VENEZUELA NEWS BULLETIN No. 880

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Interview with President Chavez (Part Two)

Sunday, Nov 23, 2003

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By: Ralph Niemeyer and Lucila Gallino

Part one of this interview can be found at: http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1055

The verbal capacity is inherent in the culture of this people and the power of the word has reached a point of warfare through the media. The credibility of the word in this country would appear to be in crisis. Perhaps this is a failure of the capacity of the Government to transmit the process?

I believe that this reflection can be applied to the whole world that is subject to the advance of telecommunications, to the force of the voice that has nothing to do with the reality that is so often disconnected from reality. Many times there are perverse voices that deceive millions. A little like what the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano says: “Never have so few deceived so many.”

Here in Venezuela part of the battle has been in the media. Inevitably. But this is not new. For already more than a decade we have been subjected to an intensive communications bombardment, debilitating for any movement. You say that credibility has been reduced. This depends on how you see it, from the sectors of the upper classes I do not have much hope in their believing in me because they are poisoned. Many suffer from a psychotic disassociation, that is, dissociation from reality, according to the psychologists. What does concern us is that the serious part of the country, the objective part believes us.

Of course, the level of credibility in the word of the government is important. A short time ago, on a Sunday we called together all the high school graduates who had never found a place in the universities. We had estimated 200,000 persons in the act. Nevertheless, we had an avalanche of 500,000 persons up to 80 and 90 years of age who answered our call to learn to read and write.

The Spanish writer, Antonio Gala, said once that the problem of man is not the flesh, or hell or the devil, but the banks. Is it because of this that Venezuelans cannot end up by taking charge of their own problems? To what point do you break with globalization?

The banks …. Someone said that the bankers have no heart. Above all in this world that is in the neoliberal phase of capitalism. The banks block development with all these mechanisms of speculative bubbles that they have generated.

Here there was a crisis of the banks in 96 when thousands of Venezuelans lost their lifelong savings. Thousands and millions of dollars were taken from the country. Now the blame not only belongs to the banks, it also belongs to the governments, it is the lack of political will, lack of national consciousness, so that each one occupies his space, we have been reviewing that in our constitution, a new law of banks was approved, new instruments for the supervision of banks are being developed, nevertheless, we are far from having a bank sector that is conscious of the needs of the country. But that is part of the battle.

Here there was an attempt from some banks to join a destabilizing movement. I gave them an ultimatum. “If you do not open the banks and pay the people, I am going to intervene the banks.” Here they imposed a forced savings plan during the coup d´etat and sabotage. And the people standing on line and they wouldn´t open the doors for them and the money was there, but they wouldn´t open the doors of the banks, or they didn´t deliver money. But by their decision. That did not meet an economic but rather a political rationale. The attempt was to remove Chavez from the government, I gave them a period and told them: they began to open and pay the people what they had to pay … And here they are…

It has been said that you have to be tamed. Even after strong shocks that your government has received and comments such as those of former President Carlos Andrés Pérez who has said that he would call for a civic military action to take power. Moreover, it is said that in one of the richest regions of Venezuela there would be movements to conform a separate Republic to divide the country. How do you foresee the new move of the opposition to remove you from power?

Look, we are speaking about the topic of scenarios. You have prepared quotes and references very well. I do not speak about the dead, rather I want to speak about realities. I refer to the political dead, to the moral dead, to unburied, putrefying bodies.

I prefer to quote Aristotle. And I am beginning to read a good book by Noam Chomsky that is called “The Common Good.” Chomsky begins by speaking of Aristotle and his formula. I am thinking and pondering over it, and comparing it with our time and our space. Aristotle said that the problem of an enriched minority and an impoverished majority is contrary to and denies democracy, that if one wants a true democracy it would be necessary to solve the problem by formulating two solutions; either reduce poverty or reduce democracy. In our case we have chosen to reduce poverty and increase democracy.

But here another problem is generated that Aristotle did not foresee in his time and it is the reaction of the privileged elite that is seeking a Pinochet, any tyrant to attack the rights of those majorities.

Here in Venezuela we have that: a privileged minority that is opposed to a full project, a full participatory democracy where they also participated because that wealthy class participated in this debate, but they do not accept the democratic game, then later they invented the matter of the coup d´etat, because they are trying to cause institutional shocks.

