[Mb-civic] Noam Chomsky on Latin America (short and sweet)

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

 http://www.zmag.org/weluser.htm


Latin American Integration

Noam Chomsky Interviewed by Bernie Dwyer

Bernie Dwyer: I am reminded of a great Irish song called "The West's 
Awake" written by Thomas Davis in remembrance of the Fenian 
Uprising of 1798. It is about the west of Ireland asleep under British 
rule for hundreds of years and how it awoke from its slumbers and 
rose up against the oppressor. Could we begin to hope now that the 
South is awake?

Noam Chomsky: What's happening is something completely new in 
the history of the hemisphere. Since the Spanish conquest the 
countries of Latin America have been pretty much separated from one 
another and oriented toward the imperial power. There are also very 
sharp splits between the tiny wealthy elite and the huge suffering 
population. The elites sent their capital; took their trips; had their 
second homes; sent their children to study in whatever European 
country their country was closely connected with. [commas better than 
semi-colons in the preceding sentence.] I mean, even their 
transportation systems were oriented toward the outside for export of 
resources and so on.

For the first time, they are beginning to integrate and in quite a few 
different ways. Venezuela and Cuba is one case. MERCOSUR, which 
is still not functioning very much, is another case. Venezuela, of 
course, just joined MERCOSUR, which is a big step forward for it and 
it was greatly welcomed by the presidents of Argentina, Brazil.
For the first time the Indian population is becoming politically quite 
active. They just won an election in Bolivia which is pretty remarkable. 
There is a huge Indian population in Ecuador, even in Peru, and some 
of them are calling for an Indian nation. Now they want to control their 
own resources. In fact, many don't even want their resources 
developed. Many don't see any particular point in having their culture 
and lifestyle destroyed so that people can sit in traffic jams in New 
York.

Furthermore, they are beginning to throw out the IMF. In the past, the 
US could prevent unwelcome developments such as independence in 
Latin America, by violence; supporting military coups, subversion, 
invasion and so on. That doesn't work so well any more. The last time 
they tried in 2002 in Venezuela, the US had to back down because of 
enormous protests from Latin America, and of course the coup was 
overthrown from within. That's very new.

If the United States loses the economic weapons of control, it is very 
much weakened. Argentina is just essentially ridding itself of the IMF, 
as they say.  They are paying off the debts to the IMF. The IMF rules 
that they followed had totally disastrous effects. They are being helped 
in that by Venezuela, which is buying up part of the Argentine debt.
Bolivia will probably do the same. Bolivia's had 25 years of rigorous 
adherence to IMF rules. Per capita income now is less than it was 25 
years ago. They want to get rid of it. The other countries are doing the 
same. The IMF is essentially the US Treasury Department.  It is the 
economic weapon that's alongside the military weapon for maintaining 
control. That's being dismantled.

All of this is happening against the background of very substantial 
popular movements, which, to the extent that they existed in the past, 
were crushed by violence, state terror, Operation Condor, one 
monstrosity after another. That weapon is no longer available.
Furthermore, there is South-South integration going on, so Brazil, and 
South Africa and India are establishing relations.

And again, the forces below the surface in pressing all of this are 
international popular organizations of a kind that never existed before; 
the ones that meet annually in the world social forums. By now several 
world social forums have spawned lots of regional ones; there's one 
right here in Boston and many other places. These are very powerful 
mass movements of a kind without any precedent in history: the first 
real internationals. Everyone's always talked about internationals on 
the left but there's never been one. This is the beginning of one.

These developments are extremely significant. For US planners, they 
are a nightmare. I mean, the Monroe Doctrine is about 180 years old 
now, and the US wasn't powerful enough to implement it until after the 
2nd World War, except for the nearby region. After the 2nd World War 
it was able to kick out the British and the French and implement it, but 
now it is collapsing. These countries are also diversifying their 
international relations including commercial relations. So there's a lot 
of export to China, and accepting of investment from China. That's 
particularly true of Venezuela, but also the other big exporters like 
Brazil and Chile. And China is eager to gain access to other resources 
of Latin America.

Unlike Europe, China can't be intimidated. Europe backs down if the 
United States looks at it the wrong way. But China, they've been there 
for 3,000 years and are paying no attention to the barbarians and don't 
see any need to. The United States is afraid of China; it is not a military 
threat to anyone; and is the least aggressive of all the major military 
powers. But it's not easy to intimidate it. In fact, you can't intimidate it 
at all. So China's interactions with Latin America are frightening the 
United States. Latin America is also improving economic interactions 
with Europe. China and Europe now are each other largest trading 
partners, or pretty close to it.

