Re: [Marxism] Interesting view on Ecuador events

["Paul H. Dillon" <illonph@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Joaquin,

You ask a very interesting question:  why did the leadership emerge in
Venezuela and not in Bolivia, Ecuador, and you also mention tangentially
Argentina . . .

To my mind the race/culture factor has a very large part to play.  Venezuela
is a country in which racial/ethnic/cultural distinctions are very
insignificant and there is a strong "national" identity in which the African
element is recognized and embraced and there is virtually no indigenous
element at all.  The Venezuelan indigenous groups that remain being
primarily Amazonian basin groups that were never integrated into the larger
national, socio-economic system at the level (The Putumayo rubber boom being
the short lived exception).  Being an "indio" or "indigena" is not a
socio-economic category in Venezuela as it is in Ecuador and Bolivia. There
is no ethnic polarization of city and country:  the peasant/indigenous from
a mestizo/urban.  This factor facilitates the existence of a coherent mass
movement bridging the city and country in Venezuela but makes it virtually
unthinkable in the two Andean countries where large numbers of people (in
Bolivia, the majority) speak native Andean languages and have traditions
that commemorate and keep alive the memory that they were conquered by
Europeans 500 years ago.   The low percentages assigned to emploment in
agriculture for all three countries belies the structure of rural-urban
migration in the Andes where migrants have traditionally maintained a strong
simultaneous presence in their communities of origin and the indigeous
culture.


If we see a mass movement as the tree on which the fruit of successful
leadership may or may not grow, but without which such a fruit is
impossible, I think we have one part of the answer to your question.  All of
the players in Venezuela might envision a common future toward which they
are struggling and that can be concretized in a leader who annunciates that
vision.  It is very difficult to see how any leader/party/modern prince
might achieve the same in Bolivia and Ecuador.

Paul Dillon
----- Original Message -----
From: "Joaquín Bustelo" <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "'Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition'"
<marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; <greenleft_discussion@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, April 22, 2005 8:04 AM
Subject: RE: [Marxism] Interesting view on Ecuador events


Very interesting articles from ipslatam, especially the account of the
demands of the indigenous movement:

*  *  *

Luis Macas, the president of the powerful Confederation of Indigenous
Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), said his organisation would continue to
press for compliance with its demands, even though Gutiérrez was ousted.

"We are demanding that the country suspend the negotiation of a free trade
agreement with the United States, close the Manta military base, and oppose
the country's involvement in Plan Colombia," the U.S.-financed
counterinsurgency and anti-drug strategy implemented in war-torn
neighbouring Colombia, said Macas.

*  *  *

An important question, one that needs to be thought about deeply, is why
both this movement and the similar movement in Bolivia have been unable to
come up with a governmental alternative at decisive moments of political
crisis.

Of course, the facile answer is "there was no revolutionary party," but this
completely begs the question, if for no other reason that there are left
parties, tons of them.

In Venezuela, with ONLY the underlying elements of an Ecuador or
Bolivia-type crisis (i.e., generalized repudiation of traditional
politicians and revulsion at the state of the nation, i.e., its subservience
to foreign interests and the conditions faced by the people, the big
majority) a leadership emerged which was even able to take advantage of
bourgeois elections and a constituent assembly to unleash a process that, at
least thus far, has largely consolidated a revolutionary government based on
the toilers, posed the question of a social transformation, and begun to
take what appear to be significant measures in that direction.

In these two other cases --and they are not the only ones (Argentina
obviously comes to mind)-- even an open revolutionary political crisis has
not called forth a leadership capable of at least posing a governmental
alternative, even though clearly this is what was called for.

There is a need for a political instrument, as Marta Harnecker argues, to
articulate the social movements and turn them into a coherent governmental
alternative. Latin America is striving to discover what those forms might
be.

Joaquín


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