:: Latin America

Historically Latin America has been of great importance to the United States on numerous counts: the region has in the past, provided the US with a trade surplus; its outflows of licit and ill-begotten funds to US banks, numbers annually in the tens of billions; the US has been, up to recently, the major trading partner in the region; Latin America has provided a lucrative outlet for US buyouts of oil, telecoms, banking and related strategic mining companies during the golden age of imperial pillage (1975 – 1999).

The unimpeded growth of Euro-American capitalism following the collapse of Soviet and European communism, the conversion of China and Indochina to state capitalism, and the rise of US backed, free market military dictatorships in Latin America give new impetus to Western empire building, labeled “globalization”.

The electoral victory of center left regimes in at least three Latin American countries, and the search for a new ideological identity to justify their rule, led ideologues and the incumbent presidents to embrace the notion that they represent a new 21st century version of socialism (21cs).

Throughout the world there is an upsurge of regional, ‘sub- national' movements whose demands range from greater ‘autonomy' to complete independence. Many analysts have commented on the apparent paradox of increasing global integration of economies and the increasing fragmentation of nation-states.

The current world recession and the potential recovery of some countries reveals all the weaknesses of the traditional “export market” – free trade - comparative advantage doctrines. Nowhere is this more evident than in the recent experience of Latin America.

The most striking aspect of the prolonged and deepening world recession/depression is the relative and absolute passivity of the working and middle class in the face of massive job losses, big cuts in wages, health care and pension payments and mounting housing foreclosures.

The situation of the energy sector in Latin America is determined by both internal and external correlations of political forces, the level of class organization and power within the ruling and the working classes, the condition of the world economy and the strength and weakness of US imperialism.

In early June, Peruvian President Alan García, an ally of US President Barack Obama, ordered armored personnel carriers, helicopter gun-ships and hundreds of heavily armed troops to assault and disperse a peaceful, legal protest organized by members of Peru's Amazonian indigenous communities protesting the entry of foreign multinational mining companies on their traditional homelands.

A serious discussion of the perspectives for socialism in Latin America today requires several levels of analysis, moving from world economic conditions, to US-Latin American relations, to their specific impact on Latin America.

On February 15, 2009, Venezuelan voters will go to the polls in order to vote on a constitutional referendum, which would allow for the indefinite re-election of the President.

The pro-Chavez United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) won 72% of the governorships in the November 23, 2008 elections and 58% of the popular vote, dumbfounding the predictions of most of the pro-capitalist pollsters and the vast majority of the mass media who favored the opposition.

The Venezuelan gubernatorial and municipal elections, taking place on November 23 of this year, are the most polarized and significant in the country's history.

Latin America is entering a period of profound economic recession, financial crises, collapsing stock market quotations, prices, deep devaluation of its currencies, growing unemployment, declining revenues and the prospect of a prolonged socio-economic recession.

Today the acid test for all democrats in North and South America is the issue of the military occupation of Haiti ,the economic pillage and denial of elementary political and human rights of the Haitian people.

Human Rights Watch, a US-based group claiming to be a non-governmental organization, but which is in fact funded by government-linked quasi-private foundations and a Congressional funded political propaganda organization, the National Endowment for Democracy, has issued a report “A Decade Under Chavez: Political Intolerance and Lost Opportunities for Advancing Human Rights in Venezuela” (9/21/2008 hrw.org).

Bolivian fascists have seized power in five of the richest states in Bolivia, forcefully ousting all national officials, murdering, injuring and assaulting leaders, activists and voters who have backed the national government – with total impunity.

Hernando Calvo Ospina's recent book, Colombia, Laboratorio de Embrujos: Democracia y Terrorismo de Estado is the most important study of Colombian politics in recent decades and essential reading in light of the Western media's and politicians' celebration of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe.

I have been a supporter of the Cuban Revolution for exactly fifty years and recognize Fidel Castro as one of the great revolutionary leaders of our time. But I have never been an uncritical apologist: On several crucial occasions I have expressed my disagreements in print, in public and in discussions with Cuban leaders, writers and militants.

When President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela called on the FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, to end their armed struggle and declared the ‘guerrilla war is history', he was following a path taken by many revolutionary leaders in the past.

Latin American development presents us with a rich array of paradoxes, which befuddle the predictions, prescriptions, and commentaries of writers and academics from the right and left. Abrupt changes and shifts in the political correlation of forces is matched by striking structural continuities.

Pedro Antonio Marin, better know as Manuel Marulanda and ‘Tiro Fijo (Sure Shot)', was the leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-Peoples Army (FARC-EP). He was without a doubt the greatest revolutionary peasant leader in the history of the Americas.

I have known and advised three left wing president including President Papandreou (Greece 1981-85), President Salvador Allende of Chile (1970-73) and President Hugo Chavez.