Posts by JuanZambrana:
Barack Obama and Evo Morales?
February 8th, 2015
By Juan Carlos Zambrana Marchetti.
Recently there have been heard some voices calling for the government of Evo Morales in Bolivia and the one of Barack Obama in the United States to draw closer. ¿Could that be possible?
Considering that the White House had its romantic interludes with Bolivia, it’s necessary to review them in order to discover what the interests are that could motivate Washington to pursue such a rapprochement.
On May 5, 1943, Franklin D. Roosevelt received Enrique Penaranda with all of the honors reserved for a valued ally. At Washington’s request, Penaranda had declared war against Germany, had accepted to pay indemnification to the nationalized Standard Oil Co., had turned over the tin at subsidized prices, and had machine-gunned the mine workers who protested. Roosevelt’s love for Penaranda, therefore, was well founded on material and geopolitical interests.
On October 22, 1963, president John Kennedy received president Victor Paz Estenssoro. The United States was living the coldest decade of the Cold War and the Soviet Union was criticizing the abuses of capitalism. The Cuban Revolution had triumphed and Che Guevara was the worldwide symbol of anti-imperialism.
Given the circumstances, Kennedy decided to wield the secret weapon that his country had been developing in Bolivia since 1950: subjection through economic dependency. Kennedy hailed conquered Bolivia as the model of the capitalist Good Revolution, in contrast to the communist Bad Revolution. He had therefore a great political interest in Bolivia.
On July 20, 1966, president Lyndon Johnson received in the White House the president-elect of Bolivia, Gen. Rene Barrientos Ortuño. After 14 years of a rightward turn in the revolution of 1952 that had dissolved the army, the Armed Forces had been rebuilt and put into power. What could have been Washington’s urgency in installing militarism in Bolivia? Che Guevara was preparing to enter Bolivia (October 3, 1966), and is quite possibly the CIA was already on his tracks.
On July 5, 1968, Johnson again received Barrientos, this time at his Texas ranch. The Bolivian president had executed Che to keep his ideas from spreading, and when the CIA’s participation was placed into evidence, he denied it totally, assuming all responsibility.
The three cases mentioned had to do with Bolivian governments that were complacent with the interventionism of the United States. They would be followed by the military dictatorships also supported by Washington, and then by neoliberalism, until the emergence of Evo Morales, who in order to defend the process of change had to expel ambassador Philip Goldberg, the DEA, and the USAID.
Thus, if it is obvious that Evo Morales is proudly anti-imperialist, and that Obama has declared him an enemy, what could be Washington’s interest in re-establishing the relationship? According to history, that would be to penetrate anew the structures of the Bolivian revolution, re-insert its subversive cadres both civil and military, promote politically the Right again, and create mechanisms of dependence that would renew its influence on the actions of the Bolivian government in order to move it rightwards.
In other words, to initiate for a second time a slow process of nation-destruction through non-violent means. If Obama does not recognize the legitimacy and value of the democratic and peaceful Bolivian revolution, reestablishing relations would be for the people of Bolivia a fatal error, one that they cannot afford to commit.
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The Bolivian Miracle: a Master class in political economy
December 21st, 2014
By Juan Carlos Zambrana.
Beyond the ideological differences and political rivalries that may exist in Bolivia, one thing that cannot be denied is that currently it is a very different country from the one that President Evo Morales found when he took power in January 2006.
With the re-founding of the country was born a new nation that took the first steps of its process of change, led by the hand of a young socialist government that confronted a capitalist world designed to boycott whatever political force opposed it. It was no easy task, and many doubted that the anti-imperialist project of an indigenous union leader could survive in such an adverse world.
However, eight years later, Bolivia’s economy has gone from being the poorest in the region to being one watched and emulated by other countries.
The Bolivian economic leap forward is an event so rare, extraordinary and marvelous that it fits perfectly the definition of miracle. The problem is that the miracles of a revolutionary government of the Left, apart from being abstract (impossible to understand within the logic of the Right), generate among the skeptics a curiosity to understand what is in fact the miracle, and what is the economic model that is achieving it.
