Lunes, 12-25-2006 = Aztlan News Report

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http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1225ihelp1225inside.html

Dec. 25, 2006 12:00 AM
Homeless man didn't give up, lands a job
Laura Houston / The Arizona Republic

Don't give up, says Robert Shelley, who's been homeless for three months.

"Eventually something will give as long as you don't give up first," Shelley, 46, advised while seeking Christmas Eve shelter at First United Methodist Church of Tempe.

Shelley didn't give up. And with the aid of the Interfaith Homeless Emergency Lodging Program, he may soon be off the streets. Shelley credited IHELP's interfaith services network on weekends for helping him get back on his feet. In two weeks he will start a job as an electrician's assistant. The IHELP program often serves the chronically homeless.

Their needs are acute, said Sue Ringler, the director of operations for the Tempe Community Action Agency. Some have lived on the streets so long they forgot that they could still access veterans benefits or re-enter the job market.

In February, Ringler helped network a total of 15 faith-based groups in Tempe, including First United Methodist.

IHELP has given about 250 people a place to sleep, eat, receive medical services or job counseling, Ringler said.

"We try to be a link for folks," she said.

The group hopes to expand to a seven-day-a-week operation from weekends-only, she said.

Statistics that try to pin down the number of homeless people in Arizona often are as fluid as that demographic. On any given day, as many as 22,000 people in the state were thought to be homeless in 2004, according to the Arizona Department of Economic Security.

On Christmas Eve, 30 had a home at First United, warm meals served on red-paper covered tables in the church's fellowship hall and mats to sleep on.

"We're thankful we didn't have to turn anybody away tonight," said Barbara Mishler, a church member who pointed out that they often run out of room.

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061225/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/venezuela_street_people_1
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Mon Dec 25, 2006
Chavez targets Venezuela homeless woes
By Ian James, Associated Press Writer

Caracas, Venezuela - 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.

Carneiro's ministry said an estimated 800 people remain on the streets in Caracas, but such estimates are disputed by Chavez opponents who argue progress has been exaggerated and that large numbers remain.

Some of the homeless refuse help from social workers who patrol at night in government buses offering food and shelter.

Street people still pick through trash heaps in parts of Caracas looking for food.

Norma Ramirez, who lives in a cardboard enclosure under a bridge with her 5-month-old daughter, said she didn't want to feel like a "prisoner" in a shelter and that she and her boyfriend were saving money from odd jobs to try to rent a room. "We'll only be here for a little while," she promised.

Every Saturday, more than 100 homeless people turn up for a free meal at the Catholic-run Mother Teresa of Calcutta cafeteria in a church in western Caracas, said Irasema Paz, who helps with the program and says the number coming has fluctuated little while the program has expanded to 22 other soup kitchens across Venezuela.

"There are many people on the street," she said, adding that most homeless resist the idea of moving into a shelter.

Some police and city workers have taken a hard line. Mavares said city workers burned a heap of his belongings earlier this month — including most of his clothes — as they put up Christmas lights in the area.

Mavares also lost an eye two years ago when he said police raided his camp and attacked him. He now wears sunglasses with a single dark lens over the stitches of his missing eye.

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http://www.elpasotimes.com/news/ci_4897503

Article Launched: 12/25/2006 12:00:00 AM MST
Dad welcomes home 3 sons back from Iraq
By Ramón Rentería / El Paso Times
Email= rrenteria@elpasotimes.com
Telefono= 546-6146

Ernesto Velasquez lost a lot of sleep worrying about which of his three sons in the Army might die in combat first.

"I would think about what you see in the movies, someone coming in uniform, the knock at the door," Velasquez said.

Velasquez, 50, a convenience store manager, office complex janitor and proud East Side father, still has trouble sleeping. This time he's simply anxious for the homecoming he has prayed for all year.

His sons -- Angel Velasquez, 26, a combat engineer; Adam Velasquez, 23, a convoy gunner; and Adrian Velasquez, 28, a military policeman -- will be reunited Tuesday and Wednesday with family and friends in El Paso after recently completing 12-month deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

"I'm the richest man alive. God gave me back my sons," Velasquez said.

Velasquez is throwing a big family party Saturday to welcome and honor his sons, two of them driving in from Fort Hood, Texas, and the third flying in from Germany.

"When my three sons went to war, there was always a moment every single day -- whether I
was taking a bath, driving to work or at nighttime -- that I found myself crying, asking God to give me the strength to go on with my life," Velasquez said.

Velasquez bought a big banner emblazoned with his sons' names, a yellow ribbon, an eagle and flag to welcome his boys and express support for all U.S. troops. In one corner, he put an emblem of the 49ers, the favorite NFL team of his oldest son Ernesto Jr., who died in 2003 a few days after being struck on the head during an assault at a nightclub.

Velasquez drifted away from the Catholic Church when his oldest son died. He felt depressed and disillusioned. The man accused of attacking his son received a probated sentence.

"I lost faith in God. It took me awhile to understand that it's not for me to question when you lose someone," he said.

Now, Velasquez tells families who lose a son or daughter in Iraq or Afghanistan that he truly feels their pain. He always thanks servicemen and women for serving their country when he runs into them at a store or cafe.

