What is it with former US (vice) presidents making about-faces after they leave office?
Carter was instrumental in legitimating Israeli land grabs and aggression against Palestinians, then he wrote ‘Peace not Apartheid’…he increased military aid to Indonesia when they were using too many bullets against the people of East Timor and ran out, and yet today he is one of the world’s most recognized protagonists of ‘human rights.’
And then there’s Al Gore.
Las Ultimas Noticias of Caracas reported last week that aside from the whole ‘Inconvenient Truth’ thing, Gore is trying to make up for some of his foreign policy errors by thumbing his nose at Colombian president Alvaro Uribe. Gore has cancelled an upcoming meeting with Uribe, who is currently awash in scandals tying his government to right wing paramilitary groups. You’ll recall of course the 2000 Presidential election in the US, where Al Gore, a.k.a. Captain Planet, was criticized for his financial interests in Occidental Petroleum, a company infamous for sicking its death squads on the U'wa people who lived on the rainforest it was trying to turn into oilfields – in Colombia.
What's next? A Cheney-making-amends visit to Venezuela in 2009?
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Friday, April 20, 2007
first days in pictures 2
Caracas welcomes you before you reach it; the ranchos that climb the mountains which brace it spill over the moutains like warnings of what is to come. The houses which make up the ranchos are built on the cheap and quick, using what Victor, the taxista, called ‘architectura de la cuarta republica’ – architecture of the fourth republic.
(editorial note: when Chávez was elected in 1998, he promised a constitutional assembly to get rid of the old system and establish what is now the fifth republic of Venezuela, his party, which has just recently dissolved into the umbrella ‘United Socialist Party of Venezuela’ was known, in fact, as the movement of the fifth republic.)
These houses were built on stilts, taller stilts made of cheaper material the higher you go up inconceivable inclines. They have this nasty tendency to collapse on a semi annual basis during the rainy seasons, often to the tune of thousands of deaths.
I’ll be writing about the context which produced the massive boom in ranchos later, as they are extremely important in understanding the politics effecting the region as a whole.
(editorial note: when Chávez was elected in 1998, he promised a constitutional assembly to get rid of the old system and establish what is now the fifth republic of Venezuela, his party, which has just recently dissolved into the umbrella ‘United Socialist Party of Venezuela’ was known, in fact, as the movement of the fifth republic.)
These houses were built on stilts, taller stilts made of cheaper material the higher you go up inconceivable inclines. They have this nasty tendency to collapse on a semi annual basis during the rainy seasons, often to the tune of thousands of deaths.
I’ll be writing about the context which produced the massive boom in ranchos later, as they are extremely important in understanding the politics effecting the region as a whole.
first days in pictures...
After two days without sleep, I landed at Simón Bolívar international airport. Geo picked up me and my friend Jeff, an incredible photographer whose images will soon grace this page, with a Taxista in a cab painted with Chávez slogans. We took the ‘old highway’ over the mountains into Caracas proper, as the main highway linking the airport (right on the coast) to the main city has been out of order since the bridge which it is known for collapsed a few years ago. The bridge, it should be noted, will most likely be up and running again by the time I return to the states, making a record for such a construction project.
Caracas welcomes you before you reach it; the ranchos that climb the mountains which brace it spill over the moutains like warnings of what is to come. The houses which make up the ranchos are built on the cheap and quick, using what Victor, the taxista, called ‘architectura de la cuarta republica’ – architecture of the fourth republic.
(editorial note: when Chávez was elected in 1998, he promised a constitutional assembly to get rid of the old system and establish what is now the fifth republic of Venezuela, his party, which has just recently dissolved into the umbrella ‘United Socialist Party of Venezuela’ was known, in fact, as the movement of the fifth republic.)
Anyway, these houses were built on stilts, up inconceivable inclines, and collapse on a semi annual basis during the rainy seasons, often to the tune of thousands of deaths.
I’ll be writing about the context which produced the massive boom in ranchos later, as they are extremely important in understanding the politics effecting the region as a whole.
The route took us through Catia, a section of Caracas, and the barrio ’23 de enero’ which is a massive archipelago of around 40 residential towers (maybe 12-13 stories or more each) that is one of the centers of Chávez’s support. During the 2002 coup, when the ‘democratic’ opposition was hunting Chavez’s cabinet ministers and Chavista legislators, many holed up in the barrio, where the pueblo has a long history of armed resistance to police incursion.
Tomorrow we head back into the area for an underground hiphop show and some communal council meetings, so I’ll post more about it then, but it appears the ethic of 21st century socialism is running strong:
I’m going to stop short for the moment, as I’m not sure the internet connection I’m working through is going to last much longer. Apparently highspeed wireless didn't make it on the checklist for 21st century socialism...nor did readily available apartments, for that matter...but more on that later.
