Oscar Arias: Vain, mediocre and obsessed with being a star

Statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs

THE Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Cuba has learned with profound indignation of the most recent statements against our country and President Fidel Castro pronounced by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias. They are not the first and surely will not be the last.

This time, in a disrespectful and completely unethical way, he compared Fidel to deceased Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. He also referred to the current situation of Latin America, where, according to him, “there is a pack of irresponsible demagogues and charlatans who are playing with people’s aspirations,” in clear reference to the new progressive leadership that is emerging on the continent.

As everyone knows, the United States government has always had one or another opportunistic clown at hand disposed to follow its aggressive anti-Cuba plans, the majority of them shady policies that end up in the garbage dump of history. With the new winds blowing in the region, it would seem difficult to find someone willing to lend themselves to the despicable task of acting as Washington’s figurehead, but the egomaniacal Arias has offered himself with unusual enthusiasm and abject loyalty to the empire. At some point, it will be known what his price is.

In case anyone has questions, suffice it to illustrate with some examples:

—On March 11, 2006, President Bush called to congratulate him on his election as president of Costa Rica, and told him, “You can help me a lot with respect to the new situation in Latin America.”

—On August 28, 2006, Arias published an article, “La Hora de la Democracia en Cuba” (Democracy Time in Cuba), an almost exact repetition of what U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon had said about “transition in Cuba” five days earlier.

—On September 23, 2006, Arias met with John Maisto, the U.S. ambassador to the OAS, and announced the anti-Cuban agenda he was planning to take to the Ibero-American Summit in Montevideo, and which finally he did not dare to bring out, having discovered that his audience there would not be conducive to his doing so.

—On December 6, during his meeting at the White House with President Bush, he extensively discussed “the Cuban case” and told reporters, with the complacency of the master: “You are well aware of my commitment to restoring democracy to the Cuban people after 47 years of dictatorship.”

Mr. Oscar Arias is a vulgar mercenary.

President Arias shamelessly supports the U.S. plans to annex Cuba and has no respect for the heroic and selfless struggle of our people for our independence and sovereignty.

President Arias, moreover, has no moral authority to criticize Cuba or anyone else. In his zeal to once again occupy the presidency of Costa Rica, he used his influence to get the country’s Constitution changed without the required referendum. He did not hold elections in his party. He was elected president with just 25% of the vote in a process plagued by irregularities that have not been clarified.

Instead of concerning himself with Cuba’s future — something that is solely the business of the Cuban people — he should be dealing with corruption in his own country, which has even involved a vice president and three former presidents. He should be attending to the dignified protests of the Costa Rican people, our brothers and sisters, against a free trade agreement with the United States that President Arias is attempting to impose without listening to their demands. He should be concerned about the 23% poverty rate that his people are suffering, the level of citizen insecurity, the lack of jobs, the insufficient access to education for thousands of children and young people, and the growing social inequalities in that nation.

President Oscar Arias is, moreover, out of context, and does not fit into the new times of genuine and definitive Latin American integration. He clashes like a servile parrot of Yankee imperialism, and it is certain that nobody will go to his political funeral.

He is a vain, mediocre person, obsessed with being a star.

He cannot be taken seriously.

Havana, December 27, 2006

Petrobras declares 19 new areas as “commercially viable”

Brazil’s government owned oil corporation Petrobras declared as Commercially Viable 19 new areas (16 offshore and 3 onshore) in the Espírito Santo, Campos, and Santos Basins. A few of them have become new oil and/or natural gas fields, while others have been incorporated into existing neighboring fields.

Although the 19 areas are still subject to more detailed technical assessments by the National Petroleum, Natural Gas and Biofuel Agency, it is estimated that Petrobras` share of the recoverable volumes will top-out at some 2.1 billion barrels of oil equivalent (boe) of oil and gas in the three basins.

Three areas Petrobras operates in the old BS-500 block, in the Santos Basin, were declared commercially viable, resulting in the Tambuatá, Pirapitanga and Carapiá oil and natural gas fields, while one area in the old BS-400 block was annexed to Mexilhão Field. It is estimated there are recoverable volumes of some 560 million barrels of oil equivalent (boe) in these areas.

Meanwhile, four new offshore and three new onshore areas have been defined in the Espírito Santo Basin, all of which operated by Petrobras. The new Carapó and Camarupim gas fields, and two other natural gas and light oil areas that will be annexed to the Golfinho and Canapú fields, have been declared commercially viable. It is estimated there are recoverable volumes of some 168 million barrels of oil equivalent (boe) in these areas.

Three new fields, Saíra, Seriema, and Tabuiaiá, have been defined onshore. Although they have slightly more modest volumes compared to the basin`s offshore portion, these finds are nonetheless greatly important to maintain the Espírito Santo Basin`s onshore production.

Finally, eight new areas have been declared commercially viable in the Campos Basin: The Maromba field, in the old BC-20 block, operated by Petrobras in association with Chevron; the Carataí and Carapicu fields, in the old BC-30 block; and, in the old BC-60 block, the Catuá, Cacharel, Mangangá, and Pirambú fields, in addition to one area to be annexed to the Baleia Azul Field. The recoverable volumes are believed to top-out at about 1.37 million boe there.
Earlier in the week Shell declared two new fields commercially viable in the Santos basin, off shore Rio do Janeiro.

Petrobras holds 40% of the rights for these fields. Petrobras has proven oil and gas reserves in Brazil equivalent to 13.5 billion barrels and extracts sufficient to cover domestic consumption.

In November Petrobras oil and gas daily production reached 2.3 million barrels with a 2.4% increase over the previous month.

Of this total, 2.1 million bpd are domestic production, 1.8 million barrels of oil and 43 million cubic meters of natural gas, and the remaining 232.485 bpd are extracted from operations in Argentina, Angola, Bolivia, Ecuador, Gulf of Mexico, Peru and Venezuela.

Cuba increases forested areas

The reduction this year in the amount of pollution to the environment in Cuba was highlighted yesterday by Dr. José Antonio Díaz Duque, deputy minister for science, technology and the environment (CITMA).

During a press conference he added that in the eight hydrographic basins of national interest, this figure dropped, compared with levels in 2005, to 3.8% and 3% in the principal bays.

Also, at the end of the current year, according to the minister’s explanation, the country’s forested areas rose to 24.54% of national territory, with an increase of more than 33,000 hectares, in excess of forecast figures for benefiting impoverished soil.

The country now possesses 2,696,589 hectares of forest, not including the 170,253 plantations that are less than three years old.

With respect to the principal achievements in science and technology, he mentioned the establishment of methodological bases for environmental codes in areas where tourism is being developed.

Studies into the dangers and risks to and the vulnerability of 15 municipalities in City of Havana in relation to coastal flooding, intense rain and high winds have also been completed.

América Santos, deputy minister at CITMA, highlighted the development of bio-preparations to break down oil, the introduction of new medical and diagnostic equipment and work undertaken to develop alternative sources of energy.

Save the Earth! - Fire the U.S. Government!

War is Not the Answer!

European Union Election Observation Mission Presidential Elections Venezuela 2006

Link

Human Rights Questioned in Oaxaca

Jose Luis Soberanes, chair of the National Human Rights Committee (CNDH), will present a preliminary report on the latest incidents in the Mexican state of Oaxaca.

According to CNDH, since the beginning of the conflict in June that territory has reported 349 people arrested, 40 injured, 20 homicides, including the death of a US reporter, nine cases of torture and 25 abdications.

Early December, social organizations and relatives of detained and missing people demanded in front of the UN headquarters the intervention of observers and reporters to end to human rights violations.

They assured that in that southern state the federal police are unfairly and arbitrarily arresting people, including those who do not belong to the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO).

Meanwhile, the Secretary of Government and APPO should resume talks on Jan 8 to solve the ongoing conflict.

The education union will assemble in early January to determine if they want to restructure the movement and define their position in the pro-democratization fight.

It assures that unsafe conditions for teachers as well as unpaid salaries persist, which is part of the agreements unfulfilled by the government.

Mexicans for Oaxaca Power Removal

The representation of the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) at the Senate presented on Friday a new demand over the elimination of powers in Oaxaca, which includes evidence and a report by the National Human Rights Committee (CNDH).

PRD deputy coordinator Ricardo Monreal said the request, the third one, has new evidence human rights were violated in that southern Mexican state so the removal of local governor Ulises Ruiz proceeds.

He noted that although the document also has various elements guaranteeing the decision, there is no political desire by the governing National Action and Revolutionary Institutional parties to reach an agreement on it.

According to Monreal, this demand is added to incidents in the latest months such as homicides, abdications, unjustified arrests and illegal transfers of prisoners.

It also included the report of CNDH chair Jose Luis Soberanes denouncing a series of constant human rights violations of the Oaxaca people.

Meanwhile, the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) reported new detentions of its supporters, which illustrates that while the local government assures it will resume talks it keeps its repressive stance in the territory.

Oaxaca calls upon its artists

by Reed Johnson, Times Staff Writer
OAXACA, Mexico

Racked by unrest, the Mexican city turns to its heart and soul to regain equilibrium — and tourists.

Rows of poinsettias are rising along the zócalo, where police and protesters recently brawled. Fresh coats of paint are being slapped on buildings to cover up angry graffiti.

Even though the barricades have been removed and the blood has been mopped from the streets, this colonial-era city is struggling to recover from a violent spasm that scarred its buildings, traumatized its citizens and left as many as a dozen people dead over a seven-month span.

"It's a tense calm," said Francisco Toledo, the Zapotec Indian considered by many to be Mexico's greatest living graphic artist.

Oaxaca is now counting on perhaps its most precious resource to help lead the city's comeback: its world-renowned artists and artisans, with Toledo at the forefront, and its global reputation for exuberant creativity.

Just a few weeks ago, central Oaxaca was a combat zone. Thousands of public school teachers who'd been on strike since May, and their allies, were battling federal police and supporters of Oaxaca's autocratic state Gov. Ulises Ruiz. Concrete chunks and sheet metal blocked the streets. Spray-painted slogans covered large swaths of the city's baroque churches and government offices.

Though federal police finally retook control of the city of 260,000, the political dispute is far from settled. Possibly as many as 100 demonstrators remain under custody. Human rights groups charge that some detainees have been tortured and "disappeared." Demonstrators around the world have called for Ruiz to resign.

Toledo, a Oaxaca state native, characteristically has been near the center of efforts to resolve the crisis. Though the artist always has insisted that his mystical, folkloric-modernist images of rabbits, lizards and other creatures don't contain political subtexts, he is continually lending himself to social causes.

Born in southern Oaxaca state in 1940, Toledo has profoundly influenced local culture and politics both through his art and as one of the leaders of the non-governmental agency PROOAX (Council for the Defense and Conservation of the Cultural and Natural Patrimony of the State of Oaxaca). Four years ago, Toledo and PROOAX blocked McDonald's from plunking down a set of its golden arches in Oaxaca's venerable zócalo, or central public square.

During the height of the recent protests, the Institute of Graphic Arts of Oaxaca, which Toledo founded and leads, served as a temporary aid center for the injured. Doctors were on call to provide treatment to the wounded. "Never have we had so many visits," said Toledo, with a touch of irony.

A longtime advocate of indigenous people's rights, Toledo is now involved with a group that's raising money to provide legal counsel to incarcerated protesters. He also hopes to gain attention for "citizen proposals" to combat the poverty and other social problems that have bedeviled Oaxaca for centuries.

"If this government doesn't hear them, what happened is going to recur again and again," he said in an interview in the institute's stately, tree-lined courtyard. "It's very important … to create a consciousness among the citizens, the business managers, the church and the politicians that it's time to change."

As the political process stumbles forward, many Oaxacans have been busily restoring their battered city. In the zócalo, the profusion of poinsettias, many donated by ordinary Oaxacans, temporarily fills the gaps left by plants uprooted from public flowerbeds during the demonstrations and police crackdown.

Carlos E. Melgoza Castillo, director general of the Institute of Cultural Patrimony for Oaxaca state, said that building repairs have been complicated by the varied types of materials that were damaged. But he said none of the damages would be "permanent."

Funds for the city's recovery are flowing in from the foundation of wealthy Oaxaca businessman-philanthropist Alfredo Harp Helú, who helped PROOAX revitalize historic Santo Domingo church as a cultural center and keep it from being converted into a hotel in the mid-1990s. The federal National Institute of Anthropology and History has been overseeing much of the reconstruction.

"The greatest damage isn't in the monuments," Melgoza Castillo said. "It's the very bad example that children and young people received over six months, that the way to show your disagreement with someone is to paint on the walls. This is much harder than to restore monuments or walls, to restore the conscience of the new generation."

Though state police in full body armor remain posted near the center, many parts of the city have reverted to their usual rhythms, and a major charm offensive is underway to convince outsiders that things are back to normal, more or less.

Marimba bands are again performing around the zócalo. Last week, a trickle of foreigners and locals stopped by the Museum of Contemporary Art, located in an elegant colonial palace thought to have belonged to the conqueror Hernán Cortes, to examine Javier Martín's exhibition of colossal human-head sculptures.

Esperanza Arizmendi Bazan, one of 500 women who belong to the arts cooperative Women Artisans of the Regions of Oaxaca, said that the cooperative currently is doing only about 1% of its regular business. But she said the people would not allow "magic Oaxaca to die."

"The affection and the love of the Oaxacans that we always have had toward international tourism, I hope to God, that this will come back," said Arizmendi, who makes pre-Hispanic-style ceramics, some of which are used in the popular Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) and Guelaguetza festivities.

Isolated for centuries by the surrounding Sierra Madre mountain range, Oaxaca has grown into one of Mexico's most popular tourist centers. Many are drawn to the arts scene, which received a major boost from the late modernist master painter Rufino Tamayo, whose intermittent presence in his native state drew numerous other artists, as later did that of Toledo and another painter, Rodolfo Morales, sometimes called the Mexican Marc Chagall.

Alicia Pesqueira de Esesarte, director of the Museum of Prehispanic Art of Mexico in Oaxaca, which houses Tamayo's personal collection of pre-Columbian artifacts, credits Toledo with attracting to Oaxaca a new generation of artists who share some of his beliefs in the importance of social justice and equality. "There are people [artists] that have a very important sense of society," she said. "I feel that their energy, their interest and their prestige are going to definitively make the restoration."

Yet Toledo and others hope that, in regaining its cultural equilibrium, Oaxaca won't simply regress to the political status quo. Oaxaca consistently ranks near the bottom of Mexican states in wealth, education and health care. Thousands have fled to the U.S. in search of work.

Toledo speculates that the recent problems here may help draw attention to these chronic deficiencies. But he also fears that the central city is fast becoming a boutique town like Venice or San Miguel de Allende, where rich foreign visitors are displacing poor locals. "The life of the city already is lost," he said.

Selma Holo, director of USC's Fisher Gallery and author of "Oaxaca at the Crossroads: Managing Memory, Negotiating Change," said in an e-mail that she believed the city would recover from what she called "a nasty, brutish interruption."

"Life is never easy in Oaxaca, but that does not seem to stop the Oaxacan artists and galleristas and restaurateurs, in the long run, from fighting the good fight," she said. Besides Toledo, she pointed to artists such as Demián Flores, Laurie Litowitz and José Luis García as "people with vision" who could be living and working in any of the world's major art centers, but have kept their roots here.

"There is something, as they used to say about Florence in the 15th century, that is 'in the water' in Oaxaca," Holo wrote, "and that something which is generative and healthy will not be permanently poisoned by this awful political mess that it has suffered."

Though Toledo earlier this year announced he was withdrawing from social activities to concentrate more on his art, those plans have been put on hold for now. "It's a necessary evil," he said, laughing, of his political activities.

“The Meeting Between the Zapatista Peoples and the Peoples of the World Begins...”December 30 to January 2 of 2007 in Oventik, Chiapas

December 30 to January 2 of 2007 in Oventik, Chiapas

Chiapas: EZLN "Intergalactic Encuentro" draws activists from 30 countries
Submitted by WW4 Report on Fri, 12/29/2006 - 01:56.

A communique from the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) "Intergalactic Commission," Dec. 24 (our translation):

Compañer@s, Herman@s: In a few days more will be Dec. 30, 2006, the start of the "Encuentro de los Pueblos Zapatistas con los Pueblos del Mundo" (Meeting of the Zapatista Villages with the Peoples of the World), which will end Jan. 2, 2007.

The compañer@s of the support bases and the authorities of the autonomous municipalities and Good Government Committees (juntas de buen gobierno) of the Carcol of Oventic are very happy and animated, as are the compañer@s of the other caracoles preparing for the encuentro.

As of Dec. 24, we have counted compañer@s from 30 countries whose rpesence is confirmed. From the American continent, we have registered compas from Argentina, Brasil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Estados Unidos, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, Puerto Rico, Uruguay and Venezuela. From Europe, brothers and sisters have arrived at Oventic from Germany, France, Belgium, Basque Country, Catalonia, Spain, Greece, Italy, Norway, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Sweden and Switzerland. And from Oceania, we have met compas from Australia and New Zealand.

We have also had communication from compañer@s who, while very animated, were unable to come this time, but say they are preparing to attend the next encuentro in July...

After registering by Internet, all attendees should check in at the offices of Enlace Zapatista in San Cristo'bal de las Casas, Chiapas, Ignacio Allende Street, number 22-A, Barrio de San Antonio, telephone: (967) 6781013...

For our compañer@s around the world who have access to the Internet, if all goes well, there will be information transmitted live and direct of all our activities. You can also read accounts,updates, and see photos on our page:

www.zeztainternazional.org

You can also write us, tell us what you are doing, what you think, or send word by e-mail:

intergalactico@ezln.org.mx

The Zapatistas invite you to speak with us and exchange ideas and experiences. For the first time in our history, we are bringing together representatives from our five Good Government Committees and our Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities (MAREZ) to speak publicly about our humble work and the problems and challenged we confront... We are only trying to show what we are building, with many difficulties, but also with many desires construct another world, one in which those that command, command obeying.

Very well, compañer@s, we will be seeing you the days of the encuentro. We are waiting for you.

Insurgent Lieutenant Colonel Moises
EZLN Intergalactic Commission

As Castro fades, a crop of new leaders

[Thanks to GuiDuckon MRR Blog for this link]

Interviews with two younger political figures suggest a gradual opening both economically and socially.

by Tom Fawthrop | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor
HAVANA, CUBA

In a country that is in the process of bidding a long farewell to its ageing revolutionaries, Mariela Castro brings an expectation of change along with an air of youthful passion. As the director of Cenesex (the National Sex Education Center) Ms. Castro is eager to consider where Cuba should go in a postrevolutionary era.

"We have many contradictions in Cuba," says Castro, the daughter of Raúl Castro, Cuba's de facto leader and brother of ailing President Fidel Castro. A Spanish doctor arrived in Cuba last week, reenergizing speculation about the health of the Cuban leader, who has not been seen in public since undergoing surgery in July. "We need to experiment and to test what really works, to make public ownership more effective, rather than simply adopting wholesale free-market reforms," Ms. Castro says.

MARIELA CASTRO: Rather than follow in Uncle Fidel's footsteps, she's forged her own revolution of sorts. CLAUDIA DAUT/REUTERS

Leaders like Ms. Castro may indicate the extent to which a post-Castro Cuba may be willing to liberalize, both economically and socially. As Cuba's old-guard leadership fades, this new generation - made up primarily of the sons and daughters of those who fought in the 1959 Communist revolution - is perhaps more sympathetic to economic reforms and more-liberal social policies.

Nevertheless, Cuba-watchers and experts have ruled out any dramatic lurch toward a liberal market economy that might undermine the island nation's heritage as the persistent holdout of traditional Communist policies. More relaxed social attitudes may also evolve gradually.

Still, no one doubts that change is afoot.

"The transition in Cuba has already taken place" and this new generation has a key role to play, says Richard Gott, a Latin American analyst and former foreign correspondent for the London-based The Guardian newspaper. "Carlos Lage will be the brains behind the new government. He, together with Julio Soberon at the central bank, will seek to chart a new economic course."

Now Raul Castro has started to echo some of his daughter's sentiments. Addressing university students, he urged that they should ''fearlessly engage in public debate and analysis," according to Granma, the Communist Party newspaper.

Cuba is one of several Latin American countries that once harassed homosexuals as a matter of policy. But Mariela Castro, who is also an executive member of the World Association for Sexual Health, insists that job discrimination and mass arrests are a thing of the past.

"[Homosexuals] still sometimes face arrest by bigoted police" says Castro, adding that she has sometimes clashed with the authorities in her efforts to release gay men and women from prison.

"Now, society is more relaxed. There is no official repression of gays and lesbians," she argues confidently.

A writer turned politico

Cuban writer and culture minister Abel Prieto has also emerged as an influential power broker in a changing Cuba. Since joining the state bureaucracy and the politburo, the long-haired, middle-aged minister still exudes a passion for culture and a common touch.

In response to a question about the conflict of interest between writers and the state, Mr. Prieto laughs, saying that, "sometimes I feel like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but I hope that artists and writers feel that I am still one of them."

Unlike many members of the government, Prieto is very candid as he speaks about allegations that the Cuban government censors political websites.

"It would be a delusion to think we could hide that torrent of information," he insists, referring to anti-Castro websites. "The only possibility is to beat them with a better concept of life."

Prieto also defended the arrest of the dissident writer Raul Rivero in 2003.

"He was not arrested for his views, but for receiving US funding for his collaboration with a country that has besieged our island," argues the minister, referring to the 45-year-long US trade embargo.

An avid fan of the Beatles since the 1970s when their music was essentially banned by the Cuban state, Prieto has led an appreciation campaign of John Lennon. In 2000, he unveiled a statue and dedicated "John Lennon Park" to the musician's memory. Many Cubans joke that he is not as much a Marxist-Leninist as a "Marxist-Lennonist."

Prieto, because of a moment on Cuban television five years ago, is known as one of the few Cabinet ministers who has ever dared to challenge the president. Cubans recall a news segment in which Castro and Prieto appeared together.

After Castro blamed his minister for the fact that so many artists were leaving the country to work abroad, Prieto defended himself.

Millions watched as their supreme leader accepted his error and apologized to Abel Prieto.

"Prieto is extremely important. He has carved out a sizable space for cultural expression [for] many Cuban artists and writers since he became minister of culture," says Julia Sweig, director of the Latin American Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.

In a Foreign Affairs article, written after a lengthy visit to Cuba in November, Ms. Sweig indicated that expectations were high among Cuban officials that the government could move forward after Castro.

"People at all levels of the Cuban government and the Communist Party were enormously confident of the regime's ability to survive Fidel's passing," Ms. Sweig wrote.

That confidence was apparent in Raúl Castro's speech to the opening session of the new parliament last week. "Tell it like it is - tell the truth without justifications, because we are tired of justifications in this revolution," the acting president urged his ministers, according to the youth newspaper Juventud Rebelde.

US economic sanctions irrelevant

Attempts by the Bush administration to set the agenda for change in Cuba, says Sweig, appear to be increasingly irrelevant to the reality inside the country, as a new generation gains increasing clout.

Gott, the Latin American analyst, says that both Ms. Castro and Prieto are figures to watch.

"Mariela Castro is a more than competent member of the Castro clan - she will have an important role in social affairs," he says. "The genial Abel Prieto might well be promoted from the culture ministry to something more taxing."

Pope Rat, Catholic Church Take Aim at Latin America

by Samuel Gregg

Few realize it, but May 2007 could be a decisive moment for Catholic Latin
America. That is when Latin America's Catholic bishops will meet in Brazil
for the Fifth General Conference of Latin American and Caribbean Bishops to
consider the profound challenges confronting the area. The importance
attached to this event by the whole Catholic world is evident from the fact
that Pope Benedict XVI will be attending.

Some of the difficulties to be addressed at this conference were identified
in the event's main preparatory document, drafted by key Latin American
bishops and published in September 2005.

These include the inadequate religious formation [sic] received by many
Catholic Latin Americans, tendencies to mix Catholic and pre-Christian
indigenous religious practices, and some Latin Americans' failure to act
consistently with what they say they believe as Catholics.

The same document also pinpoints particular problems confronting Latin
American societies. It refers to corruption as a disease disfiguring
virtually every sphere of Latin American life, especially politics and the
judiciary. The directness with which the bishops speak about corruption's
evil causes and catastrophic effects is almost without precedent in Latin
America.

Then there is the bishops' condemnation of "a growing tendency to applaud
the rise of messianic leaders... of a populist nature." "They promise
paradise," the bishops add, and engage in the politics of grand gestures,
often at the cost of undermining basic human rights.

Though no names are mentioned, there seems little question the bishops have
in mind figures - such as Presidents Chavez of Venezuela and Morales of
Bolivia - who have subtly and sometimes not-so-subtly promoted attacks on
the Church's presence in Latin America.

Given Latin America's high poverty levels, no-one should be surprised that
the bishops devote considerable attention to this subject. They repeatedly
refer to growing economic inequalities and declining living standards
throughout the continent.

Reading the text, it becomes clear that some bishops view globalization as
partly responsible for these problems. In a 2003 speech, for example,
Honduran Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga said, "Only the logic of
financial markets has been globalized. And the absolutism of that capital is
ruinous."

Such claims are somewhat odd, given that it is precisely the failure of much
of Latin America to integrate into the global market that has contributed
significantly to the region's persistently high poverty.

This becomes clearer when we consider China and India's progress over the
past 10 years. Through their continuing assimilation into the global
economy, millions of Chinese and Indians are escaping poverty.

Of course, poverty still plagues these nations. But no-one questions that
real poverty is being steadily reduced in Asia through China and India's
embrace of free trade and economic liberalization. The same, incidentally,
is true of El Salvador and Chile.

Some Latin American bishops' reluctance to acknowledge these facts may
reflect the persistence of what some call "soft-liberationist" thought in
their ranks.

As a serious intellectual force, liberation theology - the embrace of
Marxism by theologians attempting to explain Latin America's problems - is
now widely dismissed as largely irrelevant throughout the region, a relic of
the 1970s. Yet its residual effects can be found in some Catholic Latin
Americans' ongoing tendency to blame the rest of the world for the region's
economic problems, instead of acknowledging that Latin America's economic
difficulties primarily stem from mercantilist economic structures and the
failure to uphold property rights and the rule of law. Prominent Latin
Americans reluctant to acknowledge these facts include not only Cardinal
Rodriguez, but also influential figures such as Brazil's former archbishop
of Sao Paulo, Cardinal Claudio Hummes.

If the bishops meeting in Brazil in May 2007 want to see poverty diminished
throughout the region, they might consider highlighting the role played by
"right-wing oligarchs" and "left-wing oligarchs" in obstructing Latin
America's integration into the global economy.

The right-oligarchs include those Latin American businesses that pressure
governments into providing them with tariffs and special tax benefits that
protect them from competition. The left-oligarchs include populist
politicians and trade-union leaders whose positions depend on large numbers
of people remaining in a state of economic discontent.

Free trade and economic liberty threaten both groups' power. First, it
exposes the right-oligarchs to the disciplines of competition. Second, it
undermines populists and radical unionists by relieving the poverty of large
segments of the population.

Compared to Western European Catholicism - characterized by mass apostasy,
often mediocre bishops, and declining vocations - Latin American Catholicism
is in good shape. It enjoys deep reservoirs of authentic faith, a continuing
rise in diocesan vocations, and strong and prudent leadership from many
bishops. The May 2007 Latin American bishops conference represents a unique
chance for Catholic Latin America to further strengthen itself by breaking
free of the dead weight of fallacious economic thinking and the dregs of a
suspect, moribund theology.

For the sake of Latin America's poor, let's hope they take it.

[Mr. Gregg is director of research at the Acton Institute and author, most
recently, of "Banking, Justice and the Common Good."]

Argentine 'death squad' man held

A former police officer who is alleged to have been a leader of a far-right death squad in Argentina during the 1970s has been arrested in Spain.

Rodolfo Almiron was detained near Valencia on a warrant to face murder charges in Argentina.

He is a suspected member of Triple A, the anti-communist alliance that operated under the governments of Juan Peron and then his widow Isabel.

The group is blamed for the killings of 1,500 perceived government opponents.

The BBC's Daniel Schweimler says any mention of the Triple A still strikes terror into the hearts of many Argentinians today.

'Escaping his past'

The group is held responsible for killing at least 1,500 perceived left-wing opponents of the government of Juan Peron and when he died in 1974, that of his widow Isabel who was toppled by Jorge Videla in a 1976 coup.

Rodolfo Almiron, said to be one of the leaders of Triple A, is alleged to have carried out many of the killings personally.

He fled to Spain in 1975 in the midst of chaos in Argentina, with left-wing factions battling against the right, the police and the armed forces.

The military took power shortly afterwards, ostensibly to restore order but imposing their own form of terror, killing at least 30,000 people over the next seven years.

Rodolfo Almiron, 71, thought he had escaped his past, living the last 30 years in comfort in Spain, our correspondent says.

However, last week a judge in Argentina ruled that the crimes which he has been accused of do not fall under any statute of limitations and therefore he could be tried.

Mr Almiron is expected to be transferred to Madrid's National Court in the next few days to start extradition proceedings, police said.

The arrest came as Argentina asked Spain to extradite a key figure in the military government.

Gen Ricardo Miguel Cavallo has been held in Madrid on charges of crimes against humanity for the past three years, but the high court decided last week it had no jurisdiction over him.

Posada Carriles: Washington and Miami’s Preferred Terrorist

“One who shelters a terrorist, is a terrorist” – President George W. Bush

• The Bush Administration is harboring perhaps the Western Hemisphere’s most insidious terrorist, whose application for U.S. citizenship is presently on the docket and if granted, would represent an effrontery to this nation’s bona fides, as well as the legitimacy of its worldwide anti-terrorist crusade and what remains of its good name abroad
• The White House feverishly searches for a country willing to receive Posada in order to spare it from having to cross swords with the Miami leadership by either extraditing him to Cuba or Venezuela, or trying him here
• The Posada case as well as the Cuban Five represents perhaps a defining moment in which the Bush administration’s ideological passions have snuffed out a proper application of justice – an unacceptable sense of ethical values and public rectitude
• Meanwhile, the fate of the Cuban Five, whose crimes were negligible compared to Posada’s homicides, does not seem to either confuse or disturb Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Thus, the White House will likely have a problem regarding who it denominates as a “terrorist” and who it fetes as a patriot

The upcoming immigration hearing for Luis Posada Carriles, the 78 year-old felon who is a self-confessed co-conspirator responsible for the detonation of a bomb which killed 73 passengers and crew members aboard a Cuban passenger airliner as it flew over Barbadian waters on October 6, 1976, represents a huge political burden for the White House and its deteriorating relations with Latin America. The disposition of the case will now also test the authenticity of the U.S.’s War on Terror, since Posada is responsible for some of the worst pre-9/11 crimes perpetrated in the Western Hemisphere. However, he has never been conclusively tried for being one of the region’s most notorious psychopaths, as the Department of Justice (DOJ) and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) lawyers as well as his detractors continue to cavil over whether he should be accorded the gallows or be granted U.S. citizenship.

Posada originally had admitted to a New York Times reporter of masterminding the 1976 bombing of Cuban Flight 455, in which 73 passengers lost their lives, including a nine-year-old girl, Cuba’s award-winning national fencing team, a young mother-to-be, as well as Guyanese and North Korean travelers. However, in deference to the ultra rightist faction of Miami’s Cuban exile community, Washington has repeatedly offered its protection to this world class criminal from prosecution by U.S. authorities or in any other germane jurisdiction. In doing so, the Bush administration almost has gone out of its way to debase the process of shaping a corpus of applicable international standards against terrorism by protecting those whom others might describe as “terrorists,” who are considered to be in good standing by some U.S. authorities. But, as the Washington-based lawyer, Jose Pertierra – who has been retained by Venezuelan authorities to represent their country’s interests in this case – explains “the fight against terrorism cannot be fought à la carte.”

A Case Wrought with Painful Irony
Washington has heard continuous international appeals, mainly as a result of Havana and Caracas initiatives, that Posada (who is both a Cuban national and Venezuelan citizen) be brought to justice. Venezuela and the U.S. have an extradition treaty in place dating back to 1922, which obligates the U.S. to immediately extradite any Venezuelan national in this country who has been indicted on murder charges in their home jurisdiction. Under the applicable terms of this bilateral treaty, Venezuela formally applied for Posada’s extradition in May of 2005. Not surprisingly, the Bush administration immediately rebuked this effort by maintaining that the leftist, pro-Castro nature of the Venezuelan government would preclude a fair trial to Posada in a Venezuelan courthouse, and that the defendant would be subject to torture: a self-serving assumption that U.S. prosecutors have never bothered to evidence.

On the domestic front, Washington’s unwillingness to prosecute Posada or facilitate terrorism charges against him brought in other venues, demonstrates that its War on Terror unmistakably involves double standards based on selective indignation. On September 11, 2006 (the anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks), the lack of forward motion by the U.S. Attorney’s office in Miami regarding the resolution of Posada’s status, led to a judge ruling that the mastermind terrorist be released due to a lack of evidence that would establish that he was a world-class terrorist and thus shouldn’t be released into the general public until his status would be resolved.

