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A demonstration of the popular will

Tariq Ali

DANIEL ORTEGA, blessed by the church, flanked by a former Contra as his Vice-President and still loathed by the U.S. Ambassador, may be a shadow of his former self, but his victory undoubtedly reflects the desire of Nicaraguans for change. Will Managua follow the radically redistributive policies of anti-imperialist Caracas or confine itself to rhetoric and remain a client of the International Monetary Fund?

Mr. Ortega's victory comes at a time when Latin America is on the march again. There have been spectacular demonstrations of the popular will in Porto Alegre, Caracas, Buenos Aires, Cochabamba, and Cuzco. This has offered a new hope to a world either deep in neo-liberal torpor or suffering from the military and economic depredations of the new order.

The noises emanating from the governments of Venezuela, Bolivia, and Cuba, and from the giant social movements from below in Mexico, Argentina, Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil, are obviously not welcomed by the global elite or its media apologists. The struggle spearheaded by the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela against the Washington consensus has attracted the fury of the White House. Three attempts (including a military coup backed by the U.S. and the EU) were made to topple Hugo Chavez.

Mr. Chavez was first elected Venezuela's President in February 1999, 10 years after a popular insurrection against the IMF readjustment programme had been brutally crushed by Carlos Andrés Peréz, whose party was once the largest affiliate of the Socialist International. In his election campaign Mr. Peréz had denounced the economists on the World Bank's payroll as "genocide workers in the pay of economic totalitarianism" and the IMF as "a neutron bomb that killed people, but left buildings standing." Afterwards he caved in to the demands of both institutions, suspended the constitution, declared a state of emergency and ordered the army to mow down the protesters. More than 2,000 poor people were shot dead by troops. This was the founding moment of the Bolivarian upheaval in Venezuela.

Mr. Chavez and other junior officers organised to protest against the misuse and corruption of the army. In 1992 the radical officers organised a rebellion against those who had authorised the butchery. It failed because it was soon after the traumas of 1989, but people did not forget.That is how the new Bolivarians came to power and began to slowly and cautiously implement social-democratic reforms, reminiscent of Roosevelt's New Deal and the policies of the 1945 Labour government.The majority of the people who elected Mr. Chavez were angry and determined. They had felt unrepresented for 10 years; they had been betrayed by the traditional parties; they disapproved of the neoliberal policies then in force, which consisted of an assault on the poor in order to shore up a parasitical oligarchy and a corrupt civilian and trade-union bureaucracy. They disapproved of the use that was made of the country's oil reserves. They disapproved of the arrogance of the Venezuelan elite, which utilised wealth and a lighter skin colour to sustain itself at the expense of the dark-skinned and poor majority. Electing Chavez was their revenge.

In a speech in Havana in 1994, Mr. Chavez stated: "Bolivar once said that `Political gangrene cannot be cured with palliatives,' and Venezuela is totally and utterly infected with gangrene ... There is no way the system can cure itself ... 60 per cent of Venezuelans live in poverty ... in 20 years more than $200 billon just evaporated. So where is the money, President Castro asked me? In the foreign bank accounts of almost everyone who has been in power in Venezuela ... the coming century, in our opinion, is a century of hope; it is our century, it is the century when the Bolivarian dream will be reborn." —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

(Tariq Ali's new book, Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope, is published by Verso.)

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