Jeremy Corbyn

|

Latin America advances

JEREMY CORBYN urges everyone with an interest in Latin America's shift to the left to get along to this Saturday's conference.
THIS Saturday, there will be a very large gathering of people at Congress House in London to discuss the issues facing Latin America.
This has become an annual event of solidarity and this weekend will be more important than ever.
The past five years have seen a consolidation of leftward movements throughout the continent, with the left winning elections in a number of countries, notably Venezuela and Bolivia, but also making huge gains in other countries.
The political norm is no longer that national governments' first priority should be its relations with the United Stations.
However, the long and brutal history of local oligarchs oppressing popular movements with the support of US commercial interests continues.
In Bolivia, Evo Morales was elected president in 2006 following huge and successful campaigns against water privitisation and by the poorest indigenous people demanding their share of the national cake.
Morales's Movement towards Socialism party inherited a constitution designed to protect the richest elements of society in a population whose average income is less than a day.
He also inherited a country of four languages - Spanish, Quechua, Amara, Guarani, as well as enormous disparities of regional wealth.
Bolivia, having provided the Spanish empire with silver, went on to provide the rest of the world with tin, until that, too, had been exhausted by international mining companies.
The riches of Bolivia, for the most part, did not stay in the country and the levels of poverty continued almost unchanged for 200 years.
Bolivia has one of the largest reserves of natural gas in the world as well as oil reserves. On taking office, the Morales government put the gas companies on notice that public ownership of the reserves was now a reality and that the production system would soon follow.
For this, he has been widely condemned by the commercial interests of the region. He has also been attacked for building close ties with neighbouring Venezuela and Cuba. The results of these ties have meant rapid improvement in health care, education and some development of the gas industry.
However, the richest part of the country, Santa Cruz province, is being led by very wealthy landowners who are demanding autonomy from the national government in La Paz.
In doing this, they wish to prevent the radical government from redistributing the mineral wealth for the benefit of the poor.
At the same time, the wealthy leaders of the city of Sucre are demanding that the national capital revert to their city, away from La Paz with all of its associations of Bolivar and the original independence movement of the early 19th century.
These conflicts have become brutal, with many dead and a naked attempt to unseat the democratically elected Morales and his radical agenda.
Such procedures are not new in Latin America.
Those people with long memories will recall the way in which the radical government of Guatemala was removed by a coup in 1954, funded by the United Fruit Company. Nineteen years later, the radical government of Salvador Allende in Chile was overthrown by a CIA-inspired coup. And, in the early 1980s, the US funded the contra war in Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua against the Sandinista revolution which was attempting to achieve social justice.
The success of Hugo Chavez and his supporters in winning 11 elections and radically redistributing power and wealth to the poorest in the country poses a huge dilemma for the United States.
It has traditionally viewed Latin America as its backyard. Indeed, this policy is enshrined in the Monroe Doctrine and was largely accepted by the rest of the world.
This time, they are more desperate than ever for natural resources and find the twin problems of Chinese cash and competition being more welcome business partners around the world and that Bush's bete noir Hugo Chavez is not only a charismatic and a world-recognised figure but that he also has enormous oil resources and the ability to use that wealth to assist many neighbouring countries and smaller states with genuine economic health and anti-poverty measures.
The contrasts between rich and poor are especially apparent in the Caribbean islands and central America. The constant harassment by the US of Cuba has never been justified on any basis of logic or any kind of threat to the United States.
The fear is a much more complicated one of the threat of example.
It is very obvious to millions of very poor people throughout the continent and in the US itself that an economic strategy based on multinational capital and the creation of personal wealth has not delivered health, education or opportunity for millions of desperately poor people, many of whom do not speak any European languages.
Support for radical movements in Latin America is not an exotic luxury, but it is essential to help reduce their isolation, as well as to demonstrate that the free-market economic policies which the continent has suffered from for so long are no solution to chronic underdevelopment for the poorest people.
Today, Bolivia is under real threat. Tomorrow, it could be any other country that has the temerity to say that the first call to national wealth is the poorest people of that country.
Latin America 2007 is on Saturday December 1 from 9.30am to 5pm at Congress House, Great Russell Street, London WC1B. Nearest Tube is Tottenham Court Road.
Defensive about base
THE foreign affairs select committee has produced a very interesting report on relations with Russia.
Problems are beginning to mount for the United States missile defence system. The US plans to have missile defence interceptors based in Alaska and California to "protect" western shores and have others based in Poland and the Czech Republic. One hundred and thirty of them will be based on ships and an undisclosed number are to be based on further European land sites.
When he was prime minister, Tony Blair rather bizarrely offered British facilities for tracking and - some believe - as a station for interceptor missiles.
The foreign affairs select committee has made very welcome criticisms of the way in which Parliament was denied a proper debate and discussion about the use of RAF Menwith Hill as a base for a tracking system for the US. This has led to an instant denial by the Ministry of Defence and an assertion by Defence Secretary Des Browne that Britain would continue to provide satellite data processing to help the defence of the United States.
There is growing opposition throughout central Europe to the arrogance of the United States and quite understandable opposition in Russia, which feels that this is a continuation of the cold war by another name.
There is nothing defensive about national missile defence - it is an incitement to another arms race at a time when we need the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to be effective and for Russia and the United States to renew their post-cold war agreements on reducing mutually threatening missile numbers.
As ever, the inadequacies of the British parliamentary system mean that government departments are trying, once again, to bypass democratic debate about this crucial issue.
Jeremy Corbyn is Labour MP for Islington North. He can be contacted at corbynj@parliament.uk