Venezuela's Presidential Election

If there’s such a thing as a ‘nation non grata’, Venezuela in its current political configuration would be near the top of the list on both sides of the North Atlantic. From the moment when Hugo Chavez first won the presidency in 1998 - he was twice re-elected and died in office in 2013 - Western governments and the media viewed him with a combination of alarm and contempt. Charismatic, left-wing, deeply hostile to neoliberalism, Chavez made clear that his aim was to transform Venezuela’s social, economic and political landscape. At the core of his domestic programme lay a determination to provide the two-thirds of the population then living below the UN official poverty line with access to health care, education and the prospect of a dignified life. Revenues from oil during a period of high world prices furnished the necessary funds and, as UN Human Development Reports show, the programme achieved some, at least, of its initial objectives. Internationally, Chavez aimed to reduce if not eliminate what he felt to be the economic and the political domination of his country by the United States; and he collaborated with other like-minded governments in Latin America to achieve the same at continental level. He called his political programme, the “Bolivarian Revolution” and even changed the country’s formal name to the “Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela” - in honour of Simón Bolívar, the great 19th century leader of South America’s independence from Spain. Romantic certainly, but a permanent reminder that independence - the right of a nation to choose its own destiny lay - and continues to lie - at the heart of the “Chavista” project.
For some within the country, the Bolivarian Revolution has always been an anathema. An attempt to unseat Chavez by force in 2002 nearly succeeded. It was foiled by the army which has remained a stout defender of the country’s democracy. Nicolas Maduro, Chavez’ successor, has met with a different kind of resistance: street violence and calls from opponents for the United States to help topple Maduro and his “regime”. Maduro is a substantial figure, with an impressive command of the stage; but he came to power during an economic downturn brought on by a dramatic fall in the price of oil; and he won the 2013 election - with very narrow majority - to cries of fraud from the supporters of his right-wing opponent, Henrique Capriles. Without the oil revenues that had financed Chavez’s social policies, Venezuela’s ill-balanced economy with its heavy dependence on oil became evident. Imports of food, medicines and consumer goods fell away, creating shortages that severely affected the less-well-off.
Devaluation of the national currency - the Bolívar - began then and has continued at an increasingly rapid pace. At the time of writing, the unofficial exchange rate is 1 million Bolívares to US$1, down from 250 thousand Bolívares a month ago. Tomorrow there may be a further fall. Long queues form daily outside supermarkets and banks - evidence of the acute shortage of both goods and currency. Distribution of food and household products is largely controlled by the private sector and there is evidence of hoarding and reluctance to supply poorer neighbourhoods. A US embargo on trade and financial transactions with Venezuela has made it difficult to import essential goods and has probably done more to impoverish the less-well-off than to damage the Maduro government. Compounding the economic distress is the permanent insecurity caused by casual gun crime, robberies in the street at gunpoint, and “express kidnaps” in which victims are invited to empty their bank accounts in exchange for their lives. Such was the societal context of the May 20 elections.
Equally disquieting has been the attitude of the so-called West. Canada, the United States and the European Union have dismissed the elections as invalid, despite having called for them. Urged on by the Trump administration, six Latin-American countries have followed suit. For these international accusers, Nicolás Maduro is a ruthless, corrupt dictator, the elections a breach of Venezuela’s constitution, and the results de facto fraudulent.
Unsurprisingly Maduro’s opponents don’t approve of him and they’re alarmed at the state of the country. But as the campaign drew to a close, none - even under close questioning - repeated the accusations against him made by the United States and the EU. And all expressed confidence in an electoral system that US President Carter has described as the best in the world, though that didn’t prevent Henri Falcón, Maduro’s closest rival, from crying foul moments after learning of his defeat. Entirely digital, but with an automated manual verification back-up, the electoral system is designed with multiple safeguards against fraud. As an international observer, I had the opportunity not only to watch the system in action but to explore its workings. It is impressively efficient, with results available within a few hours of the closure of the polls. Among our observer group were officials responsible for electoral processes in their own country. They could find no fault in Venezuela’s system. Maduro’s electoral victory with just over two-thirds of the vote was more than comfortable; though the turnout at 46% was dangerously low by Venezuelan standards and has given rise to charges both within and beyond the country that the election lacked legitimacy. An abstention campaign by the right-wing MUD coalition (Mesa de la Unidad Democrática) undoubtedly had some negative effect on turnout, but general disaffection with politics and politicians in the face of increasing economic hardship will also have played a role in discouraging participation, not least because none of the candidates took the trouble to explain how they proposed to pull the country out of its current mess.
Meanwhile, foreign media have been making hay with defamatory rhetoric - much of it consisting of outright fabrications. On May 20th, Venezuela’s election day, we international observers, who had spent a week investigating Venezuela’s electoral procedures and meeting with campaign managers of all four candidates, learned from the Guardian/Observer website that we had been barred from the country and were not really there. “Venezuela has fallen to a dictator” screamed a Guardian headline two days later, assuring readers that the elections were fraudulent, and that among the methods employed by the regime to remain in power was “violent censorship of the press,” an assertion especially remarkable because most of the Venezuelan newspapers are openly hostile to Maduro. Perhaps the Guardian doesn’t read them. Milder, though no less larded with prejudice, was the Telegraph’s May 21st headline: “Nicolás Maduro filmed victoriously waving to an empty plaza after a ‘sham’ election,” the editor having apparently forgotten that on the previous day his newspaper had described Maduro speaking to a crowd of cheering supporters after his election victory. Similarly threadbare complaints against Venezuela are available courtesy of The Economist, the New Statesman, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal and no doubt many others.
Most of the media venom directed at the Venezuelan government is evidence-free and based on little more than rote copying from press releases issued by the United States, the European Union and other hostile governments. All decline to acknowledge that despite the intense international pressure on the country and its disquieting economic situation, Venezuelans have spoken, and have demonstrated more than anything that they do not wish to be told what to think and do by foreign governments and media.
The freshly-elected government’s immediate task, a huge one, will be to rebuild Venezuela’s shattered economy. Whether Maduro and his team are able to accomplish this while maintaining peace within the country remains to be seen. Some would undoubtedly prefer to see them fail. What they and the people of Venezuela need and deserve from the rest of the world, however, is not hostility but respect , support and recognition of their right as a soveign people to decide their future for themselves.

Venezuela: Lies, Damned lies and the Media

“… the newspaper that started to tell the truth now exists to prevent the truth being told.”
(G.K. Chesterton: Orthodoxy, 1908)