What happens with those intellectuals in Latin America, as is the case with Gabriel García Márquez, who some years earlier supported you and now seem to have changed their opinion. What is the contribution that these Latin American intellectuals are making to your process?

You would have to ask García Márquez. I have a commitment with the Hugo Chávez that I am. My commitment is to life. There are all kinds of Latin American intellectuals. There are many good writers who are illiterate; there is the case of a Peruvian called Vargas Llosa. I learned to know and love his writing, his art; I will never forget when I was a boy, 14 years old, and I read “La ciudad y los perros”. Later, I did a little research on him. I also read other books. “La fiesta del Chivo” on the life of the Dominican dictator, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. Without a doubt, he is an eminent writer, but he is an illiterate, in that he is unable to read the reality of his people, he even changed his Peruvian nationality for the Spanish nationality. I was reading a few minutes ago that there was a meeting in Madrid led by him, where he created a foundation against Chávez and against Lula. The Spanish foreign ministry attended the ceremony. This indicates a little how things are going in Madrid ….

There are all types of intellectuals. There is a group that was even part of the left, but that could not understand the world. In respect to the right to think and say what one thinks. But I follow Bolívar who said: “Before the claims of those who believe that they are wise, I prefer the advice of the people.” The people indeed are wise.

When does this passion for history, this enthusiasm for reading that you take as a sport arise?

Reading has always been a constant in my life. Through culture, study, we began to see the truth. Study and above all reading freed us from darkness. This is the thesis of Pablo Freire: “The importance of the act of reading”, it is an act of self-improvement. Yes, you obtain the edge of the freeing sword through reading.

I discovered the truth of the history of Bolívar one night when I was on duty as a soldier. We were never told that Bolívar was thrown out of Venezuela. I remember that I read a letter from Bolívar that says something like: “I am waiting for a moment of despair to finish with this life that is my disgrace”. Then I began to ask. Who treated him here so badly? Is it that those who opposed him wanted to take away properties, empty him spiritually? I asked: “But why the liberator?” Who expelled him? Were they the Spaniards? Hadn´t they already gone? It was General Páez. I admired Páez for a long time, and I continue to admire his persona and his value as an almost invincible warrior. Later he defeated the people. At the end he lost his moral posture and what Mao Tse Tung said came about: “At the end the war terminates in the favor of the side that has a moral position”. In that period, they were against Bolivar eliminating slavery, distributing land, giving education to blacks. Starting from my studies of Bolivar, I began to become free and become a rebel. “I rebel and then I exist”, as Camus says.

For this reason in our plan of Government a liberating process comes in this last stage, in this most recent period, which we call Misión Robinson. This is a program to read and write based on one carried out in Cuba that produced excellent results and is for those who did not have the possibility to become literate.

We realized that we had a debt to the people and that is how the library also arose and now we are publishing several million books more. We have libraries in the classrooms. The most important is Misión Robinson, I believe that many are sharpening the sword of light.

What is your relationship with President Fidel Castro. Is he something like a brother, a friend? What role does Fidel have in your life?

Fidel has always been an example. I was a soldier and always read him, about his life, his speeches. I remember that one night I was on duty with other cadets and we looked for a channel to hear music and suddenly from Havana I hear Castro´s speech. This was the period of the coup against Allende. I´ll never forget a phrase of Fidel: “If each worker, if each laborer, would have had a rifle in his hands, the fascist Chilean coup against Allende would not have taken place”.

For years, Fidel was a reference, above all moral. In ideological matters, it could be said that I am partly, even though I am not communist, I am a follower of Martí and above all of Bolívar. And I believe that Fidel has always been a bolivarian. And if you study José Martí, you find Bolívar.

A little while ago I answered a letter to Fidel, because he sent me a long letter, a kind of treatise on morality, politics, history, reflections. Then I write to him after having read one of those manuscript pages. And in one of the sentences that I wrote, my soul poured out and I wrote at the end: From now on I don´t know whether to call you brother or father”.

In this “Matrix”, are you the chosen person?

No, I don´t like the sound of that. I was elected, yes. I am one of those elected by the people, I am not a chosen person. I do not want to give it that connotation.

How do you consider yourself as a leader? You are not the typical president, a traditional westerner who has studied in Harvard University, you are not a blond-haired person who conducts himself as a formal President, according to your own functionaries you are considered as “the other President”.