"Only families that have kids over there -- parents, uncles, brothers, sisters, wives, cousins or whatever -- really feel the pain," Velasquez said.

Velasquez grew up in a working class family in a neighborhood near Bel Air High School, where he and five of his seven children graduated. His father was a laborer and his mother worked many years in housekeeping at a hospital.

"We never had the luxury of being middle-class people," he said.

Velasquez taught his children to earn their own money as soon as they were old enough to work. He and his wife Irma also have three daughters: Veronica, Erika and Valerie.

Angel joined the Army in 1999, eventually became a recruiter and signed up his brother Adrian in 2000. Adam followed his brothers in 2004.

Angel and Adam wound up stationed within walking distance of each other in the same brigade at a camp just north of Baghdad. Adrian served his tour in Afghanistan.

Adam Velasquez escorted more than 130 missions throughout Baghdad and the surrounding area.

"What our dad is doing for us is really cool," Adam Velasquez said in a phone interview. "The last time we said goodbye, none of us knew if we were going to see each other again."

Angel Velasquez participated in more than 100 raids, helped capture more than 60 insurgents and also worked three months training Iraqi troops.

"I can hardly wait," he said in a phone interview from Fort Hood. "This is one of the few times that we're all in town at the same time."

What the brothers thought would be a small gathering of immediate family has turned into a big holiday celebration in a rented hall with food, music and tons of relatives.

"We were extremely surprised," Angel Velasquez said. "My dad said, 'This is my treat to you guys for making it home safe.'"

Gilbert Ordoñez built a simple shrine out of plywood and installed it on his front porch in East-Central El Paso as a constant reminder to his neighbors and passers-by that his three nephews have been serving their country in the Middle East. He is Adam's godfather.

"These guys made me cry in their e-mails talking about their experiences and how they missed their dad and all of us," Ordoñez said. "I support these guys. The whole city should make a big deal out of it when these guys come back alive, from one guy to a planeload."

Ernesto Velasquez still cries thinking of the sons who sometimes call him "jefe," but he has accepted that his boys could easily be put again in harm's way.

"It's not a regular job, not a vacation," he said. "Deep in my heart, I know they'll wind up going back."

All three brothers are on standby to return to the Middle East in 2007.

Right now, Velasquez is more concerned about the big pachanga and family reunion he plans Saturday for three brothers named Angel, Adrian and Adam -- the sons and soldiers he terribly missed and that he prayed so much would be protected from the violence, danger and tragic consequences of war.

"For now, I'll just take it day by day and enjoy a celebration," Velasquez said. "This year, my sons came back."

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http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news.php?newsno=2181
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Friday, Dec 22, 2006
Venezuelan and Ecuadorian Presidents Seal Friendship with Joint Declaration

Presidents Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Rafael Correa of Ecuador signing a joint delcaration.
Credit: Prensa Presidencial

President Chavez presented Correa with a replica of Simon Bolivar's sword.
Credit: Prensa Presidencial

Caracas, December 22, 2006 (venezuelanalysis.com)— Ecuador’s President Elect Rafael Correa arrived in Venezuela Tuesday to strengthen his friendship with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and to sign cooperation commitments. The two presidents signed a joint declaration to promote integration via the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) and for energy cooperation. Correa also requested that Venezuela rejoin the trading group of the Community of Andean Nations (CAN).

The joint declaration that Chavez and Correa signed promised to deepen political, economic, cultural, and social cooperation between the two countries. This commitment would be followed up and formalized once Correa assumes the presidency in January 2007.

ALBA, which Ecuador is now interested in pursuing, is Chavez’s proposal for regional integration based on fair trade instead of free trade, complementarity, cooperation, and solidarity. So far Cuba and Bolivia have already joined the project.

With regard to energy cooperation, Venezuela committed itself to train Ecuadorian specialists in the areas of oil exploration, production, transport, storage, processing, and commercialization. Also, the state oil companies of the two countries, PDVSA and Petroecuador would create joint ventures in the area of oil refining, so that Petroecuador can modernize and increase its refining capacity in Ecuador. Until this is underway, though, Venezuela would offer to refine Ecuadorian oil in Venezuela.

Another area that the two presidents committed themselves to cooperate in is the area of communication, so that Ecuador might soon join the Telesur TV channel. Telesur is the continent-wide progressive Latin American news channel, which is currently supported by Venezuela, Cuba, Uruguay, and Argentina. Also, they discussed the creation of RadioSur, a new continent-wide radio network and a Latin American news agency.

Correa received important backing from Chavez on the issue of Colombia’s drug fumigation along the Ecuador-Colombia border. Correa has complained about the program, saying that it is bad for Ecuadorian crops and people’s health. He cancelled a planned trip to Colombia until the country halts its spraying.

According to Reuters, Chavez supported Correa’s position by saying, “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.”

After Correa’s extended meeting with Chavez, he appeared upbeat about the prospects of Venezuela’s return to the CAN. “The president is evaluating it [Venezuela’s rejoining of CAN], and let’s hope we can move forward. I think that CAN has to be strengthened and from there we have to try to merge the two processes of integration in South America: CAN and Mercosur, said Correa.