Chao…don
Caracas welcomes you before you reach it; the ranchos that climb the mountains which brace it spill over the moutains like warnings of what is to come. The houses which make up the ranchos are built on the cheap and quick, using what Victor, the taxista, called ‘architectura de la cuarta republica’ – architecture of the fourth republic.
(editorial note: when Chávez was elected in 1998, he promised a constitutional assembly to get rid of the old system and establish what is now the fifth republic of Venezuela, his party, which has just recently dissolved into the umbrella ‘United Socialist Party of Venezuela’ was known, in fact, as the movement of the fifth republic.)
Anyway, these houses were built on stilts, up inconceivable inclines, and collapse on a semi annual basis during the rainy seasons, often to the tune of thousands of deaths.
I’ll be writing about the context which produced the massive boom in ranchos later, as they are extremely important in understanding the politics effecting the region as a whole.
The route took us through Catia, a section of Caracas, and the barrio ’23 de enero’ which is a massive archipelago of around 40 residential towers (maybe 12-13 stories or more each) that is one of the centers of Chávez’s support. During the 2002 coup, when the ‘democratic’ opposition was hunting Chavez’s cabinet ministers and Chavista legislators, many holed up in the barrio, where the pueblo has a long history of armed resistance to police incursion.
Tomorrow we head back into the area for an underground hiphop show and some communal council meetings, so I’ll post more about it then, but it appears the ethic of 21st century socialism is running strong:
I’m going to stop short for the moment, as I’m not sure the internet connection I’m working through is going to last much longer. Apparently highspeed wireless didn't make it on the checklist for 21st century socialism...nor did readily available apartments, for that matter...but more on that later.
Chao…don
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Me llamo don, vivo en caracas
just a quick note. for anyone wondering, i made it, am safe, and trying to find an apartment. caracas is, even before being the revolutionary capital of the world, the world capital of not the best place to be in search of an apartment.
already, after two days, i have been able to do a fair amount of exploring the barrios, the misiones, and the now-forming consejos comunales...perhaps if all else fails i can live in the ranchos.
beets, however, are just about the cheapest vegetable one can find. so that's a good thing.
i'll type much much more and post some photos once i get a more dependable internet connection.
don
already, after two days, i have been able to do a fair amount of exploring the barrios, the misiones, and the now-forming consejos comunales...perhaps if all else fails i can live in the ranchos.
beets, however, are just about the cheapest vegetable one can find. so that's a good thing.
i'll type much much more and post some photos once i get a more dependable internet connection.
don
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Opposition Games
An interesting op-ed appeared in Mexico’s La Jornada by José Steinsleger earlier this week (on the 11th, to be exact) on the most recent moves by the Venezuelan opposition against Chávez to be approved by the US State Department. http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2007/04/11/index.php?section=opinion&article=020a2pol [The folks at ZNet were kind enough to translate the article, which is attached below.]
Here are some of my favorite moments:
...Manuel Rosales, presidential candidate of the briefly unified opposition in the 2006 presidential elections, open supporter of the 2002 coup, and current governor of Zulia State has been ensconced as the Jefferson Davis of a separatist movement known as Rumbo Propio (RP).
(Zulia's on the far western side of the country, sandwiched by Lake Maracaibo and Colombia)
...Among RP’s goals for the zulian patriots are:
- the all but complete disintegration of the Venezuelan republic into its constituent states – staunching the centralization of power in Caracas and allowing for local elites (e.g., Rosales, Carmona, et al) to start the long and nasty work of counter revolution
- the reorientation of state policy, placing primacy on the market and international trade (with some commentators going so far as to imagine the capital of Zulia, Maracaibo, second largest city of Venezuela, as “Latin America’s Hong Kong.”)
- finally, if not surprisingly, the opening of new and more robust diplomatic and military ties with the United States, with US ambassador William Bromfield going so far as to suggest the forging of direct bilateral relations between Washington and Maracaibo.
This all of course, as the op-ed fails to mention (though I’m sure, due to no malice on the author's part), rings a troublingly familiar echo to the gestures towards ‘autonomy’ by the natural gas rich state of Santa Cruz in Bolivia since the election of Evo Morales. In both cases, old money elites with the blessing of allies to the north have attempted to stir regionalist passions in their campaigns against attempts by the national government’s redistributive projects. Both cases – the zulianos as well as the separatists of Bolivia’s half moon states – allow Washington to hedge its bets in the international energy trade, ostensibly shaken by the gestures of Chávez and Morales, and to maintain influence in the so-called ‘war on drugs.’ (As the Steinsleger article points out, Zulia borders three Colombian states key to the US military campaign in the region; in the Bolivian case the Santa Cruz separatists buffer the major coca growing departments in Bolivia).