You know, I am not President. I am a citizen but I believe myself to be a soldier citizen, of flesh and bone, nerve and spirit. Now that I have a jacket, a band that they placed on me, this is something else. I am Chávez. Will I be the other president? I prefer to say that I feel like the first President of a wave of Presidents. I reached this position through the people, I did not arrive to betray that people. In that sense I am Hugo, Hugo Chávez, the citizen, the soldier and, well, a President.

But not “The Other President.” I hope that those who come after me, come with a commitment, a line of thinking, and above all, what is important is to remove the poor, the needy from the situation in which they have lived for such a long time.

When you wake up in the morning, are you afraid for how long your government may last?

Do I think about that? No, I don´t. This is going to last a long time.

Apparently, the Manual on the Perfect Coup D´Etat is being perfected … I don´t know if they are going to achieve it or if it is a strong desire …

[laughter] No, here they are not going to achieve it. Here they couldn´t even apply the method that they applied to Allende. They wanted to apply methods of destabilizers to remove a President, obligating him to resign. Recently there was an African country with a similar situation. Here they tried to apply new formulas. Our formula is not perfect, but it has great strength.

Here there is a conscious people, a mass of people, every day stronger, a military mass joined with the people, there is a government that works a lot that does not rest during the day or at night and there is a project in which we deeply believe.

Every day I feel greater strength in this project. I see that new leaders are arising. And the day will come when they will not see me any longer because I am not indispensable. There are those who say that if I disappear, this whole project would crumble. But that is not true.

I returned with such emotion because hundreds of thousands of people had surrounded Miraflores Palace. Then little by little one begins to realize, above all in the last stage, when male and female leaders arise, and these beautiful flowers bud and full of hope (he indicates the red roses in front of him). This process is an avalanche of the people.

Already on June 12, 2000, in an article, "The Unnecessary Energy Crisis: How to Solve It Quickly", T. E. Bearden, LTC, U.S. Army (Retired) CEO, CTEC Inc., the Director of the Association of Distinguished American Scientists (ADAS) and a Fellow Emeritus of the Alpha Foundation's Institute for Advanced Study (AIAS), explained the energetic quintessence of the current world recession, depression and crisis. In the last analysis, within this context, the current crisis of Venezuela and the war on Iraq have to be seen.

Below I am publishing this excellent document, from which I will quote some passages. What did he write with reference to the world energy crisis?

"The world energy crisis is now driving the economies of the world nations. Presently there is an escalating worldwide demand for electrical power and transportation, much of which depends on fossil fuels and particularly oil or oil products. The resulting demand for oil is expected to increase year by year. Recent sharp rises in some U.S. metropolitan areas included gasoline at more than $2.50 per gallon already.

"At the same time, it appears that world availability of oil may have peaked in early 2000, if one factors in the suspected Arab inflation of reported oil reserves. From now on it appears that oil availability will steadily decline, slowly at first but then at an increasing pace."

Concerning the "some 150 nations", mainly of South America, Africa and Asia, who live outside the big metropolitan countries, he explained their immediate future:

"The transfer of manufacturing and production to many of these nations is a transfer to essentially "slave labour" nations where workers have few if any benefits, are paid extremely low wages, work long hours, and have no unions or bargaining rights. The local politicians can usually be "bought" very cheaply so that there are also no effective government controls. This has set up a de facto return to the feudalistic capitalism of an earlier era when enormous profits could be and were extracted from the backs of impoverished workers, and government checks and balances were nil."

Already in 2000, what did Bearden foresee for the immediate future?

"Bluntly, we foresee these factors — and others { } not covered — converging to a catastrophic collapse of the world economy in about eight years. As the collapse of the Western economies nears, one may expect catastrophic stress on the 160 developing nations as the developed nations are forced to dramatically curtail orders."

Thus, how do the desperate actions of blowing up "Twin Towers" and declaring "new wars" on Afghanistan and Iraq, including oil sabotage in Venezuela, fit into this gruesome picture?

"History bears out that desperate nations take desperate actions. Prior to the final economic collapse, the stress on nations will have increased the intensity and number of their conflicts, to the point where the arsenals of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) now possessed by some 25 nations, are almost certain to be released. As an example, suppose a starving North Korea { } launches nuclear weapons upon Japan and South Korea, including U.S. forces there, in a spasmodic suicidal response."

And, how did he portray the current global fascism that has been launched shortly thereafter?