Venezuela withdrew from the CAN earlier this year in protest against Peru and Colombia, both members of CAN, for signing bilateral free trade agreements with the U.S. Correa said he understood the position of Chavez. “There is great disappointment about CAN. The results are very poor, the vision is mistaken…but with the will of the presidents that the Andean region is electing we can change that situation,” he said.

Correa also visited the tomb of Simón Bolívar, the leader of the independence struggle of the Andean nations (Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia) and who dreamt of a united Latin America.

“Who can doubt that we are one people on seeing the Latin American looks of those young people, on seeing the mixed race people, indigenous and brown that said: Enough! to the years of exploitation, to give away governments, to imperial domination, to exclusory systems and to injustices,” said Correa.

Correa, who was briefly the Minister for the Economy in 2005, will be formally sworn in as president on January 15 next year. He is renowned for making fiery speeches against the US government much like Chavez. In fact, when asked recently to comment on Chavez’s description of President George W. Bush as the devil he said that, “Calling Bush the devil offends the devil. Bush is a tremendously dim-witted President who has done great damage to the world.”

He was elected president November 27 with 57.9% of the vote after running on a platform that promised to rein in political elites. His opponent was the conservative banana tycoon Alvaro Noboa.

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061223/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/venezuela_us_3

Fri Dec 22, 2006 @11:45 PM ET
Venezuela rejects U.S. Senate report

Caracas, Venezuela - Venezuela took issue Friday with a U.S. Senate report criticizing its stance toward nongovernment organizations, saying such groups are treated fairly and that Washington should mind its own business.

Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro said the Senate Foreign Relations Committee report on NGOs in various countries reveals a segment within the U.S. government "who are blind, who continue on with the old scheme of seeing us as their backyard."

The report, sought by the Republican committee chairman, Sen. Richard Lugar (news, bio, voting record), said "pending legislation by the Venezuelan National Assembly to regulate and control the ability and work of NGOs is worrisome."

The report also said that under President Hugo Chavez, who was re-elected to a six-year term Dec. 3, "Venezuela has demonstrated a blatant disregard for independent civil society actors (and) any form of political dissent."

Maduro denied the report's findings, saying they reflected "an imperialist vision." He did not comment on the possibility that Venezuela could approve a new law on NGOs.

As initially proposed several months ago, the reforms would require NGOs to register with the government and declare their funding sources.

Maduro said U.S. officials should focus on their own country's problems. "They aren't in any position to be judging our countries" in Latin America, he said.

Chavez has accused Washington of funding efforts to destabilize his government through NGOs. The U.S. government denies it, saying millions of dollars have gone toward nonpartisan pro-democracy work.

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http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1920
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Friday, Dec 22, 2006
Bolivar's Second Coming?
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:
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Posted on Fri Dec 22nd, 2006 at 05:23:43 PM EST
Oaxaca: Contininuing Conquest, Continuing Resistance
By Sean Donahue,

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 Mixotec 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.”

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."

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 . . .
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http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/4585/1/229/

12-21-06, 10:00 am
The Work of Karl Marx and the Challenges of the 21st Century
By Ricardo Alarcón

Editor's Note: This speech was delivered by Cuban National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada on May 3, 2006. It was translated by Joe Bryak and Walter Lippmann of Cuba News. We invite the comment of our readers (pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net).

Let us remember that he said that it was not enough that the idea clamored to be made reality, but that it was also necessary that reality shout out to be made into idea. – Franz Mehring

I will not attempt to delineate here the ample and rich intellectual production of Karl Marx, his deep analysis of capitalism or the principal events of his era, nor will I touch upon his exemplary life as a social fighter and revolutionary leader. I know that these themes are familiar to you all.

I propose, if you allow me, to separate Marx from Marxism. With that I allude to the necessity of thinking of Marx as Marx, rather than from any of the versions of Marxism, to imagine him declaring the challenges of the 21st century, separating what is essential of his work from what others made of his work. Instead of embarking on the endless succession of reviews of his thinking that goes along with those who have claimed him as their own, as well as with those who have tried unsuccessfully to bury him, it is necessary to rescue his fundamental legacy, that which makes him transcend his era to be with us here and now in the struggle for human emancipation.

I take as a starting point the warning, not always heeded, of Rosa Luxemburg:

The work Capital of Marx, like all his ideology, is not gospel in which we are given revealed truth, set in stone and eternal, but an endless flow of suggestions to keep working on with intelligence, in order to continue researching and struggling for truth.

To take his work, on top of any other consideration, as a source of inspiration and guide for those who, like he, want not only to explain the world but, more than anything, transform it, fighting until achieving socialism.

Our obligation is to arm ourselves with all of his ideology and from that build a theory and practice that corresponds with that reality and helps to transform it.

There is probably no higher nor more urgent priority for socialists than this: to define a strategic conception and precisely delineate the tactics and methods of struggle adequate for confronting the capitalism that exists now. The theoretical tools at our disposal need to be sharpened for their efficient employment in this era that presents new challenges for the revolutionary movement.

These notes do not have any other aim than contributing to the discussion of that crucial theme and obviously lack any pretension of exhausting it. They have been edited having in mind that which from the great unfinished text declared Rosa Luxemburg:

Incomplete as they are, these two volumes enclose values infinitely more precious than any definitive and perfect truth, the spur for the labor of thought and that critical analysis and judgment of ideas, which is what is most genuine in the theory that Karl Marx has left to us.

