South America
Che makes a comeback in South America
Recent transformations of politics on the continent wrought by Chavez and Morales indicate a new direction inspired by the legendary revolutionary
- by Dan Adleman

In Achieving Our Country, Richard Rorty, one of America’s most interesting political philosophers, wrote, "Those who hope to persuade a nation to exert itself need to remind their country of what it can take pride in as well as what it should be ashamed of. They must tell inspiring stories about episodes and figures in the nation’s past. . . . Nations rely on artists and intellectuals to create images of, and to tell stories about, the national past. Competition for political leadership is in part a competition between differing stories about a nation’s self-identity, and between differing symbols of its greatness."

Nowadays, in South America, a great many progressives are invoking the spirit of Ernesto Che Guevera, the charismatic guerilla leader who helped wrench Cuba from Fulgencio Batista’s corrupt, kleptocratic military dictatorship...

Batista had had enormous American support because of his active collusion with giant corporations like United Fruit Company while most Cubans were forced to live in abject poverty. When Castro’s forces overthrew Batista in 1959, Che was made a powerful figure in the country’s new socialist government, but rather than reap the spoils of power and prestige, he went on to assist in socialist guerilla insurgencies all over the world. In 1967, while fighting Bolivia’s pro American military regime, he was killed by Bolivian military personnel under the auspices of the CIA, whose job it was to protect American business interests in the region.

There are many reasons why Che has so much resonance throughout South America. Guevera was a passionate opponent of what Lenin referred to as "the parasitism of imperialism," whereby imperial powers like America use oppressive corporatocracy-friendly regimes in order to buttress the lifestyles of their own corporations and citizens. Che once said,“Our share, the responsibility of the exploited and underdeveloped of the world, is to eliminate the foundations of imperialism: our oppressed nations, from where they extract capital, raw materials, technicians, and cheap labor, and to which they export new capital-instruments of domination-arms and all kinds of articles, thus submerging us in an absolute dependence.�? To many of us spoiled, insular First Worlders, Che’s words sound hystrionic. But after having suffered under the yoke of years of transparent CIA coups and tin-pot implants, the poor, beleaguered citizens of South America’s "banana republics" know just how right Che was.

Another reason why Che is so inspirational is his strident and articulate opposition to the kind of dogmatism that turned communism into the oppressive Chinese and Russian state religions that the American corporatocracy was able to point to as the undesirable alternative to capitalism. On this subject, he said, "One must have a great deal of humanity and a strong sense of justice and truth in order not to fall into extreme dogmatism and cold scholasticism, into isolation from the masses. We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples." Che believed that each socialist revolution has to be uniquely attuned to the exigencies of the individual country in which it takes place and must be willing to adapt and adjust for error and when necessary. In contradistinction to the rigid approaches that produced the horrors of the Gulag, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, Che advocated a protean approach whose animating principle was creative attention to the needs of the people rather than conformity to abstract principles.

Finally, in the early days of The Cold War, Che astutely opposed allowing a liberated Cuba to be forced into the invidious role of China’s or Russia’s pawn on the imperial geostrategic chessboard. Regrettably, after Che left, Castro made the mistake of making Cuba all-too-complicit in Moscow’s power plays against the US; and, as time went by, in response to America’s attempts to assassinate and overthrow him, Castro’s government became increasingly paranoid and oppressive towards the Cuban people.

Perhaps the most prominent carrier of the Guevera torch is Venezuela’s magnetic Hugo Chavez. In Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins describes how in the 70s and 80s international banks and economic hit men (EHM's) convinced Venezuela’s compliant government to borrow billions for vast infrastructure and industrial projects. When oil prices crashed, "the IMF imposed harsh austerity measures and pressured Caracas to support the corporatocracy in many other ways" at the expense of Venezuela’s enormous poor sector. According to Perkins, this was no accident. A good EHM does his best to saddle Third World governments with as much debt as possible, so when these countries inevitably default on their usurious loans, the EHM's come back and force them to privatize public industries and utilities, permit giant corporations to pillage valuable resources, and even support US imperial policy (as was the case with most of the so-called "Coalition of the Willing" that aided and abetted the US’s war on Iraq).

As poverty increased and hostility intensified, Venezuela’s class-polarization set the stage for the election of Hugo Chavez’s government. In 1998, Chavez, who often made a point of being seen in his Che t-shirt, won a landslide victory on promises to reverse the policies of the "predatory oligarchs" who’d squandered Venezuela’s oil revenues. Chavez would deploy a new Petrocarbon Policy, which would use oil wealth to fight poverty, disease, and illiteracy—as well as promote anti-imperialist solidarity, particularly in South America.

In 2002, the Bush administration funded a coup attempt against Chavez’s government. EHM's greased the palms required to foment a massive national strike in order to force Chavez out of office. Perkins points out that the national strike was a tried and true approach. This was the exact same modus operandi that the CIA had used to ouster Iran’s Mohammad Mossadeq from office after he had nationalized the country’s oil industry in 1951(he was replaced by the dictatorial Shah, whose cruel kleptocratic policies catalyzed the Iranian Revolution and the emergence of today’s vicious theocratic regime). But unlike Mossadeq, Chavez prevailed and was able to purge his army and government of US stoolies.

Chavez’s oil-rich government has become the linchpin in forming the pan-Latin front that Che envisioned so many years ago. In order to cement regional solidarity, he has extended his socialist policies far beyond national borders. For example, last year Venezuela bought $950 million in bonds from cash-strapped Argentina, whose economy has been ravaged by EHM and the International Monetary Fund. Chavez also allows Argentina to trade meat and dairy products for oil. Similarly, in an arrangement that’s equally beneficial for both nations, Venezuela has a special bartering arrangement with Cuba whereby Castro sends over much-needed Cuban doctors in return for oil. Other South American nations, like Columbia, receive discounted oil in return for good will. In fact, in a brilliant political maneuver, Chavez, whom Donald Rumsfeld has likened to Hitler, even sent cut-rate heating oil all the way over to receptive underprivileged folks in the Bronx and Boston. Pretty strange for an honourary member of the Axis of Evil!

Chavez has just gained a valuable comrade in Bolivia’s Evo Morales. Morales is an indigenous Bolivian and former coca-grower who also cites Che Guevera as a major influence on his egalitarian approach to governance. In fact, the lead-up to Morales’ presidency was not unlike that which put Chavez in power. In 1985, the IMF and World Bank persuaded the Bolivian government to privatize government industries and various public services. The result was disastrous. Multinational energy giants ran off with the lion’s share of gas and oil profits, while a Bechtel subsidiary took over the water system in Cochabamba, Bolivia’s third largest city. When Bechtel jacked up the water prices so high that Cochabamba’s poorest citizens literally couldn’t afford to hydrate themselves, the people revolted. And in the aftermath, Bechtel was given the boot and a socialist coca farmer from Cochabamba eventually became the nation’s president. Morales, who has formed very close ties with Chavez, has recently nationalized his nation’s oil and natural gas industries in defiance of the giant corporations that have exploited Bolivia’s resources for so many years.

Recently, Venezuela joined Mercosur, a South American trading alliance meant to circumvent American and European hegemony over trade networks. In 2005, at the Summit of the Americas in Argentina, not only did Mercosur member states shoot down the neoliberal Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement (which would allow larger countries like the US to overwhelm smaller, poorer ones through the forced removal of farming subsidies) that Bush was pushing, but Chavez and Morales left the premises to participate in an anti-Bush protest. And on the t-shirts and banners of the thousands who showed up to protest, the two most common themes were hatred of Bush and the resurrection of Che.