Bolivia’s Post-Referendum Conjuncture

By Jeffery R. Webber

“Summing up the aims of the new regime, Villarroel uttered his most memorable refrain: ‘We are not enemies of the rich, but we are better friends of the poor.’ This impossible pledge to favor the poor without estranging the rich – couched in a language of intimate ties – encapsulates the military populist’s ambitious but doomed reformism.” Thus writes historian Laura Gotkowitz of Colonel Gualberto Villarroel’s government in the early 1940s.

Villarroel was captured and hanged by protesters in the Plaza Murillo in La Paz, just outside the Presidential Palace, on July 14, 1946. International capital and the Stalinist Partido de la Izquierda Revolucionaria (Party of the Revolutionary Left, PIR) helped to channel these protests in a counter-revolutionary direction. The tin-mining and large-landowning oligarchy that had been threatened by the reforms of military populism in the post-Chaco War period of the late 1930s and early 1940s began its restoration after Villarroel’s lynching.

The period between 1946 and 1952 – under the regimes of Enrique Hertzog (1947-1949), Mamerto Urriolagoitia (1949-1951), and Hugo Ballivián (1951-1952) – came to be known as the sexenio. The era was marked by authoritarianism and repression in the face of rural and urban unrest, constituting essentially the ultimate effort to restore the oligarchy before it was strongly challenged again in the 1952 National Revolution.

Between April 9 and 11, 1952, an insurrection led by Hernán Siles Zuazo of the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (Revolutionary Nationalist Movement, MNR) quickly escaped the boundaries of the basic coup envisioned by the MNR leadership.

Popular militias of factory workers and miners, and MNR rank-and-file militants and urban dwellers, overran most of the armed forces of the ancien regime, compelled swathes of low-ranking troops to switch sides, and sent many of the remaining hostile forces fleeing into exile. Chaco war veterans were armed with their twenty-year-old weapons, miners were equipped with the dynamite of their trade, and the mutinous troops who joined the revolutionary forces brought with them the arms of the state. The coercive apparatuses of the old order caved in almost completely under the weight of revolutionary advance.

The counter-revolutionary whip of two early coup attempts against the MNR regime, helped to spur radical direct actions on the part of the revolutionary Marxist tin miners and militant sectors of the indigenous peasantry. The Trotskyist Partido Obrero Revolucionario (Revolutionary Workers’ Party, POR) also made a crucial contribution to the radicalization of the revolution in this period. Between 1952 and 1956, the major reforms of the revolution had been won: the nationalization of three big mining companies and the establishment of the public mining company, COMIBOL; agrarian reform; and universal suffrage.

Tragically, however, those social forces seeking revolutionary socialist transformation lost out to the right-wing of the MNR’s populism over time. Beginning in 1956 the MNR introduced a reactionary economic stabilization plan backed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). With the help of the US imperialism, the MNR disarmed the popular militias and rebuilt a professional army.

In 1964, the right-wing took advantage of this scenario and René Barrientos came to power through a military coup. The reforms of the revolution were steadily reversed, and Bolivia entered a long and dark era of dictatorship until the return of electoral democracy in 1982 – achieved, again, by the militancy of indigenous peasants and revolutionary workers.

The Centre-Left government of the Unidad Democráticia Popular (Democratic Popular Unity, UDP), under the leadership of the same Hernán Siles Zuazo, came to office in 1982. Popular aspirations for moving from limited electoral democracy to socialist and indigenous-liberationist democracy had rarely been so stoked. Yet again, however, these aspirations were crushed and capitalist power restored in just three years. The Siles regime inherited from the antecedent right-wing dictatorships an enormous external debt, low growth rates, and uncontrollable inflation.

The UDP’s strategy of seeking compromise between the IMF, the US state, and important fractions of domestic capital proved disastrous. The UDP coalition itself fragmented, as the Central Obrera Boliviana (Bolivian Workers Central, COB) from the Left, and the Confederación de Empresarios Privados de Bolivia (Confederation of Private Entrepreneurs of Bolivia, CEPB) from the Right, organized opposition to the new governments in the streets. Benefiting from the chaos of hyperinflation, a new neoliberal right-wing coalition emerged and fundamentally transformed the political economy of the country when it came to power in 1985 – ironically, under the leadership of Paz Estenssoro and a revamped MNR.

The new MNR government ushered in the most severe neoliberal restructuring in Latin America since the policies of Pinochet’s regime of terror in neighbouring Chile in the mid-1970s. The popular capacities of the largely indigenous working classes and peasantry were hammered as domestic and international capital reasserted their authority in the country. For fifteen years (1985-2000), there was no serious opposition to this right-wing neoliberal assault.

The tide began to turn again in 2000 with the heroic Cochabamba Water War, which ignited five subsequent years of left-indigenous insurrection in the countryside and cityscapes of Bolivia. The insurrectionary cycle reached its apogee in the “Gas Wars” of 2003 and 2005, with their base in the western altiplano (high plateau) and the twin cities of El Alto and La Paz. Two neoliberal presidents – Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada and Carlos Mesa – were overthrown in less than two years.

Lacking a revolutionary party and project to overthrow the existing capitalist state and rebuild a new sovereign power rooted in the self-governance of the largely indigenous proletarian and indigenous majority, however, the insurrectionary cycle of 2000-2005 was channeled once again into the more domesticated terrain of electoral politics, in which the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Towards Socialism, MAS) party was the only viable option for voters who sought change of internally colonial race relations and the system of capitalist exploitation in the country.

It was in this context that Evo Morales won 54 percent of the vote in the elections of December 2005, despite the MAS’s absence in the streets during the 2003 revolts and support for the neoliberal government of Mesa during its first 14 months in office.

During the first two and a half years in office Morales’ administration has given concession after concession to the extremist autonomist Right of the media luna departments – Santa Cruz, Pando, Beni and Tarija, while offering only moderate reforms to its popular constituency. It has declared socialism to be an impossible aim in the country for 50 to 100 years, and instead seeks “Andean-Amazonian” capitalism that tries to reconcile the conflicting interests of imperialism and capital on one side and those of the impoverished peasantry and working classes on the other. The right-wing has used the space provided to it by the MAS to rearticulate its political bases from historic lows in 2003 and 2005, to a situation of dominance in half the country, including in the richest and most populated department of Santa Cruz.

This is the historical backdrop that needs to be taken into account when we consider the meaning of the referendum results of August 10, 2008. Bolivia is living once again through a critical moment.

It would be a tragedy of immense proportions for left-indigenous forces and the Morales government to follow the paths of Villarroel in the late 1940s, the MNR of the 1950s, and the UDP government of the early 1980s. Viewed together these experiences represent the signature failure of left-wing populism when it does not confront the economic and political power bases of the urban capitalist and landowning elite, even in situations when popular mobilization and radicalization was positioned to make these sorts of inroads on elite control of society.

The restoration of right-wing power – today articulated through a fiercely racist “autonomist” movement – must be stopped by a shift in the MAS’s moderate reformism to revolutionary audacity. This will depend on the self-organization of the popular classes and indigenous majority to mobilize strategically against imperialism and the media luna racist elite, and to force the Morales government off its track of conciliation with the far-Right.

It will also depend on the widest international anti-imperialist efforts to combat the financing and training of Bolivia’s autonomist Right, support for the Morales regime when it makes reforms that improve the livelihoods of the popular majority and their chances of pushing reforms further, and solidarity with the worker and peasant radicals that are seeking to transcend the strict parameters of the reformist government.

The August Referendum, 2008

Over 400 observers from the Organization of American States (OAS), the Latin American Council of Electoral Experts, and parliamentarians from Europe and Mercosur countries (Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay) were present for the recall referendums of 8 departmental (state) prefects (governors) and President Morales and Vice-President Álvaro García Linera on August 10. All stood to lose their jobs or reinforce their support base.

Referendum day went relatively smoothly, with the only reported irregularities being intimidation of voters in the media luna departments by the proto-fascist Unión Juveñil Cruceñista (Cruceño Youth Union, UJC) – the thuggish, racist, and pathetic shock troops of the autonomist Right. Turnout was an exceptional 83 percent.

Voters were asked to decide whether prefects and the President and Vice-President should continue in their positions. In the case of Morales and García Linera, voters were also asked whether they favoured the continuation of the government’s process of change. The results – based on the 96 percent of counted ballots available on August 14 – are depicted in Tables I and II.

Table I – President and Vice-President

Department %Vote in Favour Aug 08 / %Vote National Elections Dec 05

Chuquisaca 54 54
La Paz 83 67
Cochabamba 71 65
Oruro 83 63
Potosí 78 58
Tarija 50 32
Santa Cruz 38 33
Beni 42 17
Pando 53 21
Nationwide 68 54

Source: Derived from Bolivian Information Forum Bulletin, Special Edition, August 2008. p. 2.