That is why, when I learned that Bolivia’s Minister of Economy and Public Finance, Luis Arce Catacora, was in Washington, DC, I asked him for an interview to clear some of my doubts.
KEYS TO DEVELOPMENT
Asked about the difference between the new economic model and the neoliberal models of the past, he said that the fundamental change had been the recovery for the people of Bolivia of the ownership of the natural resources that the neoliberal governments had ceded to the transnational corporations, which took out of the country the greater part of the profits.
That multiplied income immensely, and it is on that basis that new policies for the management of those resources were initiated for the benefit of the Bolivian people.
That entails a redistribution of resources to benefit the population, by means of building infrastructure throughout the country, and cash bonuses for children, the elderly and expectant mothers, plus subsidies divided between the rural and urban areas, with good prices on electrical tariffs, communications, etc.
The third element is a heads-on struggle against poverty. He cited as an example that in 2005 extreme poverty in Bolivia exceeded 38 percent, the highest in South America, and that it has been reduced to 21 percent.
Another significant measure was that of income inequality, as in 2005 Bolivia was the second most unequal country in the continent, surpassed only by Brazil. Now, Bolivia is among the seven countries with the least inequality, having closed the gap between the richest and the poorest, but not to the detriment of the richest, but rather through an improvement in the economy of the poorest.
With respect to the extraordinary control of inflation that has been achieved, he said that Bolivia has shown that a social agenda can be fulfilled without altering macroeconomic stability, and that this is made possible by an adequate management of the income and expenses of the public sector, an adequate exchange-rates policy, and an impeccable management of the currency. That is the base on which a new country is being built –industrialized, productive, without poverty or illiteracy.
CAPITALISM IN CRISIS
I asked him how the socialist ideology promulgated by President Evo Morales is related to the strictly economic principles that Bolivia applies in a capitalist world. I found his answer enlightening.
First, it must be recognized that the capitalist system is in crisis. In that context, it is necessary to look for an alternative road to development.
The construction of the socialist way of our country is very clear. What happens is that the manner and speed at which we can advance toward the final objective determine the economic policies. And so, when the President met with the entrepreneurs and organizations that at first were not committed to the process of change, it was done because the inclusive nature of the new economic model, in contrast to the model of exclusion of the past, which kept certain sectors out of the economy.
Our model, rather, is characterized as one in which the private sector take part as well as the cooperatives, because they have to be brought in, under the umbrella of the State, in the construction of the new Bolivia.
Building the new economic model requires the participation of all in the construction of a new Bolivia, which must have a high social content. At this point it’s important to underline that the political and ideological principles will never go away, because the technical elements of an economy are just that, technicalities that obey an ideological and political line.
What we have done is to recover a Bolivian economy that was dependent, dollarized, and under enormous fiscal deficits, in order to make it independent, national, more just, and with a surplus. We have recovered the instruments to be able to lead to where we want to be, gradually, together with all of our sectors, as our Political Constitution of the State says, but not forgetting to where we are headed.
A RIGHT WITHOUT ALTERNATIVES
I asked him about the accusations from a sector of the Bolivian Right that, lacking arguments for use in its electoral campaign, has tried to downplay the economic success of the Left by claiming that the country’s prosperity derives from drug trafficking. He answered that he has had several debates with the opposition about this topic. He asked them how much money drug trafficking handled in Bolivia at present. The answer, according to one of their own foundations (Millenium Foundation), was that it was 100 million dollars, to which Arce responded that that meant nothing in an economy that moves 31 billion dollars.
He added that the Right has no alternatives to propose to the country, and that, therefore, it talks about drug trafficking, corruption, or anything else in an effort to besmirch economic results that have been praised not only at a national level, but above all by international organizations.
