International capitalism  is beginning to fragment. Despite the fall of most of the Stalinist regimes of ‘Actually Existing Socialism’ and the arrogant proclamations of ‘The End of History’ and the declarations of ‘TINA’ (There Is No Alternative), a number of historically significant crises are either approaching or have already arrived.  The crises are no longer felt in the periphery of the world – and the vast majority of the world’s population – but has begun to penetrate the core of world capitalism and its fortress, the US Empire: the failed military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq (which has exposed imperial overstretch), the ecological crises, the energy crisis, the crises of food production and distribution, rising unemployment, the bursting of financial bubbles and the consequent exposure of Wall Street Banksters threatening the financial stability of the world economy come to mind. 

 Reference points of Resistance to these various symptons of the underlying system have taken many forms across the world but the stiffest resistance has probably occurred in the form of an Intifada against the various wars and military occupations of the Middle East, and the ongoing revolt of Latin America led primarily by Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution. One thing that distinguishes the reference points of struggle in Latin America is that they have gone beyond symbolic mobilizations against governments and corporate power. And, unlike the Middle East, this has gone further than a nationalist resistance against occupation but has actually begun to address the questions of taking power and how to fortify it and use it to promote radical change and social justice.

Latin America is experiencing a profound era of change.  Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa summed it up when he proclaimed that the geo-political titanium plates are shifting and that what Latin America is experiencing isn’t merely an era of change but also a change of eras. 

It would be wrong to just lump all of the different governments together as some media commentators do when they refer to the “pink tide” – when there are roughly three categories of government: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The good being the “Good Left” or the social democratic left that uses progressive rhetoric but doesn’t challenge the system but merely attempts to provide it with a human face. The bad being the “Bad Left” or revolutionary governments that are taking on their domestic oligarchy and the US imperialism and attempting to alter the institutional framework of struggle which gives it an anti-capitalist dynamic. The ugly being the governments that have made no attempt to break with the past in enforcing neo-liberalism, poverty, exclusion and the loss of national sovereignty with brute force. Despite these differences, there is,  nevertheless, a certain unity in pushing forward the integration and independence of the continent. 

However, to understand the current political panorama of Latin America today it’s necessary to give an overview of its evolution - the struggle against underdevelopment, poverty and exclusion.

Well what is underdevelopment?

Che Guevara crystallized the essence behind the concept of underdevelopment:

“For all of us, the peoples of the Americas, they have a polite and refined term: “underdevelopment”.

A dwarf with an enormous head and a swollen chest is “underdeveloped” inasmuch as his weak legs or short arms do not match the rest of his anatomy. He is the product of an abnormal formation distorting his development. In reality that is what we are – we, politely referred to as “underdeveloped,” in truth are colonial, semi-colonial or dependent countries. We are countries whose economies have been distorted by imperialism, which has abnormally developed those branches of industry or agriculture needed to complement its complex economy. “Underdevelopment,” or distorted development, brings a dangerous specialization in raw materials, inherent in which is the threat of hunger for all our peoples. We, the “underdeveloped,” are also those with the single crop, the single product, the single market. A single product whose uncertain sale depends on a single market imposing and fixing conditions. That is the great formula for imperialist economic domination. It should be added to the old, but eternally youthful Roman formula: Divide and Conquer!”

It is important, however, to understand that underdevelopment and the wealth of the imperial nations are not two separate phenomena, but rather they are interdependent polarities on the same social axis – that is they are two sides of the one social relation. There could not have been a Europe, a North America, a Japan, and an Australia without the wretched misery that engulfs the vast majority of the populations in Africa, Asia(-Pacific), India and Latin America.

Eduardo Galeano wondered: “Is everything forbidden us except to fold our arms? Poverty is not written in the stars; underdevelopment is not one of God’s mysterious designs.” Well, Latin America is rich with the history of courageous struggle for human dignity; from the Indian resistance to the Spanish conquistadors, to the liberation of Latin America from the formal colonial empires of Spain and Portugal, to the struggles against the informal empires of the British, and since World War 2, the North American Empire. 

There are three great legacies that are born from these struggles. One is Indian nationalism and the 500 year struggle against the external and internal colonization of the aboriginal populations of Latin America and to rescue their culture and liberate their people.