Table II – Departmental Prefects (Governors)

Department %Vote 12/2005 %Vote in favour / against Aug 2008
La Paz 38 36 64
Cochabamba 48 35 65
Oruro 41 51 49
Potosí 41 79 21
Tarija 46 58 42
Santa Cruz 48 67 33
Beni 45 64 36
Pando 48 56 44

Source: Derived from Bolivian Information Forum Bulletin, Special Edition, August 2008. p. 2. The department of Chuquisaca had a new prefect voted in only last month, and thus did not hold a referendum.

Perhaps the most striking component of the results is that Morales and García Linera increased their nationwide support by 14 percent compared to the December 2005 elections. Their support increased in every department save Chuquisaca. On the question of prefects, too, right-wingers Manfred Reyes Villa of Cochabamba and José Luis Paredes of La Paz lost their posts – although the deeply undemocratic Reyes Villa initially said he would not step down. According to the referendum law, Morales will appoint interim prefects in these departments until new elections are scheduled.

Many on the Left have taken the results as a triumphant victory for the MAS’s “democratic and cultural” revolution. Speaking at the Presidential Palace – Palacio Quemado – on the evening of the vote, Morales suggested the large turnout was a “democratic festival of the Bolivian people.” He rejoiced in the “triumph of the democratic and cultural revolution of the Bolivian people. We dedicate this to all the revolutionaries of Latin America and the world.”

On the one hand, Morales stressed that his government had won a new mandate for moving forward: “What the Bolivian people expressed today with their vote is their support for this process of change. Therefore, I want to say to the Bolivian people, with much respect, that we are here to continue advancing the recovery of our natural resources, the consolidation of nationalization, and the recovery of our state enterprises.”

At the same time, he promised reconciliation with the opposition and the recognition of the media luna’s demands for departmental autonomy: “But I also want to say brothers and sisters, we are convinced that it is important to unite Bolivians, and the participation of the Bolivian people works to unite the different sectors of the countryside and the city, the east and the west. And that unity will be brought together in the New Political Constitution of the Bolivian State with the autonomous statutes.” He called on “patriotic business people” to help the government help the poor.

Even before the referendums were held, much media attention across Latin America was generated by a meeting in La Paz of the Red de redes en defensa de la humanidad (Network of Networks in Defense of Humanity), a group of famous artists and intellectuals from across the region, formed in Mexico in 2003. The group released a statement on July 29 denouncing the exploitation and oppression of the indigenous majority in Bolivia and expressing their solidarity with the MAS government:

“The groups that dominated Bolivia for decades, and that still maintain the major part of economic and media power, are the same groups that subjugate to poverty, underdevelopment and racial discrimination the vast majority of the population.” Referring to the large numbers of Bolivians who have emigrated to work outside the country, the declaration states: “Three million Bolivians have felt obliged to search for the minimal conditions for their survival in other countries. This tendency will only be reversed when the economic structure of the nation can recuperate from the injustice, inequality and exclusion it has suffered until now.” They came “to support the revolutionary and democratic process that the Bolivian people and the government of Evo Morales are pushing forward.”

While the denunciations made by artists and intellectuals of injustice, racism, and inequality are exemplary, the unadulterated celebration of the expected results of the referendum before, and the actual results after, seem to neglect some crucial components of what the referendum has meant.

The autonomist Right never expected to oust Morales and García Linera at the national level. Of course, Reyes Villa (Cochabamba) and Paredes (La Paz) did not want there to be a recall referendum in the first place. They objected when PODEMOS, the main right-wing party that holds a majority in the Senate, supported the referendum law because they expected to be kicked out by the voters who hated them.

But in terms of the short-term strategy of the autonomist Right, Reyes Villa and Paredes were relatively expendable. What counted was gaining the bourgeois respectability of legal recognition for departmental autonomy in the core media luna departments. The illegal and widely-condemned autonomy referendums in those departments earlier this year were insufficient for moving forward with the concrete enactment of “autonomy,” asserting departmental control over natural gas and agro-industrial wealth.

After these latest legal referendums, right-wing autonomists maintain their control of five of nine departments – Pando, Beni, Santa Cruz, Tarija, and Chuquisaca. What’s more, they have increased their popular support in these departments, and laid the basis for a destabilization campaign against the Morales government, the assertion of new controls over their department’s natural resources, and the beginnings of a campaign to prevent the MAS’s reelection in 2010 when its five year mandate ends – if toppling it through extra-parliamentary means proves impossible beforehand. This will reinforce “the de facto division of the country” and concede “to the subversive separatists a halo of legality they did not possess earlier.” To justify the illegal extension of departmental power over national wealth, the autonomists will invoke the referendum results of August.

The Morales government seems to be clinging to a naïve faith in the eastern lowland oligarchy’s openness to negotiation, and to playing by the rules of the game. Morales is seeking to combine some of the demands of the autonomists with its own objective of introducing the draft of a new Constitution – approved by the Constituent Assembly in Oruro some months ago – to a popular referendum. The Morales administration appears to be convinced that “Andean-Amazonian” capitalism is compatible with a softer version of bourgeois departmental autonomy in the media luna. But the right-wing autonomists want nothing more than to see this project of the MAS fail, for the government to stumble from one debacle to the next, and are showing clear signs of renewed destabilizing energies since the referendum.

The Belligerence of the Autonomists

In the immediate aftermath of the referendums Morales and García Linera invited the opposition prefects to La Paz to negotiate. But the Right has signaled that it is completely uninterested in achieving any national agreement or social pact with the MAS government.

Rubén Costas, the prefect of Santa Cruz, had this to say in the wake of his resounding victory: “This insensible, totalitarian, masista, incapable government has neglected the development of the people and only seeks to concentrate power and transform us into beggars before it.” Costas spoke of a “masista dictatorship” which has as its true intention the destruction of departmental autonomy. When denouncing the alleged role of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez in propping up the Morales regime, he indulged in the same racist epithets characteristic of the Venezuelan opposition: “No to the big foreign monkeys!”

After showing up at negotiations with the government on August 14 for a few hours, the five right-wing prefects of Chuquisaca, Pando, Beni, Tarija, and Santa Cruz, ceremoniously broke off talks in a ritual that had clearly been rehearsed. Gathering together in Santa Cruz immediately after the La Paz meeting with Morales, the prefects called for a civic strike and mobilizations for August 19; Chuquisaca’s prefect called for a new illegal referendum on departmental autonomy and insisted again that Sucre should be the new capital of the country; and all five departments declared that “national authorities” are unwelcome in their territory until various demands are met.

In the early evening of August 13, 2008, nine Molotov cocktails were hurled at the Santa Cruz offices of the indigenous rights organization, Centro de Estudios Jurídicos e Investigación Social (CEJIS). The police took over one hour to respond. This follows on earlier attacks on the offices in November 2007, and the general intimidation and frequent violence meted out against dissidents in the media luna departments.

Costas has interpreted the results of the referendum as a new mandate to drive forward the bourgeois autonomist agenda in Santa Cruz and the rest of the media luna. He has announced a host of illegal initiatives: the formation of a departmental Legislative Assembly; creation of a new departmental tax agency that will control and collect taxes on natural resources in the department; and the election of sub-governors within the department of Santa Cruz.

None of this should be surprising based on the seditious recent history of social forces behind autonomy. Working through their political party apparatus – PODEMOS -, departmental prefects and civic committees, and fascistic shock troops like the UJC (and similar groups recently formed in Sucre and Cochabamba), the Right repeatedly sought to destabilize the Constituent Assembly process and the Morales government throughout 2006 and 2007, to the point of raising the threat of civil war.

In the period immediately prior to the August referendums, a group of 200 autonomist reactionaries took over the Tarija airport, successfully impeding a planned meeting between the Presidents of Venezuela, Argentina and Bolivia. A tiny group of 35 autonomists were able to take over another airport. And a vehicle in which the Minister of the Presidency, Juan Ramón Quintana, was traveling, in the eastern lowland city of Trinidad, was shot at by autonomist forces.

The Morales government backed away from enforcing the law in each of these cases. Heinz Dieterich is correct to point out, “the counterrevolution has conquered ‘liberated zones’ in which the central government can’t enter.”

The Material Bases of Autonomy

A recent report on the relationship between natural gas and agro-industry and the autonomy conflicts in Bolivia argues that the concentration of land in Bolivia is the worst in the world after Chile. Much of the concentrated landholdings are located in Santa Cruz, the leading department in the autonomist movement. Branko Marinkovic, leader of the Pro-Santa Cruz Civic Committee, to take but one example, reportedly owns some 12,000 hectares (30,000 acres) of land.

Santa Cruz accounts for more than 2 million of Bolivia’s inhabitants, 33.7 percent of its territory, and 28.2 percent of its GDP. Tarija, with only 4.9 percent of Bolivia’s population, accounts for 60 percent of the country’s natural gas production and 85 percent of gas reserves. Santa Cruz follows with 22.3 percent of production. In excess of 82 percent of natural gas production, then, is located in these two media luna states.