The cynical deployment of ‘decentralization’ and ‘autonomy’ by RP and the Santa Cruz separatists ought to highlight for observers the (at best) ambivalence of 90’s ‘horizontalism’ and obsession with ‘civil society.’ That is, rather than an inherently democratic sphere of free association, these arenas of political activity allow more precisely for the reemergence with force of the personalistic strong man politics of old.
The original, en íngles:
ZNet | Venezuela
Stoking Separatism in Venezuela
by José Steinsleger; La Jornada; April 13, 2007
After failing in the different options of delegitimising the government of President Hugo Chavez (coup d’état, media war, petroleum sabotage, assassination, disregarding electoral results), some sectors of Venezuela’s “democratic” opposition have started to unfurl the cause of Zulia (Venezuelan province with most of the oil deposits).
Before a widespread sentiment of “Zulia-ness” has taken root, it is being nourished by Rumbio Propio (Own Course), a movement of super-democratic folk who are trying, as they say, to make the petroleum-rich state of (with Maracaibo, the second city of the country, as the capital) into “the Hong Kong of Latin America”.
Rumbo is hardly “original”: it believes in “true, classical liberalism”, understands the Right as the “political side that defends and listens to human rights and liberties, individual and economic” and is (it goes without saying) “… against totalitarianism of any sort and side”.
In the presidential elections last November, Rumbo supported the state governor, Manuel Rosales, who in April 2002 openly supported the coup by the businessman, Pedro Carmona. In his campaign team, Rosales counted on the help of two figures: Commissioner Henry López Sisco (CIA agent responsible for various massacres during the government of Jaime Lusinchi 1984-88) and the pathetic Teodoro Petkoff, former guerrilla who claims to be misunderstood by “leftists and rightists”.
The separatist climate of Rumbo and the “Zulia patriots” is expressed in billboards, tee shirts showing maps of the “independent republic”, Press articles, web pages and confused declarations of academics selected to manipulate the history of the region.
The writer Luis Britto García remembers that during the coup of April 2002, the commentator, Victor Manuel García (a firm supporter of “globalisation”) shouted on television: “Why not? Bolívar, independent! Cojedes (Venezuelan region), Independent! Zulia, Independent!”
On October 26, 2003, the anti-Chavez newspaper, La Verdad (The Truth), interviewed Julio Portillo, head of the School of Political Science at the private Rafael Urdaneta University. In the text, the professor supported the idea of a “region autonomous before independence”; later he contradicted it and underscored the “resemblance” of Zulia with Quebec and Panama. Finally, Portillo proposed a consultative referendum on independence with the “argument” that Zulia would be a nation “… because of its riches”.
In 2005, the head of Political Science at Zulia University, Lucrecia Morales, urged the delinking of the state from “this government (of Chavez) and to do it through the route of “definitive emancipation”. And the geniuses of Washington keep on hoping, thinking that “Zulia-ness” could drive to an independence of the type in Panama (1903) without having learnt anything, it seems, from the defeat at Bay of the Pigs (Cuba, 1961).
Exploiting the mean spirit of the nationalists, Washington’s Ambassador in Caracas, William Bromfield, embarked on a series of visits to governor Rosales. In Maraicabo, he said: "Twenty-five years ago I lived for two years in the ‘independent western republic of Zulia’ and know perfectly what it means to be in a heated climate”.
A little before the elections, Bromfield spoke of opening a consulate and of the possible signing by Zulia of a bilateral (sic) agreement with the United States. The declaration of someone who is seen as the head of the “democratic opposition” in Venezuela led to widespread denunciation among the Deputies and politicians. The newspaper VEA of Caracas hinted at a possible plan “… to create artificial frontiers that would lead to a State without a country between Venezuela and Colombia, whose mission is to take hostage Zulia and bestow on it a euphemistic independence by the agents of the White House…”
Bromfield, in any case, was not wrongfooting it: lapped by the waters of the Maracaibo lake, three rich Venezuelan states (Zulia, Mérida and Trujillo) border three strategic departments of neighbouring Colombia: Guajira, César and North Santander, points in Pentagon’s counterinsurgency warfare.
Separatism in Zulia should be taken seriously. There are precedent: in 1928, the American financier William Buckley promoted a conspiracy by oil producers to separate Zulia; in 1916, the governor Venancio Pérez Soto defeated an attempted secessionism promoted by the United States petroleum companies; in 1869, governor Venancio Pulgar derecognised the President, José Ruperto Monagas, was defeated and ended up taking refuge in a British warship that was “by chance” observing the insurrection.
