‘This is a victory for the Latin American revolution’
Well there is life beyond Harry’s Place…this is from Richard Gott at Comment is Free
The leftist winds of change blowing strongly through South America in the 21st century arrived this month in Paraguay, where the latest member of the extraordinary coalition assembled over the past 10 years by Hugo Chávez of Venezuela assumed office in Asunción. President Fernando Lugo, a former radical bishop well-versed in liberation theology, who won an election in April with the support of a hastily-assembled Alliance for Change, is the new hope of the left, joining Chávez, Evo Morales of Bolivia, and President Rafael Correa of Ecuador in a fresh alliance of political leaders putting social and economic reform at the top of the agenda. Lugo’s victory marked a significant moment in the history of Paraguay, defeating a corrupt and exhausted Colorado party that had ruled the country for more than six decades, most of the time under the leadership of a military dictator.
On the morning after his inauguration, Lugo travelled with Chávez to the northern town of San Pedro where he was once the bishop, and received from the hands of the Venezuelan president a replica of the sword of Simón Bolívar, a symbolic act that welcomed the new recruit into the radical band of “Bolívarian” brothers that Chávez has created. Chávez’s ambitions had been confined heretofore to the Andean countries once liberated by Bolívar from Spanish rule at the beginning of the 19th century, but this new friendship with Paraguay is a historical first. In his southward march from Venezuela, Bolívar never got beyond Bolivia, and indeed was a sworn enemy of Paraguay’s founding father, the ascetic lawyer José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia.
After a week in office, Lugo has left no one in any doubt where he stands. Like Correa in Ecuador, he sees no further use for the tutelage of the International Monetary Fund, preferring the advice of the US economist Joseph Stiglitz who has suggested that a 10% tax on beef and soya exports would do wonders for the country’s low tax base. The wealthy landowners would complain, as they have done in neighbouring Argentina, but they are unlikely to risk alienating Lugo’s support among the rural poor so early in his presidency.
Another bastion of the old conservative order is the legal system, where root and branch reform is expected imminently. Lugo has already begun clearing the decks with the military and the police, traditionally the arbiters of Paraguay’s political affairs. He has put a definitive end to the “period of transition” that has constrained the country’s democratic practice since the downfall of General Alfredo Stroessner, nearly 20 years ago in 1989, and brought in an entirely fresh high command.
A purge of the diplomatic service will follow, with the removal of an entire generation of ambassadorial placemen. The appointment as foreign minister of Alejandro Hamed, a leftist historian who has been the ambassador in Beirut, has already alarmed Israel and the United States. The Israelis have a supporter in the vice-president, Federico Franco of the Liberal party, but Franco does not form part of Lugo’s inner group of political advisers. This is a matter of some irritation to Franco, since Lugo’s electoral victory was won in part with the support of the powerful Liberal machine.
In his inaugural speech, Lugo called for an unusual combination of austerity and happiness. He had already renounced his presidential salary, and he called upon young people to embark on the task of reconstructing the country with a smile. He invoked the great political leaders of Paraguay in the 19th century like Francia and the López family, but, in the presence of President Michelle Bachelet of Chile, whose father was a member of the government of Salvador Allende, he quoted Allende’s last words on the morning of his overthrow in September 1973. Allende had famously expressed the hope that “much sooner than later the great avenues will re-open along which free men will pass to build a better society”. Lugo echoed these words with the thought that the avenues would be “covered not with asphalt but with the dreams of the founders of the Patria Grande (the great fatherland of Latin America)”.
Lugo also invoked the writers and poets of the 20th century. These of course included Augusto Roa Bastos, the country’s most famous novelist; Elvio Romero, a popular communist poet who died in exile in Buenos Aires, and Rafael Barrett, an Anglo-Spanish journalist who made Paraguay his home and wrote from an anarchist perspective about its social life and the conditions of slavery that existed in the countryside. (Typically, the British government has closed its embassy in Asunción and could only afford to send its ambassador in Argentina to Lugo’s inauguration. Spain sent their crown prince.)
Lugo has received the almost unprecedented support of the Latin American media, perhaps because he is seen to deserve the respect accorded to a former bishop and perhaps too because it is hoped that he will prove more moderate than seems likely to be the case. “This is a victory for the Latin American revolution,” said Chávez in Asunción, but Ecuador’s Correa warned that Lugo’s international reception might not be so delirious once his reforms begin to bite.
My comrades know President Fernando Lugo, from his activism, and support for labor. Very good post.
Comment by Renegade Eye — 27 August, 2008 @ 9:41 pm
Also on the Latin America theme from Prensa Latina.
Caracas: Ex London Mayor Talks to Chavez
Caracas, Aug 27 (Prensa Latina) After a dialogue with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, former Mayor of London Kenneth Livingstone questioned the US government Wednesday because of its attacks to Russia.
“It looks contradictory that the US government criticizes Russia for what is happening in Georgia, if the White House intervened in the former Yugoslavia,” said Livingstone in a press round at the end of a meeting with Chavez at the Palace of Miraflores in Caracas.
Livingstone said that in the conversation with Chavez, he spoke about international topics briefly, because the main topic was on the plans for modernization of Caracas.
They also analyzed the possibility for the establishment of better relations with the new government of Great Britain starting from November 2008.
Livingstone also met the candidates for the post of Mayor of Caracas from the Venezuelan United Socialist Party (PSUV) to implement an economic and social development plan, if this political force emerges victorious in the November 23 elections.
He said President Chavez wanted him to keep in touch with him, starting from the experience acquired in London on the creation of a community police to lower crime indexes.
PSUV candidate Aristobulo Isturiz stated the dialogue was developed in a friendly environment.
Comment by Broad left — 28 August, 2008 @ 12:28 pm
Monday 16th March 2009
Reasons to be cheerful! The FMLN WINS IN EL SALVADOR !