Since the federal prosecutor failed to mount a well-coordinated case, but mainly relied upon screening films and citing general grounds for detention, Magistrate Norbert Garney was forced to be exceedingly lenient in his ruling, by lodging only a relatively minor charge of illegal entry into the U.S. against Posada. Garney forcefully scolded the prosecution for its failure to produce critical, factual evidence regarding his professed terrorist status in proving that the only prudent path to take was to continue Posada’s detention. To the families of Posada’s scores of victims, the Bush administration’s DOJ’s legal team handling of the case was a caricature of what should have been an orderly and professional disposition.

Magistrate Garney then gave the prosecutors an extension of time to strengthen their case against Posada, whose U.S. citizenship application was simultaneously being heard by the USCIS. The judge’s reasoning for the extension stemmed from an unequivocal belief that Posada was “an admitted terrorist with a history of involvement in terrorist activities,” and that releasing him could have “significant national and foreign relations consequences.” However, on October 5, the day before the 30th anniversary of the destruction of Cuban Flight 455, the DOJ’s deadline to present adequate evidence to move the trial ahead, came to an end. At this point, the presiding U.S. District Judge Philip Martinez extended a new deadline, February 1, 2007, for the federal prosecution to present its case. In Martinez’s view, Posada has been detained “well beyond” what the U.S. Supreme Court permits. Thus, as of today, at most 30 days remain for the Bush-Gonzales justice to be dispensed.

Amongst the legal community, the DOJ’s lassitude has raised suspicion over whether the U.S. attorneys’ lack of aggressiveness could be attributed to the private biases of Attorney General Gonzales’ in this high profile case, or were they simply trying to gain time by arranging an indefinite trial extension for a self-admitted mass murderer.

What is the U.S. Government Hiding?
There is no reason to scoff at the notion that the U.S. Attorney’s office may be calculatedly sabotaging the Posada case in order to spare the administration an embarrassing outcome brought about by its not applying the full weight of the law against him. Certainly, the executive branch has an interest in shielding the case from widespread publicity. Over the years, Republican administrations on several cases acted to protect Posada, a political icon in Miami. Understandably, the government might not want the U.S. public to know about Posada’s long-standing cooperative relationship with U.S. authorities on various conservative causes, including his role as a CIA agent.

For starters, during the vice-presidency of George Bush Sr., Posada was granted sanctuary in El Salvador where he worked for the U.S. Embassy assisting Contra efforts operating out of neighboring Honduras shortly after escaping for a second time from a Caracas jail on August 18, 1985 where he awaited trial for the destruction of the Cuban airliner. Perhaps only coincidentally, when Posada arrived to San Salvador, Col. Emilio T. Gonzalez, the current Director of the USCIS, was the Assistant Military Attaché in the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador. Conceivably the U.S. Congress would find it appropriate to conduct a hearing investigating any possible conflicts of interests considering that the Director of the USCIS, now Dr. Gonzalez, has substantial leverage over Posada’s hopes of being granted asylum in the U.S. Furthermore, the fact that Dr. Gonzalez is an exiled Cuban national, whose family left Cuba in 1961 shortly after the failed attack on Playa Giron, might also be of interest to Congressional investigators. Dr. Gonzalez’s known intense personal anti-Castro elements and personal friendship with the now detained Posada should be addressed after the Democrats take over Congress.
Moreover, documents in the possession of National Security Archives reveal that Bush Sr., as the CIA director at the time of the downing of Flight 455, was likely to have picked up rumors of Posada’s plan at a time when the explosives were being wired to detonate on board Flight 455. Much of the evidence against Posada has come from declassified FBI and CIA documents, including evidence of Posada’s meeting with another notorious terrorist, such as his accomplice and co-conspirator in Caracas, Orlando Bosch. One report states that “We [Posada and Bosch] are going to hit a Cuban airplane. Orlando has the details.” The DOJ even lists Bosch as a “terrorist, unfettered by laws, or human decency, threatening and inflicting violence without regard to the identity of his victims.” Revealingly, Bosch today dwells as a free man in Miami after former President Bush Sr. granted him a full pardon from all U.S. charges on July 18, 1990, a decision made at the behest of the arch Castro-basher, former U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela, Otto Reich.

But Posada, whose fate has not yet been determined, is guilty of more than just the destruction of the Cuban flight. The demolition training he received while enrolled in the notorious School of the Americas and thereafter as a CIA proxy, enabled him to mastermind several Cuban hotel bombings while operating under cover in Havana. These attacks were decried around the world as blatant acts of violence against tourists and other civilians, yet the U.S. authorities downplayed their significance at the time.

Posada was also implicated in the highly controversial Operation 40, which, throughout the 1960s, involved conducting sabotage operations and assassination plots in hopes of inciting a civil war in Cuba between pro and con Castro forces. Posada is also suspected of helping Bosch orchestrate the 1976 car bombing of former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and his U.S. assistant, Ronni Moffitt, on Embassy Row in Washington, D.C., in which both lost their lives. Most recently in Panama, Posada was preparing himself to go on trial for attempting to assassinate Castro, while the Cuban president was attending a gathering with more than 2,000 students at the University of Panama in 2000. Extraordinarily enough, former Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso, now residing in Miami, found no problem in pardoning him on August 25, 2004, on the eve of her leaving office, after Posada had been detained with 200 pounds of explosives in his possession. Perhaps Moscoso was so preoccupied with the good life awaiting her in Miami, that the matter did not adequately catch her attention. What we do know is that she was able to block from her conscience the impact of the death of 73 innocent victims – who died in the fatal airplane bombing three decades ago – out of which she was able to find the grounds to free him.

Justified Incredulity from Abroad
The Bush administration may be attempting to placate Miami and ease itself out of the Posada affair by attempting to find him a safe haven outside the U.S. However, to their dismay, upon contacting authorities in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico, Canada, Panama, El Salvador and Honduras, Bush officials were repeatedly told that they would only facilitate Posada’s extradition to Venezuela or Cuba, if such papers were ever filed against him.

Posada’s Miami-based lawyer, Eduardo R. Soto, has consistently fought such third-country deportation efforts on the grounds that he would be treated in a prejudicial manner wherever he would end up, something of a tacit admission of his guilt in itself. Other nations understandably want nothing to do with the man, who is viewed by many as a “monster,” and “Latin America’s bin Laden.” Meanwhile, the two countries which overwhelmingly have the greatest justification in seeing Posada brought to justice – Cuba and Venezuela – where Posada remains a fugitive from justice, in what has turned out to be an ongoing trial in absentia. However, the Bush administration has systematically ruled out the two as it considers them “rogue” nations where Posada would face “the threat of torture…and therefore could not be returned under the United Nations Convention Against Torture.” This is a conclusion that most legal experts would turn their back on.

Cuba has long been awaiting the administration of justice for the mass murder of its nationals on board the Cuban airliner. Havana has found widespread sympathy for the enormous loss and pain suffered by its population over this horrific misdeed. In 1998, Fidel Castro unveiled a monument in Barbados commemorating the passengers aboard the ill-fated flight. Venezuela also continues to vehemently assert its right to try Posada, whose successful escape from a Caracas jail is universally believed to be the result of well-heeled Miami confederates pulling strings and bribing prison guards. The Miami capos are also believed to be responsible for bringing Posada into contact with CIA operatives who signed him up as a useful “can-do” asset, and then again, were said by some to be involved in bringing President Moscoso into the scenario that ended up with her inexplicable pardon of him.

The Cuban Five
The fundamentally biased nature of the current Posada proceedings are highlighted by comparing them to the zealous dynamism displayed by U.S. prosecutors from the same office who were involved in the trial of five Cuban nationals: Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González and René González. Now all serving lengthy prison terms, these Havana militants were arrested by the FBI in Miami on September 12, 1998 and were accused of espionage and murder. Andrés Gómez, the Director of the pro-Castro Areítodigital magazine, insists: “The federal government lied and is still lying. The Five, as everyone knows, were not in Miami to spy against the government of the United States, but to infiltrate the terrorist organizations of the Cuban-American extreme right-wing, which with the full knowledge and protection of the federal government, plans and directs from that city terrorist actions…”

Indeed, the only real “threat” that these men seemed to pose from their monitoring of several extremist Cuban exile groups in Miami like CORU, Alpha 66, Omega 7 and Brothers to the Rescue, all of which were documented for their involvement in attacking Cuban personnel and property, bombing island tourist facilities, and illegally dropping pamphlets over Havana and other of the island’s major urban centers.

Double Standards at Work
The Cuban Five were arrested shortly after alerting Havana officials of flights that were being planned by the Miami-based anti-Castro extremist organization, Brothers to the Rescue. When two planes flown by exile pilots professedly penetrated Cuban airspace, they were shot down by Cuban pilots after warnings by Cuban air patrol officials to reverse their course. The blatant bias of trial judge Joan Lenard against the Cuban Five throughout their Miami proceedings, led to their conviction on all 26 counts, in which the jury deliberated for only four days.

The deportment throughout the proceedings of Judge Lenard, who acted more as a government prosecutor than a crusader for justice, only underscores Washington’s obsessive tactics when it comes to the interpretation of international terrorism in its favor. The fact that both the judge and jury foreman were outspokenly anti-Castro should have led to a dismissal of the indictments or certainly a change of venue. It is true that some Florida wags have been know to mutter, yet with her handling of this case, Judge Lenard proved that she is as fair to justice as Katherine Harris is to a fair vote. Notably, a UN Working Group reviewing the case was able to determine that the trial did not take place in a climate of objectivity and impartiality, which is required in order to conclude on the observance of the standards of a fair trial. The UN report also charges that the Cuban Five were wrongfully held for seventeen months in solitary confinement after their arrest, and that their lawyers were deprived of the opportunity to examine all of the available evidence before the government invoked the Classified Information Protection Act.

As a result, Hernández was sentenced to two consecutive life terms plus fifteen years, Labañino to one life term plus 18 years, Guerrero to one life term plus 10 years, and Fernando González and René González to nineteen and fifteen years respectively. The defense’s argument that Miami-Dade County was “a basic nucleus of anti-Castro Cuban exiles, where the conditions for a fair trial do not exist,” was summarily rejected in the pre-trial phase of the adjudication. On August 9, 2005, after Leonard Weinglass, the U.S. attorney for the Cuban Five, had appealed this ruling, a three judge panel of the Court of Appeals issued a 93-page reversal of the initial conviction as well as nullified the sentences. In response to the reversal, the Bush administration and Attorney General Gonzales vehemently pushed for the Solicitor General to appeal the verdict of the three-judge panel’s decision before all twelve judges of the 11th circuit in Atlanta. Its finding, to the surprise of many, in a 10-2 vote, reversed the previous pro-Cuban Five ruling, affirming the initial trial’s convictions and providing at least a temporary victory for the Bush administration and its Miami political backers.
Nevertheless, the defense counsel for the Cuban Five was quick to act and called for the conviction to be remanded back to the three judge panel (now only a two-judge panel because one had since retired) for the adjudication of the nine remaining issues under appeal. As Executive Director of the National Lawyers Guild, Heidi Boghosian explains, “The case of the Five is now in the hands of the very two judges who earlier reviewed this country’s history of crimes against Cuba, and concluded that […] it was impossible for these five Cubans to receive a fair trial in Miami.” Considering the defense’s previous success with this panel of judges, Boghosian expects that they “will again rectify this travesty of justice.”

The case of the Cuban Five is going to haunt the Bush presidency because even those opposed to the Castro regime have raised concern over the harsh treatment and violation of rights exercised upon the Five. The DOJ’s handling of these men has raised a ubiquitous fervor of nationalism profoundly affecting the younger Cuban generation who feel the U.S. has acted on immoral grounds. Considering Castro’s terminal illness, this will be a unifying factor for the Cuban system considering that the Miami-orchestrated case against the Cuban Five will be viewed as a trivial offense on all Cubans. Truly, the concepts of liberty and justice – which attracted thousands of Cubans to the U.S. shores – are not being preached by U.S. and its authorities.

U.S. War on Terror Lacks Consistency and Integrity
While a final decision on the fate of the Cuban Five is expected to be reached in the first half of 2007, the U.S. government’s single-minded hectoring of the Cuban Five – which is propelled by ideology as much as by law – vividly contrasts with the privileged treatment of Posada, whom after being accused of orchestrating the death of 73 innocent individuals, is now leading a protected life while his immigration status is being argued over in an El Paso, Texas, courthouse. Don’t be too startled if Posada is released at any time, by a lightning move on the part of the government since the DOJ has been guided by more of an ideological mission rather than by a faithful administering of the law.

If the U.S. government insists on its sovereign right to preemptively invade other nations to prevent terrorist attacks on its homeland, it might want to consider the illogicality of not attributing the same rights to its neighbor, particularly when that neighbor has repeatedly warned U.S. authorities that the Brothers to the Rescue were routinely violating international law by their repeated over-flights of Cuba.

On September 11, 2001, President Bush announced to the world that “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” Nevertheless, the U.S. continues to harbor Posada. If he is not brought to justice on this round, the U.S., by its own definition, can be identified as safe-haven for “evil-doers,” invalidating its own justifications for conducting its War on Terror. Posada’s El Paso-based lawyer, Felipe D.J. Millan disagrees, and asks “How can you call someone a terrorist who allegedly committed acts on your behalf?” Interestingly, Millan’s own query proves the need to judge Posada in another country such as Venezuela or some neutral third country, where he would have to respond to international charges, that, in effect, if found guilty on them, would make him complicit in criminal acts of terrorism and crimes against humanity. If the U.S. does not facilitate this process, as Michael Avery, the former President of the National Lawyers Guild concluded, “Allowing Posada into the United States and entertaining an asylum request from a confessed terrorist is an open acknowledgement of accomplice liability…” Perhaps a viable neutral candidate for a suitable venue to conduct Posada’s trial would be Spain, as the Los Angeles Times editorial board has argued: “Madrid is a credible interlocutor between Washington and Latin America, and Spanish courts have a recent tradition […] of aggressively taking on cases of universal jurisdiction.”

If the spotlight doesn’t stop focusing on Posada, in all likelihood, the administration could calculatedly announce to the general public – on a slow news day or on the eve of a three-day holiday – that Posada should be allowed to proceed with his citizenship application hoping that the case would disappear from the screen. This holiday season, with all the distractions that it entails, could be a period of suspense for scores of grieving family members seeking justice from Miami-spawned violence. The Bush administration has repeatedly displayed its political savvy in the timing of its archly political releases of controversial documents, other information, or individuals. This can be seen in the announcement of Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation as Secretary of Defense, which was made public on the morning after the Democrats’ triumph in the congressional elections, conveniently distracting the population by masking the Republicans’ near political implosion.

Meanwhile, the lives of the five incarcerated Cubans will continue to be squandered because of the intense ideological and political prejudices that define President Bush and Attorney General Gonzales’ way of formulating U.S. policy when it comes to the Cuban issue, or how it uses its criminal justice system for revenge rather than vindication. By setting an arch terrorist free while simultaneously continuing the draconic sentences against the five Cubans on the most meager of charges – who many would argue should never have been behind bars in the first place – Bush continues to build on the Bush family-Posada relationship, while at the same time scrapping all hopes of rendering U.S. relations towards Venezuela and Cuba more rational and responsive to the best of the U.S. tradition of the pursuit of justice and preserving, in good health, its humanitarian legacy.

This analysis was prepared by Research Associate Brittany Bond and co-edited by Research Associates Magali Devic, Danielle Ryan, and Eytan Starkman
December 27th, 2006

Street Battles in Oaxaca

by John Gibler

At 8 a.m. on November 2, police came to remove the last barricade. After clearing away the rubble and city buses used to block the major Cinco Señores intersection, several hundred riot police and special forces from the Federal Preventive Police (PFP) took positions along University Avenue on either side of the Autonomous State University of Oaxaca. Two groups of police forces armed with submachine guns, tear gas grenades, riot shields and batons prepared to advance, with military helicopters circling overhead and anti-riot tanks gunning their motors behind. Only the charred skeleton of an old bus, stretched across University Avenue halfway between the two police lines, remained.

The commander of the federal police, who would not give his name, said that they had no intention of invading the university campus, home to the occupied radio station that protesters from the Oaxaca Peoples’ Popular Assembly (APPO) had used for months to coordinate their civil disobedience uprising against Governor Ulises Ruíz Ortíz. “They are in their house,” the commander said, “and we did not come here to kick them out.”

The students saw otherwise.

Soon, residents from surrounding neighborhoods trickled into the streets to stand before the lines of riot police, talking, pleading and screaming at them not to advance, not to attack the university. The crowd swelled and by 10 a.m., students began to leap over the campus walls and join in, carrying junked cars, old tires and fallen telephone poles to build a new barricade only 10 feet from the federal police, and then set it on fire. The students shouted at the police, waving their sticks, rocks, slingshots and Molotov cocktails in the air.

Then one of the helicopters overhead fired tear gas grenades inside the campus, and the students unleashed a torrential volley of rocks and bottles. To the west, a morning soccer game froze in mid-play before both teams and the referees ran to gather rocks and join the defense.

It would take four hours, with thousands of students and nearby residents waging the fight, before the PFP finally retreated at 3 p.m. and the barricade of Cinco Señores was rebuilt.

The confrontation was the first open battle with police since teachers and local residents defeated state riot police in their pre-dawn raid on the striking teachers’ encampment on June 14. Created to support the teachers’ union after June’s failed police raid, the APPO had responded to armed paramilitary attacks only by organizing barricades—thousands of barricades—across Oaxaca City every night. When the PFP entered Oaxaca on October 29, the APPO called on protesters to turn and march with the police into the city rather than confront them. But state police in unmarked cars began a terror campaign, shooting, abducting, and brutally torturing university students and barricade volunteers in broad daylight.

The resulting rage catalyzed with the euphoria of victory on November 2, creating an urge for more battle. During a massive march on November 5, APPO organizers formed human chains in front of the police to keep protesters from throwing rocks or Molotov cocktails. But on November 20, after yet another, smaller march to commemorate the Mexican Revolution, four masked men threw rocks at the police lines outside of the town square. The police responded with tear gas and began to advance on the protesters, who retreated several blocks. After three hours of fighting, the APPO—blaming agitators for throwing the first rocks—gave the order to retreat and prepare a November 25 action.

The plan was to lead another massive march into the city center and peacefully surround the PFP—at a distance of a full city block—keeping them trapped in the town square for 48 hours. But the plan did not hold. When PFP agents stole a protester’s cooler of soda, young and enraged APPO members responded by throwing rocks and firing bottle rockets through plastic tubes.

The battle lasted for three hours and ended with the PFP using full force—tear gas, riot tanks, machine gun fire—to drive the protesters out of the center and surround them, beating and detaining over 140 people. That night, federal and state police pulled wounded protesters out of hospitals at gun point, raided houses and patrolled the city in convoys of pickup trucks carrying special forces officers. The campaign stretched over a week, forcing movement leaders and participants alike into hiding.

But on December 10, more than 10,000 members of the APPO reemerged to march in Oaxaca City, demanding Ruíz’s ouster and an end to the repression of the movement.

“People are moving beyond the fear,” says Fernando Soberanes, an indigenous teacher and member of the APPO who has participated in the movement from day one. “We are returning to the streets.”

Report from Oaxaca

by Luciente Zamora and Nina Armand
Wednesday Dec 27th, 2006 9:52 AM

First report from two Revolution correspondents who are now in Oaxaca as part of a delegation whose mission is to bring international attention to the situation in that southern Mexican state.

Report from Oaxaca
by Luciente Zamora and Nina Armand

This is the first report from two Revolution correspondents, Luciente Zamora, and Nina Armand, who are now in Oaxaca as part of a delegation whose mission is to bring international attention to the situation in that southern Mexican state. As the two correspondents wrote in a letter in Revolution #74: “Repression is hitting hard against a powerful struggle that has rocked Oaxaca for months and inspired many people throughout Mexico and other parts of the world. Now more than ever there is a need to hear from the people who have been fighting with such determination, to bring to light the government-inflicted terror currently unfolding, and to get a deeper understanding of how people are confronting these new challenges and what the implications of all this are for emancipatory struggle on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border.”

Watch this website and get the next issue of Revolution for further on-the-scene reports from Oaxaca.

Oaxaca, Mexico, December 18— Contrasted against the blue sky, the red noche buenas blooming throughout the city, along with the sounds of women cooking and children playing in the marketplace, make the center of town seem almost…normal. Oaxaca is not the same place it was before the people stood up in June of this year. The fact that for months the people raised their heads throughout Oaxaca—from the center region and through much of the countryside—cannot be erased. Oaxaca demanded to be heard.

* * * * *

On Sunday, December 17, 43 prisoners who had been detained in a prison in Tepic, Nayarit were released. Immediately upon their arrival back to Oaxaca City, many of the people released began sharing stories of the November 25th repression when the Federal Preventive Police (PFP)—which had been occupying the zocalo, the central city square, since October—attacked protesters demanding the ouster of Oaxaca's hated governor, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz. More than 150 people were brutally beaten and arrested in the area around the zocalo, including many people who were coming home from work and shopping.

Magdalena was coming home from work on the afternoon of the 25th. She’s a 50-year-old widow and works as a housekeeper to support her family. She had heard of the popular movement, but didn’t really know too much about it. She remembered some of her neighbors telling her that the teachers were just troublemakers and that it was time for the authorities to bring down order. But on the 25th everything changed. She was swept up along with many others by the PFP while she was in the town center. She was hit, thrown down on the floor, had her hands tied and told—along with other women—that they were going to die and that after they were killed their bodies would be thrown in garbage cans where nobody would find them.

Magdalena saw her relatives bloodied and beat up. For the 21 days she was in prison, she and the others arrested that day had no contact with the outside world. For Magdalena, what is burned into her consciousness is the desperation of the women prisoners who don’t know where their children are and whether or not they are eating. Just as arbitrarily as she’d been grabbed off the street on the 25th, she was told that she was going home. She can’t stop thinking about the women she left behind.

Before, Magdalena hadn’t given much thought to the people’s struggle. Her experience has affected her profoundly. She says after what the government has done to her she wants to participate in the struggle however she can. She now remembers the repression against the people of Atenco, who were fighting against the government's moves to take their land, and never would have believed she’d find herself identifying with the women who were brutalized there. She is most of all driven by an urgency to free the prisoners who remain in the conditions she’s just escaped, and she says that though she can’t read or write she wants to be involved in whatever way she can. She says she doesn’t seek to be rich and live in a mansion like URO, but she demands respect and a more just world—not just for herself, but for everyone.

* * * * *

The air is still thick in Oaxaca. In the past weeks police helicopters have occasionally flown low over the city—their blades a reminder of the brute force of the state. Officially the PFP forces have withdrawn from the city, but there are still eyes and ears everywhere. Just last night Florentino Lopez, Pedro Garcia, and Macario Padilla, prominent figures in the APPO movement were detained at a stoplight and were beaten and arrested. They were released the same night—but the threat of more repression is clear, as is determination on the people’s side.

----

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Uruguay’s recovery “has exceeded all expectations”

The recovery of the Uruguayan economy from the 2002 crisis “has exceeded all expectations” but continued efforts are needed “to entrench macroeconomic stability, deepen structural reforms and reduce vulnerabilities”, reports the IMF in the last reviews of a stand by arrangement with Uruguay.

The Executive Board of the IMF completed last week the fifth and sixth reviews under the three-year, SDR 766.25 million (about 1.15 billion US dollars) Stand-By Arrangement for Uruguay and praised Uruguay’s performance which “has paved the way for an early exit from IMF financial support”.

“Sound policies and a supportive external environment have delivered a sharp economic recovery and low inflation, a declining debt ratio and rollover risk, and a vastly improved external position”, said Murilo Portugal, IMF Deputy Managing Director and Acting Chair, adding that “the banking system, once at the centre of the Uruguayan crisis, is now substantially stronger-better capitalized and with tighter prudential regulations to internalize risks from high financial dollarization”.

On November 8, 2006, the Uruguayan authorities announced that they would shortly repay all outstanding obligations to the Fund and cancel the current Stand-By Arrangement. Full repayment of the equivalent of SDR 727 million (about 1.1 billion US dollars) was made on November 30, 2006 and the authorities indicated that they wanted the arrangement to be cancelled shortly after the completion of the fifth and sixth reviews. Therefore, there was no disbursement associated with the reviews.

Insisting on issues still to be addressed, Mr. Portugal said that, “continued policy efforts are needed to entrench macroeconomic stability, deepen structural reforms, and further reduce vulnerabilities. In the fiscal policy area, the intention to pursue policies in 2007 consistent with the medium-term primary surplus target of 4% of GDP, while maintaining appropriate levels of investment and social spending, is welcomed, as high primary surpluses should remain at the core of the strategy to reduce the debt burden and anchor policy credibility”.

"With the recent passage of the tax reform, a major milestone in the reform agenda, preparations for its implementation in July 2007 need to proceed vigorously. It will also be important to move ahead with reform plans for the budget, customs, the social security bank, and the specialized pension schemes.

"While inflation is relatively low, the authorities should stand ready to adjust policies should inflation pressures emerge. Continued central bank build-up of foreign exchange reserves, consistent with exchange rate flexibility and the inflation objectives, would help increase reserve coverage, which is not as high as in other dollarized economies.

"In the financial sector, vulnerabilities need to be reduced further. Passage and implementation of the financial sector law in 2007 will be crucial to enhance central bank independence and strengthen the supervisory and bank resolution frameworks. Completing the restructuring of the housing bank (BHU) into a viable institution in the near term will also be important" underlined Mr. Portugal.

In a supplementary letter of intent, dated December 7, Uruguayan authorities admitted to some of the structural reforms pending which will be addressed in 2007, among which: autonomy for the Central Bank; strengthen regulation of the financial system and provide a suitable bank resolution; restructuring of the Housing & Mortgage bank, BHU, by moving non performing loans to a fideicomiso and make the bank into a viable business institution; reforms to the Police, military and bank employees pensions funds.

Inside Venezuela's Controversial Revolution

by Brian Fitzpatrick - Political Affairs

Maria raised a gangster. She didn't plan on it, but Venezuela's slums tempted her son Mauricio with the drugs he needed to numb his anger. By age 14, he had fallen into a life of theft and violence, trying to pry himself out of the squalor and hopelessness in which he was trapped.

I've been a high school history and Spanish teacher, a Fulbright scholar, and a Latin American aficionado for 30 years. I've been suspicious of the media's one-sided coverage of Venezuela, so when I had an opportunity earlier this year to attend the World Social Forum in Caracas and meet people like Maria and Mauricio, I jumped at the chance. I wanted to see for myself the social, economic and political changes that are bubbling in Venezuela and causing so much controversy.

Maria told me that her priorities have never changed. She has always wanted education, health and dignity for her children. Every day she awoke in her shack, prepared breakfast, ironed laundry, kissed Mauricio and sent him off to school. Then Maria swept the sidewalk and scrubbed the laundry. Unfortunately, at the age of 12, Mauricio began playing hooky and learning lessons in the streets. He learned how to fight and wield a knife. He also learned that money made the world spin. He watched his mother slave away and scrimp on necessities. He vowed that some day he'd free her from poverty. But before that day came, Mauricio got busted for dealing drugs and was hustled off to juvenile jail. Maria cried and cried. How could she have been so blind? Kids in their neighborhood generally grew up – if they lived that long – to be dealers, addicts, pimps, prostitutes or pregnant.

So Rich Yet So Poor

Per capita, Venezuela is one of the richest countries in the world. Twice the size of California with far fewer people, Venezuela floats on a sea of oil and gas. Its mountains drip with a lucrative coffee crop. Grass sprouts faster than cattle can chew it. Exotic fruits bend boughs and litter the ground. Biodiversity explodes under the Amazonian canopy. Caribbean beaches entice tourists. Its hydroelectric potential could illuminate the continent.

With such abundant wealth, why do Venezuelan workers earn only $5 to $10 per day? Why are 80 percent of the people poor? Why are there so many broken-hearted mothers like Maria?

At the 2006 World Social Forum, I heard President Hugo Chávez and his supporters answer that question over and over. To them, Venezuela is poor because US imperialism and repression intimidate and kill union leaders and funnel national profits through an elite class to US corporations. They expand that accusation beyond Venezuela and insist that throughout the third world, rich countries use a privileged class to control the domestic population while national wealth disappears into banks in New York, London and Geneva. Chávez and his followers point to Iraq to prove their point. They insist that the US invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction but rather the installation of a regime that would pass oil profits to US and British oil companies. The populist Chávez is now drawing heat because he is implementing initiatives to keep national wealth at home and using it to mitigate the ubiquitous poverty that Venezuelans have long suffered.

Right-leaning media outlets vilify Chávez and, subsequently, the people's movement that stands behind him. The leftist press lauds him as a Bolivarian messiah. What is the truth, and what is going on in Venezuela?

At the World Social Forum, I saw red... lots of it. Parades and rallies teemed with red-shirted Venezuelans who were as fanatical about Hugo Chávez as they were about baseball. Their fervor and his mystique lured me to his rallies, which gave me a taste of the mass movement that is being embraced as a second Bolivarian revolution. Chávez and His Charisma

Born in 1954 to two school teachers, Chávez graduated from the national military academy, abandoned his baseball aspirations and began jumping out of airplanes (as a paratrooper). He made a career in the military, and in 1992 led a failed coup d'état, which landed him in prison for two years. After the coup attempt, Chávez founded the Movement for a Fifth Republic (MVR), a political party promising social transformation.

Chávez was elected president in 1998 and re-elected in 2000. His flamboyant charisma has captured a majority of Venezuelan hearts; Chavista rallies regularly throb with hundreds of thousands of red-shirted supporters. As a young man, Chávez crooned mariachi ballads, and his compelling voice continues to captivate audiences. At the World Social Forum, Chávez, wearing a blood-red shirt, took the podium and hushed the crowd. Before he took the stage, musicians had primed the audience with songs and riffs on social justice and a salsa number that sent 30,000 hips gyrating. The joint was literally jumping; I had never seen anything close to its intensity. I found myself in the midst of a frenzied group of young Afro-Venezuelan students chanting impassioned MVR slogans. I caught the Chavista fever and began making new friends left and left.

I didn't know how long-winded Chávez could be; he can and does speak for hours. After two hours, I heard him hit his stride. I was never bored. He wove history, geography, philosophy, economics, ecology, music, and humor through an extemporaneous speech that demonstrated his eclectic erudition.

In the midst of his discourse Chávez spun off on a riff vilifying "Mr. Danger," otherwise known as George W. Bush. Chávez punctuated this by quoting the grand liberator himself, Simon Bolivar, who said in 1825 that "the United States of North America is destined by providence to plague the people of the Americas with hunger and misery in the name of freedom." Chávez has elevated Bolivar's prophecy to a national mantra.

At the end of three hours, he pulled the threads taut and his words cohered into a vivid tapestry. As he left the stage, the crowd chanted "El pueblo unido jamás será vencido" (a united people will never be defeated), and I felt 30,000 hearts pulse as one.

Revolution and Its Discontents

When Chávez does something, he does it with bravado. His reforms affect every aspect of the status quo. He promises to provide universal free education and health care and eradicate malnutrition and poverty - but critics ask, "Where will the money come from?"

One of his reforms, an agrarian land-reform program, has antagonized many rich landowners. Chávez's program sets limits on the size of landholdings; taxes unused property to spur agricultural growth; redistributes unused, government-owned land to peasant families and cooperatives; and, lastly, expropriates fallow land from large, private estates for the purpose of redistribution. Landowners would be compensated for their land at market value.

At a panel discussion, I heard Chávez supporters lauding his land-reform proposals, which offer the poor life-sustaining parcels and put to use vacant plots in a nation that imports most of its food. Other reform programs offer the poor subsidized grocery markets at prices far lower than commercial outlets.

But a cabbie who drove us through downtown went ballistic when we started mentioning Chávez. "He's a fool!" he shouted and pushed the accelerator to the floor. "He wants to give away everything! They should have shot him when they had the chance. He's making a mess out of the country."

During a forum event I overheard two young men arguing. One of the men asserted that the Chávez opposition had contaminated birthing rooms so that the infant mortality rate would climb and make the government look inept. This extreme rumor made it patently clear that I was in the third world and that Venezuela was locked in a life-and-death struggle over the future of the country. I squeezed into that conversation and met Mauricio Lugo, Maria's son, a former ne'er-do-well and now a community organizer and fervent supporter of President Chávez and his populist movement.

Chávez is a lightning rod standing at the center of a political storm, both domestically and internationally. He has courted controversy by visiting Iran and inviting it to open factories in Venezuela. He wants to buy military hardware from the Russians, and he speaks openly about a US invasion of Venezuela. He reminds people of Latin American history lest they forget that the US has invaded Latin America dozens of times. And he takes every opportunity to lampoon Bush, going so far as to refer to him at the UN podium as the sulfur-scented Devil.

Even some who are convinced of Chávez's altruism are wary of the hero-worship he has cultivated. A Venezuelan psychiatrist has commented that "the love of the people is a narcotic to him. He needs it the same way he needs his coffee."