Another indispensable observation: The necessity of elaborating a revolutionary theory that brings victory confronted with what has been called neoliberal globalization has absolutely nothing to do with a supposed liquidation of Marxism and much less with the imaginary disappearance of class struggle, which some intended to convert into immovable dogmas in rushed texts that inundated the planet at the beginnings of the last decade of the twentieth century.

The collapse of the USSR and the bankruptcy of the so-called "real socialism" gave way for a triumphalist operation skillfully launched by the main centers of imperialism which, nevertheless, could hardly hide their essentially defensive character with its apparently total and definitive victory, capitalism, in reality, entered a new phase that could be terminal, in which its contradictions and limitations are manifested with a frank crudeness and in which arise new, unsuspected possibilities for revolutionary action.

That paradox perhaps may explain the short duration of that triumphalism in the academic level. Few today repeat that nonsense about the "end of history." Not even Fukuyama does it, more busy these days in criticizing the failure of the policies of Bush which are, nevertheless, much due to his own laborious and wordy work. The present crisis within the US neoconservative movement suggests that not a few question now if they were the true winners of the cold war. Self-critical reflection is called for on our side as well.

We should admit our own errors, especially those that served as fertile ground for the bourgeois manipulation of the destruction of the Soviet model. This is not the time for profound analysis of the failure of an experience that now belongs to historians. But it is inevitable that we underline here something that led to the defeat and to its advantageous use by the enemy.

That project – independently of Lenin and of the creative spirit that animated the first years of the Bolshevik revolution – reduced Marxism to a determinist and mechanist school of thought, transformed research into dogma, thought into propaganda, until the point of confining it to a condition of terminal hardening of the arteries. It constructed a simplified "science" that thought it had demonstrated that socialism would inevitably come about, by itself, as an unavoidable consequence of a predetermined history and that that socialism would continue its march, also uncontestable, according to laws and rules codified in a strange ritual. Socialism, therefore, was inevitable and invincible; with it one would truly arrive to the end of history. Not any socialism, but that one in particular, that which, with admirable struggle, Lenin and the Bolsheviks tried to achieve, whose enormous meaning no one will be able to tear out of the memory of the proletariat but which was a specific project – that is to say, a human work, with virtues and defects, glories and shadows, a result of immense sacrifice of a concrete people in circumstances and conditions likewise concrete – and not the outcome of a predestined and universal idea.

The conversion of the Soviet experience into a paradigm for those who in other places fought their own anti-capitalist battles, and the imperative obligation of defending it from its inflamed and powerful enemies, led to the subordination of a great part of the revolutionary movement to the policies and interests of the USSR, which did not always correspond to those of other peoples. The cold war and the division of the world into two blocks of antagonistic states that threatened each other with mutual nuclear annihilation, reduced to a minimum the capacity of critical thought and reinforced dogmatism. In honor of the truth one must render homage to the numberless men and women who sacrificed their lives, the greater part in total anonymity, and died heroically in any corner of the planet defending the land of the Soviets, its policies and its application in its own native soil, as wrong as it may have been in more than a few cases. For them, respect and admiration. But what is being considered now is recognizing the very harmful consequences of that tendency.

The tendency to blindly "tail" thoroughly penetrated many organizations and individuals, and they couldn't react rationally when the system that supported their faith collapsed. They had lived convinced that they were part of an unbeatable force, owners and administrators of truths scientifically demonstrated, and they marched in an enthusiastic procession in which, curiously, the founder did not march, having declared, with all naturalness, "I am not a Marxist."

The myth destroyed, old dogmatists were incapable of appreciating the new possibilities in the revolutionary movement, the spaces heretofore nonexistent that were necessary to explore with audacity and creativity. There were those who, in unsurpassed acrobatics, joined the "conquerors," converting treason into their new religion.

The third world penetrates the first. The latter needs the former and at the same time rejects it. In Europe and North America appears an undesirable protagonist, a mute guest that demands its rights. While here we carry out this important collective reflection animated by the example of a truly creative and humanist thinker and try to find the paths toward a better world, the US Congress continues discussing what to do with those who number at least 11 million people – that is, the Cuban population – the so-called undocumented, searching for formulas that allow them to continue to be exploited while access to that society is closed.

But there is a growing number of those who do not conform, are unsatisfied and rebel. All the rhetoric about US hegemony falls to pieces with its bogging down in Iraq, the undeniable contradictions and limitations of its economy, the awakening of masses that were supposed to be asleep there, and the corruption and moral fissure that undermine its political system.

Their associates in Europe are in the same boat. Accustomed as well to the "bloc" discipline and "tailism," they don't arrive at the knowledge of the depth of the insurmountable crisis of that which it was, but no longer is, omnipotent boss.

In Latin America and in other parts of the third world, meanwhile, radical processes are affirmed and plans are put forth that seek to eliminate, or at least reduce, imperialist domination.

For the first time, anti-capitalist malaise is manifested, simultaneously and everywhere, in advanced countries and in those left behind and is not limited to the proletariat and other exploited sectors. This is not only expressed today in the struggles that we could call "classics" – between classes and nations that are exploited and exploiters – but in those that are added, at times with more vigor, those that demand the preservation of the environment, or work for the rights of women and discriminated people and those excluded because of gender, ethnicity or religion.