Under the current complex arrangement of distributing hydrocarbon (natural gas and oil) revenue – split between the national government, the national gas and oil company YPFB, prefectures, municipalities, and universities – the four media luna departments receive 30 percent. Meanwhile, the other five departments (with 79 percent greater population than the media luna) receive only 19.7. This is on top of the fact that in 2007 the media luna departments had a per capita income of roughly 1.4 times that of the other five.

As Tom Lewis suggests, “The present political conjuncture in Bolivia is indeed contradictory. In principle, regional self-determination and the peoples’ right to immediately recall their elected officials are pillars of democracy. But in today’s Bolivia, ‘regional autonomy’ means handing over the country’s wealth – lock, stock and barrel – to the most reactionary sectors of the Bolivian ruling class and to continued exploitation by the transnational corporations.”

The Government’s Reformism: Soft on Oligarchs, Hard on Workers

The MAS bares considerable responsibility for allowing the autonomist Right to reconsolidate itself such as it has. In crafting the Constituent Assembly in 2006, the government distorted the revolutionary notion of the assembly envisioned by left-indigenous movements between 2000 and 2005, by seeking to make left-indigenous participation virtually impossible except through the party, and by accommodating the Right, whose strength at the time it vastly overestimated.

The government has sought continuously either to demobilize autonomous rural and urban protest – such as invasions and occupations of large landholdings by landless peasants in the east in 2006, and urban revolt against Reyes Villa in Cochabamba in late 2006 and early 2007 – or to strategically mobilize its bases against the media luna (especially the cocaleros of the Chapare region), but within very strict perimeters, predetermined by government elites.

The Federación de Juntas Vecinales de El Alto (Federation of United Neighbourhood Councils of El Alto, FEJUVE-El Alto), one of the most powerful organizations in the 2000-2005 wave of revolt, has sadly lost its independence from the government, and is unable to mobilize its bases effectively to advance the cause of the city’s indigenous informal proletarian masses.

When, in October 2006, the government faced mobilizations of state-employed miners in Huanuni, who were demanding nationalization and workers’ control, the miners were denounced by government officials as “Trotskyists” and “provocateurs.” Later that month when private cooperative mining interests, allied with transnational mining companies, attacked the state-employed miners, the government initially supported the cooperative miners rhetorically, and failed to send in the army to circumvent the bloodbath that followed.

Most recently, the same miners, with the support of the COB, struck against the MAS’s neoliberal proposal for a new pension law. The state’s coercive forces violently broke up a road blockade in the department of Oruro, leaving two miners dead and approximately 50 others wounded – some gravely. Contrast the treatment of the miners with that of the 200 proto-fascists who took over the Tarija airport.

The government has committed itself to fiscal austerity, low-inflationary growth and central bank independence. Its mining and labour market policies contain deep continuities with the antecedent neoliberal model. Its “agrarian reform” has failed to make consequential inroads on the landholdings of the agro-industrial elite of the eastern lowlands.

While the reforms in the hydrocarbons sector cannot be called nationalization, they have, in combination with elevated international prices, generated vast amounts of new revenue for the state. As a consequence of reforms of the hydrocarbons industry under the Mesa government in 2004, and subsequent reforms in 2006 by the Morales government, the Bolivian state has reaped impressive benefits from the high prices of natural gas: between 2004 and 2007 there was an increase of $1.3 billion, roughly 10 percent of the country’s GDP.

But a recent report by a Centre-Right Bolivian economist suggest that these revenues have not in fact been redirected to desperately needed social projects: “public investment has increased significantly over the past two years, rising from $629 million in 2005 to $1,103 million in 2007. Most of the new funds have been spent on roads and other infrastructure totaling close to 60 percent of total investments in 2007. Social investment has decreased over this period to less than 30 percent of total investments in 2007.”

The same report argues that the government’s 2006 National Development Plan (NDP) – the most significant document outlining its development strategy to date – is a “relatively eclectic development plan, one that borrows freely from dependency theory, indigenous multiculturalism, social-democratic protection policies and neoliberal monetary and exchange rate policy.”

On the reforms to the hydrocarbons industry, the report concludes that they cannot be considered nationalization “in the conventional or historical sense – via expropriation or changes in property regimes.” While revenues for the state have increased, real wages have declined when inflation is taken into account.

Revolutionary Advances or Populist Complacency?

The fact that Morales and García Linera enjoy 68 percent popular support is indeed an an opportunity to move forward with a more direct confrontation with the logic of capital. But the government needs to veer drastically away from conciliation with the eastern lowland oligarchy, and recognize that there are zero-sum class questions that cannot be avoided.

No justice for landless indigenous peasants will be forthcoming without expropriations of large landholdings. There cannot be justice for workers while real wages are falling and miners are being killed in the streets. There cannot be a “democratic and cultural revolution” in Bolivia so long as Guaraní indigenous people remain literally enslaved to masters in parts of the country. There cannot be authentic democracy without workers’ control and democratic social coordination of the economy.

All of this necessitates confronting capitalists and imperialism. While such a route has been made more difficult by the renewed legitimacy of the autonomist movement following the referendums, the rearticulation of the Right is not yet complete. “Autonomy” has only ever been an objective for the Right when it was too weak to conquer state power at the national level.

Today, neoliberalism is perceived as an entirely exhausted and illegitimate project by much of the Bolivian population. The autonomist Right, though, has no alternative to offer, other than autonomy and the destabilization of Morales’ “dictatorship.” There is still a window of opportunity through which a right-wing counterrevolution – along the lines of those that followed Villarroel in the 1940s, the MNR in the 1950s, and the UDP government of the early 1980s – can be circumvented.

Such a victory over the Right, such an advance toward socialism from below and indigenous liberation, will not be a consequence of the benevolent goodwill of leaders such as Evo Morales or Álvaro García Linera. It will depend on the rejuvenation of popular indigenous and left forces in rural and urban areas across Bolivia. The recent historical roots for such a project are to be found in the uprisings that galvanized the country between 2000 and 2005.

Recent statements by the COB during the most recent miners’ struggle against the pension law, and the factory workers, during a recent hunger strike in Cochabamba, suggests that the shadow cast by the revolts of October 2003 and May-June 2005 continues to resonate. On August 1, 2008 the executive committee of the COB released the following resolution: “The Bolivian Workers Central, loyal to its glorious history of revolutionary struggle, will never be a political instrument of the oligarchy and imperialism. Our iron commitment is with the defense of the democratic political process opened up in the heroic days of October 2004 [sic., 2003] and May-June 2005 with the blood of the Bolivian people and workers. We are convinced that the revolutionary, patriotic and popular forces have to unite in a single front to crush the oligarchy and imperialism, but not at the cost of giving up our social rights that have been curtailed by neoliberalism, much less of getting caught up in the political games [pongueaje politico] of this or any other government.” The documents calls on the unity of the workers and the Bolivian people, solidarity against the oligarchy and imperialism, and for driving out the right-wing of the MAS, led by Vice-President Álvaro García Linera.

Oscar Olivera, a former shoe-factory worker and the principal voice of the Cochabamba Water War, wrote this passage as part of an open letter during a recent collective hunger strike of factory workers in Cochabamba:

“The workers of yesterday and today should feel proud of our identity of being the producers of the material goods that we and others need to live, proud that we are those who use the strength of our arms and our minds and our hearts to transform mother earth’s, Pachamama’s, gifts into well-being. We have managed to resist. We have managed to subsist as an organized body. We have been able to salvage some of our rights, and we have passed into a long and dark tunnel in these years of invisibility and now we are disposed to making ourselves visible again by showing our indignation for our working conditions. We are also doing this because of the indifference of our current government, which for more than two years has ignored us. In spite of the fact that we workers struggled to put this government where it is today, our leaders have forgotten about us. We have been struggling in the streets since April for BREAD, WORK and HOUSING because they don’t listen to us, they don’t see us, they don’t feel us, because they no longer live like us, the simple working people who live from their own work and not others’ work. We ought to feel proud because with our struggle, we are pushing for the so-called ´process of change` to be not just a slogan but also a reality. The only way to change things, to change our working conditions and our lives is through unity, organization, mobilization, the recuperation of our memory, of our values. We must remember our fathers and grandfathers, our mothers and grandmothers, our older brothers and sisters and we must ask them face to face if what we are doing today is OK and what else we are missing in order for their inheritance to be preserved and augmented, so that the well-being of our sons and grandsons, and all of dignified life, forever preserved.”

Unfortunately, it would be wildly misleading to suggest that the COB’s resolution and Olivera’s statement reflect the leading ideas of left-indigenous sectors on the ground in Bolivia today. Rather there has been a demobilization of independent political action from below and an increasing reliance on elite level negotiations between the MAS leadership and the autonomist oligarchy – when the latter decides to participate.