 Leaders such as Tupac Amaru fall under this category.  In 1781, this direct descendant of the Inca Emperors launched a rebellion which successfully liberated a number of cities where slavery was consequently abolished, along with many hated taxes among other progressive and popular policies. He was eventually betrayed and captured by the Spanish who attempted to torture him in order to get information on his accomplices. In response to this he told them: “There are no other accomplices here other than you and I. You as oppressor, I as liberator, deserve to die.” They attempted to execute him by attaching his limbs to four horses and quarter him but his body didn’t break.  Before his death, he prophesised that although he would be killed then, he would return to life as millions more.  The return of Tupac Amaru today can be seen in the resistance of the indigenous communities from Southern Mexico and the Zapatistas to the Andean region with election of Evo Morales and the powerful indigenous movements throughout that region.

 Another great legacy is one of Bolivarian radical nationalism – a project to unite Latin America into one nation and to achieve real social justice and equality. Simon Bolivar – influenced by the radical European revolutions of his time went to the hills surrounding Rome, where the Plebians had launched a rebellion against the Patricians, and declared “I swear before you; I swear by the gods of my father; I swear by my ancestors; I swear by my honour and I swear by homeland that I will not allow my arm to rest or my soul to repose, until we have broken the chains which oppress us by the will of the Spanish power.” Bolivar went on to unite Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia to expel the Spanish Crown as the master of Latin America. He saw this as the first step to a united Latin American nation.

  Bolivar however differed from the Latin American oligarchy (as well as the founding fathers of the US) in that his vision of Latin American sovereignty was not only a means to accumulate capital without the parasitic colonial centers directly appropriating all the wealth.  He was actually despised by the oligarchy of his time for his unrelenting demands for complete equality. He referred to equality as the “law of laws” and that “without equality, all freedoms, all rights perish. For it we must make sacrifices.” His vision was not just of formal equality through laws but actually transforming the entire fabric of Latin American societies.  He also prophesised that “the United States of North America seemed to be destined by providence to condemn America in the name of Liberty”. His radicalism led his adversaries in the United States to condemn him as “the dangerous madman of the south”.

A third which developed later in the 20^th Century is Liberation theology which can be summed up by a conversation between a Dominican priest and his torturer when the military had captured him:

-          “How can a Christian collaborate with a Communist?”

-          “For me, men are not divided between believers and atheists, but between oppressors and oppressed, between those who want to keep this unjust society and those who want to struggle for justice.”

-          “Have you forgotten that Marx considered religion to be the opium of the people?”

-          “It is the bourgeoisie which has turned religion into an opium of the people by preaching a God, Lord of the heavens only, while taking possession of the earth for itself.”

 The fourth is a Latin American Socialism, first articulated by the great Peruvian revolutionary theorist Jose Carlos Mariategui which recognized that capitalism is a world system and capitalist development and underdevelopment are two poles of the same system making national capitalist development impossible in the semi-colonies. The recognition of this led Mariategui to assert that any meaningful revolution would need to be “socialist from its beginning but would go through two stages”. The first being national-democratic and the next being socialist with “the socialist revolution being a junction with the historic base of socialization: the indigenous communities, the survivals of primitive agrarian communism”. This conception rose organically in Latin America but was fought against by the dogma of Stalinist Communist Parties that asserted the working class must stand behind the leadership of the national bourgeoisie to develop capitalism first and open the road for socialism later.

Despite the influences of Stalinism – which was an extension of the USSR and its growing prestige and internal bureaucratisation - this organic revolutionary theory, sometimes referred to as Latin American Marxism, came to the fore again with the success of the Cuban Revolution and has been reinvigorated in the 21^st century under the banners of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution. This concept of an alternative society is not only built upon the organic traditions of the continent but is also constructed through the participation, self-organisation and empowerment of millions of people in the present time.

All of these legacies have had to confront US imperialism, as articulated in the Monroe doctrine which declared Latin America as within the sphere of US influence, and colonialism with its future vision being articulated best by US President William Taft:

“The day is not far distant when three stars and stripes at three equidistant points will mark our territory: one at the North Pole, another one at the Panama Canal, and the third at the South Pole. The whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it already is ours morally.”

And the method of enforcement is best said by General Smedley Butler:

“I spent thirty-three years and four months in active service as a member of our country’s most agile military force – the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from a second lieutenant to major-general. And during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the Big Bankers. In short I was a racketeer for capitalism… Thus I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in… I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house for of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republican … (and) I helped make Honduras “right” for American (companies)… Al Capone operated in 3 districts. I operated in three continents.”

The upshot was that alongside the fragmentation of the Spanish, Portuguese and British Empires came the rise of the US as the master of Latin America also came various challenges against that rule. The first emerged in a very mild form in Guatemala in 1953 under Jacobo Arbenz.  Guatemala was a nation where 2.2% of the population owned 70% of the arable land. United Fruit, a US company acted as a state within a state – directly controlling much of the economy.  Through its board members it also enjoyed close links to the White House, the State Department, the CIA and the US ambassador to the United Nations.