Hard to imagine a better example of Chesterton’s barb than the unremitting assault on the current Venezuelan government by much if not all of the Western media. Like parrots, they repeat the critical howls of politicians and pundits whose opinions they might otherwise view with scepticism, among them Donald Trump and Michel Temer, the unelected president of Brazil. Even Pope Francis has come out against Venezuelan President Maduro’s “regime”, but then the Catholic Church has a track record in these matters. It also sided with the Chilean military in the coup against Salvador Allende’s government in 1973.
    No one can credibly dispute that Venezuela is in a mess. Reasons to criticise the ineptness of the Venezuelan administration are not hard to find; though the same could be said of plenty of others - including the ones currently residing in the White House and Downing Street, neither of whom won the popular vote in their respective elections.  Nevertheless, Venezuela is a functioning democracy with an elected president whose term ends in 2018.  Should Maduro stand again,  he can be democratically defenestrated, and there has been no suggestion that the next election will not take place on time.
    Why, therefore, the calls for regime change? Whence the hostility of the international media? Why, above all, is the Venezuelan government being tasked with acts of violence for which the Opposition is largely if not entirely responsible? It is the latter that has been setting fire to public buildings, attacking medical centres, erecting street barricades, destroying or blocking access to polling stations, using molotov cocktails and roadside bombs against police and security personnel, and horrifically burning alive the odd “Chavista” in broad daylight - aggressions that have been caught on camera - mostly by passers-by. 
    Such outrages would be termed ‘acts of terrorism’ in the countries now calling for Maduro’s head; and the perpetrators would be in gaol.   Over 3,000 arrests followed the 2011 riots in England with nearly 1,300 receiving gaol sentences. Politicians and media alike called them “criminals”.  Their more vicious and deadly Venezuelan counterparts, on the other hand, receive billing as heroic “political prisoners” confronting a repressive regime. Notable among these heroes are Opposition leaders Leopoldo López and former Caracas mayor Antonio Ledezma, both currently under house arrest for fomenting street violence - the former having already been tried and convicted in 2015 of responsibility for inciting riots that led to over 40 fatalities.
    Among the most egregious and disappointing purveyors of disinformation on Venezuela is the BBC.  On 29th July, BBC News broadcast a truly virtuoso piece of misrepresentation in which most of the interviewees were juveniles wearing masks, though viewers were also treated to a  smorgasbord of anti-government slogans from Opposition activist María Corina Machado who was a signatory to the attempted coup against Hugo Chavez in 2002 and has worked tirelessly ever since to overthrow his successor - including appealing for US intervention.  BBC Newsnight on August 7th, treated viewers to an interview with Juan Andrés Mejía who was introduced as the leader of “Popular Will”  a Venezuelan political party supposedly “of the left”.  Sr Mejía - a Member of the Venezuelan National Assembly - recited the standard  Opposition line, accusing the Maduro government of murdering and torturing hundreds of civilians, a charge for which no one, anywhere, at any time has been able to offer the least shred of evidence for the simple reason that it’s untrue.
    What the BBC failed to mention is that Mejía’s constituency in Caracas is the wealthiest in the country, that his party was founded not by him but by Leopoldo López, that its raison-d’être was and remains to organise “La Salida” which, in plain English, means toppling the government, and that it is a member of MUD - the Opposition coalition.  In place of host Evan Davis’s usual forensic interrogation, Newsnight’s Venezuelan guest received a green light to pile lie upon falsehood with no other restraint than the time allotted for the interview. 
    On the following morning, BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme - scraping the barrel for Venezuelan pundits - came up with Gabriela Montero, a classical pianist and composer who lives in Barcelona but happens to have been born in Venezuela.  A safe choice, She dutifully trotted out a handful of Opposition clichés of the kind available for a pittance on the newsstands or free of charge over the airwaves and on the Web. Not once has the BBC bothered to interview what are known in Latin America as “el pueblo”, the people - trades unionists, rural workers, the disabled, indigenous peoples  - who make up the bulk of the population and who are all represented in the recently-elected Constituent Assembly.
    Domestically, the assault on Venezuela’s government and the “Bolivarian Revolution” comes from the traditional masters of the country and its economy - the wealthy elite whose younger members have been busy over recent months erecting street barricades and causing mayhem while the elders ramp up the political rhetoric and employ their control of key business sectors to generate shortages of essential goods, notably in the working-class areas of the main cities. Shortages are useful to the Opposition because they are seen as a means of weakening support for the regime. Getting the poorer classes to vote or to act against their own interests is a prime tactic of the neoliberal right. Governments invariably take the blame for popular misfortunes regardless of how they are caused or who may be responsible.
    Venezuela has become a target of international concern for two main reasons.
First, it has the world’s largest oil reserves - currently estimated at 300 billion barrels. Despite the impact of fossil fuels on the global climate, oil deposits of this magnitude give the country a strategic value similar to that of the Middle East. Successive US administrations have therefore looked askance at the efforts of  a ”left-wing regime” under Hugo Chavez and now Nicolas Maduro to strengthen economic and political ties beyond the western hemisphere.  Evidence of those efforts is a surge in Chinese support for the Venezuelan economy in the form of both loans and investment. As recently as June this year, planning minister Ricardo Menendez revealed that high-level discussions were underway to increase further Chinese involvement in Venezuelan agriculture, industry and technological development.
    Second, Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution - were it to succeed - might offer an example that another world is possible and thereby contaminate the opinions of voters in Latin America and beyond. Hence why a push is underway by the local elite in tacit alliance with Western governments and the international media to keep not only Venezuela but Latin-America as a whole within the neoliberal fold.  Last year, a  congressional coup in Brazil removed left-wing President Dilma Roussef from office and installed a right-wing replacement - with no election in prospect. There have been coups against left-wing presidents in Paraguay in 2008 and Honduras in 2009; and a probably fraudulent election in Mexico in 2006 that kept left-wing radical, Andés Manuel López Obrador,  from getting the keys to Los Pinos - the presidential residence. In Chile the left is constrained by a constitution framed in the 1970s under the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet  that makes changes virtually impossible.
    Only Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador and Venezuela remain as hold-outs for the left - of which the latter is by far the most significant for the West. The country is suffering a major assault not just on the Maduro administration but on a political project - the Bolivarian Revolution - that for the first time in Venezuela’s history has given the poor access to health care, education and the prospect of dignified participation in the nation’s economic life. That assault is being orchestrated by the wealthiest sections of Venezuelan society with the overt backing of the United States , the European Union and much of Latin America. Should it succeed, it will be a triumph not for democracy but for neoliberal capitalism, and for government by the one percent. Such is the context of calls from Tories and from UK media for Jeremy Corbyn to condemn President Maduro. Corbyn is right to resist them. Venezuela’s struggle is also ours.