" The resulting great Armageddon will destroy civilization as we know it, and perhaps most of the biosphere, at least for many decades.
My personal estimate is that, beginning about 2007, on our present energy course we will have reached an 80% probability of this ´final destruction of civilization itself´ scenario occurring at any time, with the probability slowly increasing as time passes. One may argue about the timing, slide the dates a year or two, etc., but the basic premise and general time frame holds. We face not only a world economic crisis, but also a world destruction crisis."

We have reached the end of Year 2003, which for him is a critical year:

"The 2003 date appears to be the critical "point of no return" for the survival of civilization as we have known it.
Reaching that point, say, in 2005 will not solve the crisis in time, and the collapse of the world economy as well as the destruction of civilization and the biosphere will still almost certainly occur, even with the solutions in hand. ... Eerily, this very threat now looms in our not too distant future, due in large part to the increasing and unbearable stresses that escalating oil prices will elicit. So about seven years or so from now, we will enter the period of the threat of the Final Armageddon, unless we do something very, very quickly now, to totally and permanently solve the present "electrical energy from oil" crisis."

So, what Is required to solve the problem? Venezuela, listen very carefully to what he said.

"To avoid the impending collapse of the world economy and/or the destruction of civilization and the biosphere, we must quickly replace much of the "electrical energy from oil" heart of the crisis at great speed, and simultaneously replace a significant part of the "transportation using oil products" factor also. ... In the name of all humanity, let us begin! Else by the time this first decade of the new millennium ends, much of humanity may not remain to see the second decade."

What solutions he had suggested, you could read in the document attached, however, according to him, it is now already too late. No real measure was taken to avoid a global catastrophy.

At any event, la lutta continua, but it is important to see the real, true, historic context of the current Venezuelan crisis; its solution is to be found neither in "away with Chávez" nor in "away with the three "Carlos".

Directly, concerning Venezuela, the Bolivarian Revolution is a direct transhistoric product of the transitional global capitalist mode of production in death agony. Surely, everything that comes into existence on this planet merits to fade away into oblivion. The so-called homo sapiens sapiens does not escape this universal law. This simply means that, as the result of a universal labour process, that has reached its destructive nadir in capitalism, we are living in a mode of destruction, and that a new mode of creativity and creation is appearing on the current horizon, in the galactic aurora.

For those who still affirm the French Revolution and all its global revolutionary concatenations, there is no Happy End, it is simply the hour of truth -- of world peace, rest in peace, death. The life energy of capitalism, imperialism and corporatism is being obliterated. Exploiting, dominating, discriminating, militarizing and alienating "classical" energy, natural and social energy, are being replaced by "free energy" (Nikolai Tesla), by "orgone" (Wilhelm Reich), by natura naturata and natura naturans, by creative nature and created nature. Labour, production, the productive process are fading into the galactic night. Forget the Holy Bible, the religious fairy tales, part and parcel of the Mental Holocaust, in reality, the Genesis, the Creation, is at the end of Capitalism.

We are living in the transvolutionary epoch of a mode of creativity and creation, where transcending man -- not homo homini lupus -, that is, where the Experiment Man, the emancipatory Super Natura Naturans, is dawning, not with "miracles", but with transsystemic achievements that already ocurred right here in Venezuela between April 11 and 14, 2002, and again in December-January 2002/3. No country in the world, not even in official history, except Venezuela, could have outlived such severe national, international, political, military and economic attacks. The Bolivarian Revolution is "made of sterner stuff", and cannot "be nipped in the bud" (Shakespeare) so easily, because it concerns other things in Heaven and on Earth than those that are dreamt of in the bloody ideology of Bush, Powell, Rumsfeld, Gaviria and Ortega.

Generally, in times of severe capitalist crises, over-production and recession, the negation within the system awakes, and globalizes itself. Currently, the superation, the neither affirmation nor negation, is being born in Venezuela, with all its weak revolutionary birthmarks. But, it is something else, not just a negation, it is an exodus, the expression of billions of obsolete physical labour forces, that sense the coming Physical and Mental Holocaust.

The Bolivarian Revolution is a mighty challenge, it is only the first emancipatory spark that will set the North American prairie on fire. It is not only a matter of solidarity with Venezuela, it is a Latin American, African, Asian, a World Issue. Thomas Bearden has indicated the real problem, the transhistoric context of the Bolivarian Revolution.