Arbenz’s program revolved around land reform for 100,000 landless peasants, improving trade union and civil rights, and introducing some social programs for the first time. He also attempted to build an alternative developmental infrastructure to the monopoly of United Fruit as well as distribute some of its lands – at market prices – to the poor.

This wasn’t a socialist program but actually one required to activate capitalist national development. This didn’t stop the denunciations coming from Washington officials. President Eisenhower decried the “Communist Dictatorship” with another Republican senator proving Eisenhower’s contention by exposing and denouncing the “unjustified increases in the price of coffee” imported from Guatemala.

Of course any attempt to implement justice had to come into conflict with the given existing order. And any conflict with that order only escalates the struggle to the next level.  The US government and Guatemalan oligarchy didn’t care that Arbenz was elected, popular and acted inside the given “democratic” framework .  Instead, they initiated a massive destabilisation campaign using the corporate media, the right-wing forces of the army and neighbouring Nicaraguan government also under the brutal dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza and whose regime would also have been threatened by this example.

 Eventually a coup overthrew Arbenz, returned all land to United Fruit, banned trade unions and opposition parties and instituted a regime of terror, where thousands where killed or tortured, tens of thousands were explicitly barred from any form of political activity or even owning a radio and three quarters of the electorate were barred from future voting along with the burning of all books considered “subversive”.

 However, this painful defeat contained many useful lessons for Latin American revolutionaries.  In fact, there was a young Argentine doctor who was working in Guatemala around the time of the coup and who fled the country to preserve his life but who became radicalized. His name was Ernesto Guevara and upon arriving in Mexico, joined up with Fidel Castro to help him launch a guerilla war to liberate Cuba from another pro-US dictator Batista.

The Cuban Revolution

Fidel Castro didn’t just lead a guerilla army in the mountains and rural areas of Cuba. He led a nation-wide democracy movement, mobilizing workers and peasants based upon the program (named after and taken from Fidel’s famous defense speech at his trial) History Will Absolve Me which outlined the road to national independence and social justice in Cuba. The July 26 movement was very heterogeneous and contradictory in its class interests and future vision but were unified in their goal to overthrow the military dictatorship and was led by the revolutionary leadership of the Rebel Army and steeled through the strategic mass participation of the Cuban working class.   At this time, the tactic of the guerilla foco was not properly understood by the Cuban oligarchy and Batista dictatorship and the future trajectory of the revolutionary movement certainly wasn’t understood by the United States.

Thus, when Castro led the July 26 Movement to power, this was not seen as the end of the revolutionary struggle by the Castro leadership and the radicalized masses but rather just the end of its first phase, with the next phase requiring the organization and mobilization of millions of Cubans to participate in the deepening of reforms and the escalation of the struggle to defend them.

Initially, when Batista fled the country he handed the reins of power to the top general who declared martial law but who was ousted in the face of a nation wide general strike and mass mobilization organized not just by Fidel Castro’s Rebel Army but also by the mass underground urban movement that emerged from under the dictatorship. However, this initial victory also led to the clash with more powerful forces and the struggle escalated.

The Revolutionary government moved quickly to solve the most pressing problems of the Cuban population through the redistribution of wealth and the expansion of state economic activity. Fidel Castro proclaimed:

“The Problems concerning land, the problem of industrialization, the problem of housing, the problem of unemployment, the problem of education and the problem of the health of the people; these are the six problems we should take immediate steps to resolve.”

The solving of such problems, however, increasingly came into conflict with the existing socio-economic framework dominated by the Cuban oligarchy, the old state institutions and US imperialism as Issac Saney reveals:

“In the years leading up to the Revolution, U.S. investment in Cuba comprised more than 11 percent of the total investment in Latin America and the Caribbean.  By 1959, U.S. corporations controlled 40 percent of sugar production and 75% of arable land; they also owned more than 90 percent of electric and telephone utilities, 50 percent of railways, 90 percent of mines, 100 percent of oil refineries and 90 percent of cattle ranches. They dominated the transportation, manufacturing and tourism sectors. Moreover, U.S. banks held more than one quarter of bank deposits. Organised crime from the U.S. – particularly the Mafia – came to have a tremendous influence in Cuban economics and politics.”

