The Rag Blog

Caracas, feb 08, ABN (Tessa Marsman)- At times it is complicated to figure out how they really want to design socialism in Venezuela. What really is socialism of the XXI century? One thing is sure the socialism of the Bolivarian Revolution does not resemble the reformist European socialism from the previous century «that continues to find a way to justify and include capitalism», says the influential Venezuelan opinion leader, Haiman el Troudi, in an interview with the Agencia Bolivariana de Noticias.

«Neither do we want a scientific socialism like they applied in east Europe in the twentieth century», explains El Troudi. «A Socialism of centralized planning in which things operate directed from above».

Socialism of the XXI century is directed from below. It is not the state that will be omnipresent in planning everything that happens in the Venezuelan society. People participate in adapting their own concrete local plan, the same way as we have seen with the formation of the community councils.

The Venezuelan Community Councils are neighbourhood watches with the power and the means to resolve local problems varying from broken sewer systems till replacement of a polluting factory. These are problems that up till now were hardly resolved by local corrupt governments in the many poor neighbourhoods of the country.

The decisiveness of these community councils will be implemented soon with the new Enabling Law that gives Chávez the power to pass decrees without deliberation them in the parliament.

The law is part of the «Five Motors» aimed at driving Venezuela towards what Chávez has termed «Socialism of the 21st Century» were first announced in early January during the swearing-in of Chávez’s new cabinet. The first motor is the «enabling» law, the second is around constitutional reform, the third, «morals and enlightenment», activated yesterday, involves a change in the educational system, while the fourth motor, «the new geometry of power» deals with the reconfiguration of state power, and the fifth motor relates to the explosion of communal power in the Communal Councils.

For Hugo Chavez, large, industrial mega projects could turn into a political mine field. The contradiction between Chavez’s rhetoric stressing social equality, on the one hand, and environmental abuses on the other, was driven home to me over this past summer when I attended the first ever environmental conference of Lake Maracaibo. The event was held in the city of Maracaibo itself, the capital of Zulia state, and organized by the government’s Institute for the Conservation of Lake Maracaibo (known by the Spanish acronym ICLAM).

Somewhat oddly, outside of the dining hall where conference participants ate lunch mining companies had set up promotional booths. Walking through an adjacent hallway, scantily clad women working for mining and oil companies plied me with glossy pamphlets and even candy. Later during the conference itself, one panelist, a representative from the local development agency Corpozulia, gave a rosy presentation about new port and infrastructure projects planned for the state of Zulia.

Later, I went back to the luxurious Hotel Kristoff where the government had put me up for the duration of my stay. One morning, sitting at a table overlooking the hotel pool, I was joined by Jorge Hinestroza, a sociologist at the University of Zulia and former General Coordinator of the Federation of Zulia Ecologists.

Sierra of Perija: Area of Conflict

Hinestroza spoke to me of destructive coal mining in the Sierra of Perija, a mountain range which marks a section of the border between Venezuela and Colombia. The area, which is home to large coal deposits, has suffered severe deforestation.

Industrial coal production, Hinestroza explained, had damaged Indian lands. He complained that America Port, a new project proposed by Corpozulia, would prove “catastrophic for mangrove vegetation in the area.” The project, he continued, was linked to coal exploitation. What’s more, Corpozulia itself owned the mining concessions.

According to reports, the Añú community, comprised of 3,000 people living around the Lake Sinamaica region in Zulia, is concerned about the devastation that would result from the construction of a deep-water port in the area, for exporting coal.

If Chavez does not attend to rising calls for greater environmental controls, he will lose support amongst one of his most loyal constituencies, the indigenous population. Already, industrial mega projects have led to angry protest and undermined public confidence in the regime. For Chavez, it is surely one of the thorniest problems that his government must confront.

Launching Raids into Indian Country

Though Indians inhabiting the Sierra of Perija have had to confront extensive coal mining in the Chavez era, it’s not as if indigenous peoples living in the area are strangers to conflict. In the first half of the twentieth century, Motilon Indians [also known as the Bari], which included several indigenous groups inhabiting the area of Perijá, confronted British and American oil prospectors.

In 2001, I was living in Maracaibo doing research for my dissertation dealing with the environmental history of oil development in Lake Maracaibo. Working in the historical archive, I was struck by historical accounts of oil prospectors headed to Indian country.

In 1914, for example, one oil expedition marched into the jungle accompanied by a large company of 50 peons. In seeking to penetrate Motilon Indian country, oil prospectors were aided by the Venezuelan government. As one oil pioneer put it, “we had for arms 12 Mauser military rifles from the government. Every man had either a revolver or a rifle.”

Oil prospectors on one expedition discovered a Motilon house, but were forced to make a harrowing escape in canoes along river rapids when Indians appeared. The oil men shot back, hitting at least twelve men.