He said that the government is not concerned by this kind of commentary that lacks a scientific base, as it has requested an impartial entity, as is the European Union, to analyze the economy of coca in Bolivia, and that, further, its policies on coca are transparent and broadly supported.
The Right, to the contrary, has nothing to support its opinions except the bilious liver provoked by its fury that the Left has shown them that it knows how to manage well the economy. The Right had 20 years to do it, but it achieved not a single positive result for society, for the people, and this is why now their theory of neoliberalism has collapsed on them, like a ceiling on one’s head, without their being able to even understand what happened nor what the country needed.
ECONOMIC SOVEREIGNTY
I reminded the Minister that at the beginning of the process of change some leftist idealists had criticized it for not having cut off at the roots the relationship with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, credit institutions that historically functioned as conveyor belts of political ideology through dependency on conditioned credits, like the one that closed down several of our mines.
Considering that he had carried forward this economic model without fighting over it with anyone, it fell to me to ask him whether it is possible to do away completely with these institutions that promote neoliberalism, whether that was utopian, and whether it is possible to deal with them without applying their policies and without leaving the country’s doors wide open to foreign intervention.
He explained that the first thing decided by the administration of Morales when he rose to power was to have no program with the IMF; that the country had a program that had been adhered to by prior administrations, but that in April 2006 it was suspended, and that from that time there is no relationship of requirements with the IMF to tie the country to any program.
He said that the country remains a member of the IMF, of the World Bank, and various international organizations only because they are good forums for making known the new Bolivian policies. He ended by saying that the administration had recovered sovereignty not only as to politics but also as to economics.
Asked about the international reserves, he said that they had received a country with $us 1.7 billion, deposited mainly in dollars and in banks of the United States.
Now, the reserves are around $us 14.5 billion, but with a much more diversified makeup in which gold has grown and the Euro and other currencies have been introduced, while a percentage of U.S. dollars has been retained, but… all of it is deposited in banks that give Bolivia the greatest assurance of preserving sovereignty over its resources.
In other words: a recovery of natural resources, a fair redistribution, a struggle against poverty and inequality, productive organization, and an implementation of inclusive policies seem to be the secret of this novel model whose name says much: the Productive Communitarian Social Economic Model. Without a doubt, the Bolivian Miracle that this model has wrought shows that it is a valuable road map for the liberation of the oppressed peoples. Another contribution of Bolivia to the world.
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Hugo Chavez in the context of history
December 5th, 2013By Juan Carlos Zambrana.
(An article about how Hugo Chavez when living became a historical figure for Venezuela)
Bolivian Newspaper Cambio.
Thanks to Chavez, other peoples were able to compete in a democracy against the interests of looting, to have access to government, and to initiate profound processes of decolonization…
Juan Carlos Zambrana Marchetti *
When history shows that even the liberators who now are universally recognized, like Simon Bolivar, were resisted while alive by the social sector that lost power, it is showing us the thankless side of patriotism. It would seem that liberty is better understood in a historical perspective, for it is only from a distance that we begin to understand, for example, that in the past we never had it. In reality, there is an eternal war for freedom, in which we have merely won battles.
So long does the war for liberty go on that even Bolivar could not see his work completed, as the new republics reached agreements with the dominant classes of the colonies, leaving intact the economic structure of looting and giving rise to a republican era of neocolonial characteristics: a long historical period in which Latin America continued to be looted and its peoples exploited, albeit in different ways.
The fact is that the interests of looting and exploitation, having economic power in their hands, adapted with agility to hide the new forms of domination, and did so long before the peoples could even realize that they were still slaves. The control of information with which the institutionalized deceit was perpetrated caused the Latin American peoples to ignore during the 20th Century that, for example, the “free market” was not free, that “democracy” was not the government of the people, and that “liberty” was no more than freedom to feed the insatiable voracity of predatory and accumulative capitalism.