A diverse group, multicolor, in which there is no shortage of contradictions and paradoxes grows in front of the dominant system. It is not yet the rainbow that announces the end of the storm.

Spontaneity characterizes it; it needs articulation and coherence that need to be stimulated without sectarianism, without being carried away with wildness. The great challenge of revolutionaries, of communists, is to define our part, the place that we should occupy in this battle. For that we need a theory.

In that sense one must return to the well known but forgotten definition of Lenin: "A correct revolutionary theory is only formed in a definitive manner in close connection with practical experience in a movement that is truly mass and truly revolutionary."

That theory, on a world scale, does not exist in fact, to serve as a guide in the struggle to substitute the present order and transform it in the direction toward socialism. That theory has to be formed and its definitive formation has to take place in constant interrelation with practice, in a process in which both form an inseparable whole. But we are not speaking of just any practice but that of a movement that is both "truly mass and truly revolutionary."

When can a movement be defined as truly a mass movement and when does it acquire the quality of being truly revolutionary? The answers will not be found in a research laboratory, nor will they erupt from academic debate. Revolutionaries themselves will have to create them, men and women of flesh and blood, acting from the masses, building their movement and trying to make it ever more revolutionary. The entire life of the genial Bolshevik leader can be described in that commitment. A persistent legend attributes to the author of Capital the saying "Man [sic] thinks as he lives," which more than a few militants still repeat, without warning of the mistake nor of its paralyzing effects. The relation between man and his surroundings is of decisive importance for ethics and politics and in order to understand the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach. To transform the world the key is in the Third Thesis. Let's remember the statements of Marx:

The materialist theory that men are product of circumstances and of education, and that, therefore, changed men are a product of different circumstances and of a modified education, forgets that it is men, precisely, who make circumstances change and that even the educator needs to be educated. This leads, then, inevitably, to the division of society in two parts, one of which is on top of society (this, for example, in Robert Owen).

The coincidence of the modification of circumstances and of human activity can only be conceived and understood rationally as revolutionary practice.

In the Second Declaration of Havana, Cubans proclaimed that "the duty of every revolutionary is to make revolution." To make it means to create a new world in spite of the obstacles and limitations that circumstances impose, in a ceaseless battle in which both man and reality will go on transforming each other reciprocally.

A certain form of socialism will emerge inevitably from the also inevitable decay of capitalism. – Joseph A. Schumpeter

The prediction that I just cited has been the object of implacable denunciation on the part of bourgeois thinkers. In 1942 it was difficult to see the fall of capitalism as something inevitable. Its author, nevertheless, did not cease believing in it until the end. Eight years afterward, just before dying, he said: "Marx was wrong in his diagnosis of how capitalist society would fall; but he was not wrong in the prediction that finally it would fall."

In 1950 US capitalism reached the zenith of its hegemony. It was the only nuclear power, it hadn't suffered the devastation that the world war had wreaked on the other developed countries, it dominated Western Europe and Latin America economically and politically, it possessed a superiority in science and technology.

At the middle of the last century the world was quite different from what it is today. By a route that they probably did not foresee we are now nearer the fulfillment of the prophecy in which, paradoxically, both the author of Capital and his tenacious Austro-North American critic coincided.

The protagonist has changed, the subject of history, humanity. The world population has grown in an exponential manner since the days of the publication of the Communist Manifesto and it continues doing so. Humanity traveled through tens of thousands of years to arrive at the first billion. It took a century to triple the double of that figure.

Every 25 years is added to that figure a quantity similar to that which represented the whole planet when Karl Marx was born. At a similar rhythm the natural resources of the earth are exhausted and animal and vegetable species are annihilated forever. Humanity is the only life form that has dedicated itself with so much fury and efficiency to destroy life.

Irreversible climactic changes, forests transformed into deserts, poisoned waters, unbreathable air, irremediably degraded soils, astounding conglomerations of human beings in uninhabitable and always growing urban clogs are distressing worries that compose a reality not known before.

Beyond ideologies the people continue discovering that which is obvious. In 1992, at the Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro, governments and civil society put ourselves in agreement that in order to save the earth it was necessary "to change the patterns of production and of consumption," words subscribed to by many, including Bush senior. They were words, certainly. But they imply explicit recognition although in the text of a document, of the necessity of the radical transformation of the relations between men and between them and nature.

The subject, besides, inevitably moves. Population grows exponentially but it doesn't do so equally in all parts of the world.

In the so-called developed countries it is frozen and even tends to shrink. In the rest, in that part of the world that was baptized as the third, they are more, ever many more – in spite of early death, misery, hunger – and also those who in an unstoppable spiral, are displaced toward the enclaves of opulence.

The third world penetrates the first. The latter needs the former and at the same time rejects it. In Europe and North America appears an undesirable protagonist, a mute guest that demands its rights. While here we carry out this important collective reflection animated by the example of a truly creative and humanist thinker and try to find the paths toward a better world, the US Congress continues discussing what to do with those who number at least 11 million people – that is, the Cuban population – the so-called undocumented, searching for formulas that allow them to continue to be exploited while access to that society is closed.