Thus, Bolivarians of the World, Unite! You have nothing to lose!! Euro-American global corporatism is already losing its very capitalist quintessence, as Karl Marx had already predicted it, had explained the tendential laws of the movement of capital, which would lead to the total extinction of capitalism itself, to its own self-annihilation. Its energy crisis is its life crisis.

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It is my intent to simply place here many of my papers, write-ups, information, etc. so that the information is more widely available. As I've just passed my 72nd birthday, I'm very much impressed with how slowly science changes and how quickly we humans age. I realize that every human being is fragile; one could simply depart this life at any moment.

So it seemed fitting to at least leave behind what I think I've learned or in some cases discovered. If these are even partially correct, then some of them have potentially significant implications. It is particularly important, I think, to make the material available for all those sharp young grad students and post-docs who are looking for where the real holes are in their present scientific models. Certainly I've not found all of the holes by any means, but I believe I have found a few of them. These we will try to point out, and in some cases we will also indicate what we think is the way to correct them.

The purpose of the site is for information only. I do not have time for, nor am I interested in, debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, so to speak. Whether a particular model is "right" or "wrong" is not the question; the question is, is it useful and does it predict some new and useful results? Eventually, technical concepts are useful only if they can do something different, provide a better model, etc. Also, abstract mathematics is a wonderful exercise and set of models, but the physics is in the concepts which the mathematical symbols represent and which the mathematical operations manipulate. The physics is not in the mathematics itself, per se.

So we will range across a large field of ideas. We'll indicate those where we've found there is experimental validation or practical use. Others, we will just present for consideration and list some possible implications. The level will be, hopefully, detailed concepts. We will also have a go at some better definitions for such things as charge, potential, energy, time, mind, thought, etc. Slowly we'll put up - and develop - a special glossary.

We'll even have a go at pointing out suggested changes in Aristotelian logic and some of its shortcomings.

And interspersed throughout the material will be suitable reference citations. These will help the reader to see what influenced my thinking, and let him or her go back to the original source to see if it really does say what I say that it did. This way, the reader can make up his or her own mind about those points and those references.

If these papers, concepts, and ideas stimulate further thought and particularly further development by the target audience, then the purpose of this website will have been fulfilled.

The first things we will be addressing are in the energy field, particularly with respect to an initial theory of permissible electrical power systems that take EM energy from the vacuum and use it to power loads. Our emphasis will be on mechanisms, concepts, and principles. The second things we will be addressing will be in the medical research field. Particularly, we will extend Becker's work to deal with the electrical operation of the cellular regeneration system, which is the body's healing mechanism. We will also address possible future development of therapeutic systems along the lines pioneered by Prioré, Becker, and others.

To do these first two things, we will also have to address the nature of time, the mechanism that generates the flow of a mass through time, and time as a special form of highly compressed energy. Here we will cite some experiments consistent with the thesis taken.

A few older papers may be placed on the site to show the original, far moreimmature thinking at the time, but also to illustrate the thrust of that thinking. These will, I hope, clearly show that real progress has been made.

Next we will address the nature of mind, thought, mind operations, and themind-body connection. We will particularly deal with the type of radicallyextended electrodynamics required, including transverse, longitudinal, andtime-polarized EM waves and photons. In addition, we will address the"infolded" internal longitudinal EM waves, currents, and energy inside all normal EM waves, potentials, and fields. What is in the present textbook are only the "surface manifestations" of a vast, hidden, superelectromagnetics for which all conventional EM entities (fields, waves, potentials) inside matter and in space are just superhighways. As an example, by the time we get a year along into the site, I expect to see a superluminal communication system entering the commercial markets. The system is already working now, and is built by a close colleague and friend.

Eventually we will get around, perhaps, to the real decisive weapons presently holding the fate of humanity. They are not the "ordinary" weapons such as nuclear weapons and long range missiles, that so preoccupy the news media.

Anyway, we hope you find the material of interest, and perhaps it may be ofassistance here and there to some young fellows who will find beneficialapplications and extensions I have not yet even thought of. If so, then thepurpose of this website will have been fulfilled.

In everything we do, we will occasionally point out that the Sachs-Evans unified field theory does possess the ability to model what is being discussed. A little of it has been modeled by Evans; much of it still remains to be fully expressed in good mathematical fashion but in the Sachs-Evans O(3) electrodynamics.