During the decade of the 60s there emerged the figure of Ernesto Che Guevara, another of the frustrated visionaries who left a deep imprint on the imagination of humankind. He happened to live during the expansion of U.S. neocolonialism through “nation-building” programs to build nations complacent with Washington’s abusive policies.
Guevara fought against that, but in his last campaign it befell him to face one of the Latin American military dictatorships that the government of Richard Nixon had supported in order to impose his policies on the continent.
Brandishing a rifle to confront the world order of the United States led Che Guevara to his immolation at the hands of the CIA, but turned him into the inspirational figure of anti-imperialism at a world level.
After the bloody dictatorships of the 70s, which continued to loot their countries, there came the era of weak democracies. These were incipient democracies that, having been born amidst the smell of gunpowder and under the hard breathing of the dictators, were content to recover the state of rights and to preserve it from new humiliations. It was hard to aspire to more, because the peoples were already so alienated by the corporate media that the Right continued to wield important political power within a representative democracy in which the people did not govern, but were instead “represented” by a candidate who was approved, one way or another, by Washington’s interests. So much so, that, in those countries where the Left reached power, it did so only with great efforts, through broad coalitions with little strength to combat the powerful political and economic international structure of looting.
Predatory capitalism is agile when it comes to morphing and to always anticipating the defense that the peoples might put up. That was never as evident as in the 80s. After the “failure” of the Left under pressure of the “worldwide system”, there was in Latin America a resurgence of the old colonialism of Spain, which had mutated into English colonialism, and later into the neocolonialism of the United States. The latter, after World War II, had already taken on the disguise of humanitarian assistance, economic aid, privatization and capitalization. It returned during the 80s with a brand-new mask called “neoliberalism” and backed by a series of control mechanisms implemented at the time by “independent” institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the other organizations of the baneful “Washington Consensus.”
Neoliberalism imposed looting on Latin America through its explicit policy of turning over all natural resources and productive sectors to international private enterprise, and further to take away from government its social function and its ability to fulfill it. It was the cruel era of institutionalized looting in the “democratic” way.
It is during that period of impune expansion of inequality that the figure of Hugo Chavez rises up to lead the new battle for the liberty of the peoples. It is the new stage of the eternal asymmetric war, which is possible only in the mind of visionaries: to confront a world order untouchable until then, and which, in this case, had turned democracy into the patrimony of the corporations –a corporatocracy, or, better yet, a pantomime to stage imitations of democracy on a set in which only the agents of the interests of looting took part.
Only Hugo Chavez, inspired in the thinking of Bolivar, puts into practice the new socialism of the 21th Century, and elevated it until it has changed into a paradigm that is internationally recognized as a viable democratic option, not just to face the crisis of predatory capitalism and of representative democracy, but also to build the society of greater justice to which humanity so aspires.
Thanks to Chavez, other peoples were able to compete in a democracy against the interests of looting, to access government, and to initiate profound processes of decolonization that have changed the face of the continent and begin to be felt in other regions of the world. Hugo Chavez, as the equalizer of asymmetries in democracy, is the most important figure of the new battle for the liberation of the peoples. He is the man who is turning into reality the dream of his afore-mentioned predecessors.
Not everyone sees things as clearly, because the Venezuelan opposition in Miami, making use of the President’s delicate health, seeks to take away yet another electoral victory of the Venezuelan people and give the impression that there is a “vacuum of power” in Caracas.
That way of thinking is a leftover of the old paradigm of power from centuries past, wholly obsolete and inapplicable, in countries with a participatory democracy like Venezuela and Bolivia, where the process of decolonization is irreversible because it is founded on an economic model that is more just, and because it is defended by the people from the trenches of their social organizations.
What Chavez has done is, in many respects, immeasurable, although the opposition needs a historical perspective to assimilate and begin to understand it. May God grant long life to the President.
(*) Correspondent of Cambio newspaper in the United States
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Bolivia is not descending Into Rogue State Status
November 19th, 2013By Juan Carlos Zambrana Marchetti.
