What's up with Hugo?

David Seaton's News Links

Hugo Chávez has managed to keep his mouth shut since the 10th of June and the world's rumor mills are alive: he is dead, he has cancer, he is in coma... soon there will be sightings like Elvis.

What advantage could there be for Hugo Chávez to simply sit in his hospital bed in Havana and keep his mouth shut for a few days?

The silences of the talkative can be very powerful.

For a devious man, and Chávez, behind his clownish behavior, is a very cold and devious man, this silent stay in the hospital could provide some unique opportunities.... rather like attending one's own funeral and watching out for who cries too little or too much.

He and his security organization in Caracas could observe very closely who in the opposition or even among his followers might have plans for a future without him at the helm and might show their hands during his strange silence. Lots of interesting and even incriminating conversations may be flying around bugged telephones...

They say he'll be back in Caracas next week and why not? A night of long knives may very well follow. DS

Hugo Chávez Frías is not Martin Luther King

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On Sunday Venezuelans will vote in a referendum that could make Hugo Chávez president for life. Tension is high, there are demonstrations, impassioned speeches for and against and even riots with people getting killed. Chávez himself is doing all he can to raise the tension by seemingly picking a new fight with someone every day. There is a significant detail here. Watching it all on the television news with the sound off, you can usually guess who is pro or anti-Chávez just by the color of their skin.

According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, only a fifth of Venezuela’s population is of white European descent. This makes it very difficult to trust media reports of the situation. White faces read the news on TV. Most Latin American commentators whose views reach us are members of the white. middle class, as are those that own and run the poll taking organizations. And not just in Venezuela, even in Castro’s socialist, afro-Cuban, Cuba, the leadership cadres are overwhelmingly white. Chávez’s support comes from what a Los Angeles Times editorial calls his, “brilliant instinct for rallying the country's disaffected poor.”

In 1952 an African-American author, Ralph Ellison published a ground breaking novel, “The Invisible Man”, whose title many critics feel defined the experience of people of African descent in the Americas: that of being invisible and voiceless. In the years that followed, the people of color in the United States raised their voices and became visible, to the great and continuing discomfort of many whites. The white people of the US south who once voted solidly Democratic have punished that party’s leadership of the civil rights movement by voting solidly Republican ever since… the key to the victories of Nixon, Reagan and Bush. The “Conservative Revolution”, that only favors the rich, is based on the resentment of poor whites.

North America and Latin America are very different, but perhaps the oppression of people of color is the experience that they most share in common. In North America, white people are a majority, but in most of Latin America the opposite is true. Now it appears that the people of color of Latin America: African, indigenous and mixed race are also finding their voices. Chávez is riding that wave. The more resistance he encounters the harder he’ll ride it

Every fight Chávez picks, every shouting match he gets into is meant to cement the empathy that people of color feel in seeing any person of color confronting a white man. This explains many things. For example: nothing in the third world of European ex-colonies could symbolize “whiteness” more than a member of European royalty. If that empathy translates into votes it will give him victory, its absence will sink him. DS

In Nicaragua: Chavez 1, Bush 0 - Greg Grandin - Washington Post

David Seaton's News Links

When you live in a Spanish speaking country for any length of time and become fluent in the Spanish language and begin to mix freely and even go to school with Latin-Americans, you will receive, whether you like it or not, what might be euphoniously known as an "alternative narrative" to "American exceptionalism". This experience was the beginning of my political consciousness, such as it is. Reagan's war in Nicaragua was every bit as criminal as Bush's war in Iraq and the World Court condemned it as criminal and was ignored. A lot of the same players are involved in both stories. DS
Abstract: Both Hugo Chavez and George Bush made it clear who they wanted to win last week's presidential election in Nicaragua: the first backed Daniel Ortega, the ex-guerrilla and Sandinista leader; the second, conservative banker Eduardo Montealegre. But the difference in the way each supported their candidate says much as to why the United States is so distrusted in Latin America. Venezuela helped Ortega by selling cheap oil with long-term, low-interest credit to Nicaraguan municipalities, a popular move since the country is gripped by a severe energy crisis. Caracas also donated tons of fertilizer and provided free eye surgery to hundreds of cataract patients. Chavez's critics pointed out this aid was nothing compared with what Washington gives Nicaragua, more than a billion dollars since Ortega was voted out of office in 1990. But roughly half of this aid goes just to keeping Nicaragua's bankrupted economy afloat, either in the form of debt relief or covering currency shortfalls, which in effect works as a subsidy to U.S. creditors and exporters, thus limiting its PR value. And of course this money pales in comparison to many billions of dollars of damage that Washington caused in Nicaragua with its devastating Contra War. In fact, the U.S. conditioned its financial assistance on Nicaragua abandoning its attempt to collect the estimated $17 billion that the World Court, in 1986, ordered Washington to pay to Managua as reparations for waging its illegal war against the country. But the real difference is that Chavez never threatened to punish Nicaraguans if they didn't vote as he hoped they would. Caracas offers all carrot and no stick. The Bush administration, in contrast, warned that an Ortega victory could bring aid cuts and trade sanctions, while Congressional Republicans said that they would pass legislation prohibiting Nicaraguans living in the U.S. from sending money home. Nicaragua is the hemisphere's second poorest country, and very heavily dependent on foreign aid and remittances; and such retaliation, if enacted, would be ruinous. That Washington reserves this kind of intimidation only for small and powerless nations like Nicaragua as opposed to a country like Mexico, where it was careful not to intervene in last summer's election, only serves to reinforce the opinion of many Latin Americans that the U.S. is a bully.(...) Jeane Kirkpatrick is one of those foreign-policy hawks who blame Chavez for Ortega's comeback. In the 1980s, as Ronald Reagan's ambassador to the UN Kirkpatrick defended the Contra War as part of a broader foreign policy that would both "protect U.S. interest and make the actual lives of actual people in Latin America somewhat better." Nicaraguans are still waiting for the second half of that pledge to be fulfilled. READ IT ALL