Separatism in Zulia is a real story of pirates entrusted with liquidating the Bolivarian project of Chavez. The possible political independence of Zulia would lead to a crisis of unpredictable levels, civil war included. How many Latin American governments would be disposed to support this separatist adventure?
Well, none to start with…
Translated from Spanish by Supriyo Chatterjee
This article was published in La Jornada, Mexico, on April 11, 2007.
Here are some of my favorite moments:
...Manuel Rosales, presidential candidate of the briefly unified opposition in the 2006 presidential elections, open supporter of the 2002 coup, and current governor of Zulia State has been ensconced as the Jefferson Davis of a separatist movement known as Rumbo Propio (RP).
(Zulia's on the far western side of the country, sandwiched by Lake Maracaibo and Colombia)
...Among RP’s goals for the zulian patriots are:
- the all but complete disintegration of the Venezuelan republic into its constituent states – staunching the centralization of power in Caracas and allowing for local elites (e.g., Rosales, Carmona, et al) to start the long and nasty work of counter revolution
- the reorientation of state policy, placing primacy on the market and international trade (with some commentators going so far as to imagine the capital of Zulia, Maracaibo, second largest city of Venezuela, as “Latin America’s Hong Kong.”)
- finally, if not surprisingly, the opening of new and more robust diplomatic and military ties with the United States, with US ambassador William Bromfield going so far as to suggest the forging of direct bilateral relations between Washington and Maracaibo.
This all of course, as the op-ed fails to mention (though I’m sure, due to no malice on the author's part), rings a troublingly familiar echo to the gestures towards ‘autonomy’ by the natural gas rich state of Santa Cruz in Bolivia since the election of Evo Morales. In both cases, old money elites with the blessing of allies to the north have attempted to stir regionalist passions in their campaigns against attempts by the national government’s redistributive projects. Both cases – the zulianos as well as the separatists of Bolivia’s half moon states – allow Washington to hedge its bets in the international energy trade, ostensibly shaken by the gestures of Chávez and Morales, and to maintain influence in the so-called ‘war on drugs.’ (As the Steinsleger article points out, Zulia borders three Colombian states key to the US military campaign in the region; in the Bolivian case the Santa Cruz separatists buffer the major coca growing departments in Bolivia).
The cynical deployment of ‘decentralization’ and ‘autonomy’ by RP and the Santa Cruz separatists ought to highlight for observers the (at best) ambivalence of 90’s ‘horizontalism’ and obsession with ‘civil society.’ That is, rather than an inherently democratic sphere of free association, these arenas of political activity allow more precisely for the reemergence with force of the personalistic strong man politics of old.
The original, en íngles:
ZNet | Venezuela
Stoking Separatism in Venezuela
by José Steinsleger; La Jornada; April 13, 2007
After failing in the different options of delegitimising the government of President Hugo Chavez (coup d’état, media war, petroleum sabotage, assassination, disregarding electoral results), some sectors of Venezuela’s “democratic” opposition have started to unfurl the cause of Zulia (Venezuelan province with most of the oil deposits).
Before a widespread sentiment of “Zulia-ness” has taken root, it is being nourished by Rumbio Propio (Own Course), a movement of super-democratic folk who are trying, as they say, to make the petroleum-rich state of (with Maracaibo, the second city of the country, as the capital) into “the Hong Kong of Latin America”.
Rumbo is hardly “original”: it believes in “true, classical liberalism”, understands the Right as the “political side that defends and listens to human rights and liberties, individual and economic” and is (it goes without saying) “… against totalitarianism of any sort and side”.
In the presidential elections last November, Rumbo supported the state governor, Manuel Rosales, who in April 2002 openly supported the coup by the businessman, Pedro Carmona. In his campaign team, Rosales counted on the help of two figures: Commissioner Henry López Sisco (CIA agent responsible for various massacres during the government of Jaime Lusinchi 1984-88) and the pathetic Teodoro Petkoff, former guerrilla who claims to be misunderstood by “leftists and rightists”.
The separatist climate of Rumbo and the “Zulia patriots” is expressed in billboards, tee shirts showing maps of the “independent republic”, Press articles, web pages and confused declarations of academics selected to manipulate the history of the region.
The writer Luis Britto García remembers that during the coup of April 2002, the commentator, Victor Manuel García (a firm supporter of “globalisation”) shouted on television: “Why not? Bolívar, independent! Cojedes (Venezuelan region), Independent! Zulia, Independent!”