The migratory phenomenon will be maintained and will gain in size along with capitalism, with its present characteristics, as it is expanded through the whole world. Capitalism cannot stop it, just as it is neither capable of abandoning those characteristics and much less transform itself into another thing.

The Central Intelligence Agency of the United States has prognosticated that, as a consequence of that phenomenon, very soon deep changes will have been produced in the cultures of several European countries. The struggle for the rights of immigrants and against discrimination expressed in public demonstrations that mobilized millions of people and in the historic May Day protest – a date that never before had been expressed in this way in the United States – brings to the forefront a political force that now cannot be easily ignored.

The presence of millions of people discriminated against and lacking civil and political rights raises an essential question that goes to the very roots of the political system that the West has attempted to set as an obligatory model for all. There is an increasingly growing number of those who work hard there, pay their taxes, die in their wars, but cannot vote nor be elected. In today's Rome the participation of the citizens is reduced while the mass of those excluded is constantly growing, the modern "barbarians." In this very building, recently, Professor Robert Dahl – prominent apologist for the archetypical capitalist – recognized in such marginalization the principal lack of contemporary liberal democracy.

The end of that exclusion, the struggle for democracy, specifically including the democratization of Western societies, should be a priority for those who wish to transform the world. This is yet more urgent if we perceive the other face of the migratory phenomenon together with it grows, in parallel, racial hatred, xenophobia, which feeds fascist tendencies today present in an obvious manner in those societies.

The migratory problem reflects, thus, an aspect of capitalism today that it is also worthwhile reflecting on. While the emigrants are humiliated and superexploited in the countries where they end up, there they are used also as instruments for the oppression of the local workers. Being used as the international reserve army, stripped of rights, and until now not organized, they serve to lower wages, are forced to accept conditions that, as Bush the lesser likes to say, US workers do not accept.

To free the immigrants from their exploitation becomes, therefore, essential for the emancipation of the workers in the developed countries. To forge a union between both exploited sectors, in an area that has had advances that are still insufficient but whose importance cannot be underestimated, is today a task that cannot be postponed. To rescue the role of the labor union, true bulwark of civil society and to guarantee the rights of all workers, without exceptions, to organize oneself is an indispensable response to a capitalism that ever more openly casts off its "liberal" mask and demonstrates the perverse face of tyranny.

Fascism must be stopped. It is necessary to prevent it from being able to gather its own victims into a senseless opposition. Never again should a Nixon be able to mobilize construction workers against the youth who, in the 1970's, rebelled against the war in Vietnam. It is possible to unite them. We saw them united, in Seattle, both opposing neoliberal globalization.

One must help them to converge, and it is possible to propose this to them, and it is a crucial aspect of the world today and in the struggle to change it.

The poor try to emigrate to the rich world to escape poverty. The rich, meanwhile, try to place their capital in the poor countries in order to increase their profits with the misery of others and inevitably worsen the conditions of work and of life for workers in the developed countries. Few in the United States and Europe would identify themselves as members of a worker aristocracy, beneficiary of the dropping of crumbs coming from the colonies. Today they are seen as those defeated by a system that, among other things, depends ever more on "outsourcing" and the maquila and that imposes everywhere the dogma of the omnipotent market and "free trade."

To forge convergence, to later on reach unity between the exploited people of the first and third world, is now not only possible but necessary. But it is not enough to work for unity between all the proletariat of the world, of the first and third world, of the South and of the North. Antifascist unity is essential for democracy, peace and life. To fight to create new models, to forge alliances where possible or meanwhile promote points or moments of coincidence between the diverse forces that today, for the most varied motives, are out of step with the world as it is, should constitute the principal guide for revolutionaries.

To struggle so that the anti-war and anti-globalization movements flow into the same great stream and that all those discriminated against, all the marginalized be included is the main duty of revolutionaries today. It is the way to create a better world. It is the road to take in advancing toward socialism. To achieve socialism in this century there must be "heroic creation," a creation that is authentic, independent, and therefore diverse and unique.

--Reach us with your comment at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net

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http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1918

Wednesday, Dec 20, 2006
Pinochet Escapes Justice in Death but Allende's Spirit Lives on in Latin America
By: Roberto Navarrete - Red Pepper Blog

The death of Augusto Pinochet, Chile's former dictator, has triggered worldwide reactions even though more than 30 years have passed since his overthrow of the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende and his death in the Moneda palace on September 11th 1973. Pinochet's notoriety was kept alive in recent years by his detention in London, in 1998, to answer for the human rights violations which he unleashed on the Chilean people following the US-sponsored coup of 1973. His death means that he has escaped justice and that for thousands of victims of torture, disappearances, imprisonment and exile, a sense of frustration remains. However, for the jubilant crowds in Santiago who celebrated the death of Pinochet and marched towards the statue of Salvador Allende in front of the Moneda palace, more than the death of Pinochet, theirs was a celebration of the memory of Allende's martyrdom and his ideals of democratic socialism which are now spreading like wildfire around Latin America at the dawn of the 21 st century.