Chávez is also accused of concentrating too much power in the presidency. (A criticism levied against Bush as well.) He has packed both the military and the courts with MVR supporters, and has said that he wants to call a referendum in which people can vote to overturn presidential term limitations and retain him in office until 2031.

Opposition leaders fear the authoritarian direction they see the government taking. They allege that government contracts are assigned with favoritism and that media intimidation has decreased criticism of the administration. They also raise the concern that Chávez's policies are insufficiently focused and require constant infusions of oil money.

Yet millions of poor and disenfranchised Venezuelans are now actively participating in the political process. Academicians attentively watch Chávez's progress, hoping that he will continue to deliver on his promises. Much of the middle class is happy to accept the health care benefits and entrepreneurial incentives his administration bestows. But there are a significant number of discontents. Although a minority, these tend to be the economic elite who prefer the status quo and fear the fundamental changes Chávez endorses.

In the Trenches

After the forum ended, I tagged along with Mauricio on a bus filled with MVR activists headed to Mauricio's hometown of Guacara. Unfortunately, Mauricio hadn't cleared me with the higher-ups. On the outskirts of Caracas, when the bus stopped so that everyone on board could shower and eat, the party leaders pointed at the 60-year-old gringo and asked, "Who's he?"

Mauricio turned out to be more trusting than the higher-ranked officials. They looked me up and down and began to whisper. Why would an American want to visit tawdry Guacara? Is he a spy? While they debated, I pulled up a soft concrete bench, opened a book and slid into a siesta. I awoke to a nudge, Mauricio shouting, "Vámonos (Let's go!), to Guacara." I wasn't sure if I was dreaming or if it was really happening, but Mauricio and I wedged our way onto a dilapidated public bus amidst bundle-wielding grandmothers, screaming babies and squawking chickens and rumbled west toward Guacara.

Soon after arriving in Guacara, Mauricio and I sat in his mother's kitchen while she reminisced about the day a woman wearing a red shirt knocked on her door. The woman had said that her name was Rosa and that she was a community organizer. She asked if Maria and her son wished to return to school. Maria stared at the woman as if she were a lunatic. Maria told Rosa that she had dropped out of school in the third grade to work, and that she still has no money and therefore couldn't return to school. Rosa insisted that she'd arrange everything, so Maria accepted. Rosa filled out the forms and enrolled Maria and Mauricio in night school.

On the first night of class, Rosa arrived and whisked Maria and Mauricio off to school. Maria said that she felt like Cinderella. Free history, math, language arts and English books were distributed. Maria told me that she fingered the pages as if they were gold; finally, after 40 years, she was getting the one thing she most desired, an education. Maria and Rosa are good friends now, and Rosa guides her through the maze of federal social programs that have been instituted under Chávez's leadership.

Mauricio sheepishly admitted that he had flunked an early class in community organizing. The final exam consisted of a simulation exercise that addressed the rehabilitation of maras (gang members). He failed the exam because he insisted that all the maras should first be shot – and thereafter the community established. Aghast, his teachers suggested he modify his social strategies. Mauricio followed their advice and now works as a community organizer. His experiences as a drug dealer have enabled him to empathize with and help adolescents who are on the dead-end street of gang life.

A Well Oiled Revolution

Over the next two weeks, Mauricio and Maria took me to visit adult education classes, computer centers, health clinics, senior centers, child care facilities, primary schools, food distribution centers and government-subsidized markets in Guacara, a formerly decaying industrial town now being revitalized by community programs.

I visited several community kitchens in which women open their homes daily to serve hot lunches to up to 150 of their neighbors. When I approached one lunch kitchen, Gloria, the barrio's grandmother, dashed into the blinding sunlight and grabbed my hand. She greeted me as if I were the king of England and dragged me past seniors dining on an aromatic pork stew. In the kitchen, I met four other women who stirred, simmered and smiled over their edible art. Five days a week, Gloria, a lonely widow, opens her home to the community and, with the help of several friends, serves delicious hot lunches. Gloria no longer suffers from loneliness; far from it. She's too busy preparing government-provided food and chatting with hungry neighbors. Mauricio winked at me and whispered, "Nourishment comes in many forms."

Throughout Venezuela, hundreds of kitchens like Gloria's add meaning to life, feed friends and vivify squalid neighborhoods. I've been a teacher for over three decades, and I can't forget the primary school that I visited in Guacara. Above the entrance was emblazoned Jose Marti's dictum: "Only the educated are free." In the school, I felt a communal thread weaving together the teachers, administrators, students, janitors, parents and volunteers. The principal glowed when she spoke of the altruism of her staff. I eavesdropped on classes and was impressed with the quality of instruction and the attentiveness of the students.

The school's bonneted cafeteria cooks personified the contagious positive attitude; the cooks glowed with delight when the second graders marched off with plates full of chicken, rice, beans, cantaloupe, strawberries and juice. No longer do students dizzy and dumb with hunger languish in classrooms. With full bellies and open hearts, they devour the education deprived their parents. The federal government views education as a national priority and backs its rhetoric with cash. I couldn't help but reflect on the impasse in US education, in which public schools have to beg for adequate funding and parry a privatizing lobby.

In night schools, I saw adults who didn't finish grade school savoring the sweet taste of knowledge previously deprived to them. The students were alert and dedicated; like dry sponges, they absorbed every comment the teacher uttered. No one knows better than an uneducated adult how much she missed when circumstances denied her an education. One man close to tears told me that not having an education felt like someone had cut off his arm; he lacked something constant and vital. Now, his smile reveals involvement, purpose and dignity.

Free computer centers encourage young and old, poor or rich, to enter and surf the wonders of the Internet and learn computer technology. In the centers, I saw technology foster literacy and literacy foster technology; the intoxicating spiral glued adults to computers they could never afford to own.

Sitting with Maria in her kitchen one day, I met the nurse who came to check on her arthritis. Prior to 1999 and the Chávez presidency, health care was a luxury only the rich enjoyed; now free health care is universal. Clinics sprout out of refurbished buildings and form natural hubs for community action. Neighborhoods revolve and are organized around medical care. Doctors and nurses respond to house calls 24 hours a day and know their patients personally; in a pedestrian barrio, patients constantly bump into their medical professionals. People, not profits, are the focal point.

The physical rehab center I visited used a gamut of therapies; a spirited and inquisitive doctor proudly showed me ultrasound, electromagnetic, and electric muscle-stimulating machines. The modest but busy clinic buzzed with treadmills and limping ladies pumping iron. The doctor then guided me through rooms that offered alternative therapies such as acupuncture and therapy from the smoke of the artemisia plant.

Geriatric community centers foster mental health by offering activities that pull seniors together. At the senior center I visited, old men slapped down dominos and bantered baseball with traditional Caribbean flair. Everywhere I went community spirit embellished health care procedures.

I learned from Mauricio that Chávez's MVR party revolves around small neighborhood groups called UBE's ("Electoral Battle Units"). The UBE's are the grassroots base of Venezuelan participatory democracy; I attended a couple of meetings and was astonished by the community involvement. More and more of the marginalized, aged, apathetic and angry are joining the progressive parade. Gangs, the most vicious manifestation of alienation, are losing their allure because UBE's provide a channel for participation. Adolescents now feel more connected and empowered and less susceptible to gang violence.

I was stupefied when Mauricio told me that stay-at-home moms receive a monthly stipend of 80 percent of the minimum wage for their service to their families and subsequently to society. During my stay in Guacara, retirement benefits were increased and a boost in the minimum wage was planned. "Amigo," Mauricio said to me as he explained how things work in Venezuela under the Chávez government, "Look at the words: socialism values society, people, and capitalism values money, a thing. Don't you get it? You gringos are getting ripped off by the corporate machine." I stared deep into his eyes; I was amazed at Mauricio's personal evolution from gang member to impassionedcommunity organizer.

A New Day in Latin America?

If Venezuelans are to be successful with their reformation movement, they must overcome a formidable array of obstacles. Systemic inertia, popular apathy, endemic corruption, a consumption-blinded populace, wealthy opposition, coups d'état, assassination and even invasion threaten to derail the changes that are sweeping across the country.

These daunting obstacles challenge the movement to continually reaffirm its commitment to change. Can Chávez or anyone else navigate through the maze of obstacles? Venezuela has aggressively grabbed the role of leadership to spur systemic change in Latin America, which is drifting leftward. Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay have leftist presidents. Resurgent left-leaning popular movements in Mexico, Ecuador and Nicaragua seem poised for power. Venezuela is not an aberration nor is it treading the leftist path alone.

Proposals for transnational oil pipelines, TV stations, banking systems, a single currency, and other unifying projects would make Simon Bolivar dance in his grave. Bolivar recognized that Latin America is united by a common language and religion; Chávez recognizes that if an incredibly diverse Europe can form a union, so too can Latin America. The people know that their land is rich and that they have more than enough resources to fund prosperity for all classes of society. Real hope is emerging that Latin America may soon make great strides in economic, political and social development.

Chávez's "Bolivarian Revolution" keeps rolling along. Expectations and dignity have been raised, but the specter of foreign intervention casts a huge shadow over the future. Venezuelans expect the US press to begin a campaign to demonize President Chávez, and in fact, the campaign has already begun. Last year Pat Robertson announced that the US should assassinate Chávez, and Donald Rumsfeld has compared Chávez to Hitler. Tensions mount daily.

Opposition forces inside and outside Venezuela try to demonize Chávez and by doing so condemn the entire national movement and the great work being done by millions of Venezuelans. Apathy, the plague of all democracies, has been replaced by hope, dedication and an involved citizenry. All leaders have their personal foibles – and Hugo Chávez is brash enough to wear them on his sleeve. But before demonizing Chávez and subsequently the social movement he has inspired, we should look more closely.

Before I left Venezuela, Mauricio reminded me of his vow to liberate his mother from poverty and to see her living with dignity. He brags that next year she will graduate from high school. He again shows me around the "hood." We walk past the new clinic, computer center, senior center, improved library, and school. In the plaza, voter registration hums daily. Mauricio tells me that six years ago Guacara was totally different – depressed, apathetic, squalid – and that now the people are involved and taking the driver's seat to transform the city.

Then he changes his tone and shifts from political to personal commentary. With a soft voice and a big smile, he admits to me that his anger has been replaced by gratitude to the new Venezuelan government for providing hope and dignity to millions of families like his. With a huge grin, he tells me, "I didn't have to free my mom from poverty; the government did it for me."

Original source / relevant link:
PoliticalAffairs.net

Argentina’s international reserves set to reach 43 billion

Argentina’s Central Bank international reserves are set to reach 43 billion US dollars by the end of next year according to estimates from the private BBVA Banco Francés, released Tuesday in Buenos Aires.

Estimates for 2007 indicate reserves will keep climbing a further 11 billion US dollars, mainly because of the country’s growing trade surplus estimated between 13.5 and 14 billion US dollars.

International reserves currently stand at a record 31.5 billion US dollars in spite of the fact Argentina cancelled all pending debts with the IMF totaling 9.5 billion US dollars.

Furthermore the Debt/GDP rate has fallen to 57/58% compared to 140% in 2002.

As to the public sector, BBVA forecasts Argentina will comfortably face all debt payments in US dollars plus interests, 75% of which will be compensated with the international reserves.

Last week official data showed that Argentina’s country risk was down to 218 points, after having reached over 5.000 points in the peak of the 2001/02 financial and banking crisis. Argentine sovereign bonds have again become attractive.

Last week President Nestor Kirchner said the Argentine economy “was advancing and with great strength”, which is signaling “an entirely different country”.

Kirchner pointed out that the country’s exports in 2006 had jumped 15% and for the fourth year running Argentina had a budget primary surplus (before debt payments) that in 2006 is expected to reach 7.5 billion US dollars.

The nominal exchange rate between the Argentine peso and the US dollar is expected to remain stable with no surprises, probably ending 2007 at 3.20 from its current 3.08 pesos.

With Argentine inflation estimated in the range of 10% and US inflation 1.8%, the real exchange rate is expected to appreciate in the range of 4.5%, which is just above market estimates.

Chile’s top scientists join international Antarctic study

Three of Chile’s leading environmental scientists are on board the Swedish ice-breaker Oden on a 14-day voyage to study the effects of climate change on the southernmost continent.

Together with a team of 21 Swedish and U.S. scientists they are launching a comprehensive study into the current environmental state of Antarctica, as part of the International Polar Year (IPY) 2007-2008.

The 30,000 ton ship, commissioned by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), set off from Gothenburg, Sweden, travelling across the Atlantic to arrive in Punta Arenas following a brief stop in Buenos Aires.

From Punta Arenas the mission crossed the Magellan Straits, Ross Sea, and then through ice up to six meters thick to the U.S. MacMurdo Base.

Six individual investigations focusing on the condition of marine life and the contamination of Antarctic water will be carried out during the voyage.

Víctor Hernández, biologist at the University of Concepción will collect around 80 litres of water from ten different locations. He is looking for evidence of residual pesticides or similar toxic products that disperse into the air and water.

“Toxic residues generated by pesticides stay in the environment for a long time,” said Hernández. “This can be highly dangerous for both humans and animals.”

For Verónica Vallejos from the Chilean Antarctic Institute (Inach) this trip is an opportunity to study Chile’s hard-to-reach Antarctic wildlife populations. “We’ve got the chance to investigate the presence of animals like whales in Chilean territory that has never before been analyzed,” she said.

Chile controls 1.250 million km of the 14 million km Antarctic continent, which is home to penguins, whales, fish, crustaceans and a range of hardy marine birds.

The first IPY began in 1882 when the scientific community decided to launch explorations into the two ice-caps. It wasn’t until 50 years later, 1932, that a second international effort was focused on the same areas. This latest IPY is co-sponsored by the International Council of Science (ICSU) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and aims to lay the foundation for major scientific advances in understanding of the nature and behaviour of polar regions and their role in the functioning of the planet.

According to the organization, this year could be the very last IPY: a document published by the organization earlier this month warned that the Arctic shelf could melt as soon as 2080.

The Santiago Times

Yes, Oil From Venezuela

by Joseph P. Kennedy II - Boston Globe

There's been a lot of controversy lately over whether Citizens Energy Corp. should distribute -- and the poor should accept -- discount heating oil from Venezuela while that country is under the leadership of President Hugo Chávez.

But those who have no problem staying warm at night should not condemn others for accepting Venezuela's oil. Rhetoric means little to an elderly woman who has to drag an old cot from her basement to sleep by the warmth of the open kitchen stove or give up food or medicine to pay her heating bill.

For nearly 30 years, Citizens Energy has provided senior citizens and low-income families with affordable fuel oil, gas, electricity, pharmaceutical drugs, and other basic necessities. Citgo Petroleum is a US company owned by the people of Venezuela. The oil it provides to Citizens Energy, the nonprofit that I lead, acts as a safety net for hundreds of thousands.

When our partnership with Citgo was announced last year, US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman praised the discount program as corporate philanthropy. "It's a charitable contribution," he said, "and I wish more companies did it." Charities like the Baseball Hall of Fame and the Muscular Dystrophy Association receive generous donations from Citgo, but no one is telling them to decline the gifts.

Meanwhile, oil companies other than Citgo have declined to share their record profits with those who most struggle to keep pace with rising energy costs.

In spite of the fact that heating oil prices have doubled over the past few years, the federal fuel assistance program faces a one-third cut this year, from $3.1 billion to $2.1 billion. Washington earns windfall tax revenues from the rising prices of petroleum products, but not a cent goes to offset rising energy costs for the poor. Nor do the poor benefit from increased royalties on gas and oil taken from federal lands and waters -- if, in fact, the energy companies pay the government at all.

Criticism of our program isn't about cheap heating oil. It's all about Hugo. While conservative interests in this country don't like him, US businesses don't mind his money and his marketplace.

Otherwise, why would General Motors and Ford sell more than 300,000 cars a year in Venezuela? Why would Chevron Texaco, Exxon Mobil, Shell, and other major corporations -- including Vice President Cheney's old firm, Halliburton -- invest and earn billions every year off of petroleum exploration, production, refining, and transportation in the country? Why would US insurance companies, banks, telecom firms, entertainment conglomerates, and consumer product manufacturers flock to our Latin American neighbor?

American consumers certainly don't mind doing business with Venezuela. More than 558 million barrels of Venezuelan crude and oil products were shipped to the United States last year. Just one-half of 1 percent of that goes into our organization's program, but that's the only portion that draws criticism.

Even though doing business with Venezuela has been very good for capitalists, the issue at hand is Chávez and his politics of socialism. Before we accept the characterizations of him as a socialist threat to our way of life, we ought to look at our own country -- ironically, a system of socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor.

Banks make billions on the gap between federal lending rates and what they charge consumers to borrow for homes, cars, small businesses, and personal needs. The government guarantees their deposits, so that if the banks fail, the taxpayer is left holding the bag.

Insurance companies charge consumers with premiums that go up and up, yet expect the government to cover their losses when they get hit -- as we saw in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

Student loan corporations, working closely with colleges and universities, contribute to spiraling higher-education costs with loans guaranteed by the government.

The fact is that many of the bluest of our blue chip corporations may actually be wearing a shade of Hugo Chávez red beneath their suspenders -- with one major difference: They're fine with socializing the risks of capitalism, so long as they can privatize the profits. As for the poor? They're decidedly on their own.

Meanwhile, in Venezuela, the president is socializing his nation's oil profits. Poverty has dropped by 25 percent. State-sponsored provision of basic needs like food and healthcare has expanded.

So, sure, we'll distribute Hugo's oil. Doing so is called compassionate capitalism. Right now, our country's vulnerable families fend for themselves, while the well-to-do can afford to throw snowballs at our program from the security of their warm homes and offices.

Joseph P. Kennedy II, a former member of Congress from Massachusetts, is the founder, president, and chairman of Citizens Energy Corporation.

Original source / relevant link:
Boston Globe/CommonDreams

Mrs. Kirchner with increasing chances for October 2007

Argentine president Nestor Kirchner will leave office next December 2007 to concentrate on building his political force while the First Lady and Senator, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner is the leading candidate to succeed her, anticipated this week Congress member Carlos Kunkel from the ruling coalition

Looking ahead to the October general election in Argentina, Cristina Fernandez is “the best proposal” to head the presidential ticket of the ruling Front for Victory movement, despite the fact that President Kirchner is entitled to run for re-election, said Kunkel.

“It’s quite clear that our presidential candidate is going to be Cristina Kirchner and in the province of Buenos Aires, (the country’s largest electoral constituency), vice president Daniel Scioli”, underlined Kunkel who is a close associate of the Kirchner political family.

However he warned that the government “is closely following public opinion”, which means changes to the presidential ticket have not been discarded.

“I believe that beginning December 10 (2007), President Kirchner will fully concentrate on the political restoration of Argentina. That’s going to be his target, and he will count with strong political support”.

According to Kunkel when Kirchner leaves office “he will continue to lead the rest of Peronists and other groupings and sectors which have common positions with the current government’s policies.

Buenos Aires analysts admit growing possibilities that President Kirchner could finally give up his bid for a second mandate and fully concentrate on organizing his own centre left political force with strong grass-root support among Peronists.

Apparently the moving force behind this strategy is to avoid the political erosion of a second consecutive mandate and the strengthening of the opposition.

Since the constitutional reform dating back to 1994, Argentine presidents are entitled to four years in office with the possibility of an only consecutive re-election.

Mercosur runs the risk of “collapse”, warn analysts

Mercosur runs the risk of collapsing because it keeps adding members without consolidating as a customs union or having solved the serious tensions between big and junior partners, according to regional analysts.

Brazilian Foreign Secretary Celso Amorim recently announced that in the coming Mercosur summit in Rio do Janeiro, Bolivia could be admitted, while Ecuador under the newly elected president has also become a candidate.

Earlier this year Mercosur admitted Venezuela but negotiations over norms regulating the group have been delayed.

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez added confusion this month when he called on all members to “reformulate” the South American integration processes arguing that the Andean Community “is useless…and so is Mercosur”.

Junior members Paraguay and Uruguay are protesting against a system which forces them to sustain a high foreign tariff without giving them access to the senior members’ markets, and this has led them to ask for trade agreements with third countries.

Uruguay is also suffering from the Argentine pickets blocking access to bridges in protest over the construction of a pulp mill in a river that acts as a natural border between the neighboring countries. The Argentine government and environmentalists argue the pulp mill is damaging for natural resources, mainly water and air.

To find a way out to the controversy both sides have put claims before the International Court of The Hague and a dialogue “facilitating” mission sponsored by Spain’s King is currently underway.

Uruguay’s Economy minister Danilo Astori during a recent meeting in Rio do Janeiro seriously questioned Brazil’s “indifference” in the controversy.

President Lula da Silva “can’t argue this is a bilateral problem: it’s a dispute that involves the entire region, all the Mercosur project”, he said.

Argentina’s Economy minister Felisa Miceli said that Uruguay must decide if the block “is useful or not” but “we’re not going to give in to Uruguay’s moaning, or are we going to expel them from the group: they will have to make their minds up”.

Similarly Paraguay has ongoing trade conflicts with Brazil and a payments dispute involving the huge bi-national Itaipu dam which supplies almost the entire electricity to the Brazilian market.

“We are very concerned with the current situation. There seems a lack of political will to advance the process of real integration”, admits Ambassador Rubens Barbosa who is head of international relations for the all powerful Industries Federation from the State of Sao Paulo, FIESP.

Barbosa described the admission of new members into Mercosur as “symbolic gestures” and other similar initiatives such as a Mercosur Parliament or a regional support fund for junior members, which “only further delay the integration process”.

“If Mercosur does not find outside solutions it’s heading for a fracture as happened with the Andean Community, which is pathetic”, said Gabriel Tokatlian from the Argentine university of San Andrés.

Tokatlian described as a “major mistake” the attempt by the South American Community of Nations, (CAN plus Mercosur, Surinam and Guyana) to consolidate since it “would add up to a crisis and a collapse”.

However Tokatlian downplayed fears of a “left wing wave” in the region, “it’s not a red tsunami, but rather a pinkish wave”. The region is facing “nationalisms with protectionist tendencies, looking inwards, not an international left wing coordinated movement”.

However Tokatlian cautioned that Mercosur, which is suffering from a leadership crisis, must bear in mind that its main objectives are economic and trade, while political integration comes on a second stage.

Brasilia University Professor Jose Flavio Saravia points out that “regional integration processes are not ruled by a formal classic logic” but rather adapts to the strategic circumstances of time and place.

But “if asymmetries and conflicts are not addressed properly, they will leave deep wounds that will finish destroying confidence and bilateral relations”, warns Professor Saravia.

The late Milton Friedman was once asked about Mercosur and admitted he was not much in touch with the group, however he did mention, following on the four founding members, that if “you have four sick people in the same bed, it won’t be very useful”.

Oil leaks from Gulf of Mexico pipe hit by anchor

NEW YORK
Dec 26

An undersea crude oil pipeline ruptured on Sunday after being hit by a ship's anchor, spilling over 20,000 gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico and leaving a half-mile long oil slick on the water.

A spokesman for the U.S. Department of Transportation said the extent of the damage to the High Island Pipeline, which is operated by Plains All American Pipeline L.P. (PAA.N: Quote, Profile , Research), was still being evaluated.

"Investigations are still ongoing, but it appears the pipeline was struck by a tanker's anchor," said a DOT spokesman.
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A 60-yard-wide oil sheen was visible on the water extending half a mile from the site of the accident, which occurred about 30 miles southeast of Galveston, Texas, a Coast Guard spokesman said.

"(The pipeline) is still leaking about 80 to 400 gallons per day of oil," Coast Guard spokesman Adam Wine said.

Plains said crude oil flows through the pipeline were halted as soon as a drop in pressure was detected and that it was working with federal and state agencies to minimize the effects of the spill on the environment.

The High Island Pipeline System (HIPS) connects offshore oil platforms in the High Island and East Breaks areas of the Gulf of Mexico with Texas City, Texas.

The pipeline is currently able to pump 26,000 barrels per day of crude oil, according to the DOT.

Oil fields operated by Apache Corp. (APA.N: Quote, Profile , Research), Anadarko Petroleum Corp. (APC.N: Quote, Profile , Research) and Newfield Exploration Co. (NFX.N: Quote, Profile , Research) are among those served by the High Island Pipeline, according to a map prepared by oil industry consultants Purvin and Gertz Inc.

An Apache spokesman said the company had shut in about 4,000 barrels per day of oil output from fields served by the HIPS pipeline.

Thousands March on Day of Solidarity With Oaxaca

In southern Mexico¹s Oaxaca City, supporters of the People¹s Popular Assembly of Oaxaca (APPO) again took to the streets Friday to demand the resignation of Gov. Ulises Ruiz, the release of political prisoners and the withdrawal of federal police. Democracy Now! producer Elizabeth Press files a report from the streets of Oaxaca.

AMY GOODMAN: As we turn south to Mexico, the southern state of Oaxaca, where supporters of the People's Popular Assembly of Oaxaca again took to the streets on Friday, known as APPO, to demand the resignation of the governor and the release of political prisoners and the withdrawal of federal police from the city. In 37 countries around the world, protests were held as a day of international solidarity with APPO. Democracy Now! producer, Elizabeth Press, was in Oaxaca for the protest. She filed this report.

ELIZABETH PRESS: Some 8,000 people marched on Friday in Oaxaca. People in the march were angry, but they were also afraid. This APPO member did not want to be identified.

APPO MEMBER: [translated] This march is to show the people, the world and every society that the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca is alive and present. We have never given up the fight, and we will keep moving forward. We will never give up the call for the resignation of Ulises Ruiz Ortiz. We have to show that the APPO and the teachers of Oaxaca are continuing the struggle.

ELIZABETH PRESS: The march stayed clear of the city center, or zocalo, to avoid contact with state police, who had barricaded all the entrances. Family members held signs of the disappeared and detained. Youth re-tagged freshly painted buildings, and the march ended peacefully in a rally at Danza Plaza.

Rene Trujillo is a member of the student sector of APPO. He marched despite having been detained and beaten weeks before for his involvement with the popular movement.

RENE TRUJILLO: [translated] They beat us even though we had been beaten already. We were interrogated. Right away, they started asking questions about other people who were participants in the movement, and they tried to suffocate us with plastic bags. Later, they gave us electric shocks on various parts of our bodies while they continued to ask us the same things, asking us for names and addresses of friends in the movement, asking us who were the leaders of the popular movement, who was running the radio, how many people were there at the university radio station. At the same time, they hit us with wet rags so the marks didn't become visible. There was an attempted rape. They pulled down one of my friends pants and tried to rape him. They threatened to kill our families

ELIZABETH PRESS: This weekend was also the century-old Festival of the Radish, in which Oaxacans carve, yes, giant radishes. On Saturday, APPO held its own alternative night of the radishes, even after the federal police tried to shut it down. These radish sculptures depict the conflict between police and the People's Assembly. On Sunday, another 18 prisoners were released from the Oaxacan state prison. From Oaxaca, this is Elizabeth Press reporting for Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: And that's some of the news from Oaxaca. Thanks to Elizabeth Press.

Chavez targets Venezuela homeless woes

Caracas

Beneath bridges and overpasses, the homeless of Caracas are spending Christmas in encampments of cardboard and discarded wooden palettes.

President Hugo Chavez has pledged to do away with homelessness in Venezuela through an aggressive outreach program that is offering street people communal housing, drug treatment and a modest stipend.

But while the government says it has helped thousands, others remain on the streets, presenting a formidable challenge to the newly re-elected Chavez as he aims to make good on a promise to fix an entrenched and complex problem.

Luis Mavares, a scrawny 37-year-old who has lived under a highway off-ramp for 11 years, said government social workers have offered to take him to a rehabilitation center but he has refused.

"I know they're doing something good, but it's not for me," said Mavares, who sleeps on an old mattress next to the trash-strewn Guaire River and says personal problems left him exiled from his family. "I don't like to be caged in."

Others say they have seen life-changing help from the state program Mission Negra Hipolita, named after the nanny of Simon Bolivar, the South American independence hero who is idolized by Chavez.

The program guides the homeless to shelters and rehabilitation centers, offering them medical and psychological care. Those who join can receive a paycheck equivalent to $65 a week for community service work like clearing weeds or painting murals with slogans like "Say no to drugs, search for Christ."

"For me, it's bringing results," said Marco Barrios, 50, who worked cutting tall grass on a roadside recently and said the program is helping him break an addiction to crack cocaine through discipline and daily prayer.

Chavez, a fierce and constant critic of the U.S. government who was re-elected Dec. 3, has started a range of social programs aimed at aiding the poor and drawing on Venezuela's oil wealth.

"This revolution cannot allow for there to be a single child in the street ... not a single beggar in the street," Chavez said earlier this year, acknowledging homelessness is a particularly difficult problem in countries across the world.

Venezuela's program began nearly a near ago and is headed by a retired general, former Defense Minister Jorge Garcia Carneiro, who says many participants are adopting more normal lives despite struggles with drug abuse. Last month, he said more than 9,000 people were being helped by the program.

The Art of Resistance, The Oaxaca Illustrations

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Shouting Truth to Depraved Power (and Its Unwitting Accomplices):

by Jason Miller

I recently had the privilege of conducting a "cyber interview" with one of the preeminent domestic critics of the American Empire. Despite his relatively recent start, Stephen Lendman has rapidly become one of the most ubiquitous and well-respected chroniclers of truth in the alternative media community. Asserting unflinching support for social democracy, Hugo Chavez, and the countless victims of US foreign and domestic policy, Lendman has penned a growing stack of essays assailing the brutality of American Capitalism and the genocidal crimes of unbridled United States militarism.

Recently receiving a well-deserved page on Third World Traveler (1), Stephen Lendman is taking his place amongst the likes of Petras and Chomsky, men he cites as his inspirations.

Here is a glimpse of Stephen and his worldview:

What is your educational background and what type of work did you do in your "former life"?

During my formal working life I read moderately as able and followed with horror and revulsion many world and national events but never wrote or spoke out about them. That began changing when I retired at the end of 1999 at age 65. I began reading heavily and now have an extensive library that includes many of the renowned giants I revere like Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Ed Herman, James Petras, Edward Said, Gore Vidal, Michel Chossudovsky, John Pilger, and dozens of others including many not as well known to the greater public like June Jordan, now passed much too young and terribly missed. Her very name inspires me for who she was and what she stood for and did in her life. A truly remarkable and courageous woman.

I tell people I never wrote anything other than business reports, memos and such since finishing my master's thesis in 1959 till, by accident, late last year I wrote a long letter to Norman Finkelstein praising one of his books. He asked permission to post it on his web site and requested I submit it to other sites which I did, got a few postings, and it all took off from there but slowly at first.

Please, tell me as much about your family as you feel comfortable disclosing.

I grew up in Boston in a low middle-income family, never had any luxuries, but did have loving parents, never felt or was deprived, and by sheer luck and chance got into Harvard in 1952 when a full year's tuition was $600. It was $1000 when I graduated in 1956 with a BA. I then got an MBA at the Wharton School in 1960 with two years in the peacetime Army (thankfully) in between. I began my formal working life as a marketing research analyst for about seven years right out of grad school and spent the next 33 as part of a small family business until retiring at end of 1999. Overall, from back in school till I retired, I led a pretty plain vanilla life as just another face in a faceless crowd. Then it began to change.

Through your writings you have expressed your vehement support for Hugo Chavez. How do you respond to critics who characterize him as another Latin American dictator in the mold of Fidel Castro?

I'm proud to support Hugo Chavez and hold him up as a genuine model of a democratic leader the likes of which we never had in this country from inception. It's because going back to the beginning of the republic, all the hyperbole about democracy and such never mentioned all those in the country left out of it like blacks who were slaves, native Indians who were exterminated and only white male property owners allowed to vote until that requirement was dropped in 1850 but not for woman who didn't get the franchise till 1920. I doubt there were long lines at polling stations back in those days.

Hugo Chavez is demonized in the US and by the former ruling oligarchs in Venezuela, including those owning the dominant corporate media there and here, because he's a real democrat representing the greatest of all threats to the ruling class in both countries - a good example that won over the hearts and minds of the great majority of all Venezuelans once he fulfilled his campaign promises and gave them a real participatory democracy and essential social services they never had before. He changed their lives dramatically for the better, so why wouldn't they support him passionately.

Most important to Washington, his good example is slowly spreading throughout Latin America as more long-oppressed and denied people there want what Venezuelans now have. Look at what's happening now in Mexico. I've written it about several times and characterized it as possibly the early stages of a true transformational revolution that one day will free the people from the repressive ruling class and replace it with a Chavez-like government.

Chavez is different from Castro because Venezuela is a democracy and Cuba is not - with a big but. Most Cubans love Castro because he ended the brutal, corrupted, and hated old order under Fulgencio Batista who turned the country into a brothel and haven for the interests of US capital and the Mafia at the expense of the people. Castro gave his people the same kinds of social services Venezuelans now have under a socialist government with no other kind allowed. I never call him a dictator. Who ever heard of one loved by his people? When he finally passes, it will be a time of overwhelming and sincere grief that will be palpable. He'll be hard to impossible to replace, and Cubans will always revere him as a great hero. I strongly believe they'll never tolerate a return to the old order, and if any attempt is made to impose it on them they'll fight to prevent it. Try getting that reported over the US corporate media airwaves or the front page of the New York Times that only portrays Castro as a ruling tyrant over an oppressed and desperate people. Pure baloney, US-style.