The Legacy of Hugo Chavez

HUGO CHAVEZ died on 5 March 2013, and two events took place recently in London to mark the first anniversary of his passing. Canning House organized a half-day conference aimed at assessing the Chavez legacy, while the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign (VSC) set itself the task of celebrating the Bolivarian Revolution that Chavez led and that his elected successor, Nicolás Maduro, seeks to continue.
Headquartered in London’s exclusive Belgravia, Canning House exists to “foster mutual understanding and engagement between the UK and the Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian world”. Membership is open to all, but at heart it has always been a conservative organization, run by men and women in smart attire, well-intentioned but of anodyne views, and perhaps a little over fond of rubbing shoulders with senior executives of big companies, ministers of state and people with seats in the Upper House. A patrician stiffness pervades Canning House, a lingering vestige of empire discernible in the crusty tones with which the old guard greet each other at gatherings and peer over the shoulders of anyone they don’t recognize. If they speak Spanish or Portuguese, most do so in a resolutely British accent with no concession to native rhythms or inflections.
Nevertheless, Canning House continues to be a useful locus of engagement with the Latin-American world, not least because it manages to secure excellent speakers from all the countries as well as from the UK for its lectures and round tables, and is generally careful to maintain political neutrality in its choice of contributors and subject matter. Such was the case with the Conference on Hugo Chavez.
Venezuela’s charismatic leader was and remains controversial, and to reflect this Canning House invited a roster of participants from all sides of the political spectrum. Notable among the “Chavistas” were London’s former mayor, Ken Livingstone, who had tried to develop a long-term relationship between Caracas and London (subsequently terminated by Boris Johnson) and, more convincing because she is clearly more knowledgeable, Alicia Castro, Argentina’s current ambassador to the UK and former ambassador to Venezuela. These two could be described as representing the progressive left. In the political centre were several speakers who did their best to be informative rather than polemical. Representing the far right were two Venezuelan die-hard anti-Chavistas: an economist called Pedro Palma who appeared to enjoy telling the audience that his country is on the brink of financial ruin, and Diego Arria, a politician who by his stiff mannerisms, elegant diction, and impeccable attire manifested his membership of the economic and social elite. Latin Americans and those who know the continent will be familiar with the type.
The presence on the same stage of ideological adversaries who, in deference to the setting, were obliged to maintain a semblance of politeness towards each other, made the event both fascinating and informative; though given the strength of opposing views, I doubt whether anyone was persuaded to change the opinion they held on entering the hall.
It is difficult, maybe impossible, for anyone with knowledge of Latin America not to find themselves on one side or other of the Chavez debate. I found Palma’s and Arria’s assertions unconvincing and their opinions too extreme to merit serious consideration. Many of those who attended, however, clearly thought the opposite - among them a coterie of young Venezuelans, in London perhaps to study or at leisure, who made their views known with rounds of applause and the occasional hiss; privileged youngsters, like those in Caracas and other cities who have made a splash by setting up road blocks, burning tyres and throwing Molotov cocktails.
What of the VSC conference? Here there was no question of neutrality. One of organization’s aims is to “defend the achievements of the Bolivarian Revolution”. Unsurprisingly, no one was invited to speak on behalf of the opposition.
The day-long affair included plenary sessions and workshops dealing both with the internal politics of Venezuela and with the influence of the Chavez revolution on Latin America and further afield.
Ambassador Castro was the only speaker to appear at both events. Her address resembled the one she gave for Canning House, though in form it was more relaxed and overtly chavista. She ended with the traditional clenched fist salute symbolic in Latin America of solidarity with the people. Alicia Castro is a stalwart defender of Latin-American independence and of the kind of progressive governments that currently hold power not just in Venezuela and, of course, in her own country, but in Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile and maybe even Cuba, that favorite bogey of successive US administrations and of the western right-wing media. Other speakers included Dr Francsico Dominguez, general secretary of the VSC, Mark Weisbrot from the US-based Centre for Economic and Political Research (CEPR), Seamus Milne of The Guardian, Neil Findlay a Labour member of the Scottish Parliament, representatives of several Latin-American embassies, notable academics, journalists, and leaders of pressure groups. Moving accounts were given of the continent-wide struggle for emancipation of the poor and of native peoples; and there were pleas for an end to US interference in the internal affairs of the region.
This last theme loomed large. Throughout the day, the immense spectre of the United States cast a shadow over all the discussions. Since the declaration of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, there have been over 170 US interventions in Latin America from an attack by US marines on Puerto Rico in 1824 to the US-backed overthrow of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya in 2009. Among the most salient interventions are the 1847 annexation of half of Mexico, the prising of Panama from Colombia in 1903 in preparation for US occupation of the Canal Zone, the shelling of the Mexican port of Veracruz in 1914, the overthrow of the Haitian government in 1915 and occupation of the country until 1925, the conversion of Cuba into a US protectorate under the so-called Platt Amendment in 1901, occupation of the Dominican Republic and installation of a puppet regime in 1916, incessant interference in Nicaragua from the mid 1920s onwards which included in 1937 installation of one of Latin-America’s vilest dictatorships under Anastasio Somoza, forced concession of Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and support for the corrupt regime of Fulgencio Batista which lasted from 1934 until the Revolution ousted him in 1959.
More recent occurrences include the overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala (1954), of President Joao Goulart of Brazil (1964), of President Arturo Umberto Illia of Argentina (1966), of President Salvador Allende of Chile (1973), of President Jean Bertrand Aristide in 1991 and again in 2004, and two celebrated failures: the invasion of Cuba in 1961, and the coup against Hugo Chavez in 2002.
As Francisco Dominguez pointed out in his address, in recent years direct military intervention by the US in Latin America has fallen out of favour as a method of control. Washington now prefers to finance US-friendly opposition groups and to institute sanctions against regimes it doesn’t like. Venezuela is currently a target of both tactics.
Two quite different views of the world are struggling for primacy in post-Chavez Venezuela. In the anti-Chavista camp are those who believe privilege and inequality to be products of nature or decrees of God. They are happy with neo-liberalism, with minimal state interference in the market, with US hemispheric hegemony which they see as a bulwark against the evils of socialism, and with a concept of personal freedom that allows them to do more or less whatever they wish. They believe in democracy provided it doesn’t undermine their interests.
Chavistas by contrast think a more equal, kinder world is possible, one in which human solidarity, the sharing of resources, and an end to extremes of poverty and inequality can and should constitute the moral basis of political and social policy. For the poor and the lower middle classes, marginalized for centuries in a deeply unequal society, Chavez represented a beacon of hope not that the proletariat and peasantry would take over the state in some utopian version of Marxism-Leninism, but that the Bolivarian Revolution would launch a social transformation sufficient to ensure that every family in Venezuela would have the means to lead a dignified life. Simple and revolutionary; too much so for the opposition which, after failing to overthrow Chavez in 2002, is trying again with his successor.
Nicolas Maduro won the hotly contested 2013 presidential election by a tiny margin of 1.5%., a result that unleashed a torrent of accusations of fraud from the United States as well as from the Venezuelan opposition. No such complaint came from the US when Felipe Calderón won the Mexican election in 2006 by an even smaller margin (0.58%) and in circumstances strongly suggesting that the real winner had been the left-wing candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Nor have we heard much about the Venezuelan municipal elections that took place in December 2013 in which Maduro’s Party, the PSUV[1], received a substantially increased share of the vote. Judgements in the US about whether a Latin-American election is valid depend entirely on the political position of the candidates. We should be in no doubt about this. US administrations - whether Democrat or Republican - have never shown themselves willing to accept governments in Latin America that the State Department considers to be overly left wing or inimical to US interests. Chavez was elected and re-elected with large majorities. In the US he was nevertheless commonly referred to as a dictator.
A program of opposition protests against President Maduro began as soon as he took office. Its stated objective is “La Salida” (the exit): the ejection of Maduro from power not by means of the ballot box but via streets protests, attacks on government offices, economic sabotage, disruption of daily life, and attempts to marshal international support for regime change.”Our aim”, affirms Leopoldo López, former mayor of Chacao, the wealthiest municipality of Caracas “is to get rid of the government”. Another protest leader , Roberto Alonso, explains that ”…the sole aim of the guarimba (street protests, barricades etc.), apart from paralyzing the country, is to create chaos….so as to oblige the Castro-communist regime of Venezuela to implement the Plan Ávila[2].” This would inevitably lead to the end of the Maduro government.
These efforts at disruption - enthusiastically adopted by students dissidents - are portrayed by western media and opposition supporters as a peaceful campaign to restore democracy in the teeth of a repressive dictatorship. Such was the account given to the Canning House audience by Diego Arria who numbers amongst his many achievements that of having graduated from the Augusta Military Academy at Fort Defiance, Virginia. In a self-serving biography (La Hora de la Verdad - the Hour of Truth), Arria describes Chavez as “the costliest sick man in human history”. Venezuela, he tells us, “is under Cuban occupation and the Venezuelan government and army have handed over national sovereignty to the communists.”
María Corina Machado, recently ejected from the Venezuelan Congress for accepting a role as a Panamanian official so as to be able to speak against her own government at a meeting of the Organisation of American States, is another right-winger given red-carpet treatment in Washington for her heroic efforts to return democracy to Venezuela. She was one of the elite figures who signed the Carmona Decree of 2002 affirming the overthrow of Hugo Chavez and the installation of a replacement government. According to Machado, the student protests which have received so much publicity are peaceful and the violence that has resulted in several deaths are entirely the responsibility of the government. This too is the version offered by Enrique Krauze, the influential Mexican rent-a-reactionary, who in a New York Times piece of February 27, describes how the country’s youth are fighting for democracy against the brutal repression of an oil-rich state. In the same newspaper on the previous day, Thor Halvorssen, president of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation, told readers that “…the majority of those protesting are Venezuela’s poor..”, a claim contradicted by all the available evidence, including the eye-witness reports given at the VSC conference by Mark Weisbrot, Seamus Milne and Neil Findlay. Halvorssen, despite his name, is Venezuelan and a cousin of Leopoldo López. We are in the territory of the super-rich Venezuelan aristocracy.
According to Weisbrot, who has walked the streets, the protests are not coming from the poor who have largely benefited from the Bolivarian Revolution, but from the rich; the barricades are not in underprivileged neighbourhoods, but in the exclusive ones where small groups “engage in nightly battles with security forces, throwing rocks and firebombs and running from tear gas.”
Nevertheless, true to form, US Secretary of State John Kerry has taken up the cudgels on behalf of the downtrodden elite, criticising the Venezuelan government for inhibiting the right of cities to protest peacefully and accusing Maduro of unleashing a campaign of terror against his own people. Not to be outdone, the House Foreign Affairs Committee has just passed a bill proposing sanctions against the Venezuelan authorities and support for the Opposition.
Doubtless all this is music to the ears of the right, Corina Machado foremost among them, who have trooped off to Washington to persuade US public opinion and Congress to “support” the opposition in her country “for the sake of democracy”. Latin America’s whole history demonstrates the danger of such overtures. Yet one of the region’s many ironies is that ever since gaining independence from Spain, it has produced a steady supply of fifth columnists ready to trade that independence in exchange for a US-backed regime that will defend their interests. Apart from the litany of tired accusations about the repressive nature of the current government, three complaints about Venezuela have gained traction internationally: endemic violence, corruption in public life, and media repression.
Criminal violence is a problem confronting several Latin-American countries though in each it takes slightly different forms. Honduras, Mexico, Colombia, El Salvador, Brazil and Venezuela all suffer from high levels of homicide - much of it perpetrated by organized gangs. There is no avoiding the crime figures, which are a terrible stain on the region, nor the fact that governments of every stripe have consistently failed to find a solution. This is not an ideological issue but one of long-term social and economic failure arising above all from the marginalization of large sectors of the population that have no stake in the status quo. For many, it is easier to make a living from theft, smuggling, kidnapping and murder than from conventional employment.
Accusations that Venezuela no longer has a free press are greedily seized upon by conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic. A storm of protest erupted, for example, at the sale of the anti-government TV station Globovision - which in 2003 had publicly called for the overthrow of President Chavez. One can imagine what would have happened if CNN or Fox News had advocated a coup against Obama. However, Globovision with less than 5% of the national audience is a tiny player. About 90% of media consumption is supplied by the private sector, which is one reason why no one has to search or go under cover to see or hear criticism of the government.
What about official corruption? Undeniably it exists, much of it arising out of price controls and market subsidies. Venezuela’s gasoline (petrol) prices are the cheapest on the planet, the result of a subsidy so extravagant that, according to a study by two Venezuelan scholars at Harvard University, its value exceeds that of all social programs combined. Cheap gasoline means, amongst other things, that large amounts of fuel are smuggled into Brazil and Colombia across borders patrolled by the Venezuelan military but apparently highly porous, giving rise to the suspicion that much of the illegal trade takes place under the auspices of the army. Likewise, many basic products imported into Venezuela for sale at regulated prices are smuggled into Colombia at a profit. According to a brilliant article by Angel Ricardo Martinez in Foreign Policy, up to 40 percent of all Venezuelan imports find their way to Colombia, destabilizing the latter’s internal markets, and creating critical shortages in Venezuela.
Although the gasoline subsidy and the associated smuggling operations are highly damaging, not even Chavez seems to have been strong enough to confront the army about its role in these lucrative activities. The late president did not, however, create the problem. As Martinez points out , “….the gas subsidy has been in place for several decades, with its current price fixed since 1996, three years before Chavez came to power.”
If drugs are the curse of Colombia and Mexico, oil is Venezuela’s curse; and it will be a very courageous government that tries to deal with the gasoline subsidy without an accommodation with the armed forces and strong support from neighbouring countries.
Venezuela’s problems are multiple, difficult to describe in terms that do justice to their complexity, and even more difficult to resolve.
Independently of the long-term issues, however, the present juncture is critical not only for Venezuela’s immediate future but for that of Latin America as a whole. A US-backed triumph for the inhabitants of Altamira, for Leopoldo López, Diego Arria, Corina Machado and their followers, for the rich kids protesting in the streets, will plunge the country back into a subservient relationship with the United States, encouraging the latter to reassert the Monroe Doctrine and convincing the US and European public that, after all, Latin-Americans are incapable of building lasting democracies based on the rule of law. If the democratically elected government of Venezuela is not safe, then neither are the progressive governments of other nations in the region. US eyes will be especially focused thereafter on Bolivia, on Ecuador, and even on the governments of larger nations that fail to toe the line.
This is not a scenario that anyone should find palatable.

[1] United Socialist Party of Venezuela.
[2] A contingency plan to use the army to maintain public order - employed in 1989 by President Carlos Andrés Pérez with disastrous consequences.