The military coup headed by Pinochet was the start of a counterrevolution aimed at halting the advance of powerful social movements which had been spreading in the southern cone of Latin America during the 1970s and which had its most clear exponent in the government of Salvador Allende in Chile. The brutal nature of the repression against the working class and political parties of the left which supported Allende's project made it clear from the start that this coup was a carefully planned attack staged by a close alliance between Chile's privileged classes and the US government. Pinochet's regime of terror was coupled with profoundly regressive economic measures. These included the wholesale privatisation of state assets in areas such as health, education, public services and sectors of the copper industry. In fact, Chile became a laboratory for testing the radical "neoliberal" economic policies devised by Milton Friedman's pupils in Chile, known as the "Chicago Boys". These policies led to a huge recession in 1975 and again in 1982-1983, and, in contrast to the "economic miracle" hailed by financial institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, it has resulted in one of the highest levels of economic inequality in the world.

The active role of the US government in promoting, financing and lending political and diplomatic support to Pinochet's regime is now well documented by the US senate Church report, and documents later declassified during Clinton's administration, now publicly available in the National Security Archive. Among his many crimes, Pinochet was responsible for ordering the assassination of the former commander in chief of the Chilean army General Carlos Prats in Buenos Aires, and of Allende's Foreign minister Orlando Letelier in the very heart of Washington's diplomatic quarter, a terrorist attack perpetrated on US soil by the Chilean DINA (Pinochet's secret police) in close collaboration with CIA-sponsored Cuban exiles Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles. Most of the military involved in human rights violations were trained in torture techniques, similar to those now used in Iraq, at the so called "School of the Americas" at Fort Benning. Henry Kissinger's infamous phrase, "we cannot allow a country to go communist because of the irresponsibility of its people", in reference to the Allende government, most clearly exposes the hypocrisy of successive US governments in supporting the use of state-sponsored terrorism to safeguard their interests while purporting to support the spread of democracy. The sad history of successive US interventions in Latin America and the current ongoing attempts to subvert the democratically elected government of President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela attest to this.

The resistance to Pinochet's regime took many forms and resulted in the death, torture and exile of thousands of activists during his 17 year long dictatorship. In the first few years, the parties of the left tried to organise an underground resistance which was followed by a brutal program of physical extermination by the secret police. This resulted in death by disappearance of more than 3000 political prisoners. In spite of the repression, the high unemployment and severe economic recession in 1982 led to mass protests in which week after week, scores of ordinary Chileans were killed by the military. His regime came to an end after a referendum in 1988 in which the majority of the Chilean population rejected his pretension of continuing as an elected despot. In the final years of his life, following Pinochet's landmark detention in London in 1998 for his commanding role in human rights violations, the true nature of his regime has gradually been exposed to new generations in Chile, where a significant sector of the population still supported him as a "saviour against communism". The macabre details of the crimes began to emerge little by little during the course of the judicial processes in which Pinochet was indicted. Accounts of disappeared prisoners being tied and thrown into the sea or into the craters of volcanoes; the systematic rape of women, including the use of dogs and other horrific measures aimed at terrorising the regime's opponents became widely known in Chile and abroad. But for Chile's oligarchy, which had been until recently prepared to justify these aberrations as a necessary part of the crusade against communism, it was the revelation of the fraudulent holding of secret accounts totalling tens of millions of dollars, stashed away in tax havens abroad, that ended up destroying the myth of the incorruptible strongman that he wanted to leave for posterity. His indictment for corruption and the numerous human rights cases against him resulted in his house arrest, although his continual feigning mental illness slowed down the legal process until the eventual heart attack that led to his death. His legacy of brutal crimes and corruption rightly belongs with that of Anastasio Somoza, Fulgencio Batista, Mobutu Sese Seko and tens of other corrupt dictators aided and abetted by US imperialism in its quest for global domination.

Last night, thousands of Chileans took to the streets in Santiago and all the major cities in Chile to celebrate his death. This cathartic act represents a small consolation for the thousands of victims and relatives of the disappeared for whom justice has been denied by the Chilean courts and the political establishment. It is significant that many Chileans have used the occasion to celebrate the figure of Salvador Allende, a man who crystallised the dreams and aspirations of the dispossessed masses in Chile and Latin America for social and political transformations. More than 30 years after his death, these dreams are finally being realised by the progressive governments which are spreading throughout many countries of Latin America. Today, Venezuela's president Hugo Chavez has perhaps best captured the imagination of Latin Americans and their aspirations for independence and social change through democratic means in his Bolivarian revolution. Let us hope that the Venezuelan people and others in Latin America will stand up to defend their gains against any US sponsored Pinochets who may be waiting in the shadows at this very moment.

Roberto Navarrete was a political prisoner under the Pinochet regime.

Original source / relevant link:
Red Pepper Blog
http://redpepper.blogs.com/venezuela/2006/12/pinochet_escape.html#more

http://www.tcgnews.com/santiagotimes/index.php?nav=story&story_id=12548&topic_id=1

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http://www.tcgnews.com/santiagotimes/index.php?nav=story&story_id=12548&topic_id=1

December 20, 2006
IMMIGRANT RIGHTS’ ACTIVISTS UNITE IN CHILE, EXHORT BACHELET
Peruvian Refugee Leads Campaign For Migrant Workers’ Rights
By Renata Stepanov
Email= editor@santiagotimes.cl

(December 20, 2006) Santiago’s Plaza de Armas, the daily gathering spot for hundreds of Peruvians in search of a day’s labor, was the starting point Monday of a small but impassioned demonstration in honor of International Migrants’ Day.