The Bush administration recently waived a ban on federal funding for right wing military training in several Latin American nations, ostensibly to counter the "threat" of the rising Leftist movement. In your opinion how much do those of us amongst the poor and working class in the United States have to fear from the likes of Chavez, Morales, and Correa?

I know about the Bush administration's attempts to fund, train and ally with the military in Latin America that, of course, means using them, if able, to counter or oust populist left wing governments if we can't co-opt them another way. I don't think they have the Pinochet model in mind as times have changed and the Chilean dictator is now held in such disgrace (even in the grave) by people throughout Latin America. He ended the most viable democracy in the region and replaced it with 17 years of ruthless dictatorship only benefiting those at the top and the well-off middle class getting enough to be satisfied and quiescent. Today the method of choice is the fig leaf of democratically elected leaders in suits and ties even if getting into office through electoral fraud in what Edward Herman calls "demonstration elections" orchestrated by the lord and master of the universe headquartered in Washington. It finds these kinds of shenanigans so effective they're now using them here routinely, the result being eight years (if he lasts) of George Bush and enough of his "elected" cronies along with him to give us 'the best democracy money can buy" and that electronic voting machines (run by giant corporations) can steal.

All ordinary working people everywhere should pray for the health and survival of leaders like Chavez, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Raphael Correa in Ecuador, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, and the courageous leaders of the peoples' movements in Mexico like the APPO leadership in Oaxaca, the masses on the streets of Mexico City supporting Lopez Obrador denied the presidency he won by massive fraud, and the "Other Campaign" of Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas (EZLN) who's a modern-day Emiliano Zapata organizing a national movement to end Mexico's entrenched unjust system of predatory capitalism with an iron fist enforcing it and replace it with real social, economic and political justice for all the people.

These leaders say they stand for us, ordinary working people whose rights have long been denied. Hopefully they'll remain true to their public declarations and won't be pressured enough to weaken in resolve by the forces of capital, especially out of Washington always looming and threatening. The only heads of state working people should fear are the oligarch types like the Bush neocons who serve the rich and powerful and have contempt for the public welfare. In the halls of power around the world, most leaders support the privileged, do far too little or nothing for the majority, and that's the burden that must be overcome.

How much chance do you give the Bolivarian Revolution of succeeding? [For the purpose of this question, success would mean that virtually all nations of South and Central America had converted to a form of social democracy along the lines of Venezuela, rejected"free trade", renegotiated their debt with the World Bank or IMF (or simply defaulted on it), severely limited or abolished transnational corporate exploitation of their people and resources, provided education and health care to their poor, and created more egalitarian societies].

The Bolivarian Revolution or Project achieved wonders in eight years following on generations of corrupted oligarch rule by the small slice of the Venezuelan rich and another 10 - 20% of the population (called sifrinos) at the top getting enough crumbs or healthy enough servings to want to preserve the old order while not giving a damn about the poor that at one time was as much as 80% of the population, many in a desperate state. The US entered the picture around the early 1920s after oil was discovered there that even then was too attractive a lure for US interests to ignore.

Chavez changed everything for the great majority after he took office. He lowered the poverty rate from about 62% after the crippling 2002 - 03 oil strike and aborted April, 2002 two-day coup to around one-third of the population plus all the great social benefits including first class health and dental care and free education to the highest level - written into the Constitution to mandate them by law. This is something unimaginable in the US. If the public here knew what Venezuelans get and they're denied, it has to be wondered how great a level of outrage they'd be demanding the same things. Most people here don’t know it because the dominant media make sure they're kept dumbed-down, distracted and uninformed about the most essential things they need to know to improve their lives.

Still in Venezuela, despite all the great advances benefiting those most in need of them, the problems facing the Chavez government are daunting. Massive corruption is endemic and the bureaucracy is stifling and entrenched - because it was that way for generations before Chavez was elected, and it will take a great many more years of determined effort and committed leadership to overcome most of it. Add to that the long shadow from Washington where the Bush administration has already tried and failed three times to oust Chavez with another attempt sure to come sometime ahead by whatever new devious scheme they'll cook up. Chavez at times must feel like a man almost alone in hostile territory, surrounded by a legion of high-level opponents, many unidentified, including some in key positions in his government. He understands the problems and must think he's infiltrated by a host of Brutuses ready to pounce on him if given a chance.

As for the Revolution spreading across Latin America, there have been baby steps only. Chavez and Castro are unique in their attention to addressing the social needs of their people, but while Castro rejects capitalism, Chavez, so far, coexists with it wanting it on the basis of fairness including the rules for foreign investors requiring them to pay an equitable amount of taxes and to be minority partners when in joint ventures with the government. Only Evo Morales is close to Chavez in commitment in South America, but James Petras points out he's disappointed his people by relenting to the entrenched interests on some things going back on his word.

Rafael Correa is still an unknown entity as he only takes office in mid-January, and it will be a while to see if his policy backs his rhetoric. The pressure on him will be intense to prevent it as is now being applied to Daniel Ortega ahead of his tenure also beginning in January. It's the same thing that happened to Lula in Brazil, Nestor Kirtchner in Argentina, and Michelle Bachelet in Chile to keep them a part of the Washington Consensus in large measure in spite all the past horrific fallout from it on their people still without redress.

Even knowing that, those leaders haven't embraced anything like Venezuela has under Chavez, but they have advanced beyond the bad old days when governments in the region only served the wealthy and powerful, ignoring the needs of their people. There have also been more enlightened policies on trade in the region with FTAA effectively dead thanks to efforts from people like Chavez promoting his "fair trade" policy of ALBA, or the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, as well as ALBA initiatives among the Mercosur Southern Common Market countries of Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. But Washington policy makers are never idle and have been able to sign countries on to mini-FTAA agreements through bilateral deals showing the struggle to be free from Global North dominance has a long way to go even in areas where advances have been made.

Chavez is gaining allies by using his nation's oil wealth to offer favorable loans to some of his neighbors freeing or reducing their burden from effective enslavement by the Washington-controlled IMF, World Bank and other international lending agencies. In sum, there are miles to go for the Latin American nations to emerge out of the dark ages of Global North dominance and exploitation led by the US and no guarantee they'll get there even in Venezuela that will always be threatened with the possibility of losing what they've already gained - as long as the US remains the imperial power in the region and corporate interests prevail.

Do you consider yourself to be a socialist, or perhaps a social democrat?

I consider myself a social democrat bordering on believing in a modified socialist philosophy. I was a "capitalist" for 33 years with a very small "c." I believe in that kind of capitalism because it's not predatory, and it’s the kind Adam Smith espoused. He hated the savage kind of his day like the monopolistic practices of the British East India Company and believed in many small, local businesses competing fairly with each other. If he were alive today he'd be railing against the neoliberal Washington Consensus model including the destructive policies under "globalization" that exploit the vulnerable multitudes as just another commodity for the interests of "big" capital.

Briefly, what are some of your thoughts on Fidel Castro and what do you think of the years of US sponsored state terrorism against Castro?

I covered Castro briefly above. Overall, I support him for what he's done. If there were no oppressive US embargo, Cuba would be a wonderful country to live in even under one-party rule as long as you support that kind of governance, which I do. I hope Fidel recovers fully and lives 100 years or longer. The great majority of Cubans do too.

US policy against Cuba for nearly a half century has been brutal, unrelenting and, of course, illegal. It's a wonder Castro was able to survive the hundreds of US attempts to kill him including a nearly successful one when the assassin had a hidden gun in a camera, got to within a few feet of him in a clear line of unobstructed sight, and then chickened out at the last moment. That was in the 1970s if I recall. There have also been hundreds of US state terror attacks against Cuba of all sorts causing destruction, great hardship and disruption. Castro overcame all of them and achieved nothing short of a miracle. He'll be a hero to millions of Cubans for generations to come, and he should be.

What are your thoughts on the disturbing trend in the United States' socioeconomic structure toward extreme economic polarization? And what do you think of the Paul Krugman article, The Great Wealth Transfer(2), which recently appeared in Rolling Stone?

I'm appalled about the socio-economic disparities in the US that have become so extreme economist Paul Krugman calls them "unprecedented." I've written before about them in much detail and am doing it again in a year end article called A Look Back and Ahead in an Age of Neocon Rule. The state of the country is appalling and disturbing. Abroad we're fighting two wars already lost with the possibility of a third one or more. We're bankrupting the country paying for them along with the tax revenue lost from the outlandish tax cuts for the rich and corporate giants. We've also lost our civil liberties in the oppressive age of George Bush and a servile Congress and judiciary rubber-stamping his hellish agenda and now live under Sparta-like militarism including brutish "Homeland Security" enforcers empowered above the law to "keep the rabble in line", including employing illegal surveillance on everyone.

Noted author, academic, and by his own characterization former "spear-carrier for the empire" Chalmers Johnson refers to the leader of this Neocon administration, George Bush, as "the boy emperor." He also says the neocons allied with him are fascists - using sanitized language to hide the truth.

We've been slashing essential social benefits since the Reagan years, and it's all contributing to the greatest wealth and income disparity at least since the 19th Gilded Age of the first generation Robber Barons. We're destroying the nation's industrial base and exporting millions of jobs abroad, including many high-paying ones, as this country hurtles toward "banana republic third world status and not giving a damn how many have to suffer for the greed and lust for power of the few at the top.

Do you think that the United States will eventually reach the point that the levels of plutocratic domination, corruption, and tyranny rival those of so-called "Third World" nations? Or do you think we are already there?

I mentioned Paul Krugman above and quoted from his Great Wealth Transfer article in my year end one to be finished right after Christmas. He's outraged and so am I, even more than he is. I think we're getting very close to the level of "plutocratic domination" in third world countries and exceed any of them in the level of federal government and corporate corruption (mostly below the radar) and a state of tyranny following the same path as Nazi Germany did in the 1930s. Most people haven't a clue that the parallels to that era are frightening as hell, and I've written several times that the US today is a national security fascist police state that so far is just short of sending the jackboots and tanks to the streets, stripping off the mask of respectability so even the dumbed-down public finally knows the score.

You have written well-researched articles exposing how fraudulent and farcical federal elections have become in the United States. Do you vote? Why or why not?

I've abstained from voting since I learned how corrupted the process was, and that was even before the 2000 election and the dominance of privatized and rigged electronic voting machines that now count over 80% of the votes. The most fundamental of all bedrock rights in a democracy is to have free, fair and open elections denying no citizen for any reason their constitutional right to vote. We never had that, but today no semblance of democracy exists and any pretense it does is just an illusion that sadly still too many in the country believe in. But many, like me, refuse to go along any more and choose instead to boycott federal elections. The only hope for real change ahead has to come from the bottom up. History shows it's always been that way, and it's why we once had a revolution in this country. I'm sure one day we will again and equally sure we'll never get the kind of society and culture we deserve from the kinds of elected officials we now have from either party, equally corrupted.

Many loyalists of American Capitalism and the Empire often challenge domestic critics of the United States with questions such as: "If you hate the United States so much, why don’t you just leave?" As a powerful voice of dissent against many aspects and dynamics of the United States, how do you respond to this question?

I've been asked at times why I don't leave and move to Venezuela, Cuba or anywhere I think I can get relief from what I rail against here justifiably. I've asked myself that too and would never rule it out. Still, I've lived here all my life, am 72, have roots, and it would be a tough adjustment living in a new society, having to learn a new language if moved to a non-English speaking country, and needing to make new friends and connections from scratch.

When did you first become aware that the United States was not exporting "freedom and liberty" through its economic policies and military interventions?

I've known for ages how oppressive US policies have been abroad and at home as well. But during my formal working life I never wrote or spoke out against them beyond occasional private conversations with friends or family that never went into depth or got heated. Only over time did things boil over for me once I spent more time focusing on them and then later saw them getting worse.

I was appalled to learn the "Cold War" was a fraud and the Russians were never coming, but we needed to convince people they were or might to justify all the harsh policies we followed in the name of national security. I was even more outraged when the "Cold War" ended but the need for enemies to scare the public didn't, we never got the promised "peace dividend," and we managed to find a way to stay in a permanent state of war. Later I was astonished to learn this country was at war with one or more adversaries every year since we became a nation in 1776. That's besides all the mischief we generated abroad through agencies like the CIA created in 1947.

In your view, what is the US actually "exporting" through its foreign and economic policies?

The US emerged after WW II as the only dominant nation left standing. It was decided, maybe in the late 1930s, that policies would be pursued to make this country the world's preeminent political and economic power, and during the war the most powerful military one as well. It worked, and we've kept that status since. I believe our preeminence reached a peak sometime in the late 60s or early 70s and has been declining since because of the Vietnam disaster. It accelerated in the last six years under the disastrous Bush administration agenda worrying the hell out of the country's power structure because they know how badly these incompetents messed things up for them.

All US policies since WW II were intended to build and maintain American supremacy including the "world" institutions set up supposedly for other purposes like the UN, NATO, IMF, World Bank and others completely dominated by Washington under all administrations. Since that time, this country's goal has been to pursue policies serving the interests of wealth and power and give back as little as possible to the people, only enough "to keep the rabble in line." Even in The Great Depression, FDR got important social policies enacted only because he and some enlightened business leaders were scared into doing it. Economic conditions were so bad, they feared a Russian-style revolution unless they acted to prevent it. The New Deal was a plan to save capitalism, and the idea was better to give back enough than do too little and risk losing everything.

We know now other corporate interests weren't so enlightened, planned a coup against FDR to depose him and tried recruiting General Smedley Butler to lead it who exposed it. Butler later wrote a book on my shelf called War Is A Racket in which he denounced the kind of military adventurism he once led saying things like he once "helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American (banana) republics for the benefit of Wall Street....and purify Nicaragua (for the bankers)" and much more. Butler was awarded two Congressional Medals of Honor for his service. For his post-military nobility, he really ended up deserving them. Where are the leaders like him today in any part of the government or military? None I know of, and that goes to the heart of the problem.

Despite the 1930s New Deal age of enlightenment, things began changing after the war. It moved slowly at first with measures like the harsh anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 (passed over Harry Truman's veto) that began reversing the great labor benefits under the Wagner Act of the 30s (that to this day was the high water mark for organized labor rights). Today, worker rights have been crushed as the corporate threat to export jobs leaves many unions with little option but to surrender to management. The ones able to fight back and win at times are those representing the kinds of service jobs (mostly low-paying) that can't be offshored, like restaurant and hotel workers.

What are your thoughts on the mainstream media in the United States?

It's no surprise the state of the dominant media in the country is appalling. Moneyed interests own or run it, and they control how it's used. It represents state and corporate interests, and no one is allowed air time on it or space in it if they are not of a single mind (with very little wiggle room allowed). I'm writing a long article on it called The Spirit of Tom Paine. In it I say things like the corporate-controlled media (including the corrupted NPR, PBS and BBC) function as a national thought-control police, but look why. In Britain from inception, the BBC had a stated policy of serving as a voice for its government and through the years it fulfilled it using all the technological advances that came along to do it even better.

The same is true here in the US where the dominant media is either corporate-owned (now by five goliaths plus cable giant Comcast serving my building with no other choice allowed--if it even mattered) or controlled including so-called public radio and TV (other than Pacifica Radio, the original and still credible public radio). They're heavily dependent on government and corporate funding to operate and thus are servile to the interests of both. It gets even worse with NPR and PBS that defraud the public, on the one hand, and regularly go to it asking for generous donations to help them keep us dumbed-down, in the dark, uninformed, well-distracted and believing the most outrageous government policies are only done in the public interest. No one should buy this baloney or ever support the NPR or PBS affiliates feeding it to us. Whenever they want your money, respond if you must with a strong show of contempt and rejection and a message to their management that one day we’re coming to get you, and we intend reclaiming our public airwaves, there to serve our interests ill-served under their aegis.

Because they failed in their mandate to serve us, the result overall is the US public is the most uninformed and dumbed-down in the developed world and a good part of the rest of it as well. Voices opposing state policy or corporate interests are verboten beyond an occasional sound bite that slips through the cracks and never resonates. The same thing is true in the other dominant institutions that influence the public like academia, the clergy, and the think tank community, mostly right wing, with generous funding to spew their business-friendly agenda and government policies supporting it.

I can attest to the way it was in school when I was at Harvard in the 1950s. I recall only one outstanding professor on the left, and his field was biology. His name was George Wald, and he later won a Nobel Prize in his field. I took a required sophomore natural sciences course with him and to this day remember how he startled us in class one day when he said in 1953 "there is no such thing as a safe amount of radiation." He became a strong nuclear power opponent for any purpose as I've been for many years after learning this is a technology from hell that will end up sending us there if we don't end its use for military or commercial purposes.

I recall one other professor in the social sciences who went part way to the left but not nearly enough for me today. At the Wharton School, no explanation is needed about the philosophy espoused there. Only rarely were professors like Ed Herman allowed on the faculty, but even he felt he was only tolerated and decided finally to retire early because he'd had enough.

He fared much better than Scott Nearing, an extraordinary man most people never heard of but should make an effort to find out about. He lived an exemplary life of about 100 years until 1983 and taught at the Wharton School after graduating from it from 1906 till at the end of the 1915 June semester when he got a brief note from the Provost advising him his contract wouldn't be renewed. It was because he spoke out against the abuses of that time including child labor. Later in life in 1972, he wrote a magnificent political autobiography called The Making of a Radical, that I read, recommend and have on my shelves along with seven of his other important books. He wrote many and lectured constantly. You might call him a Noam Chomsky before the real one emerged. But unlike Chomsky's experience at MIT, Nearing's philosophy didn't go down well in the Wharton environs. And having lived in it for a time, it's easy to know why. He also ended up being unwelcome on any faculty, was a pacifist speaking out against war, and once said he felt like he was "living as an unwilling citizen in a warfare state." I share that view but chose to stay here just as Nearing did.

What do you think of the Bush administration’s consistent refusal to engage in direct negotiations with nations it has designated as "enemies" or "evil"?

The Bush administration, and others preceding it, usually refuse to negotiate with nations it vilifies using language like sponsors of state terrorism. It doesn't mean they are, just that we say they are with the corporate-controlled media picking up the line and echoing it. In the Reagan years we had "the evil empire" we only negotiated with reluctantly and even then never in good faith. Today we have an axis of evil that began with Iraq, Iran and North Korea and now is down to the latter two. Never reported is the fact that both these nations for at least the past 20 years or so tried and failed to normalize relations with the US, wanting to live in peace with us. It never happened because that state would run contrary to this country's agenda needing enemies to scare the public enough to go along with whatever outrageous schemes the administration in power wishes to pursue.

It's an old and dirty business that Nazi Hermann Goering explained in the Nuremberg dock (before he took his own life) when asked by a Tribunal psychologist how his regime convinced the German people to go along with all their abuses. He explained it's as easy in a democracy as in a dictatorship. He said "the people don't want war (but they) can always (be manipulated by telling) them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger." It always works and shows how easily the public can be duped to believe almost anything fed to them if it's done effectively and repeated often enough.

In the age of George Bush, Iran and North Korea are still villains (plus Syria) along with Hezbollah in South Lebanon and the democratically elected Hamas government in the Palestinian Occupied Territories (OPT). They all share one common denominator making them enemies of the US Empire. They maintain their independence as Saddam did refusing to give it up to bow to the wishes of the ruling authority in Washington. As a result, their leaders remain in our cross hairs and are used to scare the public to go along with all the outrageous policies the Bush administration followed since the 9/11 attack. The only way this country will ever agree to negotiate with any of them, or any other less developed country we can’t intimidate, is if they'll renounce their national sovereignty and agree to go along with US policies and interests - in other words, surrender unconditionally and betray the interests of their people.

What do you think of Noam Chomsky’s 1990 assertion: "If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged."?

I've used Chomsky's assertion and fully support the notion that "If the Nuremberg laws were applied (that convicted Nazi war criminals), then every post-war American president would have been hanged." But I'd go even further and say most every one of them pre-WW II should be as well because their actions were hardly any different than the post-war leaders.

Chomsky posited the notion of applying the Nuremberg laws to US Presidents prior to Bush II’s rise to power. What (if any) war crimes do you believe Bush and members of his administration have committed?

No US administration has been more egregious in its foreign and domestic policy initiatives than the Neocon-led one under George Bush. The International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, Netherlands was established in 2002 to prosecute individuals for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide for those who committed these acts and aren't held to account for them in an existing national tribunal. George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and many others in the current administration, past and present, are guilty of all these offenses as are those in the Congress who went along with them by their complicity or silence. They should all be made to answer for their crimes, and if found guilty in fair trials with competent counsel, be made to pay for them. My own view is an unqualified opposition to the death penalty for any crime. If fairly convicted, I want them to spend the rest of their lives in prison on hard labor.

Shifting our perspective to the Bush Regime’s actions and policies on the domestic side, do you believe that they will utilize the power they have acquired under the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act to essentially abolish the Bill of Rights, eradicate habeas corpus, declare martial law, imprison and torture US citizens with impunity, and suspend the 2008 election to remain in power?

I've written a lot about Patriot (I and II), Military Commissions and (revised) Insurrection Acts along with the new National ID Act and other abuses against the public. I've also explained Bush declared himself a "unitary executive" claiming the right to go around the law on his own authority pursuing whatever policies he wishes in the name of national security with no corroborating evidence to show justification and no checks and balances allowed to challenge him. Is there any better definition of a dictator than that? He's using this authority to subvert the Constitution making no one in the country or around the world safe from the power he's given himself to inflict his harsh summary judgment on anyone without cause or restraint. So far, it's selectively aimed at so-called "Islamofascists," illegally-immigrating dark-skinned people (mainly NAFTA-impoverished Mexicans) and poor people of color in general always unable to defend themselves against state-inflicted abuses. The Constitution and Bill of Rights have effectively been suspended, and we're at the mercy of a rogue leader and his government that, at their discretion, can reach out and snatch any of us, secretly rendition us to an offshore torture-prison without anyone knowing where we are, try us in a military tribunal without competent counsel or right of appeal, convict us and dispense with us as they please.

If impeaching Bush and Cheney was a realistic possibility, what then?

I believe nothing will happen from the top down, and it's up to the public en masse to make things happen from the bottom up. That applies to impeaching Bush and Cheney as the new Democrat-led 110th Congress took that off the table including by new House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers who once advocated holding them to account and now backed off after getting the authority to do it. And he's one of the good ones in the Congress. It shows what the public is up against going into the new year. Expect nothing substantive from the new Democrat Congress that, on issues that matter most, will be little different than the Republican one preceding it. It's part of the culture of corruption infesting both dominant parties in collusion with the other institutions of power in the country equally corrupted.

If we lived in an ideal world, what consequences would you like to see Bush, Cheney and their numerous accomplices face?

In a perfect world, I want Bush, Cheney and all those complicit with them held fully to account and made to pay like the criminals they are. We should demand the book be thrown at them all showing them the same kind of mercy they inflicted on millions of others - none at all.

Do you believe the collapse of the American Empire is imminent, and if so, how do you envision it transpiring?

I believe the US Empire is in decline and has been for over 30 years, but the Bush administration greatly accelerated the process. In the Middle East alone, I go along with expert Gilbert Achcar who believes the Bush administration was so incompetent and "stupid" it will go down as the "undertaker" of US interests in the region. The only area we'll end up being superior in at some point is the military one, and that won't last forever. My greatest fear is that as we head toward losing it and the empire, we may unleash it full force and end up destroying the planet in trying to save ourselves unless we first do it environmentally. This is how Chomsky feels, and I agree with him along with the other great loss he fears - our democracy. I think that's already lost.

I don't think the US Empire will implode any more than I feel the economy or weak US dollar will either. I believe these things will happen slowly over time including at some point reaching an economic calamity great enough to make The Great Depression seem like a garden party. We don't have space enough to discuss this here in detail, but this is a view shared by astute observers whom I agree with.

What are your views on 9/11?

I absolutely agree with people like David Ray Griffin that either the Bush administration knew in advance about the 9/11 attack and did nothing to prevent it or their operatives actually were behind it. Unlike Chomsky, who thinks it's near impossible the Bush administration was behind it because if it had been someone high up enough would have leaked the truth by now. I think that hasn't happened (yet) out of fear of retribution, including to the families of those involved, but one day maybe it will be.

Frankly, I don't know or care who was on those planes any more than I care who pulled the triggers killing JFK, RFK or MLK. I only care who ordered the "hits." Paid assassins are a dime a dozen. It's the paymasters and their motives that matter. In the case of 9/11, the Neocons tipped their hand well in advance in their Project for a New American Century think tank document called Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century that was and is an imperial grand strategy for US global dominance to extend well into the future to be enforced with unchallengeable military power. In the document they practically preordained the future saying to pull this scheme off they needed a "new Pearl Harbor," and they'd hardly settled into high administration positions before, low and behold, their fondest wish came true - happenstance or a little advance planning? I made my choice.

If you had the judicial authority, what you would you do with members of the Bush administration?

If I had judicial authority, I'd throw the book at these people. The evidence against them is so overwhelming and their crimes are so many I think prosecuting them on them all might take the rest of their natural lives to have enough time to get it done. It's time we got on with it.

A final comment from Stephen:

One more thought on a major issue you didn't ask me about. I'm a committed pacifist (except in self-defense--if attacked for real). I'm passionately anti-war and believe as Tom Paine did, quoting him in my new article and have done it before. He wrote as an anti-militarist that all nations should reduce their armaments by 90% to ensure world peace. No other way will do it. Wars are fought for wealth and power because those winning them get it. If the profit alone were taken out of wars most all of them would never be fought.

Cut down the size of the military to a small national defense force in all nations, and they all may end, or close to it. Doing it would also free up those resources to devote to people needs as well as end up making the world a much safer place for everyone. What could be more wonderful than a world at peace with governments of the people, by the people and working for all the people serving their needs? That's the kind of world I want to live in and pass on to the next generation and all the ones after that. I know you feel the same way Jason.

My final comments: Steve, I appreciate the opportunity to pick your brain and share the enriching experience with readers. And yes, I share your feelings and views on many of the issues we explored in this interview. I stand with you shoulder to shoulder in your ardent support of social justice and human rights. If we reach the point that the United States abandons the pretenses of "democracy", I hope to find myself in the same gulag as Mr. Stephen Lendman.

End Notes:

(1) Lendman Third World Traveler Page
(2) The Great Wealth Transfer

Selected writings of Stephen Lendman:

Chavez Landslide Tops All In US History on Znet

Omissions in the Iraq Study Group Report on Steve Lendman Blogspot

The Spirit of Democracy in Venezuela on Global Research

The End of the Bush Dynasty on Populist America

New Faces—Same Agenda on Rense.com

James Petras' New Book - the Power of Israel in the U.S. on World Prout Assembly

The Shame of the Nation: A Collective Perversion on Third World Traveler

Afghanistan: The Other Lost War on Information Clearing House

Cuba Under Castro on Thomas Paine's Corner

Democracy In America - It's Spelled C-O-R-R-U-P-T-I-O-N on Counter Currents

It's Time to End the "Last Taboo" and Hold Israel Accountable for Its Actions on Political Affairs

Dirty Secrets of the Temple on The Peoples Voice

Stephen Lendman is a 72 year old, retired, progressive small businessman concerned about all the major national and world issues, committed to speak out and write about them. He maintains a Website at http://www.sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Jason Miller is a wage slave of the American Empire who has freed himself intellectually and spiritually. He writes prolifically, his essays have appeared widely on the Internet, and he volunteers at homeless shelters. He welcomes constructive correspondence at willpowerful@hotmail.com or via his blog, Thomas Paine's Corner, at http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/

Peace Corps workers forced to withdraw

by Martin Arostegui, The Washington Times

An attack by a pro-government mob on a bus carrying an American Peace Corps worker has prompted the U.S. agency to temporarily withdraw from a violent neighborhood near the capital.

"The Peace Corps has pulled out its contingent of about a dozen volunteers from the area. We expect to go back when the situation calms down," said Payne Huffman, 33, of Lexington, Ky.

Mr. Huffman survived an attack last weekend by rock-throwing supporters of President Evo Morales, who were attempting to block anti-government protesters from reaching the capital, Santa Cruz.

"We lay for almost two hours between the seats as rocks crashed through the windows and pelted the roof above us," said Mr. Huffman, who was traveling by bus with his girlfriend, Mariela Ruiz, and her 2-year-old daughter when the assault took place in the town of San Julian.

Supporters of Mr. Morales' Movement toward Socialism party (MAS) were attempting to cut off a road leading to Santa Cruz, to block anti-government protesters from reaching a rally.

"They were trying to set fire to a bus in front of us, and all we could do was duck for cover from the stones raining down. We kept the little girl sandwiched between us and covered her eyes with a rag as tear gas and smoke from burning rubber entered through the broken windows," said Mr. Huffman.

Bolivian journalists attempting to cover the rally have given chilling accounts of how TV crews and cars carrying press teams were also targeted by the mob, which numbered in the thousands.

"We tried to take refuge in a radio station only to be chased out by men armed with clubs and machetes," said a cameraman for the Santa Cruz-based Activa TV. He recalled hearing them scream, "there are cambas in there."

Camba is an ethnic term used to describe the mixed race white and Guarani Indian population of Bolivia's eastern lowlands, who overwhelmingly oppose the Andean Indian dominated central government of Mr. Morales.

The area west of Santa Cruz where the violence took place has been a focal point of intensifying ethnic and racial tensions since the government introduced a series of measures in recent months giving away local land to Andean Indians.

MAS leaders say that the violence started when protesters on board the buses fired on people, who were trying to block the road with dirt and trees.

Spokeswoman Mariela Ruiz said that shots were fired by some people armed with revolvers and that at least one MAS supporter was shot.

The government sent army troops into the area following retaliatory attacks by anti-government militants of the Santa Cruz Union.

Bush reaching out to Latin America

WASHINGTON

The Bush administration has refused to talk to foes like Iran, North Korea and Cuba, but it has no such qualms about some of its sternest critics in Latin America, including President Hugo Chávez.

The Venezuelan leader relishes calling President Bush names like Mr. Danger and a donkey, and the State Department has over the years accused him of a variety of misdeeds, from undermining democracy to cutting ties with U.S. agencies fighting terrorism and drug traffickers.

Less than two weeks after Chávez won reelection earlier this month, the U.S. ambassador in Caracas met with Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolás Maduro to ease tensions between the two countries.

Chávez replied by attacking U.S. counterdrug efforts so it is unclear if the charm offensive will work with Caracas, but the move is part of a broader effort by U.S. officials to court leftist leaders who just weeks ago were warily viewed as pro-Chávez populists. This includes President-elects Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua and Ecuador's Rafael Correa, who recently heralded the rise of a Socialist Latin America.

The Bush administration has long sought out moderate socialists like Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and relations with once-prickly opponents like Argentine President Néstor Kirchner have improved lately.

The thinking is that while these leaders don't see eye-to-eye with Bush, they were democratically elected and, unlike Iran or North Korea, pose no obvious national security threats to U.S. interests, officials say.

The move is being welcomed by many observers.

''We have to really pursue a path of quiet pragmatism,'' said Eric Farnsworth, a vice president with the Council of the Americas, an organization that promotes more contacts with Latin American nations. ``Stay out of the headlines, get out of the ideological debates.''

The contacts are the Bush administration's adjustment to the results of a dozen elections this year -- nine of which were won by leftist leaders, ranging from moderates to far left, including several that declare themselves allies of Chávez and Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

''One thing we've made clear as we deal with leaders across the region is that we don't care much if they're left, center or right, as long as they're committed to democracy and committed to working with us,'' Thomas Shannon, the State Department's top diplomat to Latin America, recently told journalists.

The Bush administration changed its tone after Ortega won his election last month. Just a year ago, the State Department accused his Sandinista party of conspiring to topple a sitting pro-Washington government, and several top Sandinista officials had their U.S. visas stripped.

Last month, Shannon traveled to Nicaragua and met with Ortega, who in recent years had moderated his criticisms of U.S. policies.

Shannon described the encounter as ''a really good meeting'' where Ortega expressed his support for the free-trade pact CAFTA with Washington and several U.S. aid programs for Managua.

Ortega's friendly relations with Chávez and Castro were not a problem, Shannon said.

''Our focus wasn't on how he relates to others,'' Shannon said. ``Our focus was on how he's going to relate to us.''

The Bush administration is also reaching out to Ecuador's President-elect Rafael Correa. On the campaign trail, the charismatic U.S.-educated economist called Bush ''dimwitted'' though he later toned down his rhetoric and held a meeting with the U.S. ambassador in Quito that was widely broadcast in the local media.

Correa opposes an agreement that lets the U.S. military use Ecuador's Manta air force base for counterdrug operations, but the United States seems to harbor no ill feelings. Bush called Correa to congratulate him on his victory.

U.S. officials also have been courting Bolivia's feisty President Evo Morales, an Aymara indigenous leader who, like Chávez, often rails against Washington's ''imperialism'' and is a frequent visitor to Havana.