Age of Dissent

We live an age of grievance and disillusionment. Manifestations of discontent have been erupting all over the globe like outbreaks of a fever. In recent times we have witnessed mass protests in London, New York, in Rio and São Paulo and other Brazilian cities, in Istanbul, Algiers, Madrid, Athens, Cairo, Sofia, Rome: protests against political incompetence, broken promises, the growing gap between rich and poor, the greed of bankers and corporate moguls, and the unholy alliance between these and the people who govern us.  At an extreme level, we have seen governments overthrown in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, and a civil war in Syria that shows little sign of concluding. Egyptians are in the streets again.
What is going on?
One possibility is that we are collectively experiencing one of the less savoury effects of globalization in the westernized neo-liberal version that has so captivated much of the world. Economic downturns are no longer merely a national problem.  A slump in the US or European markets can put people who live ten thousand miles away out of work. Sub-prime loans and clever schemes for disguising them have brought more than a few banks to the edge of ruin (and one or two over the edge) regardless of where they are or were headquartered. More importantly, people of many different countries have paid a heavy price for banking profligacy - and will likely conintue paying for many years. Cuts in public services - or a failure to invest in them - figure among the complaints of Brazilians as well as Britons; home repossessions have become a frighteningly familiar phenomenon in Spain as well as in the United States. What we have seen is the delivery of whole populations to the vagaries of the international market, the rapacity of financiers, and the careless cruelties of incompetent governments.
Globalization has achieved something else, however, that can only be uncomfortable to governing elites, namely the capacity for people to share experience and to communicate with each other instantaneously and over long distances. Much like the weather, a disturbance in one country can cross oceans and reappear on the far side of the globe. Anger and disaffection are no longer constrained by frontiers. We are becoming as knowledgeable and sometimes even as indignant about injustice in distant lands as in our own back yard. People are discovering that they have more in common with the protesters of Tahrir, Taksim, Wall Street and Avenida Presidente Vargas than with their own politicians, who increasingly convey an impression of belonging to a perverse offshoot of the human species: one that is remote, immune to economic distress, morally if not legally corrupt in its intimacy with wealth and the wealthy, and concerned about the cares of the rest of us only insofar as there is political advantage in seeming so.

One reflection of the growing distance between governors and the governed may be observed in the recent eruption into the headlines of Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and Ed Snowden: the first of these currently being tried for a litany of horrendous lèse-majestical offences, the second holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, and the third seeking sanctuary from the US Authorities. Their offences: informing the people of the illegal and morally repugnant activities of the US Government and its allies, of which the UK is a salient member. These activities are not simply in defence of the citizenry, nor directed specifically at criminals or terrorists or hostile and undemocratic regimes. They are aimed at all of us, individuals and governments alike, without the knowledge or consent of either.

In constitution-less UK, no foolproof protection exists against whatever our political leaders wish to do on our behalf. We have only the demonstrably unreliable words of ministers and their minions that although they are defending our interests and our lives, we shouldn’t know how they are going about it.  Many of them are the same career politicians who were gung-ho for the Iraq War and who happily waved our soldiers into Afghanistan on a peace and stability mission. US citizens do have a constitution that supposedly safeguards them against the abuses of government; but in matters of surveillance and secrecy, the relevant clauses seem to have been whited out.
The crimes of Assange, Manning and Snowden are to have revealed to the public that the sanctimonious image of Western democracy propagandized round the world is seriously misleading. Whether or not Manning and Snowden are, as they would claim, defenders of the US constitution, all three men have unarguably defended the people’s right to know what is being done in their name.Yet they are branded as traitors in the twisted logic of those for whom constitutional protections and civil and human rights have become mere impediments to action.No one has conducted an opinion poll of international public reaction to the hounding of Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and Ed Snowden, but it’s a good bet that all three would command a majority of support in most countries if not in the United States.
A triumvirate of corporate executives, financiers and politicians has demonstrated what a glance at history unfailingly reaffirms, namely that democracy - the voice of the people - is invariably distasteful to political elites even when by election they appear to be its beneficiaries.  Jefferson made this observation repeatedly.
Patrick Henry, another US Founding Father, spotted the danger inherent in government secrecy when he noted that:  “The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them”.
Regrettably, exposure of unpleasant secrets does not alone provoke in our leaders either remorse or a desire for change. When skullduggery becomes public - as it has done repeatedly with Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Extraordinary Rendition, collusion in torture, spying on allies, and so on - politicians  defend it on the grounds of public interest, or more specifically to protect us from the activities of terrorists, or maybe just because that’s what governments do.
There is a curiously unpleasant precedent to this kind of grubby justification. After the German Reichstag erupted in flames in 1933,  Hitler used the occasion to announce his War on Terror and to push through legislation - the "Decree on the Protection of People and the State" - that allowed the police to intercept mail, wiretap phones and imprison  terrorism suspects without charge. References to "The Fatherland" began cropping up in Hitler's speeches and, before long, an Office of Homeland (Fatherland) Security - the Reichssicherheitshauptamt came into being whose first head was that luminous defender of human rights,  SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich. It was apparently not too difficult to persuade a significant proportion of the German people that these initiatives were designed to protect them from the hostiles forces that were bent on destroying their way of life.
Disquiet over the undercover activities of public agencies is not, of course, the only cause of  the increasing distance between governors and the governed.  During the last UK election, members of the current Coalition assured the electorate that there would be no “top-down” reorganization of the National Health Service, a promise that has proved as empty as President Obama’s that he would close down Guantanamo Bay.  French and Dutch voters rejected the The Treaty Establishing a European Constitution so the EU collective changed the title to the Lisbon Treaty, made a few amendments, and this time made sure not to consult the people. While the banks have done their best to ruin us, and their senior executives continue to pay themselves obscenely large sums, governments world-wide have made no significant attempt to introduce stricter controls over financial transactions.
Wedded as they are to a market-fundamentalist view of how to shape the administration of life, traditional parties have become irrelevant as foci of alternative visions. Before Labour leader Tony Blair came into office, he promised to stick to the spending plans of the previous government. Ed Miliband, current Labour leader, has just delivered the same message. US presidents regardless of Party stick to the same neo-liberal ideology and to the same projection of US power overseas. Right now the Obama administration is wagging an authoritarian finger at China and Russia over their refusal to send Snowden back home (finger-wagger John Kerry has not yet understood that foreigners no longer genuflect before US Secretaries of State still less fear their admonishments). These are examples from the anglo-saxon world, but readers in other countries will recognise the behaviour in their own political landscape. It can be summarized as disdain for public opinion and for the openness and honesty without which democracy becomes little more than a slogan.
Among world leaders, an unusual figure appears from time to time to remind us that alternatives do exist.   Pepe Mujica, President of Uruguay is one.  He donates most of his salary to the poor, and recently opened some rooms of the presidential palace as a temporary shelter for the homeless. He has acquired a deserved reputation as the world's poorest president.  He is probably the only national leader whose word I would unhesitatingly trust.  There are lessons to be learned from the behaviour of leaders such as Mujica, but it’s unlikely that any politician in Europe or North America would be willing to heed them. I remember a conversation with a senior Foreign Office mandarin when Evo Morales, then president-elect of Bolivia and the first indigenous president of any South American country made a brief visit to Europe. I asked whether Tony Blair would be inviting Morales to Downing Street.
“No,” came the reply, “Blair only meets with important people.”
“Like who?”
“Oh, leaders of major countries, presidents of multinational companies. Bolivia’s too small for him.”
France, Italy, Spain and Portugal have recently confirmed Morales’ unimportance by refusing him permission to overfly their territory on his way home from a meeting in Moscow. Now we learn that someone has been bugging the Ecuadorean embassy in London. Evidently, in the minds of our great leaders, these are insignificant little banana republics whose dignity can be trampled at will. As Latin America locks arms in a collective protest against what is seen as an act of neo-colonialist arrogance, it would be good to let the peoples of that continent know that  in this as, in so many matters, our leaders do not represent us.

How Argentina Came About

This is an essay on the origins of Argentina. Latin American history is still a subject of intense controversy, and there is scarcely a line of this account that would not be disputed by someone. It is a hazard of the attempt. I have avoided entering into a discussion of the Falklands - Malvinas question which has long resembled a dialogue of the deaf. My modest hope is that readers unfamiliar with Argentina will gain an idea of how, in the light of their history, Argentinians may feel about their territorial integrity; and that Argentinians may accept that Brits are not necessarily the ignorant and unsympathetic neocolonialists sometimes depicted in their national media. I have used the expressions “Indian”, “native”, “indigenous” interchangeably. We lack an adequate vocabulary to refer to the original inhabitants of lands usurped by foreign, usually European, invaders so must fall back on collective descriptors, all of which seem to this writer more or less dehumanizing. I employ them for lack of alternatives.

Borders are more than mere tracings on a map. They are the means by which we identify where we belong, and who we are in relation to others. They define the territory we call our own and within which we share common myths about ourselves with our compatriots. To understand how Argentina acquired her present size and configuration and what these signify to her population, therefore, we need a little history; and we need to season that history with the flavours bestowed by her colonial past, her struggle for independence, and the fate of the peoples who lived there before the first Europeans set foot on her shores.