On October 28, 2013, The Wall Street Journal published an article by Mary Anastasia O’Grady entitled ““Bolivia’s Descent Into Rogue State Status.” A glance at the article is enough to understand why this lady cannot be taken seriously. She supports her accusations with phrases such as these: “something similar may be happening in Bolivia…reports from the ground suggest…unconfirmed reports say…Iran may be using its Bolivian network…a source who did not want to be identified…according to my source, a witness said…one Bolivian I know claims… there are rumors.” It’s ridiculous that based on this quality of “information” this lady clumsily concludes that the Andean country is “an international hub of organized crime and a safe haven for terrorists.” Such a lack of seriousness does not merit a response, but Bolivia does, and that is why I’ll clear up at least some of what she has written.
1. “In the years after a brutal 10-year Soviet occupation, Afghanistan became a petri dish in which a culture of organized crime, radical politics and religious fundamentalism festered—and where Osama bin Laden set up operations.”
She did not finish the story and say that the United States was part of that petri dish, with the CIA intervening to arm Islamist groups and later with a brutal occupation that is now 12 years old, that drug traffic has multiplied exponentially, and that so has terrorism along with corruption.
2. “Evo Morales, who is also the elected president of the coca producers’ confederation, and Vice President Alvaro García Linera, formerly of the Maoist Tupac Katari Guerrilla Army, began building their repressive narco-state when they took office in 2006.”
The project to fix in the collective consciousness an image of Bolivia, Venezuela, and Ecuador as the Latin American axis of evil is an old project of the Republican right wing, the Pentagon, the CIA, the other “security” agencies, the think tanks of the extreme Right, and puppets organizations like the Inter American Institute for Democracy, which published Douglas Farah’s booklets that slandered the three anti-imperialist governments mentioned above. The project has been underway since long ago, and I denounced it on October 19, 2010, reporting from the Capitol, in an article I titled Report on: “The Danger in the Andes.”
With this article, The Wall Street Journal simply joined the Miami Herald and Univision as a launch pad for the extreme Right to broadcast its venom. They do humanity a favor by taking off the mask of “journalism.”
3. “With the opposition cowed, President Morales has turned Bolivia into an international hub of organized crime and a safe haven for terrorists. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has been expelled.”
The constant implication that Evo Morales has destroyed the opposition by using the justice system refers to the historical prosecution of crime that emerges from power, which was untouchable during the governments of the Right that looted the country, and that, as owners of the justice system, legally protected their own criminality. The mention of the DEA’s expulsion in the context of a supposed rise in drug trafficking suggests that the institution is an authority in the fight against drugs, a lie that these days only a child could believe.
The War on Drugs, invented by U.S. political villain Richard Nixon, was used politically beginning in the 70s to cover up the right-wing drug traffickers for purposes of using the proceeds to finance counter-revolutionary guerrillas. In order to justify its lack of action against drug trafficking, the United States, in the 80s, criminalized the coca leaf, thus criminalizing the Bolivian indigenous people for their legendary resistance to imperialism. It militarized the Chapare province of Cochabamba and launched a war against the indigenous people, the resistance to which drew national and international sympathy. The DEA was expelled for its corruption, for functioning as a barricade of the CIA, for the crimes it committed in unjustly machine-gunning indigenous women and children who had nothing to do with the drug traffic and who merely opposed the aerial spraying of crops with toxic chemicals. The DEA is simply no authority in the fight against drugs. If what it did in Bolivia had been done in carrying out its police functions, it would have also militarized the United States, where the greatest drug market in the world is found, while the corporate media don’t mention that criminal impunity.
4. “According to the Bolivian daily La Razón, Bolivia’s prospective consul to Lebanon was detained by Bolivian officials for allegedly trying to smuggle 392 kilos of cocaine to Ghana. “
This lady decided to invent the word “prospective” as a substitute for the original information in La Razón, in that the Catholic man from Lebanon, married to a Bolivian women and militant in the MAS, who is now in prison for drug trafficking, had been suggested as a consul but his name was rejected by the ministry of foreign affairs. She forgot also to recognize that he was arrested by the Bolivian anti-narcotics force, which works better than the DEA.