U.S. officials have been critical of Morales' reluctance to limit a crackdown on coca farming which produces the raw materials to make cocaine. Coca is traditionally used by indigenous peoples for legitimate purposes.

In a goodwill gesture, the United States certified in September that Bolivia was doing enough to combat drug traffickers, even though Washington will take another look at Bolivia's efforts in March. The Bush administration this month pushed Congress to include Bolivia and Ecuador among a group of Andean nations that obtained unilateral trade preferences from Washington.

Getting along with Chávez will prove a bigger challenge as the two governments have a history of trading bitter barbs.

William Brownfield, the American ambassador, characterized the Dec. 14 encounter with Maduro as ''very positive.'' But five days after the Brownfield-Maduro meeting and one day after Brownfield made a public call for cordiality, Chávez called Brownfield a liar for suggesting drug trafficking in Venezuela was on the rise and reiterated his claims that Drug Enforcement Agency officials were spies.

''The battle against drug smuggling has been an excuse that imperialists have used for several years to penetrate our country, trample our people and justify a military presence in Latin America,'' Chávez said.

Copper mining companies invest in “reliable” energy

Four of the largest mining companies operating in Chile have joined forces in pursuit of reliable and affordable gas supplies.

Private mining corporations BHP Billiton, Phelps Dodge, Collahuasi and Chile’s state owned copper company, Codelco, have entered a 350 million US dollars joint venture, constructing a gas plant in Chile’s Region II.

In September Chile’s major mining companies formed a task force to help fight rising energy costs.

High international fuel prices, cutbacks on gas deliveries from Argentina, and increasing energy demand have spurred the industry to change its energy strategy. The construction of a joint gas plant is said to be a result of this task force.

Expectations in Chile’s mining industry are high - a one percent drop in energy consumption is equivalent to 10 million US dollars in savings for the economy.

Another Chilean General’s grandson fired

A week after Augusto Pinochet Molina, grandson of the former Chilean dictator, was fired from Chile’s armed forces for giving an incendiary speech at his grandfather’s funeral, the grandson of former General Carlos Prats, Francisco Cuadrado Prats, was fired from his job as a cultural director in Santiago’s borough of Las Condes.

The young Prats received widespread attention after he waited in line 12 hours while Pinochet’s body lied in state at Escuela Militar only to spit on the casket. His grandfather, Gen. Carlos Prats, had been loyal to overthrown President Salvador Allende and was blown up, along with his wife, in a 1974 car bomb attack in Buenos Aires organized by Pinochet’s secret police force.

Las Condes Mayor Fransisco de la Maza is a conservative politician and has been leading the way to have a street in Las Condes renamed in honor of the former dictator.

While Pinochet’s supporters credit the former dictator with saving Chile from Marxism and implanting the economic reforms that created Chile’s successful economy, Pinochet is accused of murdering or disappearing over 3,000 political opponents. Over 28,000 Chileans were also tortured in his 16 year rule.
Prats characterized the spit as an “act of desperation.” He “assassinated my grandparents,” he said shortly after the incident.

De la Maza was widely criticized by Chile’s ruling center-left government, but he remained firm in his decision to sack the young Prats.
“I’m man enough to make my decisions face-to-face with the country,” he said. “I’m not afraid to do what’s right.”

De la Maza said that he worked with many leftist politicians and pointed out that his own son was a Communist Party activist. “I don’t care what people think, but I care how they act,” said the mayor.
However some members from the ruling coalition described the firing as an act of “political persecution”.

SOURCE: EL MERCURIO, LA TERCERA
By Nathan Crooks, Damon Erickson and Beatrice Karol Burks
(editor@santiagotimes.cl)

A Widening Gap Erodes Argentina’s Egalitarian Image

BUENOS AIRES

Five years after the collapse that ushered in the worst economic crisis in its modern history, Argentina has largely recovered. Since 2003, the economy here has grown faster than any other in South America, expanding on average by more than 8 percent annually.

La Cava, a poor area nearby, is called a villa miseria, or misery settlement.

But another problem has come with that revival, vexing Argentines and challenging their image of themselves and their society. The fruits of the rapid expansion of commerce, construction, corporate profits and exports are not being shared by all, and as a result, economic and social inequality have intensified.

Historically, this has been a country that prided itself on its egalitarianism. An Argentine factory worker, for instance, could reasonably aspire to live in a comfortable apartment (often with professionals as neighbors), eat meat every day, get competent medical care and, through his union, enjoy a couple of weeks of vacation each year at the beach.

Argentines scorned what they saw as the individualistic dog-eat-dog, every-man-for-himself character of American capitalism and the chasm between rich and poor in nearby countries like Brazil, Chile and Peru. If there was a model Argentines admired, it was France’s manifesto of “liberty, equality and fraternity.”

Those ideals of solidarity help to explain the rise of Peronism and its continuing appeal here. But the reality on which that vision is based has eroded as a result of the wrenching transformation of Argentina’s economy and society since the start of the 1990s — and especially since the crisis that erupted in December 2001.

“In the past, Argentina really was more like Europe than the rest of Latin America,” said Bernardo Kosacoff, the Argentine representative of the United Nations’ Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. “Parents had the perception that their children would live better than they did, because workers had well-paying jobs in the formal sector, their own houses and access to good education. But now the process of social ascent is much more complicated.”

Statistics clearly make that point. In the mid-1970s, the most affluent 10 percent of Argentina’s population had an income 12 times that of the poorest 10 percent. By the mid-1990s, that figure had grown to 18 times the income of the poor, and by 2002, the peak of the crisis, the income of the richest segment was 43 times that of the poorest. The situation has improved only slightly since then.

The economic crisis, which built through the 1990s, peaked when the government froze bank accounts and declared its largest foreign debt default ever. The peso’s value collapsed, millions of Argentines lost part or all of their savings and the economy contracted by more than 11 percent the next year.

Despite the recovery, barely 5 percent of Argentine families are now saving money, according to a study conducted in April by the Market Foundation, a research group. That compares with nearly 30 percent at the end of the 1990s. At the crisis’s peak, nearly 60 percent of Argentines had incomes below the poverty line.

“The breach between the rich and the poor continues to grow even though the number of people living in poverty is declining,” said María Laura Alzúa, an economist at Mediterranean Foundation, a research group here. “There is growth, but more of it is going to those at the top of the pyramid than any other sector, and so the Argentine dream of social mobility is disappearing.”

The gap can perhaps be most easily perceived in the suburbs north of the capital, where beneficiaries of the economic rebound live in gated communities, known here by the English word “countries.”

Many of the poor, both new and old, live just outside the walls, jammed into slums called “villas miserias,” or misery settlements. Often, they work for their affluent neighbors as gardeners, maids or handymen, the only work they can find, and that is off the books.

“That is the new model of social segmentation,” said Agustín Salvia, a sociologist at the Catholic University of Argentina. “This used to be a society that was relatively homogeneous, but now there are two Argentinas, marching in different directions and at different speeds.”

Gen. Juan Domingo Perón, who came to power in 1946, ruled in the name of the so-called “shirtless ones” until he was overthrown in a coup in 1955; he returned to power in 1973 and died in 1974. His movement, Justicialismo, was proscribed under most of the military and civilian governments that followed, but they dared not dismantle the network of social benefits that he had erected.

“There really was a state of well-being, and everyone had access to goods and services,” said Jorge Colina, an economist at the Argentine Institute for Social Development, a research institution here.

Mr. Colina cited his own history as an example. He is the son of a bus driver, but in the 1960s, “the school I went to was the same one the sons of the rich and the local congressman attended, and they even fed us there,” he recalled. “If it were not for Peronism, I would not be here.”

Economists now say that system encouraged Argentina to live beyond its means and discouraged investment and production. Nevertheless, many Argentines remember those years as a golden age of equality, opportunity and well-being.

“Things were different back then, much better, I’d say,” said María Chazareta, 67. “You could live, and reasonably well, on what you earned. Prices weren’t in the clouds, and the medical care was good and cheap.”

That view is shared by young people, too, like Enrique Rolón, 26, a laborer who is a neighbor of Ms. Chazareta’s in La Cava, a villa miseria that abuts a well-to-do gated community in the northern suburbs here.

“We were nine kids, but things weren’t so tight back when I was a little guy,” he recalled. “Dad was a bricklayer, but he always managed to feed and clothe us all, and have a bit left over. I can’t do that, even though I only have three children.”

Asked if he resented the prosperity of those who live on the other side of the wall, Mr. Rolón said no. “They got it through their own effort,” he said. “What bothers me is that the wealth I see is not being shared equally. Before, it was different.”

Except for a two-year interlude that led up to the economic collapse in December 2001, Argentina has been governed since 1990 by Peronists. Though President Néstor Kirchner, who is up for re-election in 2007, has sought to alleviate some of the disparity with work programs that pay about $150 a month, experts say resentment of income inequality remains widespread.

“There is a sense of frustration, of being deceived,” said Mr. Salvia, the sociologist. “The feeling is that there was a promise, a contract, and it has been violated.”

Zapatistas Call For International Day of Protest in Solidarity With Oaxaca

AMY GOODMAN: Democracy Now! producer, Elizabeth Press, is in Oaxaca, Mexico, covering the popular uprising against the state governor Ulises Ruiz. She filed this report.

ELIZABETH PRESS: On Wednesday 91 prisoners were transferred from the federal prison in Tepic, Nayarit to Cereso, the state prison here in Oaxaca. Friends, family and human rights observers gathered outside the prison, as rumor had it that the prisoners would be released on Thursday. Selena Morina waited for her brother who was detained on Nov 25th to be released, but he was not among the 14.

SELENA MORINA: [translated] I feel sad and worried because we don't know when they will release them, since, as they said earlier, this is political. So we are subject to the decisions made by governmental groups, when here they are playing with human lives, while there are people with feelings who need to see their families and be with them.

ELIZABETH PRESS: This was on the eve of the international day of solidarity with the people of Oaxaca, called for by the EZLN. "For the living reappearances of the disappeared; for the freedom of the detained; for the exit of Ulises Ruiz and the federal forces from Oaxaca; for the punishment of those guilty of torture, rape and murder," protests are scheduled all over the world today, including here in Oaxaca City.

OAXACAN WOMAN: [translated] We will participate in the march, because when they ask us if we Oaxacans are afraid, yes, we are afraid, but our indignation and anger are even greater, because this is not the way to treat a people who are asking for justice. And we do not rise up because we're troublemakers, as they call us here, but rather because the people are hungry, the people are needy. Yes, we will participate in the march.

ELIZABETH PRESS: For Democracy Now!, this is Elizabeth Press in Oaxaca City.

Oaxaca: Contininuing Conquest, Continuing Resistance

12/8/06-- In southern Mexico they say "The Spanish were the invaders, but the Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustinians, and Jesuits were the conquerors."
Those words echo through my mind as I look at the police encampment beside the Santo Domingo cathedral in the Zocalo, the historic center of the city of Oaxaca City, capitol of the state of Oaxaca.

The guide books speak without irony of the beauty of the city's colonial architecture. Colonial is the operative word. The architecture is a triumphant monument to violent attempts to subjugate the Zapotec and Sixteens people of the region.

The Spanish conquest of Mexico coincided with the height of the witch burnings in Europe -- in both Europe and the Americas, the eradication of sacred traditions that saw the world as alive was necessary to transform the land and the minerals beneath it as commodities to be bought and sold. On three continents, intertwined powers of church and state jailed, tortured, and executed practitioners of nature-based religions, and divided up the land among the members of a rising white middle class. Starhawk describes some of the forces at work:

"In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe, new economic stresses caused by the influx of gold from the Americas challenged the power of the old ruling classes, which was based on land. A new power began to arise, based on money, trade, and the beginnings of capitalism. With it came a new ideology, the mechanistic model of the universe, which saw the world as made up of separate objects that had no inherent life, could be viewed and examined in isolation from one another, and could be exploited without constraint.

"For this new economic order to be accepted, old ideas of the dynamic interrelatedness of the universe and the sacredness of nature needed to be broken down."
(Starhawk, The Earth Path. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2004)

The same ideology that drove witch hunts in Europe led British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese colonizers to try to wipe out the traditional religions of the Americas.

There was strong resistance to the conquest among the Zapotec communities in the mountains north of Oaxaca City, and the language and traditions of the Zapotec remain strong today.

In many ways, that same clash of cultures and ideologies is playing out in Oaxaca again today, 500 years later.

From June through October of this year, Oaxaca was largely under the control of a provisional popular government guided by traditional indigenous means of decision making. Federal police retook the capitol city in a military-style invasion at the end of October. At night, police ride through the streets of the city in white pick-up trucks, kicking down the doors of suspected movement sympathizers, beating them, and sending them to prisons on the other side of the country where they are subjected to torture. But signs of resistance are everywhere -- most visibly in the form of the graffiti that appears every night on walls that had been whitewashed just hours earlier.

On its surface, the uprising in Oaxaca was initially a response to a brutal pre-dawn police attack on striking teachers and their families camped out in the Zocalo on June 14. Enraged Oaxacans came to the teachers' defense, literally beating back the police and retaking the square.

But anger had been simmering in Oaxaca for a long time. The state is desperately poor -- in the countryside, many homes have dirt floors and lack electricity or running water.

Corruption plays a role in that poverty. The Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI) has ruled Oaxaca for over seventy years, maintaining control through a system of cronyism that would make a Chicago politician blush. Jobs and land are awarded to party operatives. The current Governor, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, is believed to have looted the state treasury in order to help fund the campaign of his party's presidential candidate, Roberto Madrazzo.

The state is rich in resources -- timber, uranium, gold, silver, water. But most of those resources have been sold off to U.S. and Canadian companies, with the people of Oaxaca seeing very little benefit.

But the biggest force responsible for Oaxaca's poverty is a global economic system bent on eradicating subsistence agriculture, replacing small farms with massive plantations, and turning farmers into low wage factory workers, all in the name of economic efficiency and maximizing profits. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) destroyed Oaxaca's millennia-old corn growing culture in the 1990's. Oaxaca is the place where the world's first corn was grown. But when tarriffs and other protections were dropped, small farmers growing traditional varieties of corn to feed themselves and sell to their neighbors could no longer compete with massive government subsidized corporate corn farms in the Midwestern U.S. growing genetically modified corn using petroleum fertilizers and pesticides. To add insult to injury, when a few farmers planted the corn they bought from the U.S., the pollen from their fields contaminated neighboring corn fields, ruining Oaxaca's genetic treasury by turning heirloom varieties of corn into strange hybrids.

A few years later, Oaxaca's coffee farms took a hit when Vietnam began producing cheap, abundant coffee on the advice of international financial institutions, making the bottom fall out of the coffee market.

In recent years, most young Oaxacan men and many young Oaxacan women have been forced to leave their communities to search for work in the U.S. or in the maquilladora factories of northern Mexico. 150,000 people leave Oaxaca every year.

The handful of young Oaxacans who go to the university and become teachers are among the few members of their generation who remain in their hometowns.

Miguel Angel Vasquez of the human rights and popular education organization EDUCA says "“if migration is the individual response to this economic crisis, the conflict in Oaxaca is an example of a collective response.”
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In the town of Zaachilla, outside Oaxaca City, the people drove out their Municipal President and installed a popular government in July in the culmination of a long simmering dispute over the possibly illegal and definitely unpopular sale of community land to a company partially owned by the Governor and the outgoing Mexican President's wife for the construction of upscale housing developments to be inhabited by Oaxaca's business elite and U.S. retirees.

The Municipal Palace is now decorated with a colorful banner painted by the town's young people proclaiming the community's support for the Oaxacan people's struggle to drive out the corrupt government and take back the power to govern themselves. On both ends of the banner are the figures of longhaired men with clenched fists whose breath is a powerful wind -- images that recall the Zapotec gods.

There are arrest warrants out for dozens of people in Zaachilla -- the members of the provisional municipal government, most of the town's teachers, even a woman in her eighties who was photographed at a march in the city. Plainclothes police drive through the town on motorcycles, snatching people up. The men who are arrested are beaten, the women who are arrested are sexually assaulted, both are sent to prisons in the distant state of Nayarit, a twenty hour drive away. Thugs believed to have been hired by the ousted Municipal President have vandalized the schools, and state and federal police have gone into classrooms searching for teachers involved in the popular movement.
But the people remain strong. They take turns standing guard over the Municipal Palace and the schools at night. And on December 10 they plan to brave police roadblocks to go into the city to join a massive march demanding freedom for political prisoners.

My friend Todd sat up late at night with one of the artists who painted the banner on the Municipal Palace. The teenager pulled out small figurines of animals, relics from the archaeological site near the center of town. "These are a gift from my grandparents," he said, "The gift my grandparents gave me is resistance."

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Friends tell me that at the height of the uprising, the Zocalo was bustling with energy, filled with music, bright banners, and families camping under plastic tarps.

Today there are tanks in the middle of each of the streets leading into the square and police tents along the wall of the cathedral.
There is a giant display of poinsettias on one side of the square, the government's attempt to give the appearance that the people of Oaxaca City welcome the Federal Preventative Police.
Police in grey uniforms play arcade games and lick ice cream cones, assault rifles strapped to their backs.

Teenage girls sit on the steps of the cathedral, smoking cigarettes and flirting with the police.
A friend asked a store owner what he sees when he goes through the Zocalo, and the store owner muttered under his breath "A lot of children without fathers."

A handful of confused European tourists who didn't read the news coverage of the uprising or believed the Mexican government's claims that the situation was firmly under control wander in and out of shops and restaurants.

But overwhelmingly, there is silence. And a palpable sense that things could explode at any minute. Even when they are flirting with the teenagers, the police keep their helmets and riot shields nearby.

And inexplicably there is graffiti on a wall a few feet away from one of the tanks.

Asked to characterize the current moment in Oaxaca, Miguel Angel Vasquez says


"There are legends in Oaxaca of people hiding beneath the rocks, and then coming back as animals. So maybe that's what's happening right now, people are hiding during this incredible strife that is happening right now. But perhaps they will return."

A people who have survived 500 years of outsiders trying to eradicate their culture are a force to be reckoned with.

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Postscript 12/22/06 -- Reports say that the PFP have moved their tanks out of the Zocalo and their camp to a military base at the edge of the city. Today the APPO was supposed to be staging its last demonstration before taking a break for Christmas. The movement has come too far to turn back -- it remains to be seen what a new year of struggle will bring, especially as APPO's delegation returns fom the EZLN's intergalactic encuentro . . .

Venezuela mulls euro oil switch

Venezuela has expressed interest in an Iranian move to ask buyers to pay for oil in euros rather than US dollars.

The oil-rich nation said it planned to see if a similar scheme could be introduced to its crude exports.

Iran, the world's fourth-biggest oil producer, has already asked customers to pay for its oil in euros because of the current weakness of the dollar.

Although the dollar is the currency in which oil is usually traded, it has been falling in value against the euro.

Strained relations

The US currency tumbled to 20-month lows against the single European currency earlier this month.

Iran still prices its oil in dollars, but currently receives payment for 57% of its crude exports in euros, according to the National Iranian Oil Company.

Venezuela's energy minister Rafael Ramirez described the Iranian scheme as "very interesting".

Venezuela and Iran, which have strained political relations with Washington, are both members of oil producers' cartel Opec.

Ex oil employees versus the Venezuelan State at IACHR

Former staff of state-run oil holding Petróleos de Venezuela (Pdvsa) will file a criminal complaint against the Venezuelan Government at the Inter-American Court on Human Rights (IACHR), Organization of American States (OAS).

Eddie Ramírez, on behalf of NGO Gente del Petróleo, and Antonio Méndez, in the name of the National Workers' Union of Oil, Petrochemical, Hydrocarbons and Related Sectors (Unapetrol), labeled as human rights abuse the attacks on former employees of the oil business.

The representatives promised to insist on their petitions at international organizations, as the appropriate courts have heard their claims.

In this regard, they plan to sue next year the Government of President Hugo Chávez.

In 2004, the International Labor Organization (ILO) found in a preliminary report that the protest headed by the ex employees from December 2002 to February 2003 was a general strike.

This finding fueled the allegations of Pdvsa ex workers at international organizations.

The Economist: energy Argentina’s “biggest worry”

In five years Argentina’s recovery from catastrophe has been “swift”, but the “biggest worry” now is energy and how long growth can continue, writes The Economist in its latest edition.

In December five years ago, crowds of Argentines angry at years of deflation and recession took to the streets of Buenos Aires and ousted the president, Fernando de la Rúa. Amid chaotic scenes, three further presidents came and went in ten days, one of them declaring the biggest-ever sovereign debt default, recalls The Economist.

“In what a century ago was the world`s seventh-richest country, the economy shrank by 15% in the year to March 2002, poverty rose from 38% to 56% and unemployment climbed to 21%”.

But to the surprise of many, recovery from this national catastrophe has been swift: since the nadir in March 2002, Argentina`s GDP has grown by 45%, an average of 8.6% a year.

However some serious doubts remain and the biggest worry is energy because of the price controls Argentines pay less than half as much for energy as their neighbors in South America`s southern cone.

“Consumption has risen but investment has collapsed. Argentina has depleted its gas reserves, from 15 years` worth of production to fewer than ten.

Industry sources warn of blackouts in 2007 if weather conditions are unfavorable. Fear of blackouts has suppressed investment in energy-intensive businesses, such as steel, aluminum and petrochemicals”.

“Other bottlenecks will make it harder to sustain growth even at a more modest pace. The economy is still benefiting from private investment in infrastructure under Carlos Menem in the 1990s. Now roads are again becoming congested. There are some shortages of skilled workers, too”, points out The Economist.

The article also underlines that in the last five years at “a brutal cost, the collapse rebalanced the economy. A steep devaluation and the debt default turned deficits in the public finances and the current account into surpluses.

Roberto Lavagna, the finance minister from 2002 to 2005, kept spending under control. The government relied mainly on monetary policy to boost demand. The central bank stopped the peso from appreciating, issuing pesos to buy up exporters` dollars. The government meets its fiscal targets partly by taxing farm exports, which are unusually profitable because of the artificially cheap peso and high world prices”.

But the obvious drawback has been inflation, which began to rise again in 2004 as spare capacity was used up. Mr Kirchner`s response was to bully producers with “voluntary” price-freezes, outright price controls and export bans. However similar tactics caused several foreign investors, such as France`s Suez and EDF, in privatized utilities to pack up and go.

Nevertheless in spite of the boom, the question, says The Economist, as it has been for the past four years, is how long the growth can continue.

After Mr Lavagna`s sacking, fiscal policy has become looser. Provincial governments are already running a deficit. On the other hand, the central bank is quietly tightening monetary policy. Many assume that Mr Kirchner will relax price controls and allow the peso to appreciate after an election next October at which he is likely to seek a second term.

Local economists fear the risk is that inflation might then take off, unless the authorities act to slow the economy but officials remain bullish.

“What do we have beyond two more good years?” the foreign minister, Jorge Taiana, asks. “We have higher investment than ever before. We have an extended commodity boom. We have cancelled our debt. We have a favorable exchange rate. We have trade and budget surpluses. This growth can be sustained.”

At what pace remains to be seen, but it has become harder to doubt the overall argument, admits The Economist.

Chávez and Correa agree on the future

Caracas
Dec 20

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and Rafael Correa, the president-elect of Ecuador, have spoken today in favor of advancing the process of regional integration so that it may go beyond the area of trade.

Both politicians expressed their coinciding opinions following the reception ceremony to welcome Correa at the Maiquetía International Airport, where he had arrived to carry out a two-day visit to Venezuela.

Correa, who is set to assume the presidency next January, indicated that now is the time to acknowledge the past and the common destiny of the region, as part of an agenda of integration that goes beyond merely the commercial sphere alone.

This must be a new kind of integration, of a logical complementary nature, overriding the absurd version imposed by the North that forces us to compete with each other, he highlighted.

The Ecuadorian president-elect emphasized the complementary possibilities in the fields of energy and finance, given the region’s capacity for self-financing.

Correa, who reiterated the call for Venezuela to rejoin the Community of Andean Nations (CAN), indicated that the future should see the fusion of this organization with the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR).

This, he said, will be a priority during his mandate.

Chavez Landslide Tops All In US History

by Stephen Lendman

Well almost, as explained below. Hugo Chavez Frias' reelection on December 3 stands out when compared to the greatest landslide presidential victories in US history. Except for the close race in 1812 and the electoral deadlock in 1800 decided by the House of Representatives choosing Thomas Jefferson over Aaron Burr, the very earliest elections here weren't hardly partisan contests at all as the Democrat-Republican party of Jefferson and Madison was dominant and had everything its own way. It was like that through the election of 1820 when James Monroe ran virtually unopposed winning over 80% of the vote. A consistent pattern of real competitive elections only began with the one held in 1824, and from that time to the present Hugo Chavez's impressive landslide victory beat them all.

Amazing but true. On December 3, 2006, the people of Venezuela voted in what hundreds of independent observers from around the world, including from the Carter Center in the US, called a free, fair, open and extremely smooth and well-run electoral process. They chose the only man they'll entrust with the job as long as he wants it reelecting Hugo Chavez with a majority 62.87% of the vote with the highest voter turnout in the country's history at almost 75% of the electorate. No US president since 1820, when elections here consistently became real contests, ever matched it or has any US election ever embraced all the democratic standards all Venezuelans now enjoy since Hugo Chavez came to office.

The Venezuelan Bolivarian Constitution Hugo Chavez gave his people states: "All persons have the right to be registered free of charge with the Civil Registry Office after birth, and to obtain public documents constituting evidence of the biological identity, in accordance with law." To see this happened Chavez established an initiative called Mision Identidad (Mission Identity) that's now a mass citizenship and voter registration drive. It's given millions of Venezuelans full rights of citizenship including the right to vote for the first time ever.

As glorious and grand a democratic experiment as the US Constitution was and is, it had and still has lots of flaws including who's empowered to vote and what authority has the right to decide. It's the reason through the years many amendments and laws were needed and enacted to establish mandates for enfranchisement, but even today precise voting rights qualifications are left for the states to decide, and many take advantage to strike from their voter rolls categories of people they decide are unfit or that they unjustly wish to exclude from the most important of all rights in a democracy no citizen should have taken away.

It shouldn't be this way as millions in the US have lost the right to vote for a variety of reasons including for being a convicted felon or ex-felon in a country with the highest prison population in the world (greater than China's with four times the population). It exceeds 2.2 million, increases by about 1000 each week, one in every 32 adults in the country is either imprisoned, on parole or on probation, half the prison population is black, half are there for non-violent crimes, half of those are for mostly minor drug-related offenses, and most of those behind bars shouldn't be there at all if we had a criminal justice system with equity and justice for all including many wrongfully convicted because they couldn't afford or get competent counsel to defend them.

Virtually all citizens in Venezuela have the right to vote under one national standard and are encouraged to do so under a model democratic system that's gotten the vast majority of them to actively participate. In contrast, in the US, elections are especially fraud-laden today, but in the past many categories of voters were unjustly denied the franchise including blacks until the 1865 13th amendment to the Constitution freed them from slavery, the 1870 15th amendment gave them the right to vote, but it still took until the passage of the landmark Civil and Voting Rights Acts in the mid-1960s abolishing the Jim Crow laws in the South before blacks could exercise that right like others in the country could. Earlier, it wasn't until the 19th amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1920, before women got the right to vote they'd been fighting for over 70 years to get.

This history shows how unfair laws were and still are in force in a country calling itself a model democracy. The most fundamental right of all, underpinning all others in a democratic state, is the right of every citizen to exercise his or her will at the polls freely and fairly without obstructive laws or any interference from any source in the electoral process.

That freedom has been severely compromised today in the US, and unless that changes, there's no possibility of a free, fair and open democratic process here for all citizens. That happening is now almost impossible with more than 80% of the vote now cast and counted on easily manipulated electronic voting machines with no verifiable paper trail. The process is secretive and unreliable, privatized in the hands of large corporations with everything to gain if candidates they support win, and based on what's now known, that's exactly what's been happening as seen in the 2000 and 2004 fraud-laden elections.

The Six Greatest Landslide US Presidential Elections Since Contests Began After 1820

Six US presidential elections stand out especially for the landslide victories they gave the winners. Hugo Chavez's December 3, 2006 reelection topped them all.

1. In 1920, the first time women could vote in a federal election, Republican Warren Harding got 60.3% of the vote to beat Democrat James Cox getting 34.1%. This election was particularly noteworthy as Socialist Eugene Debs ran for the high office from prison getting over 900,000 votes. He was sentenced and was serving 10 years by the Wilson administration for violating the Espionage Act of 1917 that along with the Sedition Act of 1918 were the Patriot Acts of their day like the earlier Alien and Sedition Acts were under John Adams. Debs was found guilty of exercising his constitutional right of free expression after making an anti-WW I speech in Canton, Ohio. He served about 2.5 years before Harding commuted the sentence on Christmas day, 1921.

2. In 1928, Republican Herbert Hoover defeated Democrat and first ever Catholic to run for the presidency Al Smith with 58.2% v. 40.8% for Smith. It wasn't a good year to be a Democrat, especially a Catholic one at that time. The 1920s were "roaring," including the stock market (again only for the privileged), and Republicans were tough to beat as long as, at the macro level, the economy was strong. Coolidge was president but declined a second term (fortunate for him as it turned out) and Commerce Secretary and capable bureaucrat Hoover got the nomination winning big. As things turned out, fate dealt him a bad hand as the stock market crashed less than a year into his term, but bad administration and Federal Reserve policy turned what only should have been a stiff recession for a year or two into the Great Depression. It swept Republicans from office and ushered in the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, who won impressively in 1932, not one of our big six, but was reelected in 1936 and included in our select group with the second greatest landslide victory ever on our list. Number one is after the FDR years.

3. The Great Depression 1930s weren't good years to be Republicans, and in 1936, Democrat Franklin Roosevelt was reelected overwhelmingly with 60.8% of the vote to 36.5% for Republican Alf Landon who had no chance to convince the electorate the New Deal was corrupt and wasteful when it was helping a lot of desperate people. Roosevelt asked for and got a mandate from the public to continue his progressive agenda that included the landmark Social Security Act (now in jeopardy in the age of George Bush) and other important measures that included establishing the FDIC, insuring bank deposits, the SEC, regulating the stock exchanges, and the NLRB with the passage of the Wagner Act that was the high water mark for labor rights. It guaranteed labor had the right to bargain collectively on equal terms with management, something that began eroding badly with the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 over Harry Truman's veto that began reversing the hard-won rights gained that now have nearly vanished entirely in a nation dominated by corporate giants and both Democrat and Republican parties supporting them including their union-busting practices.

4. In 1964, Democrat Lyndon Johnson won the greatest landslide presidential victory on our list, unsurpassed to this day. He got 61.1% of the vote to 38.5% for Republican Barry Goldwater who was portrayed as a dangerous extremist in a still-remembered TV "Daisy Girl" campaign ad featuring a little girl picking petals from a daisy in a field, counting them and then segueing to a countdown and nuclear explosion. Ironically, the ad only ran once in September that year on NBC, but it stirred such a controversy all the broadcasters ran it as a news story giving it far greater prominence than it otherwise would have gotten.

5. In 1972, most people would be surprised to learn (except those around to remember it) Republican Richard Nixon trounced Democrat George McGovern getting 60% of the vote to McGovern's 38%. The main issue was the Vietnam war (that drove Lyndon Johnson from office in 1968), and Nixon managed to convince the public he had a plan to end it and peace was at hand. McGovern was strongly anti-war, but had to replace his running mate Thomas Eagleton after it was learned he hadn't revealed he'd undergone electroshock therapy for depression.

6. In 1984, Republican Ronald Reagan won a decisive victory getting 58.8% of the vote to Democrat Walter Mondale's 40.6%. The "Reagan revolution" was in full swing, and the president was affable enough to convince a majority of the electorate his administration's large increases in military spending, big budget deficits run up to pay for it, tax cuts mainly for the rich, slashed social spending and opposition to labor rights were good for the country. Mondale was no match for him and was unfairly seen as a candidate supporting the poor and disadvantaged at the expense of the middle class.

In 1980s America, Hugo Chavez might not have stood a chance against the likes of Ronald Reagan even though Chavez's Bolivarian Revolution serves all the people while Reagan's ignored and harmed those most in need including the middle class, mostly helping instead those in the country needing no help - the rich and powerful, at the beginning of the nation's second Gilded Age, serving an empowered plutocracy that reached full fruition with the dominance of the privileged class under George W. Bush.

One Other Landslide Win for Chavez Unreported

Time Magazine just voted this writer and all others communicating online their "Person of the Year." In their cover story they asked who are we, what are we doing, and who has the time and energy for this? Their answer: "you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you." Strange how underwhelming it feels at least for two reasons, but it must be stressed we beat the pros before they're even out of bed in the morning doing one thing they almost never do - telling the truth communicating real news, information and honest opinion on the most important world and national issues affecting everyone and refusing to genuflect to the country's power establishment.