Latin America is preparing to settle accounts with its white settler elite - Guardian

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A careful reader will discover in this article many parallels between Latin America and the US frontier states and former Confederacy, known nowadays as the "sun belt". The sun belt is the heart of the "red" states where the Republicans have their base. Perhaps you'll agree with me that if the CSA had won its independence, by now the Southern USA would be more like Brazil or Venezuela than like Boston or New York. And perhaps the North East and Middle West could have followed their enlightened and progressive traditions without having to share the nest with so many racists and religious nuts. DS

Abstract: The recent explosion of indigenous protest in Latin America, culminating in the election this year of Evo Morales, an Aymara indian, as president of Bolivia, has highlighted the precarious position of the white-settler elite that has dominated the continent for so many centuries. Although the term "white settler" is familiar in the history of most European colonies, and comes with a pejorative ring, the whites in Latin America (as in the US) are not usually described in this way, and never use the expression themselves. No Spanish or Portuguese word exists that can adequately translate the English term. Latin America is traditionally seen as a continent set apart from colonial projects elsewhere, the outcome of its long experience of settlement since the 16th century. Yet it truly belongs in the history of the global expansion of white-settler populations from Europe in the more recent period. Today's elites are largely the product of the immigrant European culture that has developed during the two centuries since independence.(...) Latin America shares these characteristics of "settler colonialism", an evocative term used in discussions about the British empire. Together with the Caribbean and the US, it has a further characteristic not shared by Europe's colonies elsewhere: the legacy of a non-indigenous slave class. Although slavery had been abolished in much of the world by the 1830s, the practice continued in Latin America (and the US) for several decades. The white settlers were unique in oppressing two different groups, seizing the land of the indigenous peoples and appropriating the labour of their imported slaves. A feature of all "settler colonialist" societies has been the ingrained racist fear and hatred of the settlers, who are permanently alarmed by the presence of an expropriated underclass. Yet the race hatred of Latin America's settlers has only had a minor part in our customary understanding of the continent's history and society. Even politicians and historians on the left have preferred to discuss class rather than race. In Venezuela, elections in December will produce another win for Hugo Chávez, a man of black and Indian origin. Much of the virulent dislike shown towards him by the opposition has been clearly motivated by race hatred, and similar hatred was aroused the 1970s towards Salvador Allende in Chile and Juan Perón in Argentina. Allende's unforgivable crime, in the eyes of the white-settler elite, was to mobilise the rotos, the "broken ones" - the patronising and derisory name given to the vast Chilean underclass. The indigenous origins of the rotos were obvious at Allende's political demonstrations. Dressed in Indian clothes, their affinity with their indigenous neighbours would have been apparent. The same could be said of the cabezas negras - "black heads" - who came out to support Perón. This unexplored parallel has become more apparent as indigenous organisations have come to the fore, arousing the whites' ancient fears. A settler spokesman, Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian-now-Spanish novelist, has accused the indigenous movements of generating "social and political disorder", echoing the cry of 19th-century racist intellectuals such as Colonel Domingo Sarmiento of Argentina, who warned of a choice between "civilisation and barbarism". Latin America's settler elites after independence were obsessed with all things European. They travelled to Europe in search of political models, ignoring their own countries beyond the capital cities, and excluding the majority from their nation-building project. Along with their imported liberal ideology came the racialist ideas common among settlers elsewhere in Europe's colonial world. This racist outlook led to the downgrading and non-recognition of the black population, and, in many countries, to the physical extermination of indigenous peoples. In their place came millions of fresh settlers from Europe.(...) The true Latin American holocaust occurred in the 19th century. The slaughter of Indians made more land available for settlement, and between 1870 and 1914 five million Europeans migrated to Brazil and Argentina. In many countries the immigration campaigns continued well into the 20th century, sustaining the hegemonic white-settler culture that has lasted to this day. Yet change is at last on the agenda. Recent election results have been described, with some truth, as a move to the left, since several new governments have revived progressive themes from the 1960s. Yet from a longer perspective these developments look more like a repudiation of Latin America's white-settler culture, and a revival of that radical tradition of inclusion attempted two centuries ago. The outline of a fresh struggle, with a final settling of accounts, can now be discerned. READ ALL