The now centre Left FMLN has just won the presidential elections in El Salvador, beating the deeply reactionary and corrupt, US imperialist backed right wing ruling ARENA party, after nearly twenty years in power,twenty years of implementing brutal neo liberal capitalist policies.
This after decades of popular struggle throughout the 196o´s through to the 1980´s,with 12 years of particularly intense armed struggle against US backed right wing and fascist mlitary regimes, in which over 75,000 Salvadoreans were killed,massacred and disappeared.
The FMLN has won 51.3% to 48.7% of the vote with 90% of the votes counted.The right wing Arena candidate has accepted defeat after a very well funded,dirty media campaign involving constant distortion,smear and disinformation, violent intimidation, assassination of FMLN activists and flagrant vote rigging by all accounts.
For further information go to:
www.cispes.org
(The US based committee in solidarity with the people of El Salvador)
The UK based El Salvador solidarity campaign and the El Salvador solidarity network seem to have all but disappeared.Perhaps it is time to rekindle that solidarity once again.
From New Statesman
Left wins in El Salvador
Vincent Bevins
Published 16 March 2009
Print version Listen RSS The victory of the party that fought a guerrilla war against Reagan-backed rightists in El Salvador is another step in Latin America’s march leftwards
His victory speech mentioned changed but Mauricio Funes may not be universally welcomed in the US
It was already shaping up to be a tough year for the legacy of Ronald Reagan. Big government is back and faith in the power of the market is deeply shaken. But now, to make matters worse, the Central American nation of El Salvador will be governed by the FMLN, the left-wing guerrillas that fought US-backed military governments in a brutal civil war there from 1980-1992.
They have come to power under quite changed circumstances, of course. Long ago they transformed into a political party, and Mauricio Funes, who won the presidency in Sunday’s vote, was the first candidate they had put forward who didn’t fight in the war.
Funes, a former journalist, has indicated he intends to govern more like the moderate left-of-centre leaders in Latin America, such as like Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva or Chile’s Michelle Bachelet, than Venezula’s Hugo Chavez.
If so it’s a far cry from what the Cuban-trained Marxist guerrillas of his own party fought for in the 80s.
But his win, though by a slim margin of around three percentage points, is another chapter in the seemingly unending tale of leftward movements in Latin America in recent years.
In Central America, the Sandinistas (who also fought the Reagan-backed Contras in the 80s) now govern nearby Nicaragua. Last year Honduras chose to join them in a regional left-wing development alliance with Venezuela, Cuba, and Bolivia. In South America, only Peru and Colombia remain right of centre.
What Funes’s role would be in the context of the new constellation of left governments in the hemisphere loomed large in the campaign.
The ruling right-wing ARENA party repeatedly linked Funes to Hugo Chavez, to the point that he had to deny that he’d have any influence in El Salvador. “I will not lay a finger on Venezuela, just as Venezuela won’t lay a finger on El Salvador,” he said in one TV ad. They also tried to link him to radical leftism and the violence of ‘80 and early ’90s, a task made more difficult since he himself was never a guerrilla.
When Funes takes office, it will be the first time there has been a peaceful transfer of power since civil conflict ended in 1992. Spanning 12 years, that brutal war took the lives of 75,000 Salvadorans and prominently featured right-wing death squads peddling widespread murder and terror.
These groups were not above assassinating the country’s archbishop as he celebrated Mass after he asked the US to halt massive military aid to the country’s government.
It was a particularly horrific chapter in the closing days of the Cold War and after twenty years of rule by ARENA, a right-wing party founded by a man a former US ambassador called a “pathological killer,” the old divisions are now being played out peacefully at the ballot-box.
For better or worse, El Salvador remains closely tied to the United States. Millions of Salvadorans emigrated to the US during and after the civil war, and there are now three million of them reside there compared to seven million in El Salvador. Last year, remittances from the US to the poor country made up 17 per cent of the country’s GDP.
Some US politicians tried to use that dependence as leverage to exert influence over the outcome of the election. Despite pleas to respect neutrality, some Republican congressmen indicated that flows of remittances or the immigration status of Salvadorans in the US would be in jeopardy if the FMLN were to win.
Such threats were never really credible — the Obama administration eventually rejected them and nothing similar ever happened with Nicaragua — but they were widely reported in El Salvador.
That may have been part of the reason, combined with the constant campaign attempt to link Funes to Chavez or communism, that his lead in the polls shrunk from previous double-digit numbers to the final three per cent margin of victory.
Whoever won Sunday was going to inherit an extremely difficult position. Those remittances are already shrinking as the recession in the US hits vulnerable immigrant workers especially hard. And El Salvador is one of the most dangerous countries in the world, plagued by violent and powerful gangs.
Ironically, many of these gangs formed on the streets of Los Angeles, California and brought their criminal know-how home after being deported.
Funes campaigned as a figure who would transform the country and rise above old divisions. In a move that seems quite popular these days, he framed the issues in the language of Barack Obama. “We Salvadorans voted for change, and change will come,” he said in his victory speech.
It’s not clear exactly how leftist Funes’s government will be; he is not a career politician and doesn’t have a history of policy decisions. Nobody knows if he will be a moderate centrist or end up pursuing policies closer to the core of his party’s history or his more radical ex-guerrilla vice-president.
There are a lot of serious problems confronting him and only time will tell what exactly his victory will mean. One thing is clear, however: disciples of Reagan in the US government are not very happy about it.
Comment by FLEA BITE — 16 March, 2009 @ 2:50 pm
FOR MORE UP TO DATE COVERAGE ON
FMLN VICTORY IN EL SALVADOR
Go to www.telesurtv.net
Comment by FLEA BITE — 16 March, 2009 @ 3:03 pm