Recent weeks in Latin America have seen the inauguration of Paraguay’s new President, Fernando Lugo, a former priest and liberation theologian. The Left has celebrated this addition to the “pink tide” in the region. Simultaneously, there have been wide-scale celebrations of Morales’ seeming victory through recall referendums.

But there is a danger of complacency in the air. The Economist, one of the most important mouthpieces of international capital, recently pointed out that for all the talk of a “pink tide” Mexico, Peru, and Colombia remain in the hands of the hard-Right, while the “Left” in Latin America includes many governments – such as Lula’s in Brazil – that have in practice reinforced neoliberal policies.

The London magazine concludes: “The past few years of rapid economic growth have helped incumbent governments of all sorts. The next period looks tougher. To make matters worse for the incumbents of the left, the two issues now uppermost in Latin American minds are inflation and crime, which both tend to move votes to the right. This gives the centre-right an opportunity to regain ground – though the conservatives will need to arm themselves with credible policies both to reduce poverty and to promote equality of opportunity.”

A cursory glance at the coverage in the main opposition papers in Bolivia and Venezuela in recent weeks suggest that the Right is counting on these opportunities.

Jeffery R. Webber is a Canadian socialist and close observer of Bolivian affairs. He is currently in Venezuela.

Gaza's shocking devastation- A Canadian Jew's visit to the territory left him ashamed by what he saw

August 14, 2008

Harry Shannon, Special to the Hamilton Spectator

Harry Shannon

The Hamilton Spectator
I had expected conditions in Gaza to be bad, but I was still shocked at the devastation when I went there in July.

Last month my companion and I entered Gaza at the Erez crossing through a modern building reminiscent of an airport terminal. After questioning by the Israeli border police, we left the building and had a kilometre walk to pick up transportation.

It was as if we had travelled to another planet. The sandy track is surrounded by the blown-up remnants of Gaza's former industrial district. Rubble stretching for hundreds of metres lines the route.

Even on the main road through Gaza, driving is a slalom course around potholes. The air reeks of burnt oil and stale food from exhaust fumes (cars rely on used cooking oil for fuel.)
There are not many cars on the road, anyway. Donkey carts are common.
Despite the 35 C temperatures, drivers don't use air conditioning in cars so they can save fuel.
Every so often, the smell of sewage fills the air. Lack of treatment facilities means that much of it is dumped raw into the Mediterranean.

We went first to a children's hospital on the edge of Gaza City. The hospital director and doctors described the conditions. Of 100 beds, 40 were occupied by children with bacterial meningitis, an extremely serious disease.

There's a shortage of basic medicines and supplies, even simple things such as alcohol swabs.
The hospital has three ventilators; only one is working. Israel won't let in spare parts for the others.

The working machine is for a "hopeless case" who can't be taken off. Meanwhile, patients who could benefit have no working machine.

There are many cases of malnutrition -- for example, children nearly a year old weighing 3 kilograms (6.6 pounds). Their families can't afford the special formula they need to improve.
Because of lack of equipment and qualified personnel, there is no radiotherapy and limited chemotherapy in Gaza.

Treatment for many conditions can only be obtained in Israel. Physicians for Human Rights -- Israel reports that, despite the ceasefire in the last few weeks, emergency medical cases are still refused entry into Israel, where they could have life-saving treatment. PHR has documented many cases of people dying before they are treated.
Indeed the proportion of patients denied exit from Gaza for treatment has increased since last year.

PHR will soon release a report on "medical extortion." Some sick Palestinians are interrogated at the Erez crossing and asked to become informants or collaborators as a condition of permission to leave Gaza for medical treatment.

After leaving the hospital, we travelled to the southern end of Gaza. We stopped at the Rafah crossing, the border with Egypt. It was closed, as it is most of the time.
A cluster of people were waiting, hoping against hope that they would be allowed to cross. Egypt is under pressure from both Israel and the U.S. not to open the border, and in any event, they do not want large numbers of refugees to flood in.

We drove into the city of Rafah, which has come under bombardment by the Israeli military. A huge number of buildings have been severely damaged or completely destroyed.
For street after street, barely any building is untouched. Makeshift shacks of corrugated metal and cloth sheets are now homes for those who have lost their housing.

We returned north along the coast road. The beauty of the sea view contrasted sharply with the rest of what we had seen.

After passing the Ash-Shati refugee camp, we went by modern hotels. They wait in vain for customers. The Gazan economy, devastated by Israel's border controls, continues to languish.
My sister and her husband are Orthodox Jews living near Tel Aviv. They are outraged at Israel's behaviour, especially the restrictions on sick patients needing to leave Gaza. My brother-in-law, a former chair of family medicine at Tel Aviv University and a specialist in medical ethics, has complained publicly about this.

As a Jew, I, too, am ashamed and disgusted at what is happening. Yes, Israel needs security. But what is happening goes far beyond security needs.

Israel's actions amount to collective punishment, forbidden under international law.
I am ashamed that the Harper government has tilted toward unconditional support for Israel against the Palestinians.

The current policy is unconscionable, as anyone who visits Gaza can see only too well.

Harry Shannon is a professor of clinical epidemiology and bio- statistics at McMaster University, and a member of Independent Jewish Voices. He lives in Dundas.

OCAP CHALLENGES INTERNATIONAL AWARD NOMINATION FOR TORONTO

The City of Toronto's 'Streets to Homes' program is a mechanism
for attacking the homeless and driving them from the centre of the the
City.  It dumps people without supports in outlying areas and is a
pretext for removing funding from the vital services the homeless need.

This program is up for one of two awards that will be announced on
October 6 and presented in front of the United Nations celebration of
World Habitat Day.

Below is the text of a letter that OCAP has sent to the
international body that hands out the awards.

World Habitat Awards
Building and Social Housing Foundation
Memorial Square
Coalville
Leicestershire
LE67 3TU
UNITED KINGDOM

Dear B.S.H.F.,

We have learned that the ?Streets to Homes? Program operated by
the City of Toronto has been entered and, indeed, is one of the
finalists for your annual awards.  This program may well be held up
before the United Nations celebration of World Habitat Day as a model
of ?practical and innovative solutions to current housing needs and
problems?.  Our organization has worked to challenge homelessness and
the devastation of services to homeless people in Toronto and we
writing to urge you in the strongest possible terms to avoid
legitimizing this City?s ongoing attack on poor and homeless people.
We say this because ?Streets to Homes? is a dishonest, pseudo
progressive component of and cover for this ugly agenda and it would
be massively unfortunate for your body to assist in the deception.

The underlying context for the situation I will lay before you is
a phenomenon of upscale urban redevelopment that, as an
internationally focused body, you will be well familiar with.  Capital
is reinvesting in the central part of this City following an earlier
process of ?suburbanization?.  Commercial and high end residential
development is sweeping into areas of the inner city where substantial
homeless populations and low income neighbourhoods have been
established.  Low income housing stock is being lost and homeless
people are being demonized and persecuted in the interests of this
process.  This is the economic and political backdrop to the
?innovative solution? called ?Streets to Homes? that you have already
held up before the world and that you may hand a prestigious award to.
Before you do, we want to provide you with a perspective that you
would not have heard from City officials or politicians that speaks to
the feelings of those who stand in the path of the redevelopment agenda.

We want to deal with ?Streets to Homes? from two standpoints.
Firstly, we will examine its glaring immediate shortcomings as a
program that claims to be improving the lot of those it brings under
its wing.  Secondly, we are going to deal with the bigger question of
the overall agenda of the City towards poor and homeless people and
show the role of ?Streets to Homes? in facilitating this.

So, to start with a look at the immediate track record of the
program on its own terms, you only have to scratch beneath the surface
to immediately find factors that sound a note of caution.  ?Streets to
Homes? may be putting people into housing units but on what basis?
The homeless population is, of course, concentrated in the central
part of the City but we can see that close to 40% of those being put
into units are finding themselves outside of that area.  Indeed, this
understates things because the available figures include the area of
East York as part of the central area.  This means that a definition
of central Toronto has been adopted that understates the degree to
which the program is pushing people from the actual core.  To be
placed, without living income, services and access to affordable
transportation in outlying areas of the City is a recipe for isolation
and inability to secure the necessities of life.  This factor makes it
less than surprising that, after the first seventeen months of
operating this program, 94 out of 269 people had lost their first
housing placement and fully11% of those placed had again become
homeless or their whereabouts were unknown.

We must also ask ourselves what kind of housing are people being
moved into?  If the City had to show that it was housing people in
units that could be deemed as adequate and dignified, it would have
much less to shout about in terms of the ?success? of ?Streets to
Homes?.  Many of the private sector units people are being placed in
are of the poorest quality.  In the case of placements in municipal
housing units, the situation is something of a scandal.  There are
over 70,000 people on the waiting list for public housing in Toronto
and many of them wait for over five years for a unit but ?Streets to
Homes? is able to move homeless people into a Toronto Community
Housing (TCH) unit if it is refused three times over by those on the
waiting list.  If a unit is rejected repeatedly by those who have
waited years for rent geared to income housing, you can be sure it is
woefully inadequate.