Learning the lessons of Guatemala, Fidel Castro didn’t just try to implement the reforms in the same manner of Arbenz, relying on the old state institutions to implement reforms and the oligarchy, along with Washington to respect the will of the majority. The Cuban government specifically began organizing new state institutions that would support the revolutionary process through the mass participation of the popular classes. For example, instead of relying on the old Cuban army to safeguard the changes, a national workers militia was organized combined with neighbourhood councils that served as tools of self-organisation of the Cuban masses. James Petras noted:

“The class struggle … became clearer, and the social dimension of the revolution became predominant – essentially through the penetration by the working class of the critical new institutions, the embryonic revolutionary state, the Rebel Army, and the popular militias… the socialist stage of the revolution, punctuated as it was by conflicts and some violence, was relatively peaceful, because the working-class role in the armed struggle for democracy had secured it a strategic position, allowing it to undermine all bourgeois opposition.”

 Many young cadre of the revolutionary movement were put in charge of creating a new national intelligence agency that would have to take on the CIA and other branches of the US government. Their main weapon was the active support and participation of millions of people in the revolutionary process. So every policy aimed at wealth redistribution was met by increasingly hostile blows by the US government and was met by counter-blows by the Castro government with each escalation making it impossible to return to the way things were because by relying upon the popular classes as the force driving the revolution the fabric of society had to be fundamentally transformed. The government initiated a relatively mild land reform but this couldn’t be accepted by either the Cuban Oligarchy or U.S. imperialism and millions of people joined to defend the process and the upshot lead to a far more radical land reform meaning that in order to return the former properties to the old ruling class would mean not only overthrowing the new government but also dispossessing literally millions of people of their newly acquired land, power and dignity.

 The U.S. simply wasn’t in a position to accept this radical process of social transformation and that it had lost the battle in one of the world’s smallest nations and move on because the logic of escalation wouldn’t allow it. A declassified 1961 CIA report explains why:

“The extensive influence of ‘Castroism’ is not a function of Cuban power… Castro’s shadow looms large because social and economic conditions throughout Latin America invite opposition to ruling authority and encourage agitation for radical change,” and refers to in particular to the, “Castro idea of taking matters into one’s own hands,” which was particularly dangerous because, “the poor and underprivileged, stimulated by the example of the Cuban Revolution, are now demanding opportunities for a decent living.”

 In 1964, the State Department Policy Planning Council stated: “The primary danger we face in Castro is … in the impact the very existence of his regime has upon the leftist movement in many Latin American countries… The simple fact is that Castro represents a successful defiance of the US, a negation of our whole hemispheric policy of almost a century and a half”

 Thus, the Cuban Revolution exemplifies in a very vivid way two laws of history in the era of imperialism: the struggle for a radical and real democracy, and for national independence and sovereignty, for countries that are already neo-colonies or are in some other way oppressed by imperialism inevitably turns, sooner or later, into a struggle for socialism. And that struggle inevitably acquires an international dimension.  For the United States, the continued domination of the entire region required the destruction of this bad example and the impulse of struggle that it pumped throughout the continent. The virus of people, “taking matters into their own hands,” had to be quarantined.  The class struggle needed to be escalated and it was.

Firstly against Cuba, an unprecedented campaign of state-sponsored terrorism was unleashed. This targeted factories, schools, crops and the assassination of political figures. At its height this even included forms of biological terrorism. This was organized in Miami by the Cuban exile community with the financing, technical and logistical assistance and political protection of the US government.  This escalation also included a devastating economic blockade and an invasion via proxy forces in the Bay of Pigs in 1961. The CIA actually planned that Bay of Pigs around the same strategies and tactics that had succeeded in Guatemala but it was completely routed because the Cuban people rose up en mass in support of the Cuban Revolution.

Throughout Latin America, the Kennedy administration initiated the Alliance for Progress as a way to contain the Cuban Revolution’s influence in the sphere of social justice but what is lesser known is the policy that Kennedy combined with this.  It was under his administration that the US government encouraged all South American militaries to move away from the paradigm of defense from an external threat to national sovereignty to the defense of the existing social system against internal class struggle. It was the Kennedy administration that had Latin American governments build up their capacities in death squads that was to later haunt the entire continent.

Unfortunately among the forces for change a false strategic dichotomy emerged. The first strand led by social democratic parties and pro-Moscow Communist parties was that Latin America couldn’t initiate revolution and should focus on developing democratic capitalism (as the first step to socialism) which in reality led them to never challenging the system itself. The forces that rejected this approach usually came to the conclusion that guerilla warfare was the only alternative – attempting to reproduce the tactical form of Castro’s revolutionary strategy and raising that tactic into the grand strategy.  So while the Cuban revolution was able to rise taking the ruling elite and the US off guard, the aspiring guerilla armies didn’t enjoy this tactical advantage of surprise. Where as Batista didn’t send in sufficient forces to crush Castro in the beginning, the Bolivian army sent 10,000 soldiers to encircle and assassinate Che Guevara. The ruling class adapted to this tactic in a number of ways and was able to crush the guerilla forces before they could get off the ground – with the exception to this being the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia who had designed their own strategies independently. This false dichotomy of revolutionary struggle acted in many was as a straight-jacket on the development of revolutionary struggle.