One oilman commented: “I do not like the idea of destroying a whole community of men, women and children. But this would be the only thing to do unless peace is made … If oil is found up the Lora [River], peaceful relations with the Indians would be worth several hundred thousand dollars to the company.”

“It Would Be Convenient to Suppress Them with Gas or Grenades”

Eventually, oil infrastructure in Indian country proceeded. Indians had to contend not only with armed prospectors but also growing contamination from open earth oil sumps and dwindling hunting grounds.

For the growing American community in Maracaibo, the Motilones were a nuisance. One English language paper, the Tropical Sun, remarked, “It would be convenient to suppress the Motilon Indians by attacking them with asphyxiating gas or explosive grenades.”

There are no documented cases of large scale artillery attacks on the Motilon Indians. However, Father Cesareo de Armellada, a Capuchin priest who later played a pivotal role in contacting groups of Motilones, claimed that

“It was said by some sotto voce and others even admitted publicly that in the Colombian region [of Perija] the national army organized raids under the slogan of: there is no other way. And it is also said that in the same region the Motilones were bombed by airplanes. The same thing has been repeated to me by many people living within the Venezuelan region of Perija and Colon.”

Diplomatic relations between Mexico and Venezuela seem to have become a sort of sequel to the famous Mexican film “Dos tipos de cuidado” (Two Dangerous Fellows) [*]. President Felipe Calderón even went so far as to imitate one of the most memorable moments in the film, the scene where Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete engage in an intense singing duel. Just last Friday, taking on the role of Jorge Negrete, the man from Michoacan dedicated a verse to Hugo Chávez: “We know not here such braggarts, but if needs be, a mighty will can fill our hearts.”

The Mexican leader seems to be obsessed with the president of Venezuela. Time and again he has tried to portray him as some new empire of evil. During the election campaign last year, he sought to undermine his opponent Andrés Manuel López Obrador by comparing him to Chávez. He once again lashed out at the Venezuelan without mentioning him by name early this year in El Salvador. During his recent trip to Europe, he went all out against Chávez.

Sources say that the Mexican’s aim is to spark a debate of ideas on the merits of free trade and the dangers of populism and state control. But it is striking how little substance can be found in Calderón’s attacks on the process of change in Venezuela. He does rely, however, on the dense cloud of lies and half-truths that’s been floating around about that country and distorting reality rather than explaining it.

Is it true that the Venezuelan economy is going off the rails and that is president is driving to country into hideous poverty? No, it isn’t. In opposition to the Washington Consensus, the Bolivarian Revolution has set in motion a series of highly successful policies. Oil revenue has been channelled into programs for education, health, subsidized food, diversification of industry and job creation. According to Joseph Stiglitz, Chávez “seems to have had success bringing health and education to the neighbourhoods of Caracas, where people had previously seen little benefit from the country’s rich petroleum resources.” (translated from Spanish).

The results are plain to see. The minimum wage in Venezuela is now $220 (along with benefits like a 3-month bonus) when just a few years ago it was barely $100. It is one of the highest in Latin America, and well above that received by Mexican workers: $137.

Venezuela can boast of the highest economic growth rate in South American in the last three years, nearly double the regional average. In 2004, the GDP grew by 17.3%. A year later, it grew by 9.3% and in 2006 by 10.3%. Projections for 2007 suggest it could grow by another 6%. This economic boom has gone hand-in-hand with high rates of employment, a significant recovery of real wages and a 17% increase in consumption.

If we measure Venezuela’s progress according to the UN’s Human Development Index, we’ll find that the country went from 75th place in 2005 to 72nd a year later. Life expectancy is now 73 years, and adult literacy is now an impressive 93%. Infant mortality has dropped to 16 for every thousand births. The poverty level fell from 55.1% in 2003 to 33.9% by the first quarter of 2006.

It’s strange to be vindicated by Grover Norquist, a neocon flunky connected to the American Enterprise Institute, where Bush gets his criminal “minds,” and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

In regard to the Iraq invasion and occupation, Norquist declares: “Everything the advocates of war said would happen hasn’t happened. And all the things the critics said would happen have happened.”

Please excuse my fat head. Instead, let us consider other, more portentous items of interest the “conservative” Norquist has said as of late. Bush’s neocons, or rather the neocons that run Bush, are “effectively saying, ‘Invade Iran. Then everyone will see how smart we are.’ But after you’ve lost x number of times at the roulette wheel, do you double-down?”

I’m not sure what sort of game Norquist is playing here, as he can’t be that stupid. Invasions and mass murder campaigns have nothing to do with a roulette wheel, or “winning” what a fence post understands cannot be won. Instead, it has everything to do with killing Arabs and Muslim, wrecking their countries, breaking said countries up into chunks for later micromanagement, as people set against each other along ethnic and religious lines cannot possibly hope to come together and defeat the invader. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who now warns us of the calamity to come in Iran, said it best: “the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.”