5. “Thanks to steady cocaine demand, the Bolivian economy is awash in cash.”
I don’t know what this lady may know of monetary policy and the use of liquid assets in the precarious economies of countries repressed through abuse and looting. She seems not to know that, facing the exclusion imposed by the model of neoliberal capitalism, broad popular sectors of the Bolivian people turned to the informal economy that long allowed them to survive. Having cash on hand was the last defense of the poor against an oppressive economic system that had no space for them. However, once the long emergency was overcome, and with those sectors brought into economic activity of a more just model, the administration of President Evo Morales has promoted strict regulations on the use of cash, and Bolivia is the only country in the world that has a minister to fight corruption. That is why the international Financial Action Task Force (FATF) took Bolivia off its obscure list of countries with inadequate legislation to fight money laundering. The United Nations has highlighted Bolivia’s work not only in the fight against money laundering, but also its fight against narcotics trafficking.
In reality, Ms. O’Grady seems surprised that Bolivia under the administration of Evo Morales has experienced a remarkable economic upturn. Maybe it’s not convenient for her that the world know the truth: that Bolivia was never poor, but impoverished by looting under successive powers –that when Morales took office the country received from the oil transnational corporations that exploited its gas only 360 million dollars, and that, after nationalization, that figure will surpass in 2013 the amount of 5 billion dollars, which represents an increase of 1,388 percent. That money is invested in infrastructure, in subsidies at the national level, as with fuel, and in social programs that include monetary assistance such as payments for expectant mothers, the elderly, and children.
6. “The Tehran connection is no secret. Iran is a nonvoting member of the “Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas” (ALBA). Its voting members are Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela.”
She forgot that other voting members are Antigua, Barbuda, Dominica, and San Vincent and the Grenadines. That Saint Lucia and Surinam are special invited members, that Haiti was extended the special condition of permanent member, and that Honduras was a full member until the coup d’état of 2009 supported by the United States. Apart from her errors in the information, O’Grady is also wrong in her analysis, because she suggests that there is something wrong in that relationship with Iran, which she uses as a basis for the accusation that Bolivia promotes terrorism. The logic applied is as follows. Iran protects the Palestinians, Israel and the United States consider the Palestinians terrorists, which makes Iran terrorist, Bolivia has diplomatic relations with Iran, thus Bolivia is terrorist. Such an aberrant use of logic by part of the imperialist complex of the United States, which is served by this lady, is a danger for all humanity, because now the government spies on the entire world and has sufficient information to put together all the conspiracy theories that it wishes, no matter how incredible they may be.
The reality is that Bolivia will not be the next Afghanistan, for a series of reasons that this lady cannot even begin to understand. First, its constitution no longer allows it to host U.S. military bases. Second, it no longer has USAID implanted on its territory in order to infect it with the Trojan viruses of discontent, destabilization, and financing for the right wing and subversive movements. Third, the Bolivian military now serves its country and not the U.S. embassy. Fourth, Bolivia has learned not to depend economically on the United States. Fifth, Bolivia has already defeated the separatism that the United States traditionally uses to divide countries of interest and later invade them in defense of a rebel people who ask for help. Sixth, ever since 1950, when the United States under president Harry Truman launched its international campaign to control the countries of the third world by means of technical and economic assistance, until 2003, when the Bolivian people went out on the streets to protest peacefully against the last neoliberal puppet of Washington, Bolivia has lived through the 53 years of humiliation that it took to find the perfect formula to resist imperialism under democracy. Bolivia is now a world symbol of decolonization, and that is the reason for the hate that the extreme-right elites who control power in the United States have for the former.
I am fully confident that the international community will know how to tell facts from lies in the article of Ms. O’Grady, because a failure to do so would be an offense to median intelligence.
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