Latin America In Revolt For 1st Time Since Cuban Revolution Says Tariq Ali

Seven Oaks Magazine
May 2, 2005

A Conversation With Tariq Ali (part 1)
by Charles Demers

Charles Demers is an anti-war activist and founding editor of Seven Oaks Magazine (www.SevenOaksMag.com).


Demers: At the time of the Vietnam War the greatest threat to the American Empire, outside of the immediate Southeast Asian war-zone, were the revolutions of Latin America. And today that seems to the case again, that the threat to the U.S. Empire, outside of the immediate field of battle in the Middle East, is coming from Latin America.

Ali: Well, I think that I would go further than that. I would say that after the Cuban Revolution, there was a long, long wait in Latin America. And, in fact, if one is being ruthless and hard-headed - which I think we should always be in analyzing political realities - one would have to say that after the Cuban Revolution the United States went on a counter-revolutionary offensive and crushed all the possibilities in country after country.

Military coups in Brazil, Chile, Argentina; the Cuban Revolution really scared the living daylights out of them. And had it not been for the existence of the Soviet Union, for all its problems, they would have taken Cuba back. There's no question about it. The only thing that stopped them was that the Russians backed the Cubans in putting missiles there, so they had to negotiate. But they certainly intervened in every other Latin American country to stop any developments. And that's why the guerrilla movements didn't have a chance. They were like kids going out to fight and confronting a giant Empire. Che's struggle in Bolivia - which I write about in Street Fighting Years because I was there at the time - was a futile struggle, completely isolated.

So the situation in Latin America today at the beginning of the 21st century is much more positive than it ever was in the sixties and seventies, and people have got to understand that. You've got social movements - and when I say social movements, I don't mean NGOs, I mean genuine big social movements - in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, Mexico. And you have in Venezuela now the victory of the Bolivarian movement, which totally destroys, in my opinion, all of these foolish theories, which I call theories of virtual reality, the virtual reality world of Holloway and his gang, which said we don't take power, we can change the world without taking power. I mean I have never heard a more vacuous slogan being coined by an academic, and it's ideal in the academic world, because there you can never take power, and you can write all sorts of nonsense and it's taken seriously because you have captive audiences of students.

But in my opinion the whole continent of Latin America is seething, it's in revolt, much more than it ever was when Che was alive. In Bolivia today you have a gigantic social movement where there are pictures of Che Guevara everywhere. There never were when he was alive. The people were indifferent. The Bolivian peasants were indifferent when Che was killed. They didn't care. Then, subsequently, 5, 10 years later, they began to understand 'this guy was fighting for us.' Slowly his pictures began to appear and now they are everywhere.

http://www.sevenoaksmag.com/features/61_feat1.html

Sure sounds like it to me.

:headbang:

Kick

For those who have the weekend off and didn't see the article because of work.