Like all of South America, Argentina came into being in consequence of a decision made thousands of miles away in Southern Europe. The story begins in 1493. Columbus had just returned with the exciting news that he had come across large islands far to the west of the known world. Immediately, Spain and Portugal began squabbling about rights of possession. In those far off days, territorial disputes between catholic countries went to the Vatican. Pope Alexander VI found a simple solution. Drawing an imaginary north-south line a hundred leagues west of the Azores, he divided the “New World” into two parts: lands east of the line belonged to Portugal and lands west of the line to Spain. John II of Portugal thought this unfair and argued successfully for the line to be shifted further west so that he could enjoy a piece of what we now know as the Americas. Both crowns set their seal on the agreement the following year at the Treaty of Tordesillas and Julius II, the next Pope, confirmed the arrangement in 1506. No one bothered to ask the local habitants if they approved the deal. At the time, no one even knew that the South American continent existed.

The Treaty of Tordesillas underwent several modifications mainly to accommodate Portugal’s success in pushing well beyond her allotted meridian line into the region that became Brazil. Not until the Treaty of San Ildefonso of 1777 was the question of who owned which part of South America finally settled between the two countries. By that time, Spain had organized its American possessions into administrative regions, one of which was the Viceroyalty of the River Plate with its capital of Buenos Aires. Breathtaking in size, it covered all of present-day Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, as well as parts of Bolivia and southern Brazil, and the Falkland Islands (Las Malvinas).

For over two hundred years after the Conquest, Spanish America slumbered under an indolent if rather stifling colonial regime. Wealth extraction dominated the imperial agenda, and Spain grew rich on imports of precious metals, timber, and agricultural products from the colonies while sending manufactures in return, many of which were no longer made in Spain but bought elsewhere and re-exported to South America at inflated prices.

The Bourbon Fist

Though never formally part of the Habsburg empire, Spain had been ruled by Habsburg kings who on the whole governed with a light hand. Then, in the early 1700s following the War of the Spanish Succession, the Bourbons took possession of the Spanish throne. More absolutist and authoritarian than their predecessors, they began instituting reforms - increasing the taxation of the colonies and demanding higher revenues for the Spanish coffers. They also assumed tighter political control. Fresh administrators came out from the motherland. Measures were enacted to reduce the power and privilege of the church and the elite. New legislation relieved the “Indians” of some of the worst aspects of their bondage - an initiative in keeping with European values of the time but unpalatable to local mine and land owners. In 1767, the Jesuits - wealthiest of all the ecclesiastical groups in Spanish America - were expelled - not on account of their financial success but because they had promoted education, and social and political awareness among the indigenous population - qualities that were not convenient to the maintenance of colonial control.

Bourbon restrictions and demands for increased revenues stirred much resentment among the privileged classes; and though little could be done about the expulsion of the Jesuits, the new administrators from Spain were made to feel unwelcome by criollos (Latin-Americans of European heritage) who had grown accustomed to organizing their own affairs.

In 1780, a descendent of the old Inca rulers of Peru, who styled himself Tupac Amaru - meaning ‘the Gifted One’- launched a rebellion, but within a year he was captured and made to watch as his wife, children and closest friends were hacked to death. He was then tied by the limbs to four horses and dismembered. A rebellion in New Granada (Colombia) put the Viceroy in Bogotá to flight, but it was repressed without much difficulty, and the political landscape returned to normal. Would-be revolutionaries were cowed into silence by the ferocity of Spanish reprisals.

The sparks that eventually ignited Spanish American revolutionary fervour and that were to lead to the creation of independent states came once again from Europe.

Revolution from Afar

In 1808, the French invaded Iberia. Ferdinand VII of Spain fell into Napoleon’s hands and was despatched to France; and Napoleon placed his own brother, Joseph, on the Spanish throne. Spanish Americans were outraged and rebellion broke out at first, not against the old imperial power, but against the usurper Napoleon. So, at least, the rebels claimed; although some doubtless already had outright independence in mind. In the Viceroyalty of the River Plate, a second incitement to rebellion came in 1806 and 1807 when British forces - anticipating a warm welcome - occupied Buenos Aires and Montevideo under the pretext of defending them from French imperialism. They were quickly repulsed thanks to the efforts not of the Spanish army but of local militia. “We don’t need to swap one master for another” ran one news sheet headline, a remark originally attributed to General Manuel Belgrano, a hero of Argentinian independence. (The battleship torpedoed by a British submarine during the Falklands war, originally the USS Phoenix that survived Pear Harbour, was renamed after this celebrated soldier and scholar when it was acquired by Argentina). This isolated occurrence, scarcely noticeable amid the political and military struggles then taking place in Europe, afforded the people of La Plata a sense of their separate national identity.

Between 1808 and 1810, revolution erupted throughout Spanish America. In Buenos Aires, the revolutionaries overthrew the viceroy and established a ruling junta. Anxious to secure the mineral wealth of Upper Peru, the junta at once sent an army under General Balcarce to eject the Spaniards from the region. After some initial successes, Balcarce was routed and chased from the plateau down to the foothills of Salta, a defeat that resulted in the overthrow of the junta and ushered in a period of confusion and jostling for power in Buenos Aires.

The regime that eventually emerged claimed to govern in the name of the “United Provinces of the Río de la Plata”; but the provinces were not united and the right of Buenos Aires to leadership was far from obvious to local provincial leaders. Several provinces broke away - two of them permanently.

On March 9, 1812, in the midst of the political maelstrom that followed Balcarce’s defeat in Upper Peru, José de San Martín landed in Buenos Aires. A British naval vessel, the George Canning, had given him passage - a small demonstration of British encouragement of independence. Evidently the clashes of 1806 and 1807 had been quietly buried. San Martín was a native of the small town of Yapeyu which lies on the banks of the Uruguay river, but he had spent much of his adult life as an officer of the Spanish army. He had fought for Spain against Napoleon, an experience that earned him the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel when, on arrival in Buenos Aires, he joined the revolutionary army. A successful early action against Spanish shipping on the River Plate was enough to give him promotion and prestige - to both of which he added by helping to foment a peaceful coup against the incumbent government, an unelected body whose dictatorial style had already alienated the public.

From Belgrano to San Martín

The new government believed that independence would not be safe until the mountainous region of Upper Peru (Bolivia) - now controlled by the Viceroy of Peru - had been wrested from the Spanish crown. Accordingly, in September that year, General Manuel Belgrano, who commanded the Argentinian “Army of the North”, was instructed to launch a fresh campaign. Like Balcarce before him he enjoyed some early successes, taking Tucumán immediately and Salta early in 1813; but by October he had followed his predecessor to defeat. The mountains of Upper Peru formed a seemingly impregnable barrier against assault as well as an ideal launching-pad for counter-attacks. Disheartened by his failure, Belgrano resigned his command; and Buenos Aires appointed San Martín to take his place.

Travelling with a 2,000-strong division over the wild spaces of the Argentinian pampas, San Martín took over a month to reach Tucumán where Belgrano had installed the remnants of his defeated army. At once, the new commander set about re-training the troops according to the standards of discipline he had learned during his years in Europe. He talked extensively to Belgrano about the military situation before the outgoing general retired to Buenos Aires, and he reached the conclusion that the struggle to push Spain out of South America could not be won overland through Upper Peru. The terrain was too difficult and too easy to defend. Instead, he set about building a solid defence force in Tucumán against Spanish incursions, while relying on a local gaucho leader, Martín Guemes, to keep the royalists on the defensive by launching guerrilla sorties on Spanish outposts and lines of communication. Guemes and his band of irregulars fought efficiently and cheaply - forcing royalists and rich local criollos to pay for the war effort.

Before his departure, Belgrano had also reminded San Martín of the need to seek the support of the local people - most of whom were circumspect about the revolution and dubious about the motives of the revolutionaries. Many were devoutly religious and respectful of the divine right of kings as taught by the church. “You will not have to make war solely with arms, but also with public opinion,” Belgrano told him.

“...our enemies have made war against us by calling us heretics, and by this means have been able to call the uninformed to arms, telling them that we were attacking religion... I assure you that you would find yourself in much greater difficulty if they should see in the army under your command that you are opposed to religion.... Do not forget that you are a Christian, apostolic, Roman general... remember not only the generals of the people of Israel, but also those of the pagans, and the great Julius Caesar who never neglected to invoke the immortal gods and for whose victories Rome decreed prayers.”

Once the front line had been stabilized and the Spaniards held to the highlands, San Martín did something entirely unexpected. Pleading ill-health, he retired to Córdoba, some 500 kilometres to the south, to recuperate. In fact, he had no intention of returning to Tucuman. To a confidant he explained: “Our country will not make any progress in the north, for here only a defensive war is feasible and for this the brave gauchos of Salta and a couple of squadrons of veterans suffice. To attempt anything else is to throw men and money down a bottomless pit.”

While in Córdoba, he indicated to Buenos Aires that, being too indisposed for military action, he would be happy to accept the governorship of Cuyo, one of the remote Andean provinces of Argentina. Quiet, sparsely-populated, distant from the upheavals of revolution, Cuyo was an outpost - the kind of place where a moderately distinguished but aging politician might be content to spend his final years in public life. Its capital, Mendoza, sat tranquilly amid vineyards and palm trees, a country town still small enough for the most of the citizens to know each other by name. For a soldier of the revolution, it seemed an odd choice, a form of retirement from worldly affairs, almost an admission of defeat. Again San Martín confided his reasoning. The long-term key to defeating the Spaniards, he asserted, was for a “ small, well-trained army to cross over to Chile and finish the Goths there...” and afterwards “...allying our forces, to go by sea to Lima. This is our course and no other.” Mendoza was to be the launching pad. If Lima could be captured then the whole of Spain’s South American empire would fall.