While Time was honoring the free use of the internet, its importance, and the millions of ordinary people using it, it's parent company Time-Warner has for months been part of the corporate cabal trying to high-pressure the Congress to end internet neutrality and destroy the freedom the magazine praised so effusively in their disingenuous annual award just announced. If the cable and telecom giants win their lobbying effort, the public Time calls "YOU" loses. They want to be self-regulating, to be able to charge whatever they wish, to choose wealthier customers and ignore lesser ones, to have a monopoly on high-speed cable internet so they can take over our private space and control it including, at their discretion, the content on it excluding whatever portions of it they don't want in their privatized space. They want to take what's now free and open and exploit it for profit, effectively destroying the internet as we now know it.

Time also failed to report they held an online poll for "Person of the Year" and then ignored the results when they turned out not to their editors' liking. "Time's Person of the Year is the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or for ill, and embodied what was important about the year." It turned out Hugo Chavez won their poll by a landslide at 35%. Second was Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at 21%. Then came Nancy Pelosi at 12%, The YouTube Guys 11%, George Bush 8%, Al Gore 8%, Condoleezza Rice 5% and Kim Jong Il 2%. For some reason, the magazine's December 25 cover story omitted these results so their readers never learned who won their honor and rightfully should have been named Time's Person of the Year. An oversight, likely, in the holiday rush, so it's only fitting the winner be announced here - in the online space the magazine rates so highly:

Venezuelan President Hugo is Time Magazine's 2006 Person of the Year.

Venezuela under Hugo Chavez v. the US Under Republican or DLC Democrats Little Different From Republicans

The age of social enlightenment in the US, such as it was, lasted from the election of Franklin Roosevelt through the years of Lyndon Johnson and began heading south thereafter in the 1970s and ending with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. For the past generation, the US has been run for the interests of capital while the standard of living of ordinary working people, including the middle class fast eroding, had an unprecedented decline.

It shows in how wide the income disparity is between those at the economic top and ordinary wage earners. When Reagan was elected in 1980, average corporate CEO earnings were 42 times the average working person. The spread widened to 85 times in 1990 and skyrocketed to 431 times in 2004 as average top executive pay rose to about $14 million a year after the election of George Bush plus enormous benefits adding to that total, including huge ones at retirement, compared to working Americans who now earn less, adjusted for inflation, than they did 30 years ago.

This disparity is highlighted in tax data released by the IRS showing overall income in the country rose 27% adjusted for inflation from 1979 to 2004, but it all went to the top. The bottom 60% of Americans (earning less than $38,761 in 2004) made less than 95% of what they did in 1979. The 20% above them earned 2% more in 2004 than in 1979, inflation adjusted, and only the top 5% had significant gains earning 53% more in 2004 than in 1979. The largest gains of all went to the top 1% as expected - one-third of the entire increase in national income that translates to about 350% more in inflation adjusted dollars in 2004 than in 1979.

It all means since Ronald Reagan entered office, his administration and those that followed him, including Democrat Bill Clinton's, engineered a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary working people to the top income earners in the country while, at the same time, slashing social benefits making it much harder for most people to pay for essential services at much higher prices with the lower inflation-adjusted levels of income they now receive.

Especially hard hit are the 20% of workers on the bottom earning poverty-level wages - below $11,166 a year. The IRS definition of a taxpayer is either an individual or married couple meaning the 26 million poorest taxpayers are the equivalent of about 48 million adults plus 12 million dependent children totaling around 60 million Americans in the richest country in the world with incomes of about $7 a day (per capita) in a state of extreme destitution with the official poverty line in 2004 being $27 a day for a single adult below retirement age and $42 a day for a household with one child. The data excludes all public assistance like food stamps, medicaid benefits and earned-income tax credits, but since the Clinton administration's "welfare reform" Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) ended welfare payments after five years, that loss is much greater for the needy than the benefits remaining also being reduced.

It's hardly a testimony to the notion of "free market" capitalism under the Reagan revolution, the first Bush presidency following it, and eight years under Bill Clinton governing by Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) "centrist" principles eschewing the enlightened progressive party tradition, selling out instead, like Republicans, to the interests of wealth and power at the expense of ordinary people left far behind.

It all seemed like a warm-up leading to the election of George W. Bush in 2000, characterized by outrageous levels of handouts to the rich in the form of huge tax cuts for top earners and giant corporations; larger than ever corporate subsidies (aka socialism for big corporations) at taxpayer expense; and endless wars and all the bounty from them to well-connected corporate allies, some literally getting a license to steal, that never had it so good but getting it at the public's expense this president shows contempt for and is forced to follow the rules of law-of-the-jungle "free market" capitalism.

Today, under Republican or Democrat rule, the country is run by and for a rich aristocracy, in a rigidly structured class society promoting inequality and destroying the founding principles of the nation's Framers. In the last generation, the great majority of ordinary working people have been abandoned and are sinking lower in their losing efforts to make ends meet and survive in a heartless society caring only about the interests of capital. This writer will explore this issue more fully in a year-end review and outlook article due out shortly.

A Different Enlightened Way in Venezuela Under Hugo Chavez

Things are much different in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez that showed up in the overwhelming electoral endorsement he got from his people on December 3. Until he was first elected in December, 1998 taking office in February, 1999, the country was run by and for rich oligarchs, in league with their counterpart dominant interests in Washington and corporate America. They ignored the needs of ordinary people that left most of them in a state of desperate poverty. Hugo Chavez pledged to his people he'd ameliorate their condition and did it successfully for the past eight years, to the great consternation of the country's aristocracy who want the nation's wealth for themselves and their US allies.

Following the crippling US and Venezuelan ruling class-instigated 2002 - 03 oil strike and destabilizing effects of their short-lived coup deposing him for two days in April, 2002, Hugo Chavez's enlightened Bolivarian economic and social programs cut the level of poverty nearly in half from around 62% to where it is today at about one-third of the population, a dramatic improvement unmatched anywhere in Latin America or likely anywhere in the world. Along with that improvement are the essential social benefits now made available to everyone in the country by law, discussed below.

The Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela was created democratically by popular referendum and adopted in December, 1999. It established a model humanistic social democracy providing checks and balances in the nation's five branches of government instead of the usual three in countries like the US where currently all branches operate unchecked in lockstep under the Bush administration and will change little when the DLC Democrat-controlled 110th Congress convenes in January.

In Venezuela, in addition to the executive, legislative and judicial branches, the country also has independent electoral and prosecutorial ones. Chavez controls the executive branch, and his supporters control the four others because they democratically won a ruling majority in the legislature. In the National Assembly they have the authority to make appointments to the other three branches independent of the executive while Hugo Chavez has no authority to appoint to or remove members from the other four branches or have any power to dictate what they do. Today in the US, George Bush has a virtual stranglehold over all three government branches that mostly rubber stamp his agenda without opposition including the most outrageous and controversial domestic and foreign policy parts of it.

In Venezuela, the Constitution also stipulates that all the people are assured political, economic and social justice under a system of participatory democracy guaranteeing everyone a legal right to essential social services and the right to participate in how the country is run. The services include free high quality health and dental care as a "fundamental social right and....responsibility....of the state," housing assistance, improved pensions, food assistance for the needy, job training to provide skills for future employment, free education to the highest level that eliminated illiteracy and much more including the full rights of citizenship for everyone including the right to vote in free, fair and open democratic elections, now a model for the world and make a sham of the fraud-laden ones in the US.

While the ruling authority in Washington systematically destroyed democracy and deprived people most in need of essential social services, Hugo Chavez built a model democracy growing stronger by enhancing already established socially enlightened policies further using the nation's oil revenue to do it. Much in the country is happening from below, and it's planned that way by the government in Caracas. Community organizing in councils has been promoted that includes all sorts of committees around the country involved in urban land development and improvement, health, the creation of over 100,000 cooperatives outside of state or private control, and the revitalization of hundreds of bankrupt businesses and factories put under worker control.

In addition, Hugo Chavez aggressively pursued a policy of putting underutilized land to use by redistributing more than two million hectares of it to over 130,000 families in a country with the richest 5% of landowners controlling 75% of the land, the great majority of rural Venezuelans having little or none of it, and Chavez wanting to change that imbalance and do it fairly. He also established over 5,000 Urban Land Committees representing almost 20% of the population (CTUs). The law governing them stipulates Venezuelans who live in homes they built on occupied land may petition the government for title to it to be able legally to own the land they live on. This is in addition to the government's goal to build thousands of new and free public housing units for the poor without homes.

These are the kinds of things going on in Venezuela in that country's first ever age of enlightenment, but it's only a beginning. Chavez wants to expand existing programs and advance his Bolivarian Project to the next level implementing his vision of a social democracy in the 21st century. His landslide electoral victory now gives him a mandate to do it, and during the pre-election campaign in September announced he wanted to move ahead in 2007 with the formation of a single united political party of the Bolivarian Revolution to further "consolidate and strengthen" the Bolivarian spirit.

Post-election in mid-December, Chavez addressed his followers and party members at a celebratory gathering at the Teresa Carrena theater repeating his September announcement calling for the establishment of a "unique (or unity) party" to replace his Movement for the Fifth Republic Party (MVR) that brought him to power in 1998, has been his party until now and will end in January. Chavez surprisingly announced the MVR is history and will be replaced by a United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) hoping to include the MVR and all its coalition partners that wish to join. He wants it to be a peoples' party rooted in the country's communities created to win the Battle of Ideas that will move Venezuela ahead to become a fully developed social or socialist democracy for all the people.

Chavez has enormous grassroots support for his vision but faces daunting obstacles as well, not the least of which is a hostile administration in Washington committed to derailing his efforts and removing him from office by whatever means it chooses to use next in another attempt sure to come at some point.

He'll also likely get little help from the Democrat 110th Congress arriving in January with the likes of newly empowered House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a member of the US aristocracy, shamelessly calling Chavez an "everyday thug" and the US corporate-controlled media spewing the party line by relentlessly attacking him with tirades of venomous agitprop at times strong enough to make some old-line Soviet era aparachiks blush calling him an autocrat, a dictator, another Hitler and the greatest threat to US interests in the region in decades. It's the same kind of demonizing Chavez undergoes at home by the dominant corporate media that includes the country's two largest dailies, El Universal and El National, and the three main TV networks - Venevision (owned by arch-Chavez enemy and 2002 coup plotter billionaire Gustavo Cisneros), Radio Caracas Television and Globovision.

The only charge against Chavez that's credible, for quite another reason, is that he's indeed the greatest of all threats the US and Venezuelan oligarchs face - a good example spreading slowly through the region inspiring people throughout Latin America to want the same kinds of social benefits and democratic rights Venezuelans now enjoy. The powerful interests of capital in Washington, Venezuela and throughout the region are determined to stop him, but the momentum in Latin America is with Chavez if it can advance it. He has the power of the people behind him and a growing alliance of populist or moderate leaders emerging in Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Chile and for almost half a century in Cuba either wanting an end to savage capitalism, Washington-style, or a significant softening of it, along with the old-style military-backed entrenched elitism that denied long-oppressed people all the rights they now enjoy or are beginning to demand.

The people in the region yearning for freedom and demanding governments address their rights and needs are in solidarity with him, a modern-day Bolivar, a hero and symbol of hope that they, too, may one day get the equity and justice they deserve like the people of Venezuela have, if they can keep it, and help Hugo Chavez fulfill his vision to take it to the next level.

Bush extends tariff preferences to Andean nations

President George W. Bush signed legislation Wednesday extending for six months existent trade benefits to four Andean nations: Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia. According to the bill countries that approve free trade agreements, FTA, with the US will have a further six months.

Unilateral trade preferences for Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, and Ecuador under the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDEA) were scheduled to expire at the end of 2006.

Andean exporters had warned that letting the preferences lapse, with the consequent reintroduction of tariffs, could have cost hundreds of thousands of jobs in the region. Although the extension will save jobs, they say that the uncertainty surrounding the future of the preferences will not encourage new investment.

Colombia and Peru have already concluded FTA negotiations with Washington, and thus appear likely to benefit from the additional six-month period. However, whether these accords will secure Congressional approval in the US remains uncertain. The Democrats, who will take control of Congress in January, have threatened to vote against the FTAs unless they are modified to include new provisions on labor standards.

The US has not concluded an FTA with either Ecuador or Bolivia. Negotiations with Ecuador got bogged down amidst disagreements on several issues, including the treatment of US investors. Talks with Bolivia never got off the ground and thus both countries stand to lose duty-free access to the US market on July first.

“Trade is an engine of economic growth" and the best way to increase global prosperity is "to open markets to free and fair trade", said President George Bush during the signing ceremony in the Dwight Eisenhower Building next to the White House.

Abductions of Civil Movement Leaders Continue in Oaxaca

by Nancy Davies, Commentary from Oaxaca, December 21, 2006

Three Men Kidnapped, Beaten and Released While Rueda Pacheco Says Teachers Have Left the APPO; Ulises Ruis Denies Role in Recent Apprehensions

Oaxaca
December 19, 2006

The government of Ulises Ruiz Ortiz (URO) categorically denies having anything to do with the abduction of three prominent Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO, in its Spanish initials) men who were intercepted in their car and kidnapped at gunpoint by persons in civilian clothing. According to first reports, the APPO activists were taken to a private home, beaten and tortured and then dumped behind Soriana (a store in the Oaxaca Plaza shopping mall area) after a two hour ordeal. One of the APPO men said he recognized one of their assailants as a police member.

Florentino López, spokesperson for the APPO, speaking on the program Primero Noticias, said that his kidnapping, along with two other companions, took place after a meeting of the State Council of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (CEAPPO, in its Spanish initials). “Several persons dressed in civilian clothing intercepted and stopped us. They had firearms of diverse calibers. They took us to a secure house and while on the road we were tortured.”

As Lopez reported, “[they wanted to know] what the agreements were of the assembly, they demanded the names of our family members, they demanded the names of our companions in the assembly, and we were beaten continuously during the two hours. We didn’t know who they were, but they mentioned that they were with the Death Squad, and also said they are with an organization that displays crossed insignias, which we think are fascist groups, in coordination with a person in the ministerial police by the name of Barrita, who took some of my companions and they recognized him.” Captured with Lopez was Macario Otálo Padilla, the former director of Section 22 of the National Teachers Union (SNTE, in its Spanish initials).

Padilla identified the head of the Auxiliary Police of Bancaria, Industrial y Comercial (PABIC) Alejandro Barrita Ortiz, as head of the group of local agents who grabbed the three and beat them. The third person taken is a student of the School of Law and Social Sciences of the Benito Juárez Autonomous University of Oaxaca (UABJO, in its Spanish initials), Pedro García García.

After being interrogated, the men were taken by local police to Military Air Base number 15, where they were put in the hands of federal forces, again interrogated and photographed. Padilla, quoted in Noticias, said, “… here they treated us a trifle better, they didn’t beat us. They gave us a medical exam to show that we were fine so that afterwards we couldn’t complain to the Human Rights organizations. These people were hooded, although one could see the insignias on their uniforms.” Padilla recognized Barrita through an open office door.

From there, the three were taken on another ride during where they were again beaten, before being left in the Oaxaca Plaza shopping center.

Padilla laid blame for their detention and beating on the governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, the Secretary of Government Manuel García Corpus and the Secretary for Citizen Protection Lino Celaya Luría. He also blamed President Felipe Calderón and Calderon’s Secretary of the Interior, Francisco Ramírez Acuña. “They are directly responsible for this aggression,” he stated.

He also attributed blame to the Secretary General of Section 22 of SNTE, Enrique Rueda Pacheco, “for betraying the movement and making a deal with Ulises Ruiz.”

For his part, Rueda Pacheco accuses the APPO of betraying the teachers because the APPO wanted to continue the struggle when the teachers voted to accept the government offers and return to classes. Rueda says that from now on Section 22 won’t do anything in the way of marches or aid the APPO. Section 22 won’t have another assembly of its own until sometime in January. In fact, there have been no teacher assemblies since the November vote to return to classes.

Rueda also stated that he doesn’t know who paid the fines which were paid in connection with the release of 43 prisoners, and furthermore he added that he doesn’t care because that’s not his role. However, in a possible contradiction he also claimed, in a Noticias report, that Section 22 was solely responsible for obtaining the release of the 43 held in Nyarit, and that neither the APPO nor the Human Rights organizations were due any credit. He also said he is negotiating again with the Secretary of the Interior to guarantee that no more teachers will be arrested.

On Tuesday morning even the radio announcer of Radio Hit, Noticias news, speculated on whether the public will support – or fail to support – the teachers next May when they do their annual march/strike. The question of who betrayed whom is, in my personal opinion, answered this way: Rueda betrayed the teachers, Section 22 betrayed the APPO. Not all teachers agree with the decisions made by Rueda, but no teacher assembly has been held since the vote to return to classes.

Meanwhile, according to the December 19 La Jornada, about 300 teachers from the state region of Cañada, members of Section 22 of SNTE, chained shut the doors of the State Institute for Public Education (IEEPO, in its Spanish initials), and wouldn’t permit the employees to enter the building.

The teachers belong to 88 units of basic education in the region, where conflicts continue with municipal authorities who won’t permit these teachers to return to classes since they were activists in the teachers popular movement. Several mayors hired scabs to work during the strike and on returning to classes on November 16, the teachers found their positions occupied. After two consecutive days seeking a response from the Secretary of the Interior the teachers decided to blockade the entrance to IEPPO.

For the number of teachers who have been victimized by the lies of the URO regime, with or without the connivance of Rueda Pacheco, who have lost their positions and/or been arrested, plus the shenanigans on the national level of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI, in its Spanish intials) SNTE president Elba Esther Gordillo, handing to her son-in-law an important post in elementary education, one has to wonder if the national union of SNTE, of which Section 22 is already a broken part, will completely fracture. It appears to mirror the national conflict between the political parties of the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD, in its Spanish initials) and the PRI.

304 people have been arrested in Oaxaca from June 14 to present, among them teachers, university students, leaders of civil society and members of the APPO. Since the return to classes several teachers have been apprehended in classrooms, right in front of their children students. On the November 25 confrontation between the APPO and the Federal Preventive Police (PFP, in its Spanish initials) many were arrested and tortured with no cause. All the arrested suffered arbitrary insults including no communication, denial of legal defense, denial of medical attention, as well as physical and psychological abuse.

The APPO has documented 17 dead, by the hands of the paramilitaries, in the social struggle. Physical signs of torture have been documented by Human Rights observers. The Human Rights lawyers denounced the violations of human rights of 291, detained in the repression following the PFP attack, who have been subjected to electric shock to the genitals, soles of boots, beatings and broken fingers.

It is still unknown for what cause many were arrested, what they were accused of, or (except for the claim of Rueda Pacheco) why some were freed. URO admitted that up to 80% were caught in a general sweep, and were not guilty of anything. Furthermore, for the forty-three liberated, no one knows who paid their fines. This abuse of judicial and legal authority indicates a strategic coordination on the part of several government functionaries.

Perhaps the Attorney General coordinated with the State Supreme Court, as Noticias reported, “to have these people detained although it was known their detentions were illegal, thus the very authorities themselves committed crimes against the legal process.”

The Committee for the Freedom of the University Prisoners carried out a march from the Rectory of the UABJO to the Plaza de la Danza to demand the freeing of three workers, ten students and the presentation of their ten disappeared, alive. During a meeting they demanded, in addition to the freeing of the prisoners, a halt to the repression, the cancellation of arrest orders, and the departure of the PFP and of Ulises Ruiz Ortiz as governor. The student march was the third march since the start of the PFP repression.

The first post-attack march was the largest, with 10,000 families and supporters demanding the release of the prisoners, the departure of the PFP and the departure of URO. It was followed by the women’s march, and then the students’.

Many APPO adherents who fled during the most frightening part of the repression, the week of December 3, have returned home. The movement, despite the outstanding arrest warrants, appears to be regrouping to maintain the struggle to get URO out and the state reorganized.

The zocalo has been cleared of PFP (who were replaced with state police, minus tents and trucks), in an apparent effort to make appearances satisfactory for Christmas tourism. The blue-clad police replacing the grey-clad police also wear full riot gear and stand behind grey iron barricades in the roads leading into the zocalo, but permit pedestrian passage on the sidewalks. Nearly every building in the Historic Center has been repainted as part of the new “beautification” taking place.

As kind of a side joke, about a hundred members of the Independent Organization of Merchants Established in the Historic Center carried out a march under the watch of the redeployed PFP, to denounce the “cowardly” attitude of the representative of the Secretary of the Interior, Diego Herrera Chávez, because the federal government has not freed up the resources promised to them in recompensation for money lost during the popular movement. The commercial group explained that damages exceeded 400,000,000 pesos, for which the merchants seek interest free credits and reduced taxes.

Their march gathered in Llano Park in front of the Christmas scene and artificial tree placed there for the holiday season.

Chavez Demands US Apology over Drug Claim

In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez called for an apology Wednesday from US Ambassador William Brownfield over Brownfield’s recent comments about Venezuela’s role in drug trafficking.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez: "...What the Ambassador has said here in Caracas shows a real lack of respect to the Venezuelan government and people. He said that the trafficking of cocaine, heroine - drugs through Venezuela has increased and this is absolutely false."

Costa Rican leader to give salary to poor

Costa Rican President Oscar Arias says he will give money to groups that help the elderly, children and others in need.

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica

Costa Rican President Oscar Arias will donate his $102,000 yearly salary to the nation's most needy, his government said Wednesday.

Starting in January, Arias will donate his salary, which is 4.4 million colones a month, or $8,500.

"The truth is I will not live better or worse with my salary," Arias said in a news release.

The 1987 Nobel Peace Prize winner said he would donate the money discreetly to organizations that help the elderly, children, disabled people and others in need.

Oaxaca Protesters Describe Jail Beatings, Abuse by Police

In Mexico, the government has released 42 protesters two weeks after they were rounded up during a demonstration in Oaxaca. Many of those released say they were beaten in jail and describe abuse at the hands of police. Democracy Now! producer, Elizabeth Press and journalist and Global Exchange Human Rights Fellow, John Gibler file a report from the streets of Oaxaca. [includes rush transcript] We turn to Oaxaca, Mexico - where the government has released 42 protesters who were rounded up following a large demonstration there two weeks ago. Demonstrators have been calling for the ouster of Oaxaca Governor Ulises Ruiz and the withdrawal of federal police who were sent there several weeks ago to crush the popular uprising led by striking teachers and APPO - the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca.

Many of newly released protestors have said they were beaten in jail and describe abuse at the hands of police. Scores of other protesters remain in jail including Flavio Sosa, a leader of APPO. Sosa was arrested in Mexico City the day before he was to resume negotiations with the governor to resolve the conflict. Meanwhile, the federal police have begun withdrawing from the center of Oaxaca.

Democracy Now! Producer Elizabeth Press is in Oaxaca with journalist and Global Exchange Human Rights Fellow John Gibler. They filed this report:

* Report from Oaxaca, produced by Elizabeth Press and John Gibler.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

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AMY GOODMAN: Democracy Now! producer Elizabeth Press is in Oaxaca with journalist and Global Exchange Human Rights Fellow, John Gibler. They filed this report.

JOHN GIBLER: Beneath the fragile appearance of calm in Oaxaca City, both the struggle to force Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz from office and the dirty war waged against the protesters continue. There are no signs of the graffiti and protest camps of the Oaxaca People’s Popular Assembly, or APPO. In Oaxaca’s historic center, an occasional tourist can now be seen walking bewildered through the streets.

On Saturday, the federal preventive police force that occupied the town square, or Zocalo, on October 29 moved their troops and riot tanks out of the center to nearby bases, turning over control to the state police. Only one week before, the federal police had raided the state police headquarters, searching for illegal guns suspected of being used against protesters in a string of paramilitary-style attacks that took place between August and October, killing at least 15 people. On Saturday, for the first time since striking teachers and outraged citizens forced them out of town in a pitched street battle on June 14, those state police were back in charge.

The next day, some 2,000 women from the APPO marched through Oaxaca City, calling for the governor's ouster and the immediate release of the more than 200 prisoners detained after confrontations with police on November 25. The women, who avoided confrontation with the state police, gathered at the Madero Park to greet the first prisoners to have been released. Two buses arrived after a 24-hour ride from the federal prison in Tepic, Nayarit, delivering 43 prisoners to the emotive greeting of the women and hundreds more APPO supporters and family members. This was the first contact of family and friends most of the prisoners had had since their detentions on November 25 and the first time people heard direct testimonies of their experience.

Ismael Estrada had been walking with his wife in central Oaxaca City, when he was attacked by federal police looking to round up APPO protesters.

ISMAEL ESTRADA: [translated] It was about 6:00 in the afternoon on the day of November 25, when the operation took place near Santa Domingo between Reforma and Cinco de Mayo Streets at the [inaudible]. We couldn't do anything. About five or six of the federal preventive police attacked me and began to beat me with everything they had, kicking me and clubbing me with the police batons. Yes, here they split my head. I bled a lot. I was drenched in blood. In spite of that, they kept beating me.

JOHN GIBLER: Arbitrary detentions and forced disappearances have been used by both state and para-police forces since last August. These detentions increased dramatically after the federal police crackdown on protesters three weeks ago, but then dropped off again when the state police themselves became subject to a federal raid. Human rights workers continue to press the issue of forced disappearances as one of their gravest concerns. Yesica Sanchez of the Oaxaca office of the Mexican Human Rights Defense League has documented disappearances throughout the six-month conflict.

YESICA SANCHEZ: [translated] There is a moment when nobody knows where they are, when nobody knows why they have grabbed them and where they have taken them. This is completely terrifying, not only for the families, but for us, as well, because we don’t know if they can kill them, if they can torture them. The real fear is not the detention in itself, but the real fear is what happens in the space of darkness, where nobody knows if you can guarantee your life and safety.

JOHN GIBLER: After a short lull, plainclothes gunmen apprehended three APPO members on Monday, beating, interrogating and threatening to kill them. The gunmen identified themselves as being part of the death squad, referring to the state police convoys that wounded and killed protesters in August. Florentino Martinez, Pedro Garcia and Otalo Padilla, all members of the APPO and the Popular Revolutionary Front had left an APPO meeting at the teachers’ union headquarters when they were followed and detained by several cars and trucks carrying men with assault rifles and pistols. The gunmen ordered the APPO members into one of their vans, where they were beaten and tortured for over an hour.

APPO MEMBER: [translated] They were beating us throughout the trip. My friends were hit in the head. I could hear them screaming in pain. They were constantly stepping on our heads.

JOHN GIBLER: The gunmen threatened to shoot them and to fly them out over the sea and throw them from the plane. But after over an hour of beatings, they instead threw them out of the truck, keeping their possessions, including a laptop and USB memory stick with internal APPO documents. While freshly painted storefronts try to announce the return of calm to Oaxaca, the continued use of paramilitary-style violence against protesters speaks to the deep unrest that plagues the state, a violence that may end up pulling more people into the fold of the APPO than it scares away from the protests.

FMR. DETAINEE: [translated] The worst moment for me was the day they detained me. The teargas, the police. They tied me up. I didn't understand anything. I didn't know what was happening. All 21 days were terrible. I didn't know what the APPO was or the teachers’ union. I didn't know anything about them. Now, I am determined to join them, because the government made me suffer so much. I’ll join them to help get rid of the government, because I don't want this government anymore. They not only made me suffer, but also made my whole family suffer. I’ll work with the people who have been struggling, whatever the organization is, the APPO or whatever. I don’t want my grandchildren to suffer what I’ve suffered. I want to fight for the release of all the innocent women who are still in Nayarit. They are humble people who make fans to maintain their family. Some of them are barefoot. Many don’t even speak Spanish, only Mizteco.

JOHN GIBLER: For Democracy Now!, this is John Gibler reporting with Elizabeth Press in Oaxaca City.

Venezuela Jobless Rate Falls to Eight-Year Low

by Theresa Bradley

Venezuela's unemployment rate fell to its lowest in almost eight years in November as oil-fueled government spending spurred economic growth and a boom in consumer purchasing.

The jobless rate dropped to 8.8 percent last month from 10.9 percent a year ago, the country's national statistics agency, known as the INE, said in a statement. The rate is Venezuela's lowest since January 1999, the first month for which the data is available. Unemployment was 8.9 percent in October.

Venezuela's economy swelled 10.2 percent in the past year on government oil revenue, driving a consumer spending boom that helped create 424,000 jobs in November. President Hugo Chavez's government plans to pour nearly half its budget into social and job creation programs next year, and aims to slash unemployment to 7 percent next month, INE President Elias Eljuri said in today's release.

``The economy is growing and that creates jobs, but what's up for debate is their quality,'' said Abelardo Daza, an economist at the Caracas consulting firm Lextrategy. Daza expects holiday spending to boost labor demand and help unemployment approach the government's 7 percent target, before rising again in January.

Almost three of every four jobs created last month belonged to the formal economy, entitling employees to pensions, severance and other benefits, INE data showed.

Still, about 47 percent, or 5.2 million, of all 11.1 million Venezuelans employed in November worked in informal positions, including street vendors and house cleaners, where most earned half as much as their formal-sector peers, Daza said.

``The challenge is to transition those informal jobs into formal employment and fight poverty,'' he said.

The surge in government spending has helped slash poverty rates among Venezuela's 26 million people by nearly a third since the end of 2003, according to the INE.

To contact the reporter on this story: Theresa Bradley in Caracas at tbradley7@bloomberg.net .

The US and Latin America Overview for 2006, Perspectives for 2007

by James Petras

Introduction: Escalation of Warfare

To understand US-Latin American relations this year and its likely trajectory in 2007 it is obligatory to consider three dimensions: 1) the global context of US-LA relations; 2) internal dynamics of the US and 3) the real practical political-economic consequences of the 2006 elections in Latin America.

US imperial policy continues to pursue military victories in Iraq and Afghanistan, to give unconditional support to Israel’s war against the elected Palestinian Government and to threaten a direct or Israeli attack on Iran. In other words, the prolonged, costly and inconclusive wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Palestine during 2006 will continue in 2007. Further military escalation, includes increased US troops and spending for wars in the Middle East; an extra $800 million USD in addition to the annual $3 billion USD for Israeli war plans against Lebanon, Palestine and especially Iran. Those commentators who interpreted US policy via public opinion polls, electoral processes (the victory of the Democrats), advisory reports (Baker’s Iraq Study Group) and casualty rates in Iraq, and predicted a ‘gradual’ withdrawal, failed to understand the logic of the White House’s political strategy. For the Bush regime, the military failures are a result of the application of insufficient power: what is necessary, they argue, is greater numbers of soldiers and bigger military budgets (BBC, 12/16/06).

Polarization

Both in the United States, Latin America and in the world at large, profound and deepening divisions are driving policy and provoking increasing conflicts. The lines of division in the United States on the fundamental questions of confrontation or negotiation in the Middle East and Latin America cut across the two major parties, and the liberal-conservative spectrum. On the one side the White House, backed by pro-war Democrats, Republicans, the Presidents of the Major Jewish Organizations, right-wing veteran groups and neo-conservative intellectuals and the majority of the corporate mass media. On the other side, minorities in the major parties and mass media, the majority of public opinion, sectors of the active and retired military officers, establishment intellectual and prominent political critics of the Zionist lobby and war policies like Brzezinski, James Carter, James Baker among others.

Similar divisions appear with regard to Latin American policy. The White House, backed by the Cuban (exile) lobby, the Pentagon and a minority of right-wing ideologues and business groups favor forceful pressure and intervention against Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia and support of illegitimate President Calderon, the Santa Cruz separatists in Bolivia and other authoritarian extremists in the region. In varying degrees of opposition, stand liberal and conservative congress-members backed by agro-business exporters, tourists agencies, a majority of public opinion and sectors of the State Department headed by Undersecretary for Latin American Affairs, Shannon, who support greater emphasis on diplomacy, negotiations and a ‘two-track’ approach.

Within Latin America similar profound divisions emerged in 2006 which will deepen in 2007. In Mexico, the minority Calderon regime faces major opposition from the AMLO coalition, Oaxaca popular assemblies, the trade unions and social movements. As he proceeds to deepen the liberalization of the economy and he militarizes the country to implement his program, the polarization will deepen.

In Bolivia, rightwing business and agro-business elites regrouped, taking advantage of Morales’ conciliatory policies and incapacity to carry-out any major redistributive policies (in land and income) -- and have consolidated a power base in Santa Cruz, which has forced Morales to retreat further in his reforms and aroused mass popular discontent. Similar divisions have appeared in Ecuador, between the peasants/Indians of the Andean region and the land barons and bankers of the Coast. In Colombia, the divisions between the paramilitary forces allied to President Uribe and the popular civil society organizations (and the guerrilla) have deepened (Boston Globe, December 14, 2006). In Venezuela, the polarization between the Socialist and social-liberal Chavistas (and their allies among the ‘moderate’ opposition) will surface in 2007 as Chavez implements party and cabinet changes in pursuit of a socialist agenda.

These internal divisions in the US and Latin America are played out in an international context which radicalizes the class and national confrontations.