This unending sequel to I, II & III contains foul language. You don’t like it ? Tough!
I have been way too polite with you lot so far – Enough is enough.
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I read that the criminal you voted for not once but twice and don’t give me this crap about your rigged elections – this is your screwed democracy and this is not my problem and you voted TWICE for a bastard, criminal, thug , so shut up and don’t you interrupt because I have heaps to tell you…

So this bastard of yours wants 3 trillion dollars for his war efforts in Iraq.
Four years down the line and your fucked up country with its equally fucked up military has not managed to control and seize a country the size of California.
You can stuff your flags right where the sun does not shine for starters.

Three trillion dollars to kill more innocent,poor people who have done absolutely nothing to you. Nor they nor their President Saddam Hussein nor his government.

And dont’you give me the crap about your upholding a dictator.
For us he was a saint not a dictator and when you could not get him through years and years of inflicting misery and starvation through your smart criminal sanctions, you got us and him with your filthy smart bombs…And tell that shitty anti-war “liberal” “progressive” reps of yours that you did not uphold him in power, the people of Iraq did, by hook or by crook…and however much you hate it.

So get off your high sham pedestals for you are nothing and deserve nothing but the utmost contempt and get that truth right into your thick little skulls, skulls numbed with drugs, junk food, violence and trashy soap operas and of course…dollars.

I don’t know how it ends. I saw a bleak presentiment, five years ago. Saw destruction hang like a dark satanic cloud over the bully’s pulpit at the UN, where the President preached his disdainful jeremiad to the lesser nations. I heard the blood dimmed tide roar when the Secretary of State proclaimed his holy justification for the slaughter of innocents.

Still, I blew on the embers of hope as best I could. Cooler heads could yet prevail. Grownups could come to the rescue, a light could spring over the dark brink eastward.

Now I find it hard to look. Our president can’t. He foretells ends that confound reason. Full of passionate intensity, he professes beliefs that reveal only a fool’s understanding. Yet even so, I hope, I pray, I hope again, that it will somehow turn out. Not good, maybe but please God, not disastrously bad.

Inshallah, not apocalypse bad, not Gotterdammerung bad.

But I don’t know how that happens.

And I got a bad, bad feeling.

For I can see the American president, desperate to arrest what he at long last grasps is a long slide to ruin, turning to Iran. Some captain sent to patrol in confrontational territory provokes another captain. Shots are fired, men die. Bombs explode. Hamas and Hizbolla are stirred. Israel, threatened, and given a long-awaited opportunity, attacks. The Straits of Hormuz are blocked.

Oil goes to $150. Iraq vanishes from the television screens as quickly as Afghanistan before it. Congress doesn’t know whether to stagger into the street or stand at attention. The president is a wartime president again.

None of the other possibilities look much better.

For the streets, now red with blood, could become rivers. Sunni and Shia and Kurd slaughter each other at genocidal rates. The Saudis call on the president in private. This cannot go on, they say. The Turks threaten to calm by force a destabilizing Kurdistan. The Russians put their fingers meaningfully to their lips. The worried rulers of the “moderate” oil states, contemplating the conflagration’s spread, hint that they may have to intervene if Washington does not do something.

Bush announces, “Powell was right. We broke it. And now we own it. Regrettably, liberation will have to wait Bottom line–we invaded it and we conquered it, and now its ours.” He halts forty years’ practice of sanctioning the government of client states by locals, and says “You know the trouble was, we just weren’t running the place like a business. And this time it by god will pay for itself.”

The longer the US and Britain back dictatorial regimes in the Middle East the more explosive the region will become

Politicians, especially in times of geopolitical deadlock, adopt a word or a concept to sell to the public. In 1973, at the peak of cold-war tensions, the US secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, coined the term “detente”. Such words gain a currency and become useful political tools to escape policy quagmires. As the Middle East lurches from crisis to crisis, Tony Blair, George Bush and Condoleezza Rice compulsively repeat the word “moderates” to describe their allies in the region. But the concept of moderate is merely the latest attempt to market a failed policy, while offering a facile hedge against accusations of Islamophobia and anti-Islamic policies.

Western leaders have simply chosen a few Arab rulers they believe are still saleable to western audiences. And, as the word moderate has been repeated by western leaders and echoed in the international media, these rulers have begun to believe their own billing. But who are they, and are they moderate? Their selection has been fluid at the periphery but solid at the core. Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt clearly qualify, whereas Syria, an ally during the 1990-91 Gulf war, was once at the periphery but fell out of step with US interests after 9/11. Likewise, after the death of Arafat and the victory of Hamas, Fatah became moderate, while Iran, moderate under the shah, became “radical” after the 1979 Islamic revolution.