Despite San Martín’s show of confidence, the concept of transporting an army equipped with guns and baggage overland to Chile must have seemed dangerously risky. Only pack-mules, refugees and the occasional hardy traveller journeyed over the southern Andes. The trails were poor and the climb arduous. Some of the paths were so narrow as to afford room only for marching in single file. Chile - the remotest region of the Spanish empire - looked more like a detour than a direct route to Lima and to defeat of the Spaniards. Moreover, San Martín’s natural reticence and austerity combined with his suspect health gave little cause for supposing him capable of visionary exploits.

The new Governor of Cuyo soon dispelled doubts about his health and energy. His prime concern was to build a fresh army, and to seek the necessary funds both locally and from Buenos Aires; but he took to heart the advice he had received from Belgrano and worked equally at the business of government. He began by putting the province’s finances and public services on a sound footing; and he also played a role akin to that of Azdac in Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle in the administration of justice. Tales of his eccentric but wise decisions abound. A farmer who spoke against the revolution was ordered to deliver ten dozen pumpkins to the army canteen. Having issued an instruction forbidding officers to enter the gun-powder plant in boots and spurs, he was himself refused entry by a guard - whom he promptly rewarded with an ounce of gold.

Preparations

The years 1815 and 1816 constituted a dark period for the independence movement throughout Hispanic America. In New Granada (Colombia), the Spanish were carrying all before them; an earlier Chilean revolution had collapsed; and Morelos, leader of the Mexican uprising had been executed. Further south, the situation looked equally bleak. Towards the end of 1815, the Argentine Army of the North under San Martín’s replacement, General Rondeau, suffered a massive defeat at Sipé-Sipé; and it seemed probable that the Spaniards would now push forward into the rest of the country. Unable to respond militarily, San Martín opted for ruse. He set up a network of agents in Chile and Upper Peru whose role was twofold: to obtain intelligence on Spanish movements; and to disseminate stories of the size of the rebel army stationed in Mendoza and the imminence of a major counterattack.

On the Spanish side, General Osorio, who had won back Chile for the Spanish cause, was replaced by Francisco Marcó del Ponte, a pompous aristocrat who styled himself:

Don Francisco Casimiro Marcó del Ponte, Diaz y Mendez, Knight of the order of St James, The Royal Military Order of St Hermenegildo and the Fleur-de-Lys, Member of the Royal Equestrian Order of Ronda..... Field Marshal of the Royal Armies, Supreme governor, Captain-General, President of the Royal Audiencia .....etc. etc.

Marcó’s grandiosity was matched by his incompetence as a political and military leader. He ruthlessly suppressed the Chilean population, jailing and torturing all sections of society indiscriminately and thereby alienating the sympathies even of Chilean royalists. At the same time, he became a prey to every fabrication that it pleased San Martín to feed him. As a result, plans for a Spanish invasion of Río de La Plata from Upper Peru and Chile were constantly postponed and in the end failed to materialize.

Meanwhile, in Buenos Aires, Juan Martín de Pueyrredón was elected Supreme Director of the United Provinces of Río de La Plata and, unlike his predecessor, he backed San Martín’s proposed strategy of invading Chile by way of the Andes.

San Martín was already busy with preparations. He placed the province on a war footing, forming even children into regiments who performed military exercises and carried their own flags. Foreign residents were encouraged to enlist. The English, who were numerous, raised a company of light infantry at their own cost. Under his orders, weapons and gun-powder factories, iron foundries and a textile mill sprang up, the latter to make cloth for uniforms, which the women of Mendoza were engaged to sew. He founded an army medical corps under the command of two military surgeons, one English, the other Peruvian, another of engineers, and so on. Countless requests for materials went to Pueyrredón in Buenos Aires who responded as well as he could:

"The 4,000 blankets from Cordoba are on their way, but I could only get 500 ponchos... an order has gone out to send 1,000 arrobas (11,500 kilograms) of jerked beef for December delivery... Herewith the clothes and shirts you requested... forty saddle blankets... two bugles sent separately in a small box - the only two I’ve been able to find. In January you’ll get another 1,387 arrobas of jerked beef... 2,000 sabers are on their way. Also 200 tents… Here is the World, the Devil and the Flesh... How will I ever pay off the debts incurred for all this… Maybe I’ll just declare bankruptcy, repudiate all the bills and run off to Mendoza so you can feed me on the beef I’m sending you. For heaven’s sake don’t ask me for anything else, unless you want to hear I’ve been found hanging from a beam in the fort.”

Thirty-thousand shoes were made for the horses, without which they would not have been able to cross the rocky mountain passes. Vast quantities of charquicán were prepared - an iron ration consisting of powdered beef mixed with fat and dried chile pepper. Each soldier received enough of this to provide nourishment for eight days.

Not least amongst San Martín’s resources was Father Luís Beltrán, a locally-born mendicant friar. Self-taught scientist, mathematician, engineer and a born innovator, Beltrán took charge of the arsenal and soon had three hundred workers under his orders. He cast cannon, melted down church bells to make guns and bullets, taught workers how to make saddles, horseshoes, knapsacks, bayonets and swords, built special wagons and pulleys for conveying artillery across rivers and canyons, and even made portable suspension bridges.

San Martín’s young wife, Remedios, threw herself into fund-raising - and no well-to-do Cuyo family escaped her request for a donation. The entire province - no more than 50,000 strong - transformed itself into a military-industrial enterprise and, as so often happens, acquired a sense of purpose and unity as well as prosperity in the process. San Martín’s popularity grew along with his reputation as an inspiring leader.

Independence declared

On July 9, 1816, after a congressional meeting in Tucumán, the United Provinces of the River Plate formally declared their independence from Spain. San Martín sent his aide-de-camp, Alvarez Condarco, overland to Chile with a copy of the declaration for delivery to Marcó del Ponte. San Martín’s instructions to Condarco were typically succinct and not without macabre humour: “You are to go via Los Patos which is the longest road. If they don’t hang you, they’ll send you packing at once, in which case you’ll return via Uspallata which is the shortest path. Without taking a note, you are to memorize both routes so that you can make a map on your return.” As expected, Marcó had the document burned in public - but he released Condarco thereby allowing him to complete his mission.

In September, San Martín invited the Pehuenche Indians, who occupied part of the eastern slopes of the Andes, to a conference at the fort of San Carlos, south of Mendoza. San Martín’s first biographer, General Bartolomé Mitre, describes the scene:

“With the invitation, San Martín sent them many mules laden with spirits and wine, with sweetmeats, cloth, and glass beads for the women, horse gear and clothes for the men. In savage pomp they came; the warriors, followed by their women, rode up to the fort on the day appointed in full war costume, flourishing their long lances. Proceedings commenced with a sham fight in the Indian fashion, whereby they dashed at full speed round the fort, from whose walls a gun was fired every five minutes and was answered by Indian yells. Then the chiefs entered the fort and were told by San Martín that the Spaniards were foreigners who intended to rob them of their lands, their cattle, their women and children; and that he desired to pass though their country with an army, to go by the Planchon and Portillo passes to the country on the other side of the mountains, there to destroy these Spaniards. The Indian chiefs listened to his request and granted him the permission he required, after which they, with their warriors, gave themselves up to an orgy which lasted eight days.”

San Martín had no intention of taking the routes confided to the Pehuenches, who owed allegiance to neither side in the war of independence, but he anticipated, rightly, that they would sell the information to the Spaniards.

By mid January 1817, San Martín pronounced the Army of the Andes ready for action. On the 12th, the soldiers - 5,000 in total - marched through the streets of Mendoza to the sound of drums, while the citizens cheered and waved flags. In the main square, the soldiers gave a ceremonial salute to the Virgen del Carmen - patron saint of the army. San Martín formally accepted a special flag embroidered by the women of the city. Clutching the flag, he ascended a platform and addressed his troops.

“Soldiers, this is the first flag of independence to be unfurled in South America.” Cries of “Viva la Patria” rang through air as the troops hailed the flag and swore fidelity to the principles for which it stood. Next came a twenty-five gun salute followed by a bullfight and a rodeo, with gauchos, regular cavalry and even some native riders vying with each other in splendour, exuberance and skill in the saddle. San Martín looked on. “These are the madmen our country needs,” he remarked.

Up and Over

A week later, the army set out. The vanguard and rearguard under generals Soler and O’Higgins (future leader of an independent Chile) were to take the long route over the mountains through the pass of Los Patos. General Juan Gregorio de Las Heras was appointed to lead the second division through Uspallata - the only pass suitable for heavy guns and ammunition. Other, smaller detachments were sent further north and south. As befitted the commander-in-chief, San Martín took the more arduous Los Patos route. All rode mules which were more sure-footed than horses on the mountain paths.