International Context

Two world-historic processes affect US policy toward Latin America: 1) the prolonged Middle East wars and 2) the dynamic growth of the four Asian powers led by China. The Middle Eastern-South Asian wars have severely overextended US military forces, undermined domestic support for new wars and severely strained the budget. These outcomes have weakened the US military capacity for intervention in Latin America in support of a military coup, or, even less, a direct military invasion. As a result the US increasingly relies on domestic (Latin American) clients to defend its interests (Calderon, Santa Cruz land-business barons, Garcia, Uribe).

Asia’s (particularly China and India) dynamic growth and demand for raw materials (iron, copper and oil), food and agricultural products (like soya) has resulted in greater competition with the US-EU for access to Latin American exporters and suppliers, and increased prices and revenues for Latin American treasuries (major trade and budget surpluses). Asia increases the diversity of markets and investors for Latin American exporters. These changes mean less dependence on external financing (especially the IMF) and US markets which in turn means Washington has less political and diplomatic leverage over Latin American regimes, even neo-liberal governments like Lula, Bachelet, Kirchner and Vazquez.

Faced with a loss of military capacity and a decline in economic leverage, Washington is moving toward a ‘compromise’ between the White House’s hard line militarists and the State Department’s market-driven ‘negotiators’. The essence of the compromise is to pursue a ‘two-track policy’: combining support for the subversive opposition in countries where it is strong (Bolivia) with negotiation in countries where it is weak (Venezuela). With regard to the neo-liberal regimes, which have some degree of autonomy (Brazil, Chile and Argentina), Washington will emphasize bilateral relations and try to maximize economic opportunities while discouraging any concession to the mass movements especially demands to reverse privatizations. The two-track policy will be combined in the cases of Cuba and Venezuela: with promises of dialogue and agreements conditional on major concessions in diplomacy, property and investments combined with continued financial support for agents of destabilization.

Latin America: Political Changes and US Response

The mild response of the US to the regime changes resulting from the Latin American elections of 2006 can easily be explained by the fact that they did not produce any consequential socio-economic structural changes, at least for the foreseeable future.

The clearest demonstration of the marginal effects of ‘center-left’ electoral victories is the case of the electoral victory of Lula who made it clear to even his own most ardent intellectual supporters (Frei Betto, Emir Sader, Joao Pedro Stedile) that he considered ‘leftism an infantile disorder’ (La Jornada, 12/14/2006), a remark much appreciated in business circles throughout the hemisphere. No doubt Wall Street was pleased that the Brazilian ‘Workers Party’ voted to double Congressional salaries from$6500 US to $12000 US per month (and doubling each Congress member’s individual monthly budget to $75,000 US) while increasing the minimum wage by $7 US a month from $159 to $166 US (about 1.7% after inflation) (Financial Times, December 16-17, 2006). One out of five Brazilian Congress members (many from Lula’s coalition) are currently under investigation for corruption. Wall Street speculators who also were recently investigated for fraud and yet received huge year-end bonuses would feel a real identity of condition with Brazilian lawmakers who doubled their salaries, while awaiting criminal charges.

Contrary to White House expectations, but much to its liking, Evo Morales’ regime pursued orthodox, austere fiscal policies aimed at budget surpluses, eschewed any redistributive policies (virtually no land, mining or energy expropriations). While Morales demobilized the social movements and focused on endless legal procedures, the oligarchy regrouped, expanded its power base in Santa Cruz and threatens to bring down the government. While Washington’s oligarchic Bolivian clients advanced toward power (La Jornada, December 16, 2006) Evo Morales continued his self-destructive policies of symbolic radical populist rhetoric and greater concessions to the elites. Washington has maintained a foot in both camps, providing over $60 million dollars in foreign aid to Morales and untold millions to the opposition in Santa Cruz organizing massive ‘separatist’ demonstrations (HoyBolivia.com, December 16, 2006).

Washington’s ‘soft-line’ negotiators (Shannon) strengthened their position vis-à-vis the White House’s ‘hard line’ policy toward Venezuela by pointing to Hugo Chavez’ electoral victory (63% of the vote) as a reason for a rapprochement (La Jornada, December 14, 2006). Shannon has advanced the argument in Washington that a significant sector of the Chavez government was open to a negotiated pact with involves freezing the status quo, softening criticism of US imperial policies, consolidating oil and gas agreements and blocking any steps toward socializing the economy.

Perspectives for 2007

The international position of the US during 2007 will continue to deteriorate -- the coming massive military escalation in Iraq, the large-scale transfer of arms for Israel to threaten or attack Iran, Syria, Hezbollah or Hamas (or all simultaneously) -- will not lessen the armed resistance in Iraq. A US-backed Israeli attack on Iran will extend warfare throughout the Gulf States including Saudi Arabia. On December 15, 2006, Bush presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Israeli extremist, Natan Sharansky -- advocate for the genocidal ‘transfer’ of all Palestinians from ‘Greater Israel’ -- symbolizing the meeting of the minds of US imperial militarism and Israeli brutal colonial expansionism. The total discarding of any new diplomatic initiative (like the recommendations of Baker’s Iraq Study Group), is the result of the combined strength of the powerful pro-Israel Lobby and the Bush-Cheney-Rice White House.

Washington, overextended militarily in the Middle East, will follow its ‘two-track’ policy in Latin America. The White House will support incumbent clients (like Uribe, Calderon and Garcia); the State, Treasury and Commerce Departments will engage in trade agreements with more ‘autonomous’ neo-liberal regimes like Lula, Bachelet, Vazquez and Kirchner), encouraging greater distance from Cuba and Venezuela and closer diplomatic relations with the US. With regard to Bolivia, Washington will continue to pressure Morales to make further concessions to the far-right civic-oligarchic coalition based in Santa Cruz, allowing the local business elite to ‘carry the ball’ for US imperial interests. n Venezuela, the ‘two track policy’ will attempt to deepen the political divisions in the Chavista movement, in order to block new Chavez initiatives toward greater socialization and in order to promote new political configuration of ‘moderate oppositionists’ and liberal Chavistas.

The weakest link in Washington’s projected strategy in Latin America is the re-emergence of socio-political movements, like those which burst forth in the late 1990s and first years of the new century: the MST in Brazil, the workers, peasant and Indian movements in Bolivia and Ecuador and the mass uprising in Oaxaca and electoral protests in Mexico are in the process of re-grouping, none having suffered a historic defeat. All the major popular movements retain their organizational structures and have recovered their political independence. They will soon be capable of once again engaging in major uprisings and political confrontations with the oligarchies in power or with their shock troops in the streets.

The New Year does not promise ‘more of the same’; it will start with a major US military escalation in the Middle East but it will likely end with a greater military debacle, ensuring deepening political crises and increased economic instability both in the Middle East, the US and Latin America. The weakening of the US political regime will open a window of opportunity for a decisive break with the US Empire, providing that the re-emerging social-political movements can overcome the obstacles posed by the new political elites of ex-leftists and traditional oligarchs.


James Petras, a former Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York, owns a 50-year membership in the class struggle, is an adviser to the landless and jobless in Brazil and Argentina, and is co-author of Globalization Unmasked (Zed Books). His latest book is, The Power of Israel in the United States (Clarity Press, 2006). He can be reached at: jpetras@binghamton.edu.

Women march against Ruiz, freed detainees come home

Over 2,000 women marched through Oaxaca City on Sunday calling for Gov. Ulises Ruiz´s ouster and the immediate release of the more than 200 members of the Oaxaca People´s Assembly (APPO) detained since the street battles on Nov. 25.

The march skirted the police-occupied Zócalo, arriving at Madero Park on the edge of town around noon without any incidents of violence.

"With our marches we are showing the government that we are ready to struggle with all we´ve got," said Patricia, one of the organizers of the march and a founding member of the August First Oaxaca Women´s Organization, a group that sprung up within the APPO after the first women´s march on August 1 that led to the seizure of the state television station, Channel 9.

"We all felt afraid for a while there, but we are going to keep on struggling until the last prisoner is freed," she said.

During the past week, Oaxaca´s streets have remained calm, and tourists have slowly begun to return to the city. Protests have been limited to weekend marches, and after federal police raided the state ministerial police headquarters to confiscate over 340 guns on Dec. 7, the recent wave of arbitrary street detentions stopped.

On Saturday, the Federal Preventive Police (PFP) who occupied the Zócalo on Oct. 29 lifted their camps and moved out of the historic center, turning control over to the state police.

Also on Saturday, 43 prisoners detained following a clash between police and protesters on Nov. 25 and later sent to a medium security federal prison in Tepic, Nayarit were unexpectedly released on bail, with the state government footing the bill.

Officials at the state attorney general´s office did not answer their phones on Sunday.

Isaac Torres Carmona, a human rights lawyer with the Mexican Association of Human Rights Advisors (AMADH) said that the prisoner´s sudden release, like their arrest, was highly irregular, and most likely illegal.

"The government used sophistry to get them out of jail," Carmona said, referring to the state government´s request for and posting of the prisoners´ bail while continuing to accuse them of serious crimes. Carmona also said that the charges against the prisoners - arson, sedition, and resisting arrest - were applied to the entire group of detainees without any specific reference to the time or location of the crimes with which they are charged.

Most of the buildings burned during the confrontation were set on fire after the PFP made most of its detentions, and several blocks away from where the arrests were made.

Carmona said the prisoners have "a precarious freedom," and with charges still pending, they could be arrested again at any time.

The released prisoners arrived in Oaxaca at 3 p.m. after a 24-hour bus ride from Tepic. They arrived to an emotive reception. Most of the women who marched in the morning, along with hundreds of other APPO supporters and family members, gathered at Madero Park with flowers and a local brass band to greet the released prisoners.

Men and women with their hair cropped short and bloodstains on their shirts and pants got off the buses to eagerly awaiting family members and a crowd of some two thousand people.

One university student who declined to give his name held flowers next to a stain of dried blood on his t-shirt. "They beat us and took our belongings - cell phones, wallets, backpacks - we were beaten and then tortured psychologically," he said.

One young woman held her mother´s face in her hands and said, "don´t cry, no tears mom, I am okay."

Most declined to discuss their detentions, saying that they had agreed to withhold testimonies until all of the other prisoners had been freed.

The APPO is planning another march on Dec. 22, but spokespeople said protests would be suspended during Christmas and New Year´s Day, to give people time to rest and be with their families. Demonstrations would resume in January.

Bolivia to legalize more coca production

LA PAZ, Boliva

President Evo Morales says his government is ready to expand the allowed production of coca, the basis of cocaine as well as of some legal products.

Morales told a gathering of coca growers late Monday that he had "no problem" with a proposal to decree an expansion of expand legally permitted coca production to 20,000 hectares (49,400 acres) from the current 12,000 (29,700).

The issue has caused friction with U.S. officials who have campaigned to wipe out coca growing as part of their battle against international drug trafficking.

Morales, who himself rose to prominence as a coca growers' representative, has pledged to fight cocaine trafficking while trying to expand the market for legal uses of coca, such as traditional herbal teas.

It was not clear if Morales could expand the coca area by decree or if he would have to ask for legislative approval.

A 1988 law stated that legal coca growing areas could be expanded only by law, not decree, but President Carlos Mesa in 2004 authorized an expansion to 15,200 hectares (37,600 acres) without going to Congress.

Morales said expanded production would be used for commercial projects such as coca tea bags.

A U.N. study estimated that Bolivian coca crops cover 25,400 hectares (62,800 acres), most of it illegal. Much of that is grown in the Chapare region of central Bolivia where Morales spoke on Tuesday to coca producers who still consider him their union leader.

"If the government committed ourselves to have at least 20,000 hectares of coca, it impossible to commit ourselves to something that does not meet the promise to the people," he said, referring to earlier vows to authorize expanded production.

U.S. Ambassador Philip Goldberg has said that U.S. officials are increasingly worried about the growth of coca crops, 90 percent of which, they say, end up as cocaine.

Something to chew on: a salad with coca leaves?

by Rick Vecchio
LIMA, Peru

Alan Garcia

President Alan Garcia on Tuesday suggested an unorthodox use for the coca leaf, the raw material for cocaine: Why not toss it in a salad?

"I insist that it can be consumed directly and elegantly in salad," Garcia told foreign correspondents.

Garcia's comments put him in the company of leftist presidents Evo Morales of Bolivia and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, who have publicly promoted mixing the high-calcium leaf into everything from toothpaste to soft drinks.

Coca has for centuries been considered a medicinal and ceremonial plant in Andean culture, and Garcia said it should not be vilified solely for producing the illegal narcotic.

For years, the U.S. has pressed Andean nations to fight production of the drug.

Garcia pledged during an October meeting with President Bush to continue a policy of manual eradication and to pursue programs to replace coca with alternative crops.

Peru permits cultivation of about 25,000 acres of coca for chewing and for sale to companies that produce pharmaceutical cocaine, package coca tea or produce extracts used in soft drinks. But experts say more than 90 percent of Peruvian coca is grown illegally to fuel the cocaine trade.

Bolivia ready to formalize Mercosur full membership request

President Evo Morales will officially formalize this week the request for Bolivia to become a full member of Mercosur, announced Monday in Brasilia Bolivian Foreign Affairs minister David Choquehuanca.

However Bolivia expects to be accepted in Mercosur without having to cut links with the Community of Andean Nations, CAN, to which it belongs and currently holds the rotating chair.

“We would like to have the chance of joining Mercosur without loosing the benefits we enjoy in CAN in true integration spirit”, said Choquhuanca.

“Next January 18, CAN is scheduled to meet when Bolivia’s request to join Mercosur will be considered. In the meantime Mercosur will be naming a task group to address Bolivia’s aspiration”, added Choquehuanca.

The formal request will become official in a letter to be addressed to the five presidents of the group’s full members, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Bolivia is currently an associate member of Mercosur which means it must not abide by the common external tariff. President Morales made the informal sounding with his South American counterparts during a recent summit in Cochabamba.

Brazilian Foreign Affaire minister Celos Amorim said he believed CAN would put no obstacles to Bolivia’s request to become a Mercosur full member, mainly because both blocks have already signed a free trade agreement.

Furthermore “in practical terms, CAN ceased to be a customs union when two of its members (Colombia and Peru; Ecuador is on hold) signed free trade agreements with United States”.

Earlier in the year Venezuela split from CAN complaining that Colombia and Peru had “betrayed” the group by signing trade accords with the US. Ecuador’s elected president Rafael Correa has also anticipated that any agreement with the US “will remain on hold”.

Mexico Releases 42 Protesters In Oaxaca

In Mexico, the government has released 42 protesters who were rounded up following a large demonstration in Oaxaca two weeks ago. Scores of other protesters remain in jail including Flavio Sosa, a leader of APPO, Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca. A schoolteacher named Aurelia Juarez was among the protesters released. She said the protesters were beaten in jail. They were pulled by their hair, hit and kicked in their stomachs. She said they were lucky to be out of the prison. Meanwhile the federal police have begun withdrawing from the center of Oaxaca. They were sent there seven weeks ago to crush the popular uprising led by striking teachers and APPO.

From Bolivia to Baghdad: Noam Chomsky on Creating Another World in a Time of War, Empire and Devastation

Listen to entire show

World-renowned scholar and linguist Noam Chomsky spoke this weekend at an event sponsored by Massachusetts Global Action. The event titled, "What's Next? Creating Another World in a Time of War, Empire and Devastation" was held at the Emmanuel Church in Boston. Chomsky, who is a professor of Linguistics at MIT, returned from Latin America in October. He talked about the recent elections in the region, which have brought leftist, governments to power that are challenging U.S foreign policy. Chomsky also spoke about Iraq and Iran in the context of Latin America.

In this excerpt, he begins by analyzing the recently released Iraq Study Group report that was chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker.

Chomsky begins by talking about the recent South America Summit meeting, held earlier this month in Cochabamba, Bolivia.
*

AMY GOODMAN: Today, we bring you world-renowned scholar and linguist Noam Chomsky, who spoke a few days ago in an event sponsored by Massachusetts Global Action. The speech was called "What's Next? Creating Another World in a Time of War, Empire and Devastation." It was held at the Emmanuel Church in Boston.

Chomsky is a professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He recently returned from Latin America. He talked about the recent elections in the region, which have brought leftist governments to power that are challenging US foreign policy. Chomsky also talked about Iraq and Iran in the context of Latin America.

In this excerpt, he begins by analyzing the recently released Iraq Study Group report that was chaired by the former Secretary of State James Baker.

NOAM CHOMSKY: There are efforts to try to extricate the US from the US power -- doesn’t matter much to the people, but US power -- from the catastrophes it’s created for itself. The most recent such effort, right on the front pages now -- so I’ll keep to that one -- is the Baker-Hamilton report, the Iraq Study Group report, which has some interesting features. Very interesting.

For example, one of its -- it doesn’t have much in the way of proposals -- but the thinking is interesting. So here's one paragraph, refers to recent polls in Iraq. The US government and polling agencies here take regular polls in Iraq. They care a lot about Iraqi opinion. And this points out that recent polling indicates that 79% of Iraqis have a mostly negative view of the influence that the United States has in their country, and 61% of Iraqis -- includes Kurds -- approve of attacks on US-led forces. Well, that's clearly a problem. And we have to deal with that problem by changing tactics, so they'll understand that we really love them and we’re trying to help them and they'll stop thinking they ought to attack us and hating us, and so on. OK, that was the proposal.

There's something missing. The same polls that they cited have some other information, for example, that two-thirds of the people of Baghdad want US troops out immediately, and about over three-quarters of the whole population, including Kurds, again, wants a firm timetable for withdrawal within a year or less. Well, that isn’t mentioned, because in our mission to bring democracy to the world, we don’t care about the opinions of people. They’re kind of irrelevant, so that isn't mentioned. And, of course, there's no timetable for withdrawal. That’s one of the options they rejected.

Also interesting is that the American people are treated the same way. A majority of people here are in favor of a firm timetable for withdrawal. But that's irrelevant, too. In fact, back as far as April 2003, considerable majority of people here in the United States were in favor of keeping US troops there only if they were under UN supervision. The UN ought to take responsibility for security, for economic development, reconstruction, for democratic development, and so on. But that opinion was, of course, totally ignored and, to my knowledge, not even reported.

Now, that continues, if that attitude continues, the next big problem, next to Iraq, is Iran. And the Baker-Hamilton Commission, as you know, gave a recommendation about that. It said the US must somehow engage Iran, but they said that that’s going to be problematic given the state of US-Iranian relationships. Well, the US population has an opinion about that, too. 75% of the population here, including a majority of Republicans, think that the United States ought to keep to diplomatic peaceful measures in engagement with Iran, which they approve of, and not use military threats -- exact opposite of the policy.

The same attitudes are true of the people of the region. They don't like Iran, and they don’t certainly [inaudible] nuclear-armed Iran, but a majority of the population of the regional states favors a nuclear-armed Iran to any form of military intervention, just as people here do. Well, that's kind of irrelevant, so that’s also not mentioned in the report.

A third interesting fact about the report is that it says the United States cannot achieve its goals in the Middle East -- of course, taken for granted they must achieve those goals. It doesn't mean the people of the United States, it means the government and their constituency. The United States cannot achieve its goals in the Middle East unless it deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict. And then goes on to say that the US must encourage discussions and so on, but restricting and allowing Palestinians to participate, but only those who accept Israel's right to exist. OK, those are the only Palestinians who can participate. What about Israelis who accept Palestine's right to exist? Well, no point in mentioning them, because there probably aren't any.

And, in fact, there shouldn't be any. No state has a right to exist. It's obvious. In fact, the whole concept, right to exist, as far as I’m aware -- somebody should -- it’s a good research project for someone -- to my knowledge, that concept was created in the 1970s when the Arab States and the PLO accepted, formally accepted -- PLO tacitly, the Arab States formally, the major ones -- formally accepted Israel's right to exist within secure and recognized borders, borrowing the wording of the major UN resolution, UN 242. So it became necessary to raise the barrier to prevent negotiations diplomacy and to allow expansion instead.

And here comes right to exist, which, of course, nobody is going to accept. It means accepting not only the fact of the expulsion of Palestinians, but also its legitimacy. No state in the world is ever going to accept that, any more than Mexico accepts the -- it recognizes the United States, but it does not recognize the legitimacy of the US conquest of half of Mexico -- outlandish.

But even if we reduce it from the crazy notion of right to exist to just recognizing Palestine, how many -- who -- recognizing Israel, suppose we limit Palestinians to those who recognize Israel, which Israelis recognize Palestine? Does the United States recognize Palestine? I mean, I won’t run through the history here, but for 30 years, the US and Israel have, with rare exceptions, been unilaterally preventing the establishment of a broad international consensus on a two-state settlement. I mean, they're willing now, in the last couple of years, only the last couple of years, to accept a very truncated Palestine that’s dismembered, surrounded -- no chance of viable existence. Maybe they'll recognize that. A couple of Bantustans, but not any viable state.

AMY GOODMAN: We are watching and listening to Noam Chomsky, giving an address last week in Boston. When we come back, we'll turn to the segment of his speech where he talks about Latin America, from which he just returned. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We return now to Noam Chomsky, who spoke a few days ago in Boston.

NOAM CHOMSKY: I’ll start with last weekend. Important city in South America, Cochabamba, with quite a history. There was a meeting last weekend in Cochabamba in Bolivia of all the South American leaders. It was a very important meeting. One index of its importance is that it was unreported, virtually unreported apart from the wire services. So every editor knew about it. Since I suspect you didn't read that wire service report, I’ll read you a few things from it to indicate why it was so important.

In last Saturday, the South American leaders agreed to create a high-level commission to study the idea of forming a continent-wide community similar to the European Union. This is the presidents and envoys of all the nations, and there was the two-day summit of what's called the South American Community of Nations, hosted by Evo Morales in Cochabamba, the president of Bolivia. The leaders -- reading just now --agreed to form a study group to look at the possibility of creating a continent-wide union and even a South American parliament. The result, according to the -- I’m reading from the AP report -- the result left fiery Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, long an agitator for the region, taking a greater role on the world stage, pleased, but impatient -- normal stance. They went on. It goes on to say that the discussion over South American unity will continue later this month, when MERCOSUR, South American trading bloc, has its regular meeting that will include leaders from Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Paraguay and Uruguay.

There is one -- has been one point of hostility in South America. That's Peru, Venezuela. But it points out that Chavez and Peruvian President Alan Garcia took advantage of the summit to bury the hatchet, after having exchanged insults earlier in the year. And that was the only real conflict in South America. So that seems to have been smoothed over.

The new Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa proposed a land and river trade route linking the Brazilian Amazon Rainforest to Ecuador's Pacific Coast, suggesting that for South America, it could be kind of like an alternative to the Panama Canal.

Chavez and Morales celebrated a new joint project, the gas separation plant in Bolivia's rich gas-rich region. It’s a joint venture with Petrovesa, the Venezuelan oil company, and the Bolivian state energy company. And it continues. Venezuela, as I’m sure you know, is the only -- it which points out -- is the only Latin American member of OPEC and has by far the largest proven oil reserves outside the Middle East, by some measures maybe even incomparable to Saudi Arabia. Well, that’s very important in the general global context. I’ll return to a couple of words about that.

There were also contributions, constructive, interesting contributions by Lula da Silva, Brazil's president, Bachelet of Chile, and others. All of this is extremely important.

This is the first time since the Spanish conquests, 500 years, that there has been real moves towards integration in South America. The countries have been very separated from one another. And integration is going to be a prerequisite for authentic independence. I mean, there have been -- I’m sure you know -- attempts at independence, but they've been crushed, often very violently, partly because of lack of regional support, because there was very little regional cooperation, so you can pick them off one by one.

That’s what happened since the 1960s. The Kennedy administration orchestrated a coup in Brazil, the first of which happened right after the assassination was already planned. It was the first of a series of falling dominoes. Neo-Nazi-style national security states spread across the hemisphere. Chile was one of them, but only one finally ended up with reaching Central America, with Reagan's terrorist wars in the 1980s, which devastated Central America, similar things happening in the Caribbean. But that was sort of a one-by-one operation of destroying one country after another. And it had the expected domino effect. It’s the worst plague of repression in the history of Latin America since the original conquests, which were horrendous. It’s only beginning to be understood how horrendous they were.

But integration does lay the basis for potential independence, and that's of extreme significance. The colonial history -- Spain, Europe, the United States -- not only divided countries from one another, but it also left a sharp internal division within the countries, every one, between a very wealthy small elite and a huge mass of impoverished people. The correlation to race is fairly close. Typically, the rich elite was white, European, westernized; and the poor mass of the population was indigenous, Indian, black, intermingled, and so on. It's a fairly close correlation, and it continues right ‘til the present.

The white, mostly white, elites were not -- who ran the countries -- were not integrated with -- had very few interrelations with the other countries of the region. They were Western-oriented. You can see that in all sorts of ways. That's where the capital was exported. That's where the second homes were, where the children went to the universities, where their cultural connections were, and so on. And they had very little responsibility in their own societies. So there’s very sharp division.

They were also very support-- you can see it, for example, in imports. Imports are mostly luxury goods, overwhelmingly. Development, such as it was, was mostly foreign. It was much more open, Latin America, much more open to foreign investment than, say, East Asia. It’s part of the reason for their different paths of development in the past -- radically different paths of development in the last couple of decades.

And, of course, the elite elements were very strongly sympathetic to the neoliberal programs of the last 25 years, which enriched them -- destroyed the countries, but enriched them. Latin America, more than any region in the world, outside of southern Africa, adhered rigorously to the so-called Washington Consensus, what's called outside the United States the neoliberal programs of roughly the past 25, 30 years. And everywhere where they were rigorously applied, they led to disaster. There’s scarcely an exception. Very striking correlation. Sharp reduction in rates of growth, other macroeconomic indices, all the social effects that go along with that.

Actually, the comparison to East Asia is very striking. Latin America is a much -- potentially much richer area. I mean, a century ago, it was taken for granted that Brazil would be what was called the “Colossus of the South,” comparable to the Colossus of the North. Haiti, now one of the poorest countries in the world, was the richest colony in the world, a source of much of France’s wealth, now devastated, first by France, then by the United States. And Venezuela -- enormous wealth -- was taken over by the United States around 1920, right at the beginning of the oil age, had been a British dependency, but Woodrow Wilson kicked the British out, recognizing that control of oil was going to be important, and supported a vicious dictator. And then, more or less, it goes on until the present. So the resources and the potential were always there. Very rich.

In contrast, East Asia had almost no resources, but they followed a different developmental path. In Latin America, imports were luxury goods for the rich. In East Asia, it's capital goods for development. They had state-coordinated development programs. They disregarded the Washington Consensus almost totally. Capital controls, controls on export of capital, harsh punishments for it, pretty egalitarian societies, a lot of -- authoritarian, sometimes, pretty harsh -- but educational programs, health programs, and so on. In fact, they followed pretty much the developmental paths of the currently wealthy countries, which are radically different from the rules that are being imposed on the South.

And that goes way back in history. You go back to the 17th century, the commercial and industrial centers of the world were China and India. Life expectancy in Japan was greater than in Europe. Europe was kind of like a barbarian outpost, but it had advantages, mainly in savagery, conquered the world, imposed something like the neoliberal rules on the conquered regions, and itself, very high protectionism, a lot of state intervention and so on. So Europe developed.

The United States, as a typical case, had the highest tariffs in the world, most protectionist country in the world during the period of its great development. In fact, as late as 1950, when the United States literally had half the world's wealth, its tariffs were higher than the Latin American countries today, which are being ordered to reduce them.

Massive state intervention in the economy. Economists don't talk about it much, but the current economy in the United States relies very heavily on the state sector. That's where you get your computers and the internet and your airplane traffic and transit of goods, container ships and so on, almost entirely comes out of the state sector, including pharmaceuticals, management techniques, and so on. I won’t go on into that, but it’s a strong correlation right through history. Those are the methods of development.

The neoliberal methods created a third world, and in the past 30 years, they have led to disasters in Latin America and southern Africa, the places that most rigorously adhered to them. But whereas there was growth and development in East Asia, which disregarded them, following the rules, following pretty much the model of the currently rich countries.

Well, there’s a chance that that will begin to change. There are finally efforts inside South America -- unfortunately not in Central America, which has just been pretty much devastated by the terror of the last -- of the ’80s particularly. But in South America, from Venezuela to Argentina, it’s, I think, the most exciting place in the world. There’s reactions to this. After 500 years, there’s a beginning of efforts to overcome these overwhelming problems. The integration that's taking place, that I just read about, is one example.

There's efforts of the Indian population. The indigenous population is, for the first time in hundreds of years, taking a -- really beginning in some of the countries, take a very active role in their own affairs. In Bolivia, they succeeded in taking over the country, controlling their resources. Bolivia -- and it’s also leading to significant democratization, real democracy, in which the population participates. So it takes a Bolivia -- it’s the poorest country in the hemisphere in South America -- Haiti is poorer -- it had a real democratic election last year, of a kind that you can't imagine in the United States, or in Europe, for that matter. There was mass popular participation, and people knew what the issues were. The issues were crystal clear and very important. And people didn't just participate on election day. These are the things they had been struggling about for years. Actually, Cochabamba is a symbol of it. I’ll come back to that. So, clear issues, popular participation, ongoing efforts, elected someone from their own ranks. I won't bother to compare it to the United States. You can work it out for yourselves, but that's a real democratic election of the kind we can't imagine.

In fact, in our elections, the issues are unknown. There’s careful efforts to make sure that the issues are unknown to the public, for good reasons. There's a tremendous gap between public opinion and public policy. So you have to keep away from issues and concentrate on imagery and delusions and so on. The elections are run by the same industries that sell toothpaste on television. You don't expect to get information from a television ad. You don't expect to get information about a candidate from debates, advertisements and the other paraphernalia that goes along with what are called elections here.

There's a lot of fuss on the left about election irregularities, like, you know, the voting machines were tampered with, they didn't count the votes right, and so on. That’s all accurate and of some importance, but of far more importance is the fact that elections just don't take place, not in any meaningful sense of the term “election.” And so, it doesn't matter all that much, if there was some tampering. I suspect that's why the population doesn't get much exercised over it. The concern over stolen elections and vote tampering, and so on, is mostly an elite affair. Most of the country didn’t seem to care very much. “OK, so the election was stolen.” I mean, if you’re flipping a coin to select a king or something, it doesn’t matter much if the coin is biased. That seems to be the way most people feel about it. And there’s some justification.

In fact, the attitude of the public here towards the political system is very dramatic. I mean, about a third of the population in the United States, according to recent polls, believes that the Bush administration was responsible for 9/11. But they don't think it's a problem, like they don’t think that’s anything to worry about it. Yeah, of course, they’re all crooks and gangsters and murderers, tell us something new, you know. It doesn't have much to do with us. That's a shocking commentary on the state of American democracy.

There's a lot of talk here about, you know, we have a divided country. We have to unify. We need a unifier, somebody who will bring it back together. Red and blue, and so on. That's pretty marginal. It is a divided country. It's divided between public opinion and public policy. A very sharp divide. And on issue after issue, the whole political system is well to the right of the public and public attitudes. And we know a lot about these, because it’s a very well studied topic in the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: We’ll continue with Professor Noam Chomsky's address after break.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We return to the address of Noam Chomsky, professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, speaking last Thursday in Boston.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Just to give one last illustration, I was driving home from work the other day and torturing myself by listening to NPR, and -- I have kind of a masochistic streak I can’t get over. Actually, some day I’m going to sue them. Sometime -- once they got me so angry that I started speeding. I lost control of what I was doing, and I was stopped by a cop, and I was going like 60 miles an hour in a 30 mile zone. Maybe a basis for a civil suit, if there are any lawyers around here. But they had a section on Barack Obama, the great new hope. And it was very exuberant: what a fantastic personality he is and a great candidate, thousands of people coming out. And it went on for about 15 minutes of excited rhetoric. There's only one thing missing. They didn’t say a word about what his policies were on anything. It’s kind of not -- doesn't matter, you know. He’s a unifier. He looks at you when he talks to you. He’s a really decent guy. Great background. OK, that's an election.

Bolivia was radically different, and that's a very striking different. Well, there is -- one of the things that’s happened in Latin America in the past several decades is there has been a wave of authentic democratization. Despite US efforts to impede it, it's taken place. However, an unfortunate side effect of it is that as the wave of democratization increased, while support for democracy remained strong in Latin America, support for the elected governments has been declining, steadily declining.

There’s a reasonable explanation for that that was given by an Argentine political scientist, Atilio Boron. He pointed out that the wave of democratization correlated with the neoliberal programs, which are designed to undermine democracy. I don’t have time to talk about it, but every element of them is specifically designed to undermine democracy, to restrict the public arena and participation and so on. So he concludes -- I think plausibly -- that it's not surprising that while a desire to have democracies remains very high, support for the elected government declines, insofar as they follow the programs that are undermining democracy.

Now, there are a few exceptions. The leading exception -- again, Latin American opinion is also pretty carefully polled and studied, so we know a lot about it -- the leading exception is Venezuela. From 1998 to the present, support for the elected government has increased sharply, in pretty dramatic contrast to almost all of Latin America. There are some increases elsewhere. And, in fact, Venezuela leads the continent in support for the elected government. That’s probably why it's called anti-democratic and authoritarian and, you know, dictator, and so on and so forth.