In the course of our advocacy work, our organization has visited
TCH buildings and units that people have been dumped in that would
shock anyone concerned with basic health and human dignity.  We have
seen people living in conditions of dilapidation and neglect in such
units that are so extreme that their health, safety and social
inclusion are more compromised than they would be in any homeless
shelter.

If people are being housed without proper regard for location,
ongoing support and any effective commitment to ensure the adequacy of
their living conditions, this only reflects something fundamental
about ?Streets to Homes?.  It has been developed not as a solution in
the lives of homeless people but as a ?solution? to the problem of
homelessness as it exists for those concerned with redevelopment and
commercial activity in this City.  The homeless are seen as a problem
to extent that they are visible, especially in the central area.  The
intention is to remove them from view so that they are not sleeping on
the streets or asking for change in areas where tourism and recreation
find overt destitution an impediment to their business operations.
That?s why so many are being placed in units outside of the core and
that?s why anything that can be referred to as ?housing? will do
regardless of what it represents in the life of the person dumped in
it.  This brings us to important consideration of where ?Streets to
Homes? fits into the overall agenda of the City around the homeless.

If this program were only a very shoddy and dishonest attempt to
put some people into housing units, we would regard a high profile
international award as ill deserved and laughable but our sense of
outrage would still not be as great as it is.  However, the most
harmful element of ?Streets to Homes? lies in its use as a cover for a
broader agenda to attack the homeless.  While a process of dubious
rehousing of some people proceeds, the City is closing beds within its
shelter system and defunding the services that the homeless need to
survive.  The new religion of ?housing the homeless? is utilized to
hide the worsening crisis on the streets.  Vital services for those
who access shelters or must sleep outside are being curtailed and all
complaints and concerns on this score are swept away by a chorus of
ill deserved triumphalism.  Yet, people are not able to access the
overcrowded shelters.  On the streets, they must deal with an
escalating and ugly drive by the police to push them out that proceeds
regardless of claims by the City that new, supportive approaches are
being adopted to assist those who sleep outside or who panhandle to
try and survive.  Last year, Toronto police issued over 10,000 tickets
to homeless people who were panhandling (a massive increase) and, as
this is written, the City of Toronto is revealing a plan to crack down
on poor people who collect and return empty bottles and discarded cans
in order to try and survive.

That you have already made ?Streets to Homes? a finalist in your
competition is desperately unfortunate.  As a program for housing
people it could better be called ?Streets to Slums?.  As a cover for
an agenda of social exclusion in the service of upscale urban
redevelopment, it is as dishonest as it is harmful.  In this most
wealthy City in one of the wealthiest countries on earth, the homeless
are being swept from view.  Should you reward and promote such an
outrage, it will be a shame on your organization and on World Habitat
Day that will cry out for public exposure.  Please consider this
letter and reject ?Streets to Homes? when you make your decision.


The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty

Iraq’s Nationalist Surge

By PATRICK COCKBURN

Barack Obama was lucky in the timing of his visit to Iraq. He arrived just after the Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki had rejected a new Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) institutionalizing the US occupation. The Iraqi government is vague about when it wants the final withdrawal of US combat troops, but its spokesman Ali al-Dabagh said that they should be gone by 2010. This is within the same time frame as Obama’s promise to withdraw one combat brigade a month over 16 months. Suddenly John McCain’s claim that US troops should stay on until some undefined victory sounded impractical and out of date.

The Iraqi government seemed almost surprised by its own decisiveness. It is by no means as confident as it pretends that it can survive without US backing, but it unexpectedly found itself riding a nationalist wave. The US occupation has always been unpopular among Iraqi Arabs since 2003. A poll by ABC News, the BBC and other television networks in February 2008 showed that 61 per cent of Iraqis say that the presence of US forces makes security worse in Iraq and 27 per cent say they improve it. The only large pocket of support for the US occupation is among the Kurds who are about a fifth of the population. Among the Iraqi Arabs, the other four fifths, some 96 per cent of the Sunni and 82 per cent of the Shia says they have no confidence in the US occupation forces. The unpopularity of the occupation has been the fundamental political fact in Iraq since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein five years ago. American and British politicians, diplomats and soldiers usually failed to realize this. In response to the poll figures, which year after year have shown that Iraqis hate the occupation, they produce self-serving explanations, saying that in private “ Iraqis will always say they do not want us to leave immediately.” They then go on to claim, in the face of all the evidence, that this means that Iraqis secretly do not want the occupation forces to depart. Self-deception like this means that American commentators often speak of the extent and timing of a US troop withdrawal as if it was a purely American decision, something to be decided by the outcome of the US presidential election. “Iraqis may be deeply divided along sectarian, ethnic, tribal, and factional lines,” writes Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and one of the few US commentators to have an understanding of Iraqi politics. He points out that Iraqis “have a national consciousness, a great deal of national pride, and they do not want to be ‘occupied’ or have a US presence any longer than necessary.” During the sectarian civil war between Sunni and Shia in Baghdad in 2006-7 Iraqi nationalism may have been at a low ebb, but as the sectarian slaughter ebbed it has begun to reassert itself.

There is an edgy mood both in the Iraqi government and among ordinary Iraqis. The number of dead bodies being picked up in the streets of Baghdad is well down on a year ago, but nobody knows how long this will last. “For the moment life is better but everybody has fear in their hearts,” one Shia woman told me. And the fall in violence is only in comparison to the previous bloodbath. Some 554 Iraqis were killed this June, which was 66 per cent lower than year earlier, but still makes Iraq the most dangerous country in the world. Alcohol is once again openly on sale, showing that the shopkeepers who sell it are no longer as terrified as they once were of Islamic militiamen. But Sunni and Shia no longer visit each other’s districts. Baghdad is still divided up into sectarian ghettoes sealed off from each other by high concrete walls. The 2.4 million refugees who fled to Syria and Jordan are not returning in large numbers. When they do it is often because residence visas have become more difficult to obtain in Damascus and Amman. The Shia, always the majority in Baghdad, seized most of the rest of the capital in a savage war waged by assassins and death squads two years ago. There is no sign of these demographic changes being reversed. When Sunni and Shia try to get their houses back in areas that have been purged by the other community, they are in immediate danger of being killed. When a husband and wife, both Shia, went to visit the house from which they had fled in the heavily Sunni al-Mekanik district of Dora in south Baghdad they were instantly shot dead and their driver beheaded. The militias may have left the streets, but they have not gone very far.

Visiting dignitaries to the Green Zone, be they George Bush, Tony Blair or Barack Obama, seldom realize the extent of the military operations required to protect them or the impact of these on Iraqis. Not surprisingly the visitors get an exaggerated impression of the progress towards normality in Baghdad. Last year US embassy employees in the heart of the Green Zone complained that they were ordered not to wear body armour and helmets if they were photographed or filmed standing beside John McCain because their attire might seem to contradict his claim that Baghdad was a safer place than was being reported. When Vice President Dick Cheney visited there was a ban in the Green Zone on sounding the siren which normally gives a few seconds warning of incoming rocket or mortar rounds. Cheney’s staffers thought the sirens’ menacing wail might suggest to American television viewers that all was not as well in Iraq as the vice president was claiming. In the case of Barack Obama’s visit on 21 July much of central Baghdad was closed down to guarantee his safety, deep though he was within the Green Zone. A friend called Gaylan had taken his car out to get its air conditioner fixed in the Karada district of east Baghdad when US troops stopped all traffic at 12.15pm. Caught in the torrid heat of the Iraqi summer, he and other drivers were not allowed to move again until six in the evening. “There were helicopters overhead to control the sky,” Gaylan said. “They blocked Abu Nawas Street opposite the Green Zone and searched the houses there. Then they moved to the Babylon hotel and took up positions on the rooftops. I was stuck in the traffic the whole evening,” During his long wait Gaylan had plenty of time to ask what the other drivers what they thought of Obama and his visit. Their opinions were unsurprisingly bitter. “Why does it matter to us if a white man or a black man wins the [US presidential] election,” replied one irate driver. “Obama and Bush are two faces on the same currency, an American currency.” Another asked: “Why does he come here? What will he do for us? Will he fix the electricity? He is just coming because of the election.” A third driver was dubious about Obama’s plan to pull out US forces. “He says he’ll withdraw his troops from Iraq, but I don’t believe that,” he said. “The Americans planned for a long time to take over Iraq to protect Israel from Iran and seize the oil here.”