Despite San Martín’s careful preparations, the ascent proved more taxing than even he had expected. Of the 10,500 mules, 16,000 horses and 700 head of cattle taken on the march, only 4,300 mules and 511 horses survived the journey, all in poor condition. On the Los Patos route, five mountain ranges had to be crossed, and the trail led between some of the highest peaks of the Andes. Some soldiers died from cold and lack of oxygen; others became sick with fatigue and exposure. Half-way through the march, at eight thousand feet, in the midst of a violent hailstorm, San Martín came close to despair. As night fell, the marchers settled as best they could in the freezing temperature, San Martín taking refuge in a cave where the combination of cold and fear that he might have launched his army on an impossible mission deprived him of sleep. By morning the storm had blown over, but San Martín sensed that he must make a gesture to revive the flagging spirits of his soldiers. He ordered his band to play anthems of the revolution over breakfast; and for an hour the music echoed through the barren landscape of ice and rock.

Though the struggle was far from straightforward, San Martín succeeded in fulfilling his main objective which was to secure his homeland from any possibility of a return to its former colonial status. Eventually he also reached Lima with his army as he had planned. He did not, however, manage to drive the Spanish army from Peru nor liberate Upper Peru which is probably one of the principal reasons why Argentina’s borders do not include areas of present-day Bolivia that were formerly part of the Viceroyalty of the River Plate. It was left to Simón Bolívar and his great lieutenant José Antonio Sucre to complete the task of freeing South-America from its colonial yoke.

While the war against Spain was still underway in the west and the north of South America, civil war broke out between the Argentine provinces and the capital, Buenos Aires, with declarations of independence coming, at various times from Santa Fé, Entre Ríos, Tucumán, Santiago del Estero, Catamarca, Córdoba, La Rioja and the Banda Oriental (Uruguay). Paraguay fell into the hands of a local caudillo, José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, a morose, sinister dictator who closed his country to the outside world ostensibly to protect it from economic and political subservience to Buenos Aires. In 1816, Uruguay was invaded by Portuguese/Brazilian forces and subsequently annexed and renamed Cisplatina (literally ‘this side of the River Plate’). José Gervasio Artigas, a charismatic Uruguayan gaucho, led campaigns against both the centralists of Buenos Aires and the Portuguese invaders. After a prolonged struggle, the Portuguese prevailed and Artigas was forced to seek asylum with Francia in Paraguay. Nevertheless, he laid the foundation for Uruguay to become an independent state, and he is remembered as the father of the nation. After his departure, Uruguayan irregulars continued the fight against the Portuguese and although neither side prevailed, statehood was finally achieved in 1828 at the Treaty of Montevideo, which was partially drawn up and diplomatically fostered by Great Britain. By this time, Bolívar and Sucre had completed their mission to free the rest of Spanish South America of colonial rule.

Not yet Argentina

Argentina was now fully independent, but not yet Argentina. Two obstacles stood in the way of a settled nation: a lack of internal unity between the provinces, and the fact that huge swathes of the country, including virtually the entire region south of the Province of Buenos Aires and a large area of the north bordering Paraguay and Bolivia were marked on maps of the time as “Territorio Indígena” (lands belonging to native peoples).

The intermittent civil war and struggle for power between centralists and federalists is a complex tale, made more convoluted by war against a short-lived confederation of Peru and Bolivia, and by periods of interference from foreign powers, notably France and Great Britain, which included prolonged naval blockades of the River Plate. A visitor to the region as late as the 1850s would not have known for certain which nation she had reached nor how it was governed. Not until 1862, when Bartolomé Mitre was elected president, did Argentina emerge as a more or less unified country.

Border stability took a little longer. In 1864, Argentina entered an alliance with Brazil and Uruguay in a savagely destructive war against Paraguay. The Paraguayan War lasted for six years and ended in a devastating defeat for Paraguay whose losses amounted to fully sixty percent of the population and, according to some estimates, up to ninety percent of adult males. Argentina’s share of the post-war spoils amounted to significant chunks of Paraguayan territory, which today make up the Argentinian provinces of Misiones and Formosa.

Once the Paraguayan War drew to a close, the authorities in Buenos Aires turned their attention to the “territorios indígenas”. During the colonial period, where there were mines to work or haciendas to run native peoples had been enslaved or indentured; but in areas of no obvious profit to Spain or to the local criollo elite, they had often been left alone or had defended themselves with enough vigour to discourage attack. Hence why San Martín felt it necessary to requested permission from the Pehuenches for the Army of the Andes to pass through their land en route to Chile.

After independence, hostility between the two very different populations began to grow as the “Europeans” pushed into native lands, and the native peoples pushed back. Some became adept at conducting raids or “malones” on criollo communities for the purpose of carrying off goods, cattle and women. Nevertheless, the native peoples gradually gave ground in the face of increasing determination by central government to occupy every corner of the land inherited from Spain. In the late 1870s, the Conquest of the Desert - as the campaign in the south became known - hardened into a programme that some (though not all) historians have called genocide. Native tribes of the south were broken up and their populations reduced or dispersed. Contrary to a widespread belief, however, many survived and their descendants continue to live in small groupings, though often in very poor circumstances.

By 1890, it was all over. Native resistance had ended and Argentina had stamped her presence throughout her mainland territories.

All that remained to clear up was a dispute with Chile over land at the southernmost tip of the continent. It took nearly a century and was resolved in 1984 under the auspices of the same authority that awarded the continent to Spain and Portugal in 1493: the Vatican.

And Las Malvinas (The Falkland Islands): a thorn in the side of a nation whose founding myths are about the struggle against European colonialism and the defence of territory awarded in perpetuity by God’s representative on earth. Whoever has flown into Ezeiza, the international airport of Buenos Aires, will have seen on their way into town a large billboard with the words: “Las Malvinas son Argentinas” (The Falklands belong to Argentina). No one is going to forget.

Sources on the period and geographical area addressed in this piece are vast though many of the best and most enlightening are in Spanish. Among the best readily-available works in English are those of Professor John Lynch, in particular: The Spanish American Revolutions 1808-1826, London (various editions), San Martin: Argentine Soldier, American Hero (New Haven 2009), Spanish Colonial Administration 1782-1810: The Intendant System in the Viceroyalty of the Rio De La Plata (New York 1958), Spain under the Habsburgs (Oxford 1964). A fascinating contemporary source in English is The Memoirs of General Miller (London 1828) available in electronic format from Google. Among countless works in Spanish, Bartolomé Mitre’s Historia de San Martín y de la Emancipación Sudamericana (Buenos Aires 1938) is indispensable despite being controversial in many respects. For the colonial period, an excellent general survey is Henry Kamen’s Spain’s Road to Empire, London 2002 which covers all Spanish colonial possessions, including those of the far east. Material specifically on the La Plata region is harder to come by. A superb if highly opinionated view of how Argentinians think and feel about themselves and others is Marcos Aguinis’ Un país de novela - Viaje hacia la mentalidad de los argentinos (Buenos Aires 1988).

Note: This article was first published in Open Democracy

Mexico's Drugs War

Mexico City

An end-of-year drink at the house of some friends. Our hosts - Nacho and Sandra - are a young couple with two small children - Carla and Tomás. The telephone rings. Sandra picks up the receiver, listens for a moment, grimaces and hangs up. The caller, she tells us, said he was: “Colonel Roberto Ordoñez of the Zetas”. He claimed to have four-year-old Carla in his “possession” and wanted a million dollars for her return. Happily, both children were playing in the garden under their parents’ watchful eyes.
The Zetas are the most feared and violent criminal gang in Mexico, a drug cartel with a lucrative sideline in kidnapping for ransom.
“We’re used to the threats,” Sandra explained.
The couple, well-known artists, are back home only for the holidays. They now live in the United States which has an open-door policy for people of exceptional ability - their talents having made them targets in their own land. Even on this short visit - they are in town for just a few days - the criminals know they are here and have their local telephone number. Tomorrow the family leaves for the coast, and by the time anyone reads this, they will be safely back across the border.
Countless less well known Mexicans have also fled their homes, if not to the United States then elsewhere in the country so as to escape the seemingly ineluctable criminalisation of their town or neighbourhood.

The wave of violence currently sweeping Mexico reaches virtually every part of the Republic, but it is centred on the northern states - notably those sharing a frontier with the United States.