This minuet of political marketing may play well in the west, but not in the Arab world, where the double standards and manipulation are all too plain to see. The Saudi Wahhabis are, after all, fanatics; Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak is intolerant of dissent; and Jordan, the state closest to the western ideal, is a marginal player. These countries’ appalling human rights records, lack of transparency and repression rank them among the world’s least moderate. Is there such a thing as a “moderate public beheading”? For the US and UK governments there clearly is, because all departures from the ideals of liberal democracy and social justice are rooted in “tradition”. Hence bribes, beheadings and the oppression of women and minorities are traditional, and because whatever is traditional is not radical, it must be moderate.

Nothing, it seems, is more moderate than inertia. So inertia pays. Egypt has received an average of $1.3bn a year in military aid from the US since 1979, and $815m a year in economic assistance. Saudi Arabia relies on oil revenues and the international legitimacy provided by membership of such moderate bulwarks as the WTO and the IMF.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Pentagon officials undercut the intelligence community in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq by insisting in briefings to the White House that there was a clear relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, the Defense Department’s inspector general said Friday.

Acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the office headed by former Pentagon policy chief Douglas J. Feith took “inappropriate” actions in advancing conclusions on al Qaeda connections not backed up by the nation’s intelligence agencies.

Gimble said that while the actions of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy “were not illegal or unauthorized,” they “did not provide the most accurate analysis of intelligence to senior decision makers” at a time when the White House was moving toward war with Iraq.

“I can’t think of a more devastating commentary,” said Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan.

He cited Gimble’s findings that Feith’s office was, despite doubts expressed by the intelligence community, pushing conclusions that September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta had met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague five months before the attack, and that there were “multiple areas of cooperation” between Iraq and al Qaeda, including shared pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.

For the first time, one of Iraq’s principal insurgent groups has set out the terms of a ceasefire that would allow American and British forces to leave the country they invaded almost four years ago.

The present terms would be impossible for any US administration to meet – but the words of Abu Salih Al-Jeelani, one of the military leaders of the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Resistance Movement show that the groups which have taken more than 3,000 American lives are actively discussing the opening of contacts with the occupation army.

Al-Jeelani’s group, which also calls itself the “20th Revolution Brigades”, is the military wing of the original insurgent organisation that began its fierce attacks on US forces shortly after the invasion of 2003. The statement is, therefore, of potentially great importance, although it clearly represents only the views of Sunni Muslim fighters.

Shia militias are nowhere mentioned. The demands include the cancellation of the entire Iraqi constitution – almost certainly because the document, in effect, awards oil-bearing areas of Iraq to Shia and Kurds, but not to the minority Sunni community. Yet the Sunnis remain Washington’s principal enemies in the Iraqi war.

“Discussions and negotiations are a principle we believe in to overcome the situation in which Iraqi bloodletting continues,” al-Jeelani said in a statement that was passed to The Independent. “Should the Americans wish to negotiate their withdrawal from our country and leave our people to live in peace, then we will negotiate subject to specific conditions and circumstances.”

Al-Jeelani suggests the United Nations, the Arab League or the Islamic Conference might lead such negotiations and would have to guarantee the security of the participants.

Then come the conditions:

* The release of 5,000 detainees held in Iraqi prisons as “proof of goodwill”.

* Recognition “of the legitimacy of the resistance and the legitimacy of its role in representing the will of the Iraqi people”.

* An internationally guaranteed timetable for all agreements.

* The negotiations to take place in public.

* The resistance “must be represented by a committee comprising the representatives of all the jihadist brigades”.

BAGHDAD, 8 Feb 2007 (IRIN) – “I’m an 11-year-old boy who has never been to school – so I can neither read nor write. For the past two years I have been living on the streets of Baghdad, surviving on leftovers that I scavenge from garbage or by stealing from people and shop-lifting.

“When I first started, I was scared that at any time the police would catch me for stealing. Now it has become easy for me to steal. I have become an expert and the proof is the title my peers have given me. They call me ‘the young king’.

“People might be surprised to hear a child like me being happy for being an expert at stealing and looting things but in a country like Iraq, where most people are without homes and food, the hero is the one who can survive by whatever means.

“I’m an orphan and don’t know who my parents are. Nor do I know if they are alive or dead. I was taken into an orphanage when I was four years old and since then different people have been taking care of me. They were not good people. During [former president Saddam Hussein] Saddam’s time, police officers sometimes used to come and have sex with older boys.

“I ran away from the orphanage during the [US-led] invasion with another three boys in 2003. But three months ago they abandoned me as they discovered the world of drugs.