Chile under Allende opened up a period of revolutionary opportunities but President Allende, who was a socialist, was unwilling to escalate the struggle in step with the Chilean Oligarchy working in alliance with Washington which poured all possible resources into the overthrow of this government. He relied on the institutions of the bourgeois state to safeguard the process that was anti-capitalist and he fell primarily because of this.

With the fall of Allende, however, the normality of old didn’t return. What took the place was a reign of terror under General Pincohet which sparked a wave of military dictatorships throughout the continent with tens of thousands of people arrested, tortured and killed or simply disappeared.  The lessons learned from this tragedy were summarized by leader of the MIR leader Miguel Enriquez at an underground press conference held one month after the coup:

“The crisis of capitalist domination was crystallized in the rise of the Popular Unity government. This generated conditions if it would have permitted, if the government had utilized as an instrument of the working class struggle, the conquering of power by the workers and a proletarian revolution.

“But the reformist project assumed by the UP imprisoned itself in the bourgeois order…With the hope of achieving an alliance with a section of the bourgeoisie, it didn’t base itself on the revolutionary organization of the workers, in their own organs of power. It refused an alliance with the soldiers and junior officers; it preferred trying to fortify itself within the capitalist state apparatus and the officer corp of the armed forces.

“The reformist illusion allowed the dominant classes to fortify themselves in the superstructure of the state and from there initiate its reactionary counter-offensive. The reformist illusion was paid and is being paid for cruelly by the workers, their leaders and parties…dramatically confirming the words of the French revolutionary of the 18^th century, Saint Just: ‘Those who make revolutions in halves only dig their own graves.’”

 The next major wave of revolutionary struggle occurred in Central America with the rise of the Sandinista Liberation Front that overthrew the Somoza dictatorship. It was also complimented by the FMLN in El Salvador that was attempting to overthrow a military government. Ronald Reagan initiated a campaign of genocide throughout the region as his way to escalate the struggle with hundreds of thousands of people murdered by death squads, who Reagan defended as the ‘moral equivalents of the founding father of the United States”. This genocide forced the FMLN into a strategic deadlock and to sign agreements to be incorporated into the existing political framework. On the other hand, in Nicaragua, the Sandinistas did conquer power for 10 years but the US supported death squads causing havoc in the rural regions combined with a crippling economic blockade forcing Nicaraguan people to vote for their candidate in the elections if they wanted any hope of returning some stability to their lives.

However, despite the mass murder that occurred at the hands of these regimes, people never stopped fighting for democracy and were able to move beyond the military dictatorships although this came at a critical juncture.  These movements were very heterogeneous and at the time when they started challenging these regimes, the Soviet Union collapsed which sent a wave of demoralisation through activists looking to systemic change. Thus, these democratic movements were easily co-opted into the system once the threat of revolution had died down and the removal of the military regimes was seen as important to maintaining the stability of the system. The program of the ruling class was reconciled with electoral politics and also legitimized by it.

Unfortunately most of the figures of the US government who coordinated these campaigns of mass terror and genocide have been reappointed to powerful positions within the Bush administration. These figures include Otto Reich (State Departments top official for Latin America), John Negroponte (UN ambassador), Elliot Abrams  (who once declared that “the administration’s record in El Salvador is one of fabulous achievement” but was eventually thrown in prison for his role only to be pardoned by Bush I and to be appointed to the National Security Council by Bush II to promote democracy and human rights worldwide).

With the “fabulous achievements” consolidated it was possible to gradually return to civilian rule as long as the same political-economic programs were implemented. Thus from 1990-2002 transnational corporations acquired some 4,000 banks, telecommunications, transport, petrol and mining interests in Latin America. This had the effect of stripping national governments of their sovereignty, destroying the internal markets, draining the surplus wealth out of the economies and the relaxing of trade protection destroyed many local producers. The most spectacular example being that of Argentina which went from being a poster-boy of IMF neo-liberal policies to an economy that collapsed and a government that changed a number of presidents within the period of a week. The culmination of this era was meant to occur in the Free Trade of the America’s Agreement which would have been the largest in the world and while Bill Clinton cynically invoked Simon Bolivar as FTAA’s inspiration, in reality it was more in the realm President Taft’s fantasies.

 The End of Latin American History had finally arrived or at least the various oligarchies of the Americas thought so.  However, the popular classes and revolutionists of Latin American had other ideas.