Proceso - Mexico’s premier investigative journal - runs regular in-depth reports on the drug cartels - or “narcos”. Its 26 September edition - largely dedicated to drug trafficking - includes a headline: “Where the Narco rules”. The place: Ciudad Juarez, in the state of Chihuahua, a border town with a credible claim to be the world’s most dangerous city.
The story focuses on a press photographer from local newspaper El Diario sent to cover yet another murder, this time in a shopping centre two blocks from the newspaper office where he works. A grey car riddled with bullet holes stands in the parking lot, its wind-screen and side-windows shattered. Inside, slumped against the steering wheel, is 21-year-old Luis Carlos Santiago, an apprentice journalist from the same newspaper. He is the second reporter from El Diario to be murdered - the first being Armando Rodriguez who, a year earlier, was gunned down outside his house while taking his daughter to school.
Journalism is a risky business in northern Mexico - but then so is almost any other way of life: on the day of Santiago’s murder, twenty-four others were also slaughtered - including two whole families machine-gunned in their homes.
A three-way war is underway for control of Ciudad Juarez between the army and two rival drug cartels; and anyone who gets in the way is likely to be killed. The scale and bloodiness of the war are spine-chilling. Media reports are common of weddings, festivals and parties being interrupted by the arrival of hit-men carrying sacks of severed heads that they roll out onto the dance floor. In 2010 alone, Ciudad Juarez suffered over 3,000 drug-related murders. Almost a quarter of a million people are believed to have fled the city and its environs. Even the mayor, José Reyes Ferriz, lives in Texas. On Independence day (September 15th) only the police and the military showed up for the public ceremony; and the traditional cry of Viva Mexico rang out from the Town Hall into a space emptied by fear, and by threats from mobsters.
Violence in the eastern state of Tamaulipas receives less coverage than Chihuahua - but it may be even more lethal and widespread. Stories emerge of as many as 200 deaths in a single encounter, of stretches of road strewn with the corpses of men, women and children, of piles of bodies thrown into ditches. Most reports are unofficial and reach the outside world in the form of anonymous blogs, private letters, and verbal accounts made by people who have left. Few are willing to speak up publicly. No records are kept of murders. No one knows where many of the bodies of the slain end up, only that they are not in official graveyards. Politicians, police, journalists, and local bureaucrats are said to be in the pay of drug traffickers. Informers are everywhere, ready to report attempts to clean up or to dispute authority over the area. Government employees in rural ministries can work solely during daylight hours and via main highways. Travel on secondary roads is foolhardy. The local press has been silenced.
Abasolo , a small town 100 km north west of Ciudad Victoria, the State Capital, lost its mayor in August. He simply disappeared. So too the mayor of the little town of Cruillas. In Hidalgo the mayor was assassinated, his replacement has been warned against entering his office, and the Gulf Cartel has imposed a curfew on the inhabitants. A growing number of towns and villages lack a police force - the previous officers having all resigned or fled.
Tamaulipas has many of the characteristics of a criminal dictatorship, the difference being that control is disputed by the Zetas and their rivals the Gulf Cartel. In effect, no one is in charge, unless it be Thanatos the god of death.

Michoacan and Sinaloa are two “drug” states not adjacent to the US border. Drug-running in the former is in the hands of the Michoacán Family, La Familia. Cartel chief, Nazario Moreno González - El Chayo - was reportedly shot dead by troops in December 2010 after a street battle that for two days virtually closed down the state capital, Morelia. If El Chayo is truly dead, then he has undoubtedly already been replaced by another member of the gang. Like the Hydra of Lerna, decapitation merely produces more heads.
Perhaps more than any other figure of the Mexican underworld, El Chayo reflected the strange nether world of the drug barons - a world in which conventional values are reversed yet remain recognisably of the same order - like a photographic negative. He famously published a magazine - Pensamientos (Thoughts) - which he used as a vehicle to set out a personal credo in words that could be mistaken for those of a passionate evangelist. Here is an extract from one of his pieces:
Brothers in Christ, Mexicans, Michoacanos, fellow tropicals, we have so much in common: a humble birth, a harsh childhood, hard labour, little leisure, troubled dreams... Everything we do springs from this..... I dreamed of being someone, of fighting for my loved ones, so that everyone in future would enjoy all the things that I lacked in the days when injustice made me tremble with frustrated rage....thanks be to god that my dreams haven’t changed and now form part of my reality... - and from there I have come to an evangelistic, militant Christianity that the Crusaders would have recognised.
Easy though it may be to dismiss this as the self-justifying ramble of a criminal, the expression of outrage at the social and economic injustices of a deeply unequal country is something with which many Mexicans will sympathise.
Sinaloa is the home of the cartel of the same name, and headquarters of Mexico’s most famous drug baron - Joaquín Guzmán Loera, El Chapo. Since his escape from a federal prison in 2001, El Chapo has become something of a Robin Hood figure, a glamorous anti-hero with a reputation for daring and for generosity towards the poor. Countless articles have been written about him, as well as at least one book - Malcolm Beith’s The Last Narco. He is reputed to have a vast and complex network of legitimate as well as illegitimate business, with up to 150,000 people in his employ. In 2009, he made the Forbes list of world’s richest people - an accolade that drew a furious response from Mexican president Felipe Calderón who claimed that the magazine was glorifying criminality. Ever since El Chapo’s jail break, both the previous government and the present one claim to have devoted substantial resources to recapturing him. With the enormous wealth at his command, El Chapo can probably bribe his way out of trouble. He can also, without doubt, fight his way out: all the cartels are known to be equipped with modern weaponry imported - largely - from the United States, but also from other supposedly “respectable” countries like Germany.
Alone among the cartel leaders, El Chapo appears to have a significant section of the general public on his side, not least because many see him as an enemy of the feared Zetas and with a greater chance of bringing them to heel than the federal government.
He is not, however, the only cartel chief to capture the public imagination. Several are celebrated in popular songs - or corridos - composed, performed and recorded by professional groups. It is not uncommon for a drug lord to commission a corrido and, for obvious reasons, no one dares decline. Nor is it wise for local radio stations to refuse to broadcast such songs - despite official attempts to ban them from the airwaves.
There is sense in some quarters that the drug cartels - especially those able to project a social conscience (however distorted) - may be winning the battle for public opinion.
Almost immediately on taking office in December 2006, President Calderón launched a crackdown against the cartels, using the military rather than the police as the main instrument of attack. Part of the rationale for this offensive lay in the increasing bloodshed wrought by the gangs themselves as they fought each other for control over drug supplies and trade routes to the United States. Pressure is also likely to have come from the US administration for Mexico to clean up its act - though Mexicans point out that the US is the world’s largest market for illegal drugs and that a ‘clean-up’ will be unlikely to work unless something is done to restrict demand.
In any case, while Calderón’s anti-drugs war has claimed some successes, notably the capture or killing of several prominent narcos, the overall level of conflict has increased alarmingly. Since Calderón’s campaign began, over thirty-five thousand drug-related murders have been recorded - with the number of deaths steadily increasing. A further ten thousand people have been reported as missing - though the number of these is likely to be much larger. Reforma newspaper runs a macabre “Execution Metre” - an annual “organised crime” death count presented in graphic format. It shows a rise in “executions” every year since 2006, with steep increases over the last two years. Latest official figures for 2010 give a total of 15, 273 executions - making it the most violent year in the country’s peacetime history.
Many interpret these figures as evidence that the government’s war against the cartels is failing; and there are suspicions, too, that some of the leaders - El Chapo being one - are enjoying government protection.
Conspiracy theories abound, with some ministers such as Genaro García Luna, Minister of Public Security, suffering repeated press barrages for his alleged links with mobsters. The distrust of government, however, is not based on hard evidence. It stems from a failure of authority to deal with the savagery that prevails in so many Mexican states, from a sense of living in a country where criminality wins out over the law, from a feeling of powerlessness feeding a suspicion that the government itself is a participant in the lawlessness both through the corruption of ministers and its tactic of responding to violence with violence so that citizens can hardly tell the difference between the behaviour of the official and the unofficial armed forces.
If anything seems clear in this chaos of brutality, religiosity and perverse idealism, it is that President Calderon’s war against the cartels is about a lot more than the drug trade. Unlike the leaders of revolutionary groups such as the Zapatistas, or the kidnappers of national politician Diego Fernández de Cevallos who left a well-written if tortuous justification of their action, the narcos come from the poor and marginalised classes who - a century after the Mexican Revolution - continue to account for over half of the country’s 110 million people. For everyone, from top to bottom of the cartel hierarchies - the petty traders, couriers and hit-men, the marijuana and poppy growers, as well the bosses and their wives and mistresses - the drug trade provides a path out of poverty and access to a life-style unobtainable, indeed not even thinkable, in the world of so-called legitimate activity. Here lies the challenge not just to Mexico but to a wider world.
Capitalism has proved over time to be a prime force for the creation of wealth. By the same token, it has shown a tendency to concentrate that wealth in relatively few hands - particularly in the neo-liberal version that holds sway in a large part of the West. Extremes of inequality can produce in people who are marginalised by the economic or political system a belief that they no longer have a stake in “society”, that the prevailing order is one of injustice and cruelty from which they can expect nothing positive, and that their only recourse is to hold it in contempt. This effect may well lie at the heart of Mexico’s problem; and it also offers a warning that no country can afford to ignore.
In the words of Isaiah Berlin:
Men will suffer for centuries in societies whose structure is made stable by the accumulation and retention of all necessary power in the hands of some one class. Ferment begins only when this order breaks down for some reason...Lack of adequate status, humiliation of the parents, and the sense of injury and indignation of the children are what drives men to social and political extremism.
Mexico’s drug war represents a challenge not just to Mexico but to the West. The turmoil has already spilled into the United States and possibly also to the country’s southern neighbours - Guatemala and El Salvador. Europe, too, has recently become a target market for the Mexican cartels.
In the end, this is a war about fundamental human justice in almost every conceivable sense of that phrase. The solution, if there is one, will require an international response; solidarity with Mexico as the country struggles to find a path to peace, and maybe something more - recognition that neither peace nor justice can be achieved while so many millions of our fellow human beings lack the wherewithal to live a dignified life. Four hundred and fifty years ago, in 1562, the great French essayist Montaigne heard the message in Paris from the lips some of the first South Americans to cross the Atlantic.
....(the visitors) noted that though there were some men among us of great wealth, many were ragged, half-starved beggars; and they found it strange that people who suffered such injustice did not rise up and take the rich by the throat or set fire to their houses.
That may well be what the cartels are about.

Note: This piece was originally published in Open Democracy