Not all official visitors even get as far as Baghdad. A week before Obama arrived, King Abdullah of Jordan had been expected to make his first official visit to Iraq. This was of some importance because in the past Abdullah had warned of the danger of revolutionary Shi’ism sweeping through the Middle East. Along with other Sunni Arab rulers, he had watched with horror as, after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s predominantly Sunni regime, a Shia-Kurdish government was established in Baghdad under American protection. His visit to open a new Baghdad embassy, replacing one blown up in August 2003, was to be an important sign that the Sunni Arab rulers were beginning to accept that the new Iraqi government was here to stay. But at the last moment the visit was cancelled as Jordanian officials cited ‘security concerns’. Iraqi police said that Jordanian security had run a dummy convoy of special armoured black four wheel vehicles through the al-Mansur district the day before the King arrived to test the safety of the route. As the convoy sped through the streets of al-Mansur the Jordanians heard the sound of gunfire close at hand and feared this might be an assassination attempt by gunmen hoping to kill the king. “In fact,” explained an Iraqi army officer with the 6th Division which was protecting Abdullah, “we had sealed off the roads so the king’s convoy could pass, when an old man drove his car from a sub- road onto the main road so our soldiers began to shoot into the air to get his attention and make him go back.” Evidently the Jordanians did not wholly accept this benign explanation of the gunfire and promptly cancelled the visit. The Iraqi government’s confidence is of recent birth. Four months ago the prime minister Nouri al-Maliki looked as if he was about to be deposed. “In March most of the political parties including ourselves were ready to get rid of him,” said a Kurdish official. “Then he had his success in Basra and Sadr City and since then he has been over-confident and hardly listens to what we say to him.” The government’s success against the Mehdi Army militiamen of Muqtada al-Sadr was not quite all it seemed. In the first rounds of fighting the Iraqi army got nowhere, some of its units mutinying and handing over their arms. It was American troops who did most of the fighting in Sadr City and supplied the logistics and air and artillery support in Basra. Nobody knows what would happen if the Iraqi army had to fight the Mehdi Army on its own. There are still 1,000 US troops in Basra and another battalion supporting the Iraqi army in Amara province, once a Mehdi Army stronghold in southern Iraq. The turning point in the fighting was not only American military intervention but al-Sadr calling his men off the streets and Iran backing the Maliki government. This is a point made by Ahmed Chalabi, the much maligned but highly astute opponent of Saddam Hussein, in his well-defended headquarters in Baghdad. “People fail to realize that the success of the ‘surge’ was the result of a tacit agreement between the US and Iran,” he says. This was true when Muqtada, who would need Iranian support if he was to fight a real war with the Iraqi government backed by the US, declared a truce at the start of the surge last year. Iran does not want to do anything to weaken or destroy the first Shia government in the Arab world since the Saladin overthrew the Fatimids in Cairo 800 years ago.

The departing American commander General David Petraeus keeps saying that the fall in violence and the extension of government control in Iraq is ‘fragile and reversible’. His caution is based on experience. In 2004 in Mosul Petraeus, then commander of the 101st Airborne Division, appeared to have pacified the northern city of Mosul. But eight months after he departed, insurgents took over the city, the police and army changed sides or went home, 30 police stations were captured along with $41 million worth of arms. It is unlikely that the same thing will happen to the Maliki government. But some Iraqi politicians believe that the Mehdi Army is simply lying low and could take over half Baghdad in 48 hours. For the moment the Sadrists have gone to ground. Muqtada sits in his house in the holy city of Qom in Iran where he says he is pursuing his religious studies. His strategy is not to be drawn into a fight before the Americans depart or draw down their forces. When crowds attending Sadrist[-controlled mosques in Sadr City in July started to tear down barriers in the streets placed there by the Iraqi army, it was Sadrist preachers who pleaded with them to go home and avoid a confrontation. “He [Muqtada] is not the kind of man,” says his spokesman Salah al-Obaidi, “who plucks the fruit before it is ripe.”

The Iraqi government for its part is eager to liquidate the Sadrist movement, despite its deep roots in the impoverished Shia masses, while the Iraqi army is backed by American firepower. Class divisions are deep in the Shia community and the Shia middle class would like to see the Sadrist movement permanently crushed. Persecution is unrelenting. In Basra even men selling cassettes of songs praising Muqtada have been told by the police to throw them away and sell gypsy music instead. In Amara the army is under continual pressure from the Maliki government to arrest any Sadrists they can find. The Sadrist governor has been put under arrest, the province is effectively under martial law and even Sadrists who took advantage of an amnesty are being arrested. But the Sadrists and the Mehdi Army depend ultimately on a core of committed militants who survived much more savage persecution under Saddam Hussein. They will be difficult to eliminate. Muqtada himself is still revered in millions of Shia households though his picture is less evident. Bashir Ali and Ahmed Mohammed, two powerful anti-Sadrist tribal sheikhs from Sadr City, told me that they thought “the Sadrist current had lost much of its support in Sadr City and does not have the strength to stage an uprising.” They are hardly unbiased observers because they freely admitted that the Sadrists had reduced the power of the tribes and they were eager to seize it back. But, while claiming that the Sadrists, had lost popularity they admitted that they did not dare criticize them in public “because they would shoot us down the next time we went to the mosque to pray.” The bitterness between Maliki and the Sadrists is all the deeper because it was their members of parliaments who made him prime minister. Their ministers withdrew from his government in 2007 because the prime minister had not demanded a timeline for for an American military pull out from Bush. Sadrist crowds demonstrate every Friday demanding an American withdrawal. Paradoxically, Maliki’s government is now asking for an American withdrawal along the lines Muqtada demanded over the coming years. Iraqi nationalism, along with religious revivalism and social populism, is what has given the Sadrists such widespread appeal. It was largely because Maliki did not want to be denigrated as an American pawn that he objected so vigorously to the new military agreement or SOFA that would have institutionalized the American occupation and replaced the current UN mandate. He may be nervous about what he would do without American support, but they have no alternative Iraqi leader with which to replace him. Nor would this be as easy to do as it was two years ago. At that time the US ambassador helped get rid of Maliki’s predecessor as prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, by saying that Bush ‘doesn’t want, doesn’t support, and doesn’t accept’ that Jaafari should lead the government. Since then the Iraqi state, ramshackle though it is, has gone a long way to reconstitute itself with over half a million men under arms and an oil income next year of $150 billion.

America made a mistake in pushing for a SOFA with Iraq at the time it did. When the US presented its first draft of the security agreement in March, it envisaged simply continuing the occupation in which the US would be colonial overlord. The agreement the US had in mind was compared by Iraqis to the Anglo-Iraqi treaty of 1930, under which Britain retained enough authority in Iraq to discredit Iraqi governments which were seen by many Iraqis as puppets of the imperial power. “What the Americans were offering us in terms of real sovereignty is even less than the British did eighty years ago,” said one Iraqi leader. The agreement was supported by the Kurds and initially by the pro-American wing of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, the two main supports of the present government, who wanted to lock in US support for their present elevated status. But the US, along with many of its allies in the Green Zone has always tended to underestimate the extent to which the occupation is disliked by Iraqis outside Kurdistan. It is not that the government wants the Americans to go quite yet. “The government lacks faith in itself and wants to be baby-sat by the US army,” said Mahmoud Othman, a veteran and influential MP who freely admits that his feelings as a Kurd are different from his feelings as an Iraqi. He opposed the SOFA with the US saying: “I think it was being hurried through because the US wanted an achievement for this administration to benefit the Republican party in the elections.”

The failed attempt to reach an agreement between Iraq and the US helped crystallize Iraqi resentment over the occupation: the military bases, the immunity for US soldiers and contractors, the 23,000 Iraqis held prisoner by the US, the ability of US troops to arrest Iraqis and carry out military operations at will. The extent of the nationalist backlash by Iraqis surprised both Maliki’s government and Washington. But there were other forces also at play. The Iranians had played a central role in mediating an end to the fighting between the Iraqi army and the Mehdi Army in March and May. The Iranians also made clear that they would not accept the new US-Iran security agreement. What proponents of the ‘surge’ like John McCain never understood was that its success, in so far that it was successful, depended on Iran cooperating with it. The new security agreement would destroy this cooperation. “The Iranians are implacably opposed to the deal,” said Chalabi, who had just seen the Iranian leaders in Tehran. “It consecrates America’s massive presence in Iraq and threatens their security. They say it will be a ‘non-security agreement’ and not a ‘security agreement.’” Maliki’s increasing willingness to stand up to the US over the agreement may well be the result of a private assurance from Iran that he will not face an uprising by the Mehdi Army in southern Iraq if he does so. The struggle for power in Iraq is entering a new phase. The US may not have got the agreement it wanted with Iraq, but it remains the predominant military power in the country. The US still largely controls the Iraqi army. Whether Obama or McCain wins the presidential election the battle for who really rules in Baghdad will go on.

Aug. 8, 2008

Reproduced from Counterpunch

Bil'in Habibti - Bil'in My Love

Venezuela The Bolivarian Revolution at the Crossroads

By Fernando Esteban

The defeat of President Hugo Chavez in the referendum last December marks an important turning point in the Bolivarian process, which began more than ten years ago. Following this defeat a crucial choice arises: to accelerate the process towards a socialist society or on the contrary to prefer the status quo by centring the revolution solely around the image of the president. After thirteen electoral victories in a row, the defeat in December was a body blow for the whole of the Bolivarian Left. For the first time in ten years, the Venezuelan people had expressed its disapproval, in spite of the widely-recognised gains of the revolution.

The gains of the revolution

In a country which is the fourth world exporter of oil and which has the greatest oil reserves in the world, oil is a very powerful financial weapon. The profits generated by PDVSA (the state oil company) make it possible to finance the “missions” of the revolution. Among the most important are those concerning education: – The Robinson mission aims at teaching illiterates how to read and write. – The Ribas mission trains graduates. – The Sucre mission gives access to the university to students that the former republic had excluded. To this end, a Bolivarian University has been established and located all over the country. It functions parallel to the traditional Venezuelan universities, of which the best known are the Central University of Venezuela (in Caracas) and the Andean University (in Merida).

These educational missions are extremely successful. The students, of all ages, are very numerous, so much so that the centres where they operate are being multiplied. This enthusiasm can be explained partly by the methods of teaching that are used. The courses are given on video cassette and a teacher is there to help the group, which is always quite small. There is no place here for the system of evaluation and sanction. Everything is done to encourage the student’s progress. And the results speak for themselves: in October 2005, UNESCO officially proclaimed Venezuela “a territory freed from illiteracy”.

Another of the best known missions is “Barrio adentro”, which is a medical mission. In the framework of an agreement with Cuba, nearly 15.000 Cuban doctors are today employed by the Venezuelan government. Access to health has thus become completely free. Installed in doctors’ surgeries, all built on the same model, these doctors treat the population, but at the same time they inform and make people aware of the rules of hygiene and contraception. They also keep many statistics up to date, in order to observe the evolution of the medical situation of the population. It is clear that progress is being made, and the whole of the population, in particular in the barrios, has seen its living conditions improving, largely thanks to these doctors.

We could also speak about the Mercal mission, which markets food products at low prices. Created for all Venezuelans, it addresses itself more specifically to the poorest sectors of the population.

We could futhermore mention the Piar mission which aims at improving the living conditions of children, or “Vuelvan Caras”, the purpose of which is to develop co-operatives of production, or Guaicai which works to restore the rights of the indigenous peoples and communities of the country. Chavez often repeats that “to fight against poverty, it is necessary to give power to the poor”. The missions are there for that… to help the needy populations of the barrios, those who took to the streets at the time of the coup d’etat in 2002 to put Chavez back in power.

Lastly, how can we speak about the gains of the Bolivarian revolution without evoking one of the essential reforms of the process: the law on land and fishing. Just eight families in the country own between them more than 150,000 hectares of land. That represents roughly the equivalent of eighteen times the surface of the capital of Venezuela, where more than 4 million people live. Furthermore, these immense landholdings remain most of the time uncultivated, whereas they are located in the most fertile areas of the country. It should be stressed that some big landholdings, such as for example the liquor-producing Santa Teresa company, established in the valleys of Aragua, do not have any documented title to the land that they occupy. The law has made it possible to launch a process of more equitable distribution of land resources, by regularizing the division of the land among peasants through the National Land Institute. It has encouraged the construction of rural population centres equipped with basic services, giving their inhabitants access to health and education, in order for them to have a better and more dignified life. The law protects the poor peasants and encourages the formation of co-operatives and other associative forms of production, by supporting them financially and technically and by creating at the same time the conditions of their economic viability, through establishing the necessary means of transport and marketing of their produce.

Again on the lost referendum

So we might be astonished that in spite of these well-known gains, Hugo Chavez lost the referendum last December. All the more so in that in the president’s proposal we could find in particular: – recognition of popular participation through the Councils of Popular Power (such as, for example, the Student, Peasant Councils, etc.), and through workers’ associations, co-operatives, community enterprises; – strengthening of the right to work, including the creation of a fund of social stability for workers, allowing them, with the help of the state, to take advantage of wide-ranging rights concerning retirement, pensions and paid holidays; – the reduction of the working day from 8 to 6 hours, and from 40 to 36 hours a week; – recognition of the specificities of the indigenous groups and the groups descended from forced African immigration, guaranteeing the exercise of their rights and special attention from the law; – the creation of a state productive economic model, based on the values of humanism, co-operation and the preponderance of social interests over private interests. The state promotes and develops specific forms of companies and economic units based on social, communal or state property, social production and distribution, mixed enterprises between the state and the private sector, creating the best conditions for the realization of the socialist economy.

All these social gains would make you think that the popular classes would mobilize to once again vote massively in favour of the proposals of Chavez. However that was not what happened, quite the contrary. The referendum was more a defeat of the Venezuelan president than a victory of the opposition. If we compare the results with those of the last presidential election, won by Chavez with 61,35% of the votes, the opposition stagnated, with 4 million votes, whereas Chavez lost 3 million votes. The abstention was 45 per cent. In the final analysis, it was by only 200,000 votes that the constitutional proposal was rejected.

Most of the Western media were quick to salute the wisdom of the Venezuelan people. For them, the explanation of this failure was simple, linear, and came down to two points: the refusal of a “Cuban-style” socialist model and the refusal to allow Chavez the right to stand for the presidency indefinitely. Admittedly, article 230 of the new Constitution proposed a lengthening of the presidential term to 7 years, with the possibility of standing again immediately and indefinitely. Such a proposal is obviously not satisfactory. But to conclude from it that Chavez wants to make Venezuela a dictatorship, as the media said, is to forget a little too quickly that this same system is in force in France and in other European democracies without it posing the least problem for these right-thinking media people. Besides, they even quickly forgot to point out that Venezuela really is a democracy, since Chavez recognized his defeat and congratulated his opponents on the evening of the results.

The reasons for the defeat are undoubtedly to be looked for elsewhere.

Reasons for the defeat

First of all, by aiming to broadly satisfy the population, the proposal did not in the end satisfy anyone. The renewal of the presidential mandate was clearly there to satisfy the moderate wing of the Bolivarian process, the wing that wants a Chavism without socialism. It could not however satisfy the most radical wing of the process. So we saw personalities like Orlando Chirino, a member of the leadership of the country’s main trade-union confederation, the UNT, officially come out against the proposal. On the other hand, the entire social aspect of the reform, which we outlined above, was unacceptable to a new Bolivarian bourgeoisie which does not want socialism. From this point of view, it was highly symbolic that General Baduel, an old associate of Chavez, came out strongly against the reform.

Furthermore, there was very clearly a problem with the method chosen by Chavez. The Venezuelan president worked on a constitutional reform, consulting only a group of friends selected by him and gathered around his own person. Over and above the reform proposals, Chavez thus made disappear by decree the original formula of this revolution: that of a popular, revolutionary, democratic process of a constituent nature. The maximum that was obtained was the kind of open discussion that there was around the constituent assembly of 1999. At a moment when the context made it possible to go much further, to undertake a reform by establishing spaces of dialogue and power all over the country, Chavez threw down a challenge to the entire Bolivarian and revolutionary movement, forcing it to be with him or against him. There was a possible way out of this, making the model of reform proposed by Chavez a working draft for a great many constituent spaces organized all over the country, seeking perhaps their approval but gaining a model of legitimacy and a concretization of constituent and revolutionary democracy. In fact, the reform almost faded into the background because in the campaign Chavez personified the referendum to the point of transforming it into a plebiscite. The line was: “To vote No is to vote for Bush, to vote Yes is to vote for Chavez”.

In the face of that the opposition developed a highly effective campaign. Through advertising spots on television, but also by going into the popular quarters, it ceaselessly explained that with the reform and “the arrival of socialism”, the state would be the owner of all private goods and could seize in an absolutely legal way anyone’s house or car. Exploiting people’s fears by explaining that socialism would take from those who had little or nothing, this line of argument was extremely successful .

Lastly, the primary reason for this failure was undoubtedly the rise of a certain contestation within the Bolivarian camp. The desire to identify the Bolivarian revolution with the sole figure of Chavez, the way in which the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) is being constituted, without much consultation, and then the way in which they tried to impose the reform, explain this disaffection. Abstention was high because the proposal of Chavez, both in its form as and in its essential contents, did not offer practical democratic and counter-hegemonic perspectives. As Sebastien Ville and François Sabado wrote in Rouge n° 2230, “this defeat is a response to the degradation of the relations between the government and the most combative sectors of the Bolivarian revolution”.