The rhetoric here is kind of interesting. There are authoritarian tendencies, undoubtedly, but depicture of Chavez as a tin-pot dictator -- has destroyed freedom of press and so on -- that's the standard line also in the rightwing press in South America, and believed, in fact, completely inconsistent with the facts.

I mean, take, say, freedom of the press. As you know, there was a coup in Venezuela in the year 2002, supported by the United States. The government was overthrown. It was taken over by Pedro Carmona, a rich businessman, who immediately dissolved parliament, destroyed the supreme court, got rid of the attorney general's office, the public defender. Every vestige of democracy was instantly demolished.

US strongly supported it. The Venezuelan private press, the press, strongly supported it. One of the people who supported the coup was the opposition candidate in the last election. Just another -- other supporters of the coup were a group called Sumate, the group that the US provides aid to for what's called “democracy building.” So the coup was supported by a substantial part of the elite in the society that was backed by the United States, destroyed the democratic system.

It was quickly overthrown by a popular uprising. US had to back off. But what's striking is that the newspapers continue to publish, still continue to attack the government. Rosales, who supported the coup, ran in the election. Sumate, which supported the coup, is functioning, the main recipient of US democracy promotion funds.

Just imagine that that had happened in the United States. Suppose there was a coup that overthrew the government, supported by the leading press, you know, by political figures and so on. Would the press continue to function? I mean, would the supporter of the coup be the opposition candidate in the next election. I mean, it’s unimaginable. They’d all be lined up in front of firing squads. But this is the tin-pot dictator who’s destroying freedom of press, not the first time. But these are quite important developments.

And what they illustrate is a decline in the -- first of all, a move towards integration, independence and authentic democracy with mass popular movements and participation and so on, all extremely important, but also along with it goes a decline in the methods of domination and control. I mean, the US has dominated the region for a long time with two major methods: one of them, violence, and the other, economic strangulation, economic controls. And both of those methods are declining in efficacy.

2002 was the last effort of the United States to overthrow a government. In earlier years, it was routine. And in fact, the governments that the US is now supporting -- say, Lula -- probably would have been overthrown 40 years ago. There's not that much difference between Lula and Goulart, the Brazilian president who was overthrown by the Kennedy-instigated coup. There is a notable decline in the efficacy of violence for control.

And the same is true of economic controls. ve si decline. The main economic controls in recent years have been the IMF, which is virtually a branch of the US Treasury Department. But the countries are freeing themselves of its controls. Argentina basically told the -- Argentina was the poster boy of the IMF. It was a great success story, except that it led to a total complete crash, a terrible crash. Argentina did recover, but by violating IMF rules, refusing to pay its debts, buying up what remained of the debt and “ridding ourselves of the IMF,” as the president put it. They were able to do that, partly with the help of Venezuela, which bought up about a third of the debt, another form of cooperation. Brazil, in its own way, moved in the same direction, freeing itself from the IMF.

Bolivia is now doing it. Bolivia had been, again, a rigorous obedient student of the IMF for about 25 years. It ended up with per capita income lower than when it started. Well, now they’re getting rid of the IMF, too, again with Venezuelan support. And as this proceeds through the -- in fact, the IMF itself is in serious trouble. If you look at the business pages, you’ll notice that its viability is in question, because it's not getting the kinds of funds it used to get from the role it played in what one -- the US executive director of the IMF once called it the credit community’s enforcer. It's like the Mafia. They’re the goons who were sent in to get the payments, the default, and so on. But they're not getting it anymore, and their own funds are running low. They may not survive.

Well, all of this is just one aspect of the weakening of the economic controls, alongside the weakening of the controls of violence, and that's going hand-in-hand with the steps towards integration and independence.

The US has had to have a policy change. There's still a distinction between the good guys and the bad guys. The good guys happen to be governments the US probably would have overthrown 40 years ago, like Lula’s Brazil That’s one of the good guys. Morales and Chavez, they’re the bad guys. Well, that's the party line. You’ve read it over and over.

In order to maintain it, it's necessary to finesse some of the facts, like, for example, the fact that when Lula was re-elected in October -- the good guy -- his first act was to fly to Caracas to support Chavez's electoral campaign -- that’s the bad guy. Now, that wasn’t reported in the United States, too remote from the party line. Also, Lula dedicated a Brazilian project in Venezuela, a bridge over the Orinoco River, new development projects, and so on. That’s all the wrong story.

And as I mentioned, as the AP reported, Venezuela has been in the lead of trying to move towards regional integration. That's what Chavez's [Bolivarian] Alternatives for the America is all about -- is supposed to be about, that involves efforts to develop institutions for an integrated South America. Petroamerica is kind of an integrated plan for an integrated energy system of the kind that China is trying to initiate in Asia, also very worrisome to the United States. Telesur is an effort to break through the closely guarded Western media monopoly. It’s a big story in itself. The University of the South, if it takes off, would be an academic center for the Americas, and so on.

Well, the US is kind of losing control. It's not that US policy is changing. The policy has to be adjusted. The US has not given up on means of violence and economic control, but they’re taking new forms. So the training of Latin American officers has, by the US, has gone way up, very sharply in the last few years. And they're being trained differently. The training is being shifted. It's being shifted from the State Department to the Pentagon. That's of some significance. When training of Latin American officers is under State Department controls, there's at least theoretically congressional supervision of human rights violations and so on. Not very many teeth in it, but at least it's sort of there.

AMY GOODMAN: MIT linguist and political analyst, Noam Chomsky, speaking in Boston several days ago.

U.S. Congressional delegation concludes visit to Cuba

A delegation from the United States House of Representatives, led by Republican Congressman Jeff Flake and included Democrats William Delahunt, Jane Harman, Jim McGovern, Hilda Solís, Gregory Meeks and Lincoln Davis, as well as Republicans Jo Ann Emerson, Jerry Moran and Michael Conaway visited our country from December 15 to 17. Congressional aides and other prominent individuals from the United States were also part of the delegation.

The group had an intense schedule of activities that included discussions with Ricardo Alarcón, president of the National Assembly of People’s Power; Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque; Fernando Remírez de Estenoz, member of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party; Francisco Soberón, president of the Central Bank of Cuba; Yadira García, minister of basic industry, and Pedro Alvarez, president of the ALIMPORT company.

They also toured the city’s historic district and visited the former residence – now a museum – of celebrated U.S. writer Ernest Hemingway in San Francisco de Paula.

The delegation held a broad exchange on the state of relations between the two countries and was informed about the Cuban economy and its perspectives; energy development and the oil industry; environmental protection regulations, and food purchases from U.S. companies, among other issues. The discussions were cordial and respectful.

The delegation left for the United States at 6:00 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 17.

The Dominican Republic and Venezuela make a new deal

The Governments of the Dominican Republic and Venezuela announced Monday in Santo Domingo the renewal of Petrocaribe -an oil agreement whereby Venezuela provides the Caribbean island with 50,000 bpd.

The new deal "is a patent example of the positive way taken by the relations of both countries," said Dominican Minister of Finance Vicente Bengoa and Venezuelan Ambassador Francisco Belisario Landis during a press conference, Efe quoted.

According to Bengoa, the oil agreement helps to bolster both production and exports.

The instrument establishes 25-year funding at an annual interest rate of 1 percent.

Since 2005, the date of execution of the agreement, Venezuela has funded USD 309 million, for a total of approximately 11.8 million barrels of oil, Bengoa stated.

Global warming harms Chile’s salmon industry

Two environmental experts lashed out the Chilean and Argentine governments this week for their failure to address environmental issues currently damaging ecosystems and agriculture on both sides of the Andes.

Dr. Antonio Lara from Chile’s Austral University and his Argentine counterpart, Dr. Ricardo Villalba, warned that global warming is already producing drastic changes in their countries, pointing to the example of the Puelo River, which now carries 20% less water than it did 60 years ago.

The river starts in Argentina and flows into Chile’s Reloncaví Estuary. Lara’s studies of tree rings located near the river showed that the drop in water levels is part of 84-year long cycle.
“But this time it’s much, much lower,” warned the scientist. And the reduced flow of the river is starting to have adverse effects on one of Chile’s most important industries.

“This reduction in rainwater affects water rights to the river basin and salmon farming,” said Lara. “Salmon farms in Region X depend on oxygen carried in the Puelo River’s water, which oxygenates the Reloncaví Estuary.”

During hot summer months, oxygen dissolved in water drops to five parts per million (ppm) having dire consequences for the estuary’s salmon stocks, thousands of which die from suffocation. The study also found that cutting down native forest causes water levels in nearby river basins to fall by around half, even if the area has been repopulated by new trees.

Villalba, a climatologist, described the different effects in each country: the Argentine pampas now suffer regular flooding, while on the other side of the Andes Chile’s central regions are experiencing their driest years in history. “What a shame it’s not the other way round!” he joked.

Chile’s drought problem gets worse further north. Rainfall in Region IV’s city of La Serena has fallen by about 50 percent over the last 120 years. Farmers will have to start looking at investing in Southern land if they want to ensure successful crops in the future.

According to Lara and Villalba, neither the Chilean nor the Argentine government has paid enough attention to climate change - an increasingly tangible reality in both countries. The issue of water rights is currently passing through Chile’s Supreme Court in the Los Pelambres case. Judges will have to decide whether the limited water in the Pupío Valley is more important for local farmers or a new tailings dam currently being constructed by Antofagasta Minerals.

Lara and Villalba offer three recommendations for immediate action to combat the problems brought by such changes.

First they stress the need for investigation into the effect of climate change at a local level, so that individual communities are better prepared. Second they recommend a reassessment of water rights so that the diminishing water can be used most efficiently. Finally, they emphasize the need for well-managed environmental policies towards conservation of rivers and forests. The Santiago Times

Oliver Stone fined for filming in Cuba

by PEDRO DE LA HOZ, Granma daily staff writer

THE U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control has just fined well-known filmmaker Oliver Stone for violating the laws of what they euphemistically refer to as an embargo, actually nothing more than a barbaric, brutal, systematic blockade, universally recognized as such and condemned by an overwhelming majority in the United Nations.

Stone and the production company Ixtlan were accused of having traveled to Cuba in 2202 and 2003 to shoot footage for two films on the leader of the Cuban Revolution. The newspaper El Nuevo Herald, voice of the anti-Cuban mafia in south Florida, carried the news in its December 12 edition.

In medieval times, such edicts were published as an admonition. The modern-day Inquisition is taking up that ancient practice: the message, obviously, is directed against those who try to exercise their right to creativity and expression, or to objectively reflect the realities of Cuba, even someone like Oliver Stone, whom nobody in their right minds could call anti-American after watching – as hundreds of Havana spectators have done during the 28th Havana Film Festival – his movie, World Trade Center, about the atrocious terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers.

Everyone is very familiar with Stone’s vicissitudes in making his films on Fidel. The first, Comandante, which he made for the HBO cable TV network, could not be screened when it was supposed to be because of pressures from the Miami-based anti-Cuban lobby and its right-wing sponsors.

Stone had to cede to demands to go back and film again, this time including interviews with employees of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, whose capacity for histrionics, in the service of demonizing the Cuban Revolution, was demolished in the new production, Looking for Fidel.

It is very likely that the OFAC officials noted Stone’s statements during the launching of Looking for Fidel in the San Sebastián Film Festival, Spain: “Castro is a great host,” he said. “He looks you straight in the eye. He gave me the impression that he trusted me, and I like that (...) I was able to ask all of my questions about internal conflicts in the country, the future of Cuba after Castro, and the international pressure that is placed on Cuba, especially by the president of the United States, George W. Bush. (...) Castro is one of the wisest men there are; he is a survivor and a Quixote. I admire his Revolution, his faith in himself and his honesty.”

For the current U.S. authorities, a price must be paid for a free and unprejudiced opinion like the one above. Hence, cracks and contrivances must be found, despite the fact that Stone’s producers complied with the cumbersome license process, to punish and impede people from thinking for themselves.

It doesn’t matter that they make even more obvious something that is already known: the victimization of the U.S. people themselves, prevented from traveling freely to the island, by those who impose the criminal blockade on Cuba.

Lula voted Brazil's best ever president: survey

SAO PAULO, Brazil

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, elected to a second four-year term in October, was voted the country's best-ever president, a survey released on Sunday showed.

The survey by Datafolha polling firm showed Lula leading by a wide margin former Brazilian presidents including Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Juscelino Kubitscheck and Getulio Vargas, despite corruption allegations against his administration.

When asked to name Brazil's best president, 35 percent of people in the survey responded Lula, with Cardoso coming a distant second with 12 percent, Kubitscheck with 11 percent and Vargas with 8 percent.

Respondents said Lula's best accomplishments have been in fighting hunger, creating social assistance programs, education and the economy, while his weak points included health issues, creating jobs, public safety and fighting corruption.

The survey polled 2,178 people on Wednesday and had a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.

Chavez Moves Forward

Was it my imagination or were there lots of sad faces at last night's meeting at the Teresa Carrena theatre -- the site of so many Bolivarian rallies and celebrations? Certainly, here was another occasion for celebration. It was a meeting to recognize the electoral triumph of Hugo Chavez on 3 December and, in particular, to acknowledge the contribution of campaign workers organized in the Comando Miranda.

And, acknowledge they did: certificates were given to the state organizations which produced the greatest votes for Chavez's re-election: Amacuro Delta (77.98%), Amazon (77.81%), Portuguesa (77.05%), Sucre (73.70%), and Cojedes (73.33%) -- as well as to exemplary municipal battalions such as Rio Negro (96.4%). Definitely a time to celebrate.

So, why those glum faces? Well, it had to do with Chavez himself. Now, I've seen many Chavez speeches on the Channel 8, the state TV station. And, they've run the gamut -- those electric occasions in which high velocity currents flow between the red-shirted Chavez and red-shirted supporters (especially women) lifting them higher and higher, the meetings where Ministers and prominent leaders smile and chuckle on cue and wish for just-a-little-mention, and the similar gatherings where businessmen-who-want-to-do-business-with-the-state listen to the blue-suited Chavez for hints about their future. But this was like none of those occasions.

Last night, there were cheers in the back half of the theatre and in "the gods" -- but few in the high-priced seats. And, it had to do with Chavez's message. Not the part about going toward socialism (although there would have been some who still shudder at the word but who have retained hopes at working on the modifying adjective). And, not the part about asking all his Ministers for their resignation (because that can be just a formality but also does open up the possibility of new appointments). And, not the attacks on corruption (which have been heard before). No, it was all about the new party, the "unique party."

Many of those present have been looking forward to this idea -- ever since Chavez announced earlier this year that 2007 would be a year to create this unified party. After all, the battles among the various Chavista parties have been growing more intense recently. (And, so have the struggles among the various factions of the MVR, the Movement for the 5th Republic, the electoral party that Chavez formed initially.) Accordingly, the idea of bringing unity to an often-dysfunctional team did have its appeal (and not the least to Chavez, who was well aware of problems in the MVR and the other parties).

Of course, the terms of unification were unclear, and the MVR domination of the Comando Miranda didn't inspire confidence in the smaller Chavist parties. So, it wasn't surprising, after electoral results in which the prominently-placed MVR slot overwhelmingly captured the Chavez vote, that there were mutterings from that camp that the MVR is the party (and that all others should dissolve) or that the MVR initiated moves for the delisting of all parties which failed to receive 1% of the vote (which would remove all but 4 of the Chavista parties).

But, last night Chavez offered some surprises. The MVR is history, he said. The new party (provisionally called the United Socialist Party of Venezuela) will be there for all the parties to join or, alternatively, to separate themselves from the government. But this, he stressed, will not be a party that combines the existing parties. Rather, it will be a party that can only be built from the base. In your communities, in your patrols, battalions, squadrons, identify your neighbours who are supporters of the Revolution -- you know who they are, he proposed. Do a census, build the party from below. Make it a party that is not built for electoral purposes (although able to engage in electoral battles); make it a party that can fight the Battle of Ideas, one that can fight for the socialist project, one that allows us to read and discuss the way forward. Make this party the most democratic in the history of Venezuela.

And, choose your true leaders, which only the base can do. There's been too much anointing of people from above with a pointing finger (especially mine). Choose the people you have faith in, whom you know -- not the thieves, the corrupt, the irresponsible, the drunkards. The bad boys must be kept outside. We need to stress socialist morals, socialist ethics.

All this was bad news enough for the politicians accustomed to the practices of the 4th Republic and those who had adopted them to succeed. But, the real dagger came with a message which summed it all up succinctly: "The new party cannot be the sum of old faces. That would be a deceit."

And Chavez said to those representatives of the old parties: we don't have the time for endless debates about this. We have to build this new party from below now. So, you decide what you are going to do because there's no time to lose.

Small wonder that there were glum faces at this celebration. The battle for a new party of the revolution and to build socialism is underway.

---

Michael A. Lebowitz is professor emeritus of economics at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and the author of Beyond Capital: Marx's Political Economy of the Working Class, winner of the Isaac Deutscher memorial prize for 2004, and Build It Now: Socialism for the Twenty-First Century, just published by Monthly Review Press

Original source / relevant link:
MRZine

ICE's Swift Plant Raids Netted Only Poor Folks Caught Up in the `War on Illegal Immigration'

by Bill Conroy,
Posted on Sat Dec 16th, 2006 at 11:49:24 AM EST

Political language ... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. — George Orwell

Earlier this week, the mainstream media headlines were blaring with news of a raid carried out by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on six meat-processing plants owned by Greeley, Colo.-based Swift & Co.

The raids, orchestrated on Dec. 12, resulted in more than 1,200 allegedly undocumented immigrant workers being detained at the plants, many of whom were hauled off by busses across state lines to be processed and later released — a fact that has not yet made its way into the mainstream media. The raid was trumpeted by ICE as a major victory in the “war on illegal immigration” and as the culmination of a successful investigation into an organized crime ring that was supplying fraudulent ID documents to these workers.

The implied threat there, of course, is that this same organized crime ring could supply phony IDs to would-be terrorists as well. That has led the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to renew its political push for the quick adoption of a new centralized ID card system for U.S. citizens.

The day after the Swift plant raids, ICE issued a press release announcing “that approximately 1,282 persons have been arrested as part of an ongoing worksite enforcement investigation into immigration violations and a massive identity theft scheme that has victimized large numbers of U.S. citizens and lawful U.S. residents.”

The press release continues:

Yesterday, ICE agents executed civil search warrants at six facilities owned by Swift & Co. (Swift), one of the nation’s largest processors of fresh pork and beef. Agents executed warrants at Swift facilities in Greeley, Colorado; Grand Island, Nebraska; Cactus, Texas; Hyrum, Utah; Marshalltown, Iowa; and Worthington, Minnesota.

In total, agents apprehended 1,282 illegal alien workers on administrative immigration violations at Swift facilities. Of these, 65 have also been charged with criminal violations related to identity theft or other violations, such as re-entry after deportation. ….

It seems like the perfect script.

But, according to law enforcement sources who spoke with Narco News, that might be all it is: a script.

The Wizards of Oz

First, before we delve into that script, we have to keep in mind that ICE is part of DHS, which is headed by Michael Chertoff, who is the same bureaucrat who tried to put a happy face on DHS’s handling of the deluge of New Orleans. After that, who can seriously take anything DHS’ leadership says at face value?

Following is the happy face Chertoff put on the Swift plant raids in the ICE press release:

Violations of our immigration laws and privacy rights often go hand in hand. Enforcement actions like this one protect the privacy rights of innocent Americans while striking a blow against illegal immigration.

The head of ICE, Julie Myers, a Chertoff crony who served for a time as his chief of staff when he headed the Justice Department’s criminal division, then adds this bit of drama to the script of the press release:

This investigation has uncovered a disturbing front in the war against illegal immigration. We believe that the genuine identities of possibly hundreds of U.S. citizens are being stolen or hijacked by criminal organizations and sold to illegal aliens in order to gain unlawful employment in this country. Combating this burgeoning problem is one of ICE’s highest priorities.

But this script has to be thought of like the Wizard of Oz, because to really understand the twist in the script, we have to come to realize who is pulling the levers — even if the wizards on the stage are warning us to pay no attention to the men behind the curtain.

Behind the scenes

What is not made clear in the ICE press release is the importance of the fact that the Swift plant raids did not involve criminal search warrants. The warrants used to justify ICE’s invasion of the plants, by ICE’s own admission, were “civil warrants” — also referred to as administrative warrants. In layman’s terms, those are warrants issued to examine documents, such as I9 Employment Verification forms.

So if the ICE raids on the Swift plants were intended to bust up a major criminal ring supplying stolen ID information to undocumented workers, the law enforcers came armed with the wrong paperwork.

A criminal investigation makes use of criminal search warrants. But a judge will only issue a search warrant when he or she has been convinced that enough evidence has been gathered in an investigation to meet the standard of probable cause. For example, if an ICE agent or informant had actually purchased stolen identification documents from the so-called organized crime ring as part of an undercover operation, that act would constitute probable cause for a search warrant.

So ICE clearly had not met that threshold in its investigation of this devious organized crime ring, if there even is such a ring providing phony ID documents to the Swift workers.

In fact, law enforcement sources tell Narco News that ICE initially was trying to build a case against Swift itself.

It wouldn’t be the first time that the federal government went after a private company to try and prove its officials were in criminal violation of immigration laws.

From an ICE press release issued on April 20 of this year:

Yesterday, ICE agents arrested seven current and former managers of [IFCO Systems North America Inc.] pursuant to criminal complaints issued in the Northern District of New York. All these individuals are charged with conspiring to transport, harbor, and encourage and induce illegal aliens to reside in the United States for commercial advantage and private financial gain, in violation of Title 8, USC Section 1324 (a). The conspiracy charge carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000 for each alien with respect to whom the violation takes place. Two other IFCO employees were arrested on criminal charges relating to fraudulent documents.

In addition to the criminal arrests, ICE agents yesterday conducted "consent" searches or executed criminal search warrants at more than 40 IFCO plants and related locations in 26 states that resulted in the apprehension of approximately 1,187 illegal alien IFCO employees. Three of the criminal search warrants were executed at residences in Guilderland, NY, where IFCO was allegedly housing illegal alien employees.

(It is important to note that in the IFCO raid, criminal search warrants were issued.)

“ICE tried to get a criminal search warrant, but they didn’t have enough evidence,” says Mark Conrad, a former supervisory special agent for ICE’s predecessor agency, U.S. Customs. “… Nothing had been developed against the company.”

“This was all being directed out of ICE Headquarters in Washington,” adds Conrad, who serves as the associate general counsel for the National Association of Federal Agents. “It [the ICE investigation] was absolutely a fiasco.”

Swift officials have denied any complicity in providing phony documentation to the more than 1,200 workers detained by ICE officials at its plants. In addition, ICE has brought no charges against the company.

In a statement provided to the press, Swift & Company President and CEO Sam Rovit said: “Swift has never condoned the employment of unauthorized workers, nor have we ever knowingly hired such individuals. “

However, as Conrad points out, ICE did attempt to make a case against the company and failed.

In the wake of that failure, ICE settled for administrative warrants authorizing its agents to dig through I9 Employment Verification documents at the Swift plant sites, and then ICE used the warrants as the pretext to question and detain workers.

In the world of immigration enforcement, they are known as Blackie’s warrants.

The American Civil Liberties Union describes it this way:

Even raids conducted with a legitimate warrant, often referred to as a "Blackie's" warrant, [Blackie's House of Beef v. Castillo, (D.C. Cir. 1981)], are conducted in a dragnet fashion. The Blackie's warrant does not require that the INS name or even describe the allegedly undocumented aliens it seeks. Consequently, the raid is conducted by barring the exits, and questioning everybody, or discriminatorily questioning those who "look foreign" or speak with a foreign accent.

But these “administrative warrants” do have their limits, if the law is applied properly, according to Jeff Joseph, an immigration attorney in Aurora, Colo., who is a member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

“An administrative warrant doesn’t by itself give law enforcement agents the right to stop someone and ask them about their immigration status,” he says.

In essence, the undocumented workers at the Swift plant who were detained likely thought they had to produce documents or respond to the questions raised by ICE agents raiding the plant, when, in fact, a lawyer might well have advised against that openness.

But even one DHS source told Narco News that the spirit of the law soon breaks down when workers are confronted with dozens of agents in raid jackets and guns asking them questions while their employers seemingly are cooperating with the agents. Lawyers are rarely on hand for those pressing moments in the course of “justice.”

The supposed criminals behind the stolen ID ring that Chertoff claims were feeding on Swift plant employees, though, were never in danger of being arrested during the ICE raids, because, if such a ring does exist, it certainly wasn’t operating within the plants, according to Swift officials.

The best ICE could hope for was to find some workers with fake IDs that were purchased from illegal vendors who were on the agency’s radar screen elsewhere, outside the Swift plants, due to other criminal investigations. The fishing expedition under the Blackie’s warrant, ICE brass hoped, then, would at least maybe give them some leads – or at least some straws to cling to in order to justify the huge expense of this multiple-month, 1,000-agent, multi-state investigation and raid.

Apparently, a good number of the ICE agents who were dragged away from their homes to carry out this doomed operation also felt they were being forced to fish in an empty pond.

“Field agents were telling ICE Headquarters to scale back the operation, but Washington refused,” Conrad says.

Dropping the ball

The aftermath of the raid is proof of the fiasco that ICE brass had dreamed up with the Swift raids.

The six Swift plants raided by ICE employ workers across three work shifts. ICE claims it detained more than 1,200 undocumented workers during the plant assaults. But that number might only have been the tip of the iceberg.

Conrad says that, in the case of at least the plant in Texas, ICE only detained workers from one shift. If that holds true across all six plants, and other shift workers were left untouched by the ICE raids (or didn’t show up for work after the publicity of the raids) the number of undocumented workers detained by ICE likely represents only a fraction of the total number of undocumented workers at the Swift plants.

But company officials insist they had no clue their work force was so dominated by undocumented immigrant workers.

A press release issued by the company following the ICE raids emphasizes that the company goes beyond the call of duty in checking the background of its laborers:

Swift & Company’s comprehensive work authorization diligence has included, since 1997, participation in the federal Basic Pilot program – a voluntary, online verification system that allows employers to confirm the eligibility of new hires by checking the personal information they provide against federal databases. Today, Swift remains one of the very few employers to use the system.

ICE, for its part, seemingly claims in its press release about the Swift raids that the agency only recently discovered a major flaw the Basic Pilot program. It seems the program can’t detect when a valid Social Security number is being used multiple times by different people.

From the ICE press release issued Dec. 13:

By using valid Social Security numbers and birth certificates of U.S. citizens, these illegal aliens were able to thwart the Basic Pilot Employment Eligibility Verification system, a federal program designed to help employers detect unauthorized workers. Swift has used the Basic Pilot program since 1997.

Ironically, a Swift official told Congress about a major flaw with the Basic Pilot program this summer.

“As currently structured, the Basic Pilot Program cannot detect duplicate active records in its database,” stated Jack Shandley, Swift’s senior vice president of human resources, in testimony before the House Small Business Committee in June of this year. “The same social security number could be in use at another employer, and potentially multiple employers, across the country.”

So, it sounds like someone figured out a way to scam the Basic Pilot program, and ICE trumpets that fact in its press release (an indication that it had no clue up to that point) — even though Swift had figured it out by at least June of this year.

Anyway, according to DHS’ Chertoff, the glitch in the system led to Swift hiring 1,200 undocumented workers, if not more. Despite this fact, ICE was not able to gather enough evidence to convince a judge to issue a search warrant.

Conrad says all it would have taken to get at the evidence was a sting operation inside one or more of the plants. An undercover operation could have been set up to determine whether or not Swift was illegally hiring workers knowingly, and to determine if there was a black market for stolen IDs operating among the workers within the plant. If evidence was found on either or both fronts, that would be sufficient probable cause for a search warrant to be issued, he adds.

If an undercover operation was carried out and failed, then why did ICE still raid the plants? If ICE never attempted to set up an undercover operation, then why did the agency fail to do so?

One clue is found in comments made about the ICE raids to the New York Times by a Swift official:

From the Times article:

Sam Rovit, chief executive of Swift, said the company learned of the ICE investigation in March [three months before Swift told Congress about the flaw in the Basic Pilot program], but had been “rebuffed repeatedly” when it offered to cooperate.

If the word of the investigation was leaked to Swift, assuming there was an undercover operation underway at the plants, it ran a great risk of being compromised at that point.

In any event, once the company was made aware of the fact that ICE was conducting an investigation, it reduced greatly any chance of establishing a successful undercover operation after that point.

But we have to concede the fact that even though ICE might suspect a company of a crime, it doesn’t mean the company committed a crime.

So even if Swift was tipped off to the ICE investigation, assuming the company had done nothing wrong, and even offered to fully cooperate, it really can’t be blamed in that case for ICE’s bad luck.

In fact, Swift officials argue that far from being too lenient in their hiring practices, they have a past experience of being slapped by the law for being too strict.

From the company’s press release concerning the plant raids:

Current law limits an employer’s ability to scrutinize the background and identity of new hires, and – as Swift learned first-hand – employers can, in fact, be punished for probing too deeply into applicants’ backgrounds. Specifically, in 2001 the Department of Justice’s Special Counsel for Unfair Immigration-Related Employment Practices brought a complaint against Swift for an alleged “pattern and practice” of document-based discrimination against job applicants, and sought civil damages of $2.5 million. After two years of cooperation and negotiation, Swift settled the claim, with no admission of guilt, for approximately $200,000.

Though the lawsuit is a convenient card to pull out in the current controversy, since the company admitted no guilt, they could be seen as playing the same card both high and low by trying to advance the argument now that they were too strict in enforcing employee background checks.

Adding even more twists to the bungling on ICE’s part in this investigation, the Associate Press reports that ICE was forced to delay the planned date of its Swift plant raids by about eight days, after the company objected.

From the AP story:

Immigration officials last month [in November] informed Swift that it would remove unauthorized workers on Dec. 4, but Swift asked a federal judge to prevent agents from conducting the raid, arguing it would cause ``substantial and irreparable injury'' to its business.

The company estimated a raid would remove up to 40 percent of its 13,000 workers. Greeley-based Swift describes itself as the world's second-largest meat processor with sales of about $9 billion.

Conrad also confirmed that the ICE raid was originally scheduled for Dec. 4, but adds that it was postponed for what he described as “political reasons.” He and DHS sources also found it odd that ICE would give any company so much advanced warning for a planned “raid.”

The aftermath

Just as puzzling as the bungling by ICE prior to the plant raids is the fate of the more than 1,200 detained workers in the wake of the raids.

ICE concedes in its press release that only 65 of the undocumented workers apprehended have been “charged with criminal violations related to identity theft or other violations, such as re-entry after deportation.” So if this ICE operation was premised on snaring a huge identify-theft ring, then who was in charge of this alleged multi-state organized crime ring that was dealing bad paper to thousands of Swift workers?

Clearly, by the wording of ICE’s press statement, only some fraction of the 65 charged criminally were booked on ID theft violations. It just doesn’t add up, according to immigration attorney Joseph.

“There were over 1,200 detained [in the raids], and to only turn up 65 people on criminal charges, means it was a failure for them,” Joseph says. “All it accomplished was separating families and leaving kids without parents.”

But surely there is something ICE salvaged from this apparently terribly bungled operation, right?

Well, think again, Conrad and others say.

DHS sources and Joseph told Narco News that many of the undocumented workers picked up in the ICE Swift plant raids were loaded on busses and shipped to other locations, including El Paso, Texas, and Albuquerque, N.M.

“I heard ICE is shipping them [the detained Swift workers] all over the country,” Joseph says. “Two bus loads [from Colorado] were sent to facilities in El Paso to hold people.”

In Texas, at least, nearly all of the undocumented Swift workers who did not have a criminal record were processed through the immigration system and then released to the streets because there was no place to keep them, Conrad and DHS sources confirm.

The detention centers were already over-booked. DHS sources said they suspect that probably was the case in other states where Swift workers were detained as well.

An internal ICE memo leaked to Narco News does seem to confirm that ICE has a standardized policy in place for the “catch and release” of undocumented immigrants who do not have a criminal background.

The May 16 memo, issued to ICE field offices by Marcy Forman, director of the agency’s Office of Investigations, states the following:

This memorandum will serve as guidance to all Office of Investigations (OI) personnel on response to calls for service involving undocumented alien(s).

If all criminal and DHS systems checks reveal no derogatory information [no criminal record] on the detainee, it is expected that the agent complete the administrative processing through ENFORCE and, if applicable, issue a Notice to Appear (NTA). Depending on available bed space, and after consultation with the Office of Deportation and Removal Operations (DRO), a determination of bond … or release on the alien’s own recognizance … will be made.

So, in the end, it appears this hugely expensive ICE operation netted only 65 criminal arrests, many likely for minor offenses such as re-entering the country after being deported — technically a felony, but rarely prosecuted. The balance of those detained and shipped around the country are all likely to be cut loose — assuming they are not tricked into signing away their rights by agreeing to be voluntarily deported.

And even for those charged with ID theft, if there really are any, the government faces a big hurdle in obtaining a conviction.

One DHS source explained it this way: