I was dropped at Paradiso, the last middle-class area before barrio La Vega, which spills into a ravine as if by the force of gravity. Storms were forecast, and people were anxious, remembering the mudslides that took 20 000 lives. “Why are you here?” asked the man sitting opposite me in the packed jeep-bus that chugged up the hill. Like so many in Latin America, he appeared old, but wasn’t. Without waiting for my answer, he listed why he supported President Hugo Chávez: schools, clinics, affordable food, “our Constitution, our democracy” and, “for the first time, the oil money is going to us”. I asked him if he belonged to the MRV, Chávez’s party: “No, I’ve never been in a political party; I can only tell you how my life has been changed, as I never dreamt.”
It is raw witness like this, which I have heard over and over again in Venezuela, that smashes the one-way mirror between the West and a continent that is rising. By rising, I mean the phenomenon of millions of people stirring once again, “like lions after slumber/In unvanquishable number”, wrote the poet Shelley in The Mask of Anarchy. This is not romantic; an epic is unfolding in Latin America that demands our attention beyond the stereotypes and clichés that diminish whole societies to their degree of exploitation and expendability.
To the man in the bus — and to Beatrice whose children are being immunised and taught history, art and music for the first time, and Celedonia, in her seventies, who is learning to read and write, and Jose whose life was saved by a doctor in the middle of the night, the first doctor he had ever seen — Chávez is neither a “firebrand” nor an “autocrat” but a humanitarian and a democrat who commands almost two-thirds of the popular vote, accredited by victories in no less than nine elections. Compare that with the fifth of the British electorate that reinstalled Blair, an authentic autocrat.
Chávez and the rise of popular social movements, from Colombia down to Argentina, represent bloodless, radical change across the continent, inspired by the great independence struggles that began with Simón BolÃvar, born in Venezuela, who brought the ideas of the French Revolution to societies cowed by Spanish absolutism. BolÃvar, like Che Guevara in the 1960s and Chávez today, understood the new colonial master to the north. “The USA,” he said in 1819, “appears destined by fate to plague America with misery in the name of liberty.”
At the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001, George W Bush announced the latest misery in the name of liberty in the form of a Free Trade Area of the Americas treaty (FTAA). This would allow the United States to impose its ideological “market”, neoliberalism, on all of Latin America. It was the natural successor to Bill Clinton’s North American Free Trade Agreement, which has turned Mexico into an American sweatshop. Bush boasted it would be law by 2005.
On November 5, Bush arrived at the 2005 summit in Mar del Plata, Argentina, to be told his FTAA was not even on the agenda. Among the 34 heads of state were new, uncompliant faces and behind all of them were populations no longer willing to accept US-backed business tyrannies. Never before have Latin American governments had to consult their people on pseudo-agreements of this kind; but now they must.
In Bolivia, in the past five years, social movements have got rid of governments and foreign corporations alike, such as the tentacular Bechtel, which sought to impose what people call total locura capitalista (total capitalist folly) — the privatising of almost everything, especially natural gas and water.
Following Pinochet’s Chile, Bolivia was to be a neoliberal laboratory. The poorest of the poor were charged up to two-thirds of their pittance-income even for rainwater.
Standing in the bleak, freezing, cobble-stoned streets of El Alto, 4 270m up in the Andes, or sitting in the breeze-block homes of former miners and campesinos driven off their land, I have had political discussions of a kind seldom ignited in the West. They are direct and eloquent. “Why are we so poor,” they say, “when our country is so rich? Why do governments lie to us and represent outside powers?” They refer to 500 years of conquest as if it is a living presence, which it is, tracing a journey from the Spanish plunder of Cerro Rico, a hill of silver mined by indigenous slave labour and which underwrote the Spanish Empire for three centuries. When the silver was gone, there was tin, and when the mines were privatised in the 1980s at the behest of the International Monetary Fund, tin collapsed, along with 30 000 jobs. When the coca leaf replaced it — in Bolivia, chewing it curbs hunger — the Bolivian army, coerced by the US, began destroying the coca crops and filling the prisons.
In 2000, open rebellion burst upon the white business oligarchs and the American embassy, whose fortress stands like an Andean Vatican in the centre of La Paz. There was never anything like it, because it came from the majority indigenous population, the victims of centuries of racism. They encircled and shut down the country’s second city, Cochabamba, until their water was returned to public ownership. Every year since, people have fought a water or gas war: essentially a war against privatisation and poverty. Having driven out President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada in 2003, Bolivians voted in a referendum for a constituent assembly similar to that which founded Chávez’s Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela, the expulsion of the transnational water companies and a 50% tax on the exploitation of all energy resources.
When the replacement president, Carlos Mesa, refused to implement the programme, he was forced to resign. Next month, there will be presidential elections and the opposition Movement to Socialism may well turn out the old order. The leader is an indigenous former coca farmer, Evo Morales, whom the American ambassador has likened to Osama bin Laden. In fact, he is a social democrat who, for many of those who sealed off Cochabamba and marched down the mountain from El Alto, moderates too much.
All over Latin America, people regard Chávez as the modern BolÃvar. They admire his political imagination and his courage. Only he has had the guts to describe the US as a source of terrorism and Bush as Señor Peligro (Mr Danger). He is very different from Fidel Castro, whom he respects. Venezuela is an extraordinarily open society with an unfettered opposition. On the left, there are those who oppose the state, in principle, believe its reforms have reached their limit and want power to flow directly from the community. They say so vigorously, yet they support Chávez.
At the entrance to every barrio there is a state supermarket, where prices are 40% less than in commercial stores. Despite specious accusations that the government has instituted censorship, most of the media remains violently anti-Chávez: a large part of it in the hands of Gustavo Cisneros, who backed the failed attempt to depose Chávez. What is striking is the proliferation of lively community radio stations, which played a critical part in Chávez’s rescue in the coup of April 2002 by calling on people to march on Caracas.
On March 17, the Washington Post reported that Feliz RodrÃguez, “a former CIA operative well-connected to the Bush family” had taken part in the planning of the assassination of the president of Venezuela. On September 16, Chávez said, “I have evidence that there are plans to invade Venezuela. Furthermore, we have documentation: how many bombers will over-fly Venezuela on the day of the invasion … the US is carrying out manoeuvres on Curacao Island. It is called Operation Balboa.” Since then, leaked internal Pentagon documents have identified Venezuela as a “post-Iraq threat” requiring “full spectrum” planning.
The old-young man in the jeep, Beatrice and her children, and Celedonia with her “new esteem” are indeed a threat — the threat of an alternative, decent world that some lament is no longer possible. Well, it is.