I would like to close this "mission statement" with a quotation from AlbertEinstein, which succinctly summarizes my own scientific philosophy and also, in a way, the mission of this website material. In his foreword to Max Jammer's Concepts of Space: The History of Theories of Space in Physics, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1969, p. xi-xii, Einstein made the following profound observation:

At any rate, posting the results of our decades of re-examination of concepts is our task, and we shall get on with it. But it is also just as important, if not even more important, to keep one's sense of humor. So we will also try to not tread too heavily, and ever so often even to "lighten up", so to speak. In that respect, remember that human knowledge is not absolute; at best it is a useful model or a set of useful models. At worst it is a set of biases that are of little utility or even useless. The theory of modeling tells us that we shall never have a perfect theory, but only a theory which is useful perhaps, and still in the act of becoming.

We have tried to get just a fathom or two deeper, and that is what the material will present.

To the reader, we wish you good reading, and also we wish you good fortune in your own quest, whatever it might be.

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"All the coal, oil, natural gas, etc. ever burned, and all the nuclear fuel rods ever used, and all the hydroelectric dams ever built, have directly added

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The Unnecessary Energy Crisis: How to Solve It Quickly

T. E. Bearden, LTC, U.S. Army (Retired)
CEO, CTEC Inc.
Director, Association of Distinguished American Scientists (ADAS)
Fellow Emeritus, Alpha Foundation's Institute for Advanced Study (AIAS)
June 12, 2000

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The most powerful conventional bomb in the U.S. arsenal exploded in a huge, fiery cloud on a Florida test range on Friday after being dropped by an Air Force cargo plane in the last developmental step for the nearly 11-ton"mother of all bombs."

An MC-130E Combat Talon I dropped the 21,700-pound satellite-guided GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb, or MOAB, over the test range at Eglin Air Force Base in northwestern Florida, said base spokesman Jake Swinson.

A plume of smoke rose more than 10,000 feet in the air and was visible 40 miles away in Pensacola, Florida.

"It looked like a big mushroom cloud filled with flames as it grew and grew and grew," Swinson said after the afternoon test. "It was one of the most awesome spectacles I've seen."

The Air Force called the test successful, saying the bomb separated cleanly from the aircraft with the help of a parachute at 20,500 feet, glided 41 seconds to its target area and detonated as planned.

Officials said the bomb was developed in only nine weeks to be available for use this spring in the Iraq war, but commanders opted not to use it. Its only previous live test came on March 11, the week before the U.S.-led invasion.

The MOAB, the most powerful nonnuclear U.S. bomb, carries 18,700 pounds of high explosives, detonating just above the ground when the tip of the 30-foot-long bomb hits the earth, Swinson said.

Swinson said the bomb was now available to U.S. commanders, but said there were no immediate plans for it to go into production.

The United States has had larger conventional bombs in the past but none in the current U.S. arsenal is as big.

The MOAB is envisioned as a successor to BLU-82, the 15,000-pound "Daisy Cutter."

The "Daisy Cutter" was used to clear helicopter landing areas in the Vietnam War and was used in the 1991 Gulf War and in 2001 in Afghanistan. In the latter two conflicts, U.S. commanders used the "Daisy Cutter" partly for the psychological effect of such a massive blast.

Swinson said it was the last of four developmental tests for the MOAB -- nicknamed the "mother of all bombs" by some in the military. The two live tests were preceded by two inert tests.

Lynda Rutledge, MOAB program manager at Eglin, said there were minor modifications to the MOAB tested on Friday compared to the one detonated in March, adding that the latest test sought to give commanders a chance to understand how the big bomb performs, particularly relating to targeting.

Nota de aporrea: Visite el sitio web de Radio Nacional de Venezuela en: www.rnv.gov.ve.

En un interesante debate transmitido en el canal del Estado entre el fundador del Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) Pompeyo Márquez y el diputado del MVR, Willian Lara, el Presidente Chávez se comunicó de una forma sorpresiva e inesperada y por vía telefónica para intervenir en el debate.

El programa se caracterizó por un enorme respeto al invitado de la oposición, Pompeyo Márquez, ante quienes todos (incluyendo el presidente Chávez, el ministro Istúriz, el propio diputado Lara y los dos moderadores, el presidente del canal Vladimir Villegas y el periodista Jesús Romero Anselmi) mostraron su respeto y admiración por la lucha que él realizó en la izquierda durante buena parte de su larga vida.

