting a president to have two successive terms of office (up till then this was not possible). The new constitution was put to a referendum and popularly approved. His opponents instituted a recall referendum with the active support of the U.S.A.: Chavez won it handily. Last Sunday, December 3, Chavez easily beat his neo-liberal opponent, the current governor of one of the states, by 62% to 38%. Voting turnout was about 75% of the eligible electors. The E.U. election-observers certified the voting as without incident and perfectly fair. So Chavez was very popularly elected in a completely democratic way and with full knowledge of his programmes and intentions. George Bush surely can’t say that!

The election campaign was noisy around here in La Guardia. As in Ecuador, the campaign seemed to be based on who had the best election song and who could play it the loudest from the back of trucks. The “Chavistas” had it hands down even on Margarita, which in the election did not vote a majority to him (they did this time; in fact, every constituency but one voted for Chavez this time round, up from his results in the recall referendum). There were regular weekend car and truck cavalcades and voter rallies but no “demonstrations”, no violence, no hassling of foreigners, no damage to property. There was not even a particularly noticeable police or Army presence in the streets. You see far, far greater armed presence in the U.S.A. these days! The opposition put on some large rallies in the capital, Caracas and put up a clear political agenda. But in the end Rosales, in his speech conceding the election to Chavez, stated that the elections were fair and that the opposition would accept the voice of the people. (The opposition boycotted the last election so they could claim that Chavez was a dictator. It only gave Chavez the ability to do anything he wanted, of course: the voters were apparently very happy with the results and happy to be rid of the corrupt congressional politicians for a while.)

So, Chavez has another six years. He has already gone through the negotiating trauma with international oil (they now pay normal international rates rather than the 1 percent they previously paid!). Already the constitutional reform has taken place. Already negotiations with the IMF have been completed. Already 56% of the population has free healthcare and 40% are receiving food support. Already a school reform is underway. He has already created a lot of immediate low-level jobs for the masses of unemployed poor (the beach and streets where we live, for example, are now regularly being cleaned up of trash by people wearing red Chavez t-shirts). The Venezuelan economy is booming right now although much of that has to do with the high oil prices. Venezuelan government bonds are hot items. The voters keep electing him with ever-increasing absolute majorities.

One of the criticisms that Rosales raised against Chavez is that he is has not planned for long-term structural changes in the economy for the day when oil prices fall again or oil runs out. He is right, of course. Chavez’s planning is based on very conservative oil prices in the future so he is not over-leveraging the country. Chavez felt however he needed to do something quickly for the main areas of need. He by-passed the civil service and started is misiones (missions) directing money quickly at needy areas (health, education, work programmes, etc.). Second, most developing countries, Venezuela amongst them, hardly have the managerial ability to make long-term structural-development changes. That will all have to be worked out going forward and will doubtless require help from outside. It would be good if the U.S.A. and the E.U., who have vilified or disqualified Chavez, would sit back and rethink their attitudes and offer to help.

The anti-war movement

I posted this blog on 10 November 2005. I thought it might be interesting still.

QUOTE

Many of us foreigners and many intelligent Americans as well have been appalled at what the United States has been doing in the Middle East and elsewhere since George W. Bush became the U.S. president in 2000. There are many Americans who oppose the government’s policies but no effective opposition. Why is this? Of course, when both houses of Congress are in neo-con Republican hands and the mass media are unlikely to criticise a neo-con, it might be understandable. I have often thought too, that with the ending of national service (the draft) by the Nixon Government, middle-class boys have no fear of being killed or maimed and their parents have therefore little reason even to pay attention to what their government is doing in far-away places like Iraq.

I like to read Empire Notes (www.empirenotes.org). The author is part of the anti-war movement and has expressed some ideas that I like in the following:

Radio Commentary -- Polls and the Antiwar Movement
The latest Gallup poll shows 55% saying Bush's leadership has been a failure and 54% that the war on Iraq was a mistake, down from slightly higher peaks earlier. Polls consistently show 60-70% of Americans in favor of withdrawing some troops, with support for immediate withdrawal about half that.So why does there seem to be an almost total lack of serious opposition to the war among mainstream circles (as opposed to criticism of the way it's being handled, which is universal)?An article by Harriet Erskine in the Spring 1970 issue of Public Opinion Quarterly, recently referenced by the History News Network, may help shed some light on that. Writing near the height of the Vietnam War, she looked at records of public support for World Wars I and II and the Korean War, as evidenced through polls of those times.Her conclusion was that World War II was the only one that saw consistently high levels of support from the American people during its prosecution. Perhaps most relevant, although just initially only 20% said the Korean war was a mistake, by February of 1951, only eight months into the war, 50% thought it was a mistake. Later, as truce talks stretched out and the war bogged down into a highly destructive stalemate, that number went into the high 50 percents, even over 60% in one poll.As Erskine pointed out at the time, only months after the highly successful Moratorium events of Fall 1969 and months before the resurgence of protest over the bombing of Cambodia, these disapproval numbers for the Korean War were higher than any seen by the end of 1969 for the Vietnam War.Do you recall learning in school of how public opposition forced the United States to end the Korean War and how the war transformed the nation's consciousness, creating a Korea syndrome that kept it out of major interventions for decades?No?I think the lesson is clear and can be encapsulated in two points. First, "opposition" in public opinion, as expressed in answers to poll questions, means very little; what matters is political opposition, things that genuinely make it more difficult for those in power to continue on their course, or that make alternatives seem preferable.Second, closely linked to the first, is the source of and reasons for opposition. That first poll, shortly after the Korean War began, asked people if it was a mistake for the United States to "defend Korea." Throughout the horrors of U.S. bombardment of North Korea, which made the bombing of Vietnam seem light by comparison, the mounting numbers who opposed it still viewed it as the defense of Korea – as do the vast majority today.We defended Korea from the Koreans, as we later defended South Vietnam from what Adlai Stevenson termed "internal aggression" by the people of South Vietnam. And yet, for a variety of reasons, that story broke down and, by the early 70's, almost nobody believed it. So complete was the breakdown that it took a 20-year propaganda campaign to rewrite the story of the Vietnam War, starting with Reagan and a spate of Hollywood movies and ending when John Kerry reported for duty at the Democratic Convention last year. Even the seemingly overwhelmingly successful first Gulf War and a spate of supposedly humanitarian interventions in the 90's were not enough to completely rewrite the story.There is no doubt that the vastly greater commitment and perseverance of the Vietnam antiwar movement as compared with the current one had a great deal to do with the immediate threat to activist students posed by the draft, something that is certainly not going to happen again. But it is equally true that much of that fervor came from two other sources – horror at what was being done and belief that society could be dramatically transformed.Today, right now, in our movement, we have some of that first component, though I would argue not enough, and we have little or none of the second. The Vietnam movement managed to help spread the first widely through society, though the majority clearly rejected the second. Our antiwar movement has largely failed even to spread the first. By so failing, we not only have a harder time ending the war, we lose the potential to use the horror and the failure of the war as a starting point for transforming society.