On October 26, 2003, the anti-Chavez newspaper, La Verdad (The Truth), interviewed Julio Portillo, head of the School of Political Science at the private Rafael Urdaneta University. In the text, the professor supported the idea of a “region autonomous before independence”; later he contradicted it and underscored the “resemblance” of Zulia with Quebec and Panama. Finally, Portillo proposed a consultative referendum on independence with the “argument” that Zulia would be a nation “… because of its riches”.
In 2005, the head of Political Science at Zulia University, Lucrecia Morales, urged the delinking of the state from “this government (of Chavez) and to do it through the route of “definitive emancipation”. And the geniuses of Washington keep on hoping, thinking that “Zulia-ness” could drive to an independence of the type in Panama (1903) without having learnt anything, it seems, from the defeat at Bay of the Pigs (Cuba, 1961).
Exploiting the mean spirit of the nationalists, Washington’s Ambassador in Caracas, William Bromfield, embarked on a series of visits to governor Rosales. In Maraicabo, he said: "Twenty-five years ago I lived for two years in the ‘independent western republic of Zulia’ and know perfectly what it means to be in a heated climate”.
A little before the elections, Bromfield spoke of opening a consulate and of the possible signing by Zulia of a bilateral (sic) agreement with the United States. The declaration of someone who is seen as the head of the “democratic opposition” in Venezuela led to widespread denunciation among the Deputies and politicians. The newspaper VEA of Caracas hinted at a possible plan “… to create artificial frontiers that would lead to a State without a country between Venezuela and Colombia, whose mission is to take hostage Zulia and bestow on it a euphemistic independence by the agents of the White House…”
Bromfield, in any case, was not wrongfooting it: lapped by the waters of the Maracaibo lake, three rich Venezuelan states (Zulia, Mérida and Trujillo) border three strategic departments of neighbouring Colombia: Guajira, César and North Santander, points in Pentagon’s counterinsurgency warfare.
Separatism in Zulia should be taken seriously. There are precedent: in 1928, the American financier William Buckley promoted a conspiracy by oil producers to separate Zulia; in 1916, the governor Venancio Pérez Soto defeated an attempted secessionism promoted by the United States petroleum companies; in 1869, governor Venancio Pulgar derecognised the President, José Ruperto Monagas, was defeated and ended up taking refuge in a British warship that was “by chance” observing the insurrection.
Separatism in Zulia is a real story of pirates entrusted with liquidating the Bolivarian project of Chavez. The possible political independence of Zulia would lead to a crisis of unpredictable levels, civil war included. How many Latin American governments would be disposed to support this separatist adventure?
Well, none to start with…
Translated from Spanish by Supriyo Chatterjee
This article was published in La Jornada, Mexico, on April 11, 2007.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Corrections and Addenda
(already)
Souces close to the governmet of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela have informed me that I am in error...my post will not be with the 'Ministerio del interior' but rather with the 'ministerio de planificación y desarollo.
We're at T-minus. hell. I don't know.
Spent the past weekend at a conference in Irvine, CA (location for the filming of 'Conquest of the Planet of the Apes') at which I was accused of being an 'anarcho-fascist' for my support of ethical violence in Enrique Dussel and Antonio Negri.
yup. i'm ready to go now.
Monday, April 2, 2007
Prelude. T-Minus 20 days and counting...
This is a story of knowing a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy…
And then I got offered a job in the Ministerio del interior Venezolano, working at the newly founded Instituto de Planificación Venezolano.
For starters, I’ll be teaching English with organizers of the ‘communal councils’ (the participatory apparatuses of the Bolivarian Revolution) before moving on to instructing political theory, global political economy, that sort of thing (details, I am sure, to follow). I also intend on doing research and generally observing ‘what’s going on’…something along the lines of fieldwork for a doctoral dissertation on constituent power – the emerging details of which I hope will fill future posts on this blog.
Finally, I hope to do what I can to report back to the US – seeing as how the coverage of the rest of the world, but of Venezuela in particular, is atrocious at best in the heart of the Empire…
And then I got offered a job in the Ministerio del interior Venezolano, working at the newly founded Instituto de Planificación Venezolano.
For starters, I’ll be teaching English with organizers of the ‘communal councils’ (the participatory apparatuses of the Bolivarian Revolution) before moving on to instructing political theory, global political economy, that sort of thing (details, I am sure, to follow). I also intend on doing research and generally observing ‘what’s going on’…something along the lines of fieldwork for a doctoral dissertation on constituent power – the emerging details of which I hope will fill future posts on this blog.
Finally, I hope to do what I can to report back to the US – seeing as how the coverage of the rest of the world, but of Venezuela in particular, is atrocious at best in the heart of the Empire…
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