Chávez llama

El presidente Chávez se comunicó inesperadamente con el programa para responder los alegatos de Márquez. El fundador del MAS había criticado con bastante fuerza los esfuerzos del gobierno bolivariano a nivel educativo, afirmando que las misiones Ribas y Robinsón eran meras improvisaciones, y que desaprobaba la gestión del presidente Chávez a nivel de manejo de recursos: "No apruebo a un presidente que afirma sacar dinero bajo del colchón", alegó, y luego afirmó que los planes no tenían garantizados recursos para su continuidad. Márquez también afirmó que el gobierno estaba destruyendo los proyectos educativos pre-existentes y no les estaba garantizando continuidad alguna.

El Presidente, luego de presentar sus respetos al invitado, le informó de forma muy amigable que estaba desinformado.

Logros educativos

"Ese dinero no está en el mi colchón --afirmó Chávez en un tono conciliador--; son recursos extraordinarios que ingresaron y que los estamos administrando, Pompeyo, mira, con mucho cuidado para los hospitales, para la educación, para planes de vivienda. Y te lo informo a ti y a todos el país porque el que los recursos para asegurar la continuidad de los planes no están en el presupuesto sería muy irresponsable de mi parte, y créeme que no lo soy: asumo mi responsabilidad para darle continuidad al plan de alfabetización, para el plan Ribas y para el plan Sucre."

Chávez invitó a Márquez a reunirse con él y a dialogar para escuchar sus críticas y darle toda la información que él necesite.

Afirmó que nunca se interrumpieron los métodos preexistentes: "el método tradicional, que hemos mejorado, sólo permitía alfabetizar a 20 mil adultos por año. Con nuestro método, reconocido por la Unesco como uno de los mejores del mundo, alfabetizamos a millón y medio de personas. De todas formas podemos revisar todo eso frente al país".

Citó como logros universitarios la Universidad Rómulo Gallegos, cuyo cupo fue incrementado de 4 mil a 12 estudiantes, así como la Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela y la Universidad Sur del Lago, la cual fue recuperada por el Estado.

Ante las acusaciones de Márquez de haber dividido al país, Chávez aseguró que el país ya estaba dividido hace mucho tiempo entre una sociedad de privilegiados y una mayoría de excluidos. Citó a Aristóteles: "cuando hay una gran cantidad de pobres, la democracia entra en conflicto porque la mayoría de pobres le impondrá sus intereses a la minoría privilegiada. Entonces tú tienes dos opciones: o disminuyes la pobreza, o disminuyes la democracia. Y nosotros elegimos disminuir la pobreza y disminuir la democracia (...) El Aló Presidente parece que no lo estás oyendo mucho, porque del 100 por ciento del programa, el 99 por ciento está dedicado a enviar mensajes positivos al país.”

Aristóbulo también responde

El ministro Aristóbulo Istúriz también se comunicó con el programa, donde duró más de diez minutos enumerando rápidamente los muchos logros educativos del gobierno bolivariano.

Comenzó mencionando el Proyecto Simoncito y su fusión de maternales con preescolares, “En los próximos días entregaremos 100 nuevas aulas de preescolar”, afirmó. También habló de las escuelas integrales, las escuelas rurales y las escuelas bolivarianas, indicando que se han construido 450 escuelas durante el gobierno bolivariano y 250 están en construcción; “en el área metropolitana hay 10 escuelas nuevas en construcción en La Vega, Valle Alegre, Calle 18, Antimano 2 y 3, Cemai 3, y en todo el país. “En Guasdualito, municipio Páez, hay 102 escuelas bolivarianas”.

También habló del debate de actualización curricular, indicó que se están brindando cursos de actualización para directores y profesores, que se habían abandonado en el pasado. Le recordó a Márquez que Caldera había cerrado las escuelas técnicas. “Chávez las está reabriendo públicamente, haciendo un gran esfuerzo para dotarlas. Además, acabamos de jubilar a 25 mil docentes, lo cual nos permitió incluir a 34 mil nuevos docentes nuevos, atacando así el problema del desempleo.”

Resaltó que las misiones sociales están atendiendo a millón y medio de personas que nunca habían entrado a una escuela; “estamos atendiendo a los excluidos”, indicó, recordando que hay 650 mil personas en la misión Robinsón II quienes forman parte de la estrategia escolar.