It is utopian to think that in the Latin America of today, it is possible to impose socialism from on high. The challenge is to build a radical democracy, opposed to the present status quo but pluralist in terms of actors and popular ideologies. Faced with this first setback, there are strong temptations for the moderate wing of Chavism to impose a new reform that would reduce the socializing or socialist aspects, explaining that they were the cause of the defeat on December 2. So what is at stake for the social movement is to keep the process moving forward. And from this point of view, there are fortunately some positive points.

The nationalization of SIDOR

First of all, there is of course the very recent nationalization of SIDOR. After three months of a determined strike and of struggle, on Wednesday April 8, Hugo Chavez finally intervened and agreed to renationalise the most important iron and steel plant in the country, which had been privatized in 1997 by President Caldera.

At the heart of the debate was the denunciation by the workers and the UNT trade union of the violation by SIDOR of Venezuelan labour legislation. Completely ignoring the collective bargaining agreement, the management of Ternium-SIDOR, a company owned 20 per cent by the state, 20 per cent by the workers and 60 per cent by the Italo-Argentinian consortium Techint, had maintained for 15 months a situation of absolute wage insecurity for the 15.000 workers, including 9.000 who had no contracts. Not only did the management refuse until now to implement the wage increases voted legally in a general assembly by the workers, but on the contrary it sought to impose a reduction of the workforce, wage cuts, modifications of work contracts in the direction of greater insecurity, as well as a downward revision of the pensions paid to former employees.

Worse still, whereas the fact of having 20 per cent of the capital enabled the workers to appoint one of the co-presidents, the management categorically refused to recognize the validity of this vote. Hitherto protected by Jose Ramon Rivero, the Minister of Labour, the management of the firm thought it could count on the fact that it benefited from foreign capital to continue flouting Venezuelan law. Whereas Rivero never sought to negotiate and on the contrary preferred to impose a trial of strength on the workers, as he had previously done last August with the comrades of the UNT in the public sector, he has just been repudiated in a scathing fashion by Chavez.

On April 4, the UNT trade union organized a referendum where two questions were put to the workers of the factory: first of all, did they or did they not agree with the proposal that the employers had made at the negotiating table; then, whether they wished to continue the strike and the negotiations. In spite of three months of struggle, the workers answered No to the first question by 3,338 votes to 65, and Yes to the second by 3,195 to 97. On Monday April 7, weary of the workers’ resistance, the government decided, in the person of Vice-president Ramón Carrizales, to convene new negotiations. Negotiations to which the minister Jose Ramon was this time not invited. Under the constant pressure of 600 workers guarding the factory permanently, it took less than 48 hours to resolve the crisis.

The fall of Rivero

This struggle led in addition to the fall of Jose Ramon Rivero. It was not the first time that the comrades of the UNT had clashed with him. On August 15 last year, the trade-union representatives of the UNT, workers in the Venezuelan Ministry of Labour, had an appointment with the director of his cabinet, Lennina Galindo, in order to present their draft of a national collective agreement for the whole of the workers of the public sector. On their arrival, they were told that she was in a meeting with the minister Jose Ramón Rivero. So the trade-union representatives decided to wait. At the end of the day, someone came back to see them to tell them that by order of the minister, Lennina Galindo was not authorized to receive them.

The trade unionists, furious, then decided to occupy the Ministry until they were received. Forty-five people, men and women, thus continued to wait. Initially, the director of his cabinet and the vice-minister were sent to convince the recalcitrant workers to leave the Ministry. Then, understanding that he could not avoid a confrontation, the minister ordered the doors to be closed, but also for water and electricity to be cut off. Six days passed thus, without any change in the situation. Fire-fighters were prevented from entering, all contact was prohibited with the employees of the ministry who, out of solidarity, vainly tried to forward get food to them.

Deprived of water, food and medicine, faced with this serious lack of respect for the elementary rights of the human person, the courageous trade unionists nevertheless remained in place. The minister then called on the army to evacuate them. Soldiers came to the scene, noted the occupation, but decided not to intervene. Furious, the minister then decided to use purely and simply gangster methods, by calling in roughnecks from the neighbourhood. Promising each of them 50,000 bolivars (approximately 15 euros), he asked them to forcibly make these trade unionists leave, presenting them as anti-Chavist oppositionists. A violent evacuation of the ministry ensued, with the trade unionists being driven out by thugs armed with revolvers.

But the funniest part of the story was not in the evacuation itself.

In fact, these trade-union comrades were all members of the C-CURA and Marea Socialista currents of the UNT, and many of them were Trotskyists. And at the time as the evacuation was taking place, this same minister was making an inaugural speech on the occasion of the first official homage paid by the Bolivarian Republic to… Leon Trotsky! Such are the methods of Rivero.

Finally, at the time when he was ousted, Rivero was trying to set up a new trade-union confederation, directly in competition with the UNT, and which would have followed his orders. Although this project seems to have been frozen with the departure of Rivero, nothing indicates that it will not be taken out of the closet one day by the right wing of Chavism.

The internal manoeuvres in the PSUV

The right wing seems for the moment more preoccupied by the PSUV, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, the new party bringing together the old MVR (Movement for Fifth Republic) of Chavez, and part of the Venezuelan Communist Party, of PPT and of Podemos. During March, the election of the leadership took place.

The first stage consisted of designating the members who had the right to vote. Out of 5 million members, only 80.000 could vote, without anyone knowing on what criteria this choice was based. In a second stage, Chavez announced on live television a list of 70 names from which it was necessary to choose the 35 people who were going to make up the national leadership. Lastly, in the third stage, once the 35 members of the national leadership had been elected, Chavez designated on live TV the members of the political bureau. There you can only find members of the government, and there are no representatives of the social or trade-union movement. The vote of the delegates in each battalion (base organisation) proceeded without there being any control of the results.

In spite of the way the bureaucracy arranged this election, there remain political spaces within the PSUV. Thus for example, when there was the election of the 35 people who were to make up the national leadership, a list drawn up by the government was circulated, indicating the names for which it was necessary to vote. Unfortunately for those thus designated, the 80,000 grand electors did not follow instructions and voted freely. Which undoubtedly partly explains Chavez taking matters in hand directly by nominating the political bureau. In the same way, comrade Gonzalo Gomez, a member of Marea Socialista, succeeded in being elected a delegate, in spite of the opposition of the bureaucracy.

Admittedly, learning how to work within the big machine that the PSUV is, is extremely complicated. Nevertheless the assiduity and the sharpness in the political struggle that the comrades of Marea Socialista, above all Stalin Perez, have shown, is making it possible for them to win a hearing. These small day-to-day political victories validate a posteriori the choice of going into the PSUV and calling for a Yes vote at the time of the last referendum. Inversely, the positions of the comrades of C-CURA and Orlando Chirino on these two principal points, tend to put them off the political field.

The next electoral deadlines

In this context, the municipal elections in November look like being very complicated. There is a strong chance that the Chavist camp will lose quite a few towns and cities, which would weaken the process a little bit more. At the time when the revolution seems to be looking for its second wind, the problems of daily existence are coming to the fore again. Galloping inflation (20 per cent per annum), insecurity, the problem of refuse disposal, unemployment, corruption are elements which contribute to weighing on the process and which will play a preponderant role at the moment of putting a voting paper in the ballot box. Admittedly, these problems did not start with the Bolivarian revolution and are inherited from the former republic. However, the Chavists must be able to respond to questions relating to living conditions at the same time as proposing a project for another society.

For ten years, the revolution has continued to be unceasingly attacked by the capitalist bureaucracy, which forces it to solve the strategic problems of industrialization and nationalization, of the development of agro-industry in the countryside, and especially of private banking which still controls public finances and the rates of interest and borrowing (which is about 32 per cent). If the Bolivarian camp does not grapple with these problems, the towns of Ciudad Guyana (the most important iron and steel basin of Venezuela), of Puerto Cruz (an oil town), of Valencia (the main industrial city in the country) and even Caracas, the capital, can be lost, which would lead to a halt in the revolutionary process.

So it is more than ever important to defend the Bolivarian process. Of course it makes mistakes, even takes condemnable decisions such those that we have described above, and we will not cease to condemn them. Nevertheless, it is worth repeating with force that the Bolivarian revolution remains by far, and in spite of its errors, the most interesting phenomenon existing on the planet today. On it depends the equilibrium of the entire Andean and Caribbean region. If a fatal blow was dealt to it, the Bolivian and Ecuadorian processes would crumble. The Cuban experience would end. In spite of undeniable gains which have benefited the most underprivileged layers, the bureaucratic heaviness of the state apparatus as well as the continental context weigh enormously. That is why it is important to follow and support the Venezuelan social movement. Admittedly, it remains weakened and divided. But it is its capacity to unite which will make it possible to give a second wind to the revolution and will radicalize a process which is still and always too dependent on the sole figure of Hugo Chavez.

Fernando Estevan is a member of the Fourth International working in Venezuela. This article is reproduced from International Viewpoint

For more on Venezuela, see the interview with socialist union activist Stalin Perez Borges