Carrying a megaphone in one hand and pamphlets in the other, Raúl Paiba, President of the Committee of Peruviana Refugees in Chile, led the procession to La Moneda presidential palace, where he submitted a letter with over 2,300 signatories to President Michelle Bachelet.

“Michelle Bachelet has done nothing” to further the rights of migrant workers, said Paiba, whose first two letters to Bachelet’s government never received a response. But with close to 60,000 Peruvian immigrants legally registered in Chile and tens of thousands more working “under the table” for little pay, his campaign is not losing any steam.

“Enough with the indifference!” Paiba screamed into the megaphone in Plaza de la Constitución, behind La Moneda. “We are making a contribution to this country!”

Indeed, according to the 2002 census, Peruvians are the hardest working immigrant community in Chile – with 85 percent of men and 75 percent of women employed. At the same time, they receive the brunt of xenophobia and police discrimination.

“I get called ‘Peruano Culiado’ (fucking Peruvian) all the time,” said Luis, a young immigrant who attended Monday’s event. “I get the worst treatment from the people I work with,” he added. “To them I’m just a ‘Peruano’ – I don’t even have a name.”

Luis arrived three years ago and acquired a steady job and temporary work authorization. Matters took a turn for the worse when he switched jobs before accumulating enough years with the same employer to obtain permanent legal status.

Before he was able to secure another job and renew his status, Chile’s international police confiscated Luis’ passport during one of the mass document searches they regularly conduct at the same bustling corner of Plaza de Armas. The police force some immigrants to forfeit their passports, Paiba explained, for merely being seated or carrying food in their backpacks, indications they are waiting to pick up an under-the-table job.

Now Luis has to sign in with the international police on a weekly basis until his papers are sorted out, a process that never ends for some Peruvians in Chile marked as “infiltrados extranjeros” (foreign infiltrators).

“You end up trapped in Chile,” said Paiba. Without documentation, it is nearly impossible obtain a job and normalize their status, he continued. The only way out of the country is to pay a fine at the Extranjería, the government office that deals with foreigners, take back your passport and head for the border.

Paiba’s appeal goes beyond an overhaul of labor laws to untangle visa procedures and ensure fair salaries and working conditions. The letter submitted to Bachelet also calls for free transit across Chilean borders, the regularization of all migrant and trafficked workers, reform of Chilean immigration law following international guidelines, and the punishment of groups that conduct human trafficking.

“The Chilean state has not taken on its social and humanitarian responsibility,” reads the letter. “The current politics of closed frontiers violates the rights to free transit, migration, and residence, to which Chile is committed in national law and international treaties.”

Moreover, this politics of closed frontiers, as Paiba calls it, “encourages irregular migration and the proliferation of mafia that engage in human trafficking, abusing the needs of immigrant workers.”

A recent report from the International Organization for Migration’s (IOM) Santiago office confirms an alarming increase in migrant smuggling and trafficking for sexual exploitation. Of 99 female trafficking victims interviewed in six regions throughout Chile, including the Metropolitan, 11 percent were minors and 23 percent were victims of internal trafficking. The scope of human trafficking is underreported, the study maintains, due its clandestine nature.

Mafia and human traffickers poised as employers and middlemen are not the only problem. The illegal status of the migrants leaves them vulnerable to police discrimination from the moment they reach the border.

As an example, Paiba said border police use “discretionary criteria” to select which immigrants can enter the country. The absence of reliable laws and a comprehensive migration policy may have served the Pinochet era well, he said, but it doesn’t address the needs of modern-day Chile.

In 2002 over 240,000 foreigners resided in Chile. Peruvians make up the largest single group, followed by Argentines, Bolivians, Ecuadorians and Colombians. This figure is 75 percent higher than just ten years earlier and is expected to grow higher.

The influx of migrants from neighboring countries has everything to do with regional economic inequalities rather than friendly border police. Families in Peru rely heavily on money sent from abroad, primarily the United States but from Chile, too. The Peruvian Consulate in Chile reported that remittances from Chile total about US$50 million annually.

Once in Chile, immigrants do have a few places to turn for a helping hand. A small group of churches offer food, housing, and employment assistance. Hogar de Christo, for example, offers housing for one night for 100 pesos, approximately 20 cents. Even so, Paibo said, some women sleep on the floor of dance clubs, and others on benches in Plaza de Armas.

Workers in the irregular labor market are finding increasingly creative ways to overcome the daily hazards of life, be it homelessness or defaulting employers. Having learned the hard way that “contratistas” (contractors that serve as middlemen between workers and businesses) often disappear without a check or a trace, some workers have taken to snapping pictures of their workplace and the contratistas themselves. If the paycheck never arrives, they can take their evidence to the international police.

Another group of Peruvians looking for an extra source of income set up a 24-hour black market liquor store on the ninth floor of a downtown building, said Paiba. The store charges a commission, and no policemen dares enter.

The insecurities that make up the lives of so many recent immigrants – lack of secure housing or medical care, inadequate labor protections – apply equally to millions of Chileans. “Their problems are our problems,” said Paiba, though for the moment, very few are turning their heads to look.

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