These developments are eroding the means of domination of the US 
world system. And the US is pretty naturally playing its strong card 
which is military and in military force the US is supreme. Military 
expenditures in the US are about half of the total world expenditures, 
technologically much more advanced. In Latin America, just keeping to 
that, the number of the US military personnel is probably higher than it 
ever was during the Cold War. There sharply increasing training of 
Latin American officers.

The training of military officers has been shifted from the State 
Department to the Pentagon, which is not insignificant. The State 
department is under some weak congressional supervision. I mean 
there is legislation requiring human rights conditionalities and so on. 
They are not very much enforced, but they are at least there. And the 
Pentagon is free to do anything they want. Furthermore, the training is 
shifting to local control. So one of the main targets is what's called 
radical populism, we know what that means, and the US is establishing 
military bases throughout the region.

Bernie Dwyer: It appears, from what you are saying, that the US is 
losing the ideological war and compensating by upping their military 
presence in the region. Would you see Cuba as being a key player in 
encouraging and perhaps influencing what's coming out Latin America 
right now?

Noam Chomsky: Fidel Castro, whatever people may think of him, is a 
hero in Latin America, primarily because he stood up to the United 
States. It's the first time in the history of the hemisphere that anybody 
stood up to the United States. Nobody likes to be under the jackboot 
but they may not be able to do anything about it. So for that reason 
alone, he's a Latin American hero. Chavez: the same.

The ideological issue that you rightly bring up is the impact of 
neoliberalism. It's pretty striking over the last twenty-five years, 
overwhelmingly it's true, that the countries that have adhered to the 
neo-liberal rules have had an economic catastrophe and the countries 
that didn't pay any intention to the rules grew and developed. East Asia 
developed rapidly pretty much by totally ignoring the rules. Chile is 
claimed as being a market economy but that's highly misleading: its 
main export is a very efficient state owned copper company 
nationalized under Allende. You don't get correlations like this in 
economics very often.  Adherence to the neoliberal rules has been 
associated with economic failure and violation of them with economic 
success: it's very hard to miss that. Maybe some economists can miss 
it but people don't: they live it. Yes, there is an uprising against it. Cuba 
is a symbol. Venezuela is another, Argentina, where they recovered 
from the IMF catastrophe by violating the rules and sharply violating 
them, and then throwing out the IMF. Well, this is the ideological issue. 
The IMF is just a name for the economic weapon of domination, which 
is eroding

Bernie Dwyer: Why do you think that this present movement is 
different from the struggle that went before, in Chile for instance when 
they succeeded in overthrowing the military dictatorship? What gives 
us more hope about this particular stage of liberation for Latin 
America?

Noam Chomsky: First of all, there was hope in Latin America in the 
1960s but it was crushed by violence. Chile was moving on a path 
towards some form of democratic socialism but we know what 
happened. That's the first 9/11 in 1973, which was an utter 
catastrophe. The dictatorship in Chile, which is a horror story also led 
to an economic disaster in Chile bringing about its worst recession in 
its history. The military then turned over power to civilians. Its still there 
so Chile didn't yet completely liberate itself. It has partially liberated 
itself from the military dictatorship; and in the other countries even 
more so.

So for example, I remember traveling in Argentina and Chile a couple 
of years ago and the standard joke in both countries was that people 
said that they wish the Chilean military had been stupid enough to get 
into a war with France or some major power so they could have been 
crushed and discredited and then people would be free the way they 
were in Argentina, where the military was discredited by its military 
defeat.

But there has been a slow process in every one of the countries, 
Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, all the way through, there's been  a process 
of overthrowing the dominant dictatorships - the military dictatorships - 
almost always supported, and sometimes instituted, by the United 
States

Now they are supporting one another and the US cannot resort to the 
same policies.

Take Brazil, if Lula had been running in 1963, the US would have done 
just what it did when Goulart was president in 1963. The Kennedy 
administration just planned a military dictatorship. A military coup took 
place and that got rid of that. And that was happening right through the 
hemisphere.

Now, there's much more hope because that cannot be done and there 
is also cooperation. There is also a move towards a degree of 
independence: political, economic and social policies, access to their 
own resources, instituting social changes of the kind that could 
overcome the tremendous internal problems of Latin America, which 
are awful. And a large part of the problems in Latin America are simply 
internal. In Latin America, the wealthy have never had any 
responsibilities. They do what they want.


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"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

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