Márquez continuó mostrando su desacuerdo con el gobierno, pero repudió los comunicados del Bloque Democrático llamando a la rebelión civil durante la recolección de firmas de la oposición. Por su parte, Willian Lara afirmó, a solicitud de Márquez, que el oficialismo no realizará ningún acto violento en la recolección de firmas de la oposición la próxima semana.

Sitio de información en Cadena de una Red de partidarios de la Revolución Bolivariana y de su Comandante el Presidente Constitucional Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías, para combatir la información mediática y la propaganda de guerra psicológica de los enemigos del Pueblo Soberano. Te invitamos a formar parte de nuestra Comunidad Virtual Bolivariana, para elevar nuestro nivel de conciencia social y de formación político-ideológica; para compartir informaciones, ideas, criterios; para coordinar tareas y organizarnos en la defensa cívica y constitucional de nuestra Revolución Bolivariana; por una Patria Bonita y de Justicia Social. Invita a tus amigos y ayúdanos a llegar a todos aquellos Bolivarianos y Revolucionarios que navegan en la Internet. Si el dominio de tu cuenta de e-mail es diferente del servicio de Yahoo y no te puedes incorporar desde el portal; te podemos incorporar enviando un mensaje al moderador sierrajaguar-owner@yahoogroups.com manifestando tu deseo de incorporarte y tu solicitud será atendida a la brevedad.

"...O nosotros somos capaces de destruir con argumentos las opiniones contrarias, o debemos dejar que se expresen. No es posible destruir opiniones por la fuerza, porque esto bloquea cualquier desarrollo libre de la inteligencia".
Comandante Dr. Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

Nueva York, (PL).- La policía de Miami detuvo a 143 personas en la represión a las protestas contra el ALCA durante la reunión ministerial concluida la víspera aquí, según un reporte divulgado hoy.

La mayoría de las detenciones ocurrieron en las inmediaciones del hotel Continental donde sesionó la conferencia, marcada por el secreto de lo que ocurría adentro, mientras afuera resonaban las consignas de cientos de personas opuestas al proyecto de Area de Libre Comercio de las Américas (ALCA).

Protegidos por cascos, escudos y chalecos antibalas, la policía miamense utilizó bastones, "spry" tóxicos conocidos como gas pimienta y gases lacrimógenos para enfrentar las manifestaciones, en las que participaron miles de activistas llegados de todo el continente.

Otras fuentes aseguran que los efectivos antimotines utilizaron equipos especiales para disparar balas de madera y perdigones de goma, capaces de causar gran dolor.

Asimismo contaron con cobertura aérea por medio de cinco helicópteros Apache, del mismo tipo de los utilizados con fines bélicos en la ocupación de Iraq.

El reporte indica que dos policías resultaron heridos durante los forcejeos con los manifestantes en las cercanías del Continental, que estuvo todo el tiempo rodeado por un impresionante dispositivo de seguridad.

Miami aspira a convertirse en sede de la Secretaría del ALCA, y para la reunión de ministros movilizó a tres mil efectivos de diferentes departamentos de la policía y otras fuerzas de seguridad.

No agreement in Miami on FTAA

“Free trade lite” deal papers over US-Latin American conflict

By Bill Vann
21 November 2003

In an attempt to stave off another humiliating public debacle like the recent collapse of the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Cancun, Mexico, the Bush administration has backed off from its drive to forge a sweeping agreement for a hemisphere-wide free trade zone at a ministerial meeting in Miami, Fla.

Instead, Washington has joined with its principal hemispheric trade adversary, Brazil, in proposing a far more limited accord that observers have dubbed “free trade à la carte.” Under this proposal, individual countries would be able to pick and choose which parts of the free trade agreement they wish to observe. The deal would cover 34 countries in the Western Hemisphere, except for Cuba, which has been excluded under pressure from Washington.

Confrontations between police and demonstrators erupted outside the meeting site at Miami’s Intercontinental Hotel, with riot police using batons and pepper spray against protesters. The city has been turned into a virtual police state for the meeting to negotiate terms for a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Some 2,500 cops from 40 different agencies were deployed in full riot gear on the first day of the talks.

The text of the draft agreement negotiated by the US and Brazil—which are the co-chairs of the summit—states that “countries may assume different levels of commitments” in joining the FTAA.

The inability to forge ahead with the nine-year-old proposal to create a free trade zone from “Alaska to Tierra del Fuego,” encompassing around 800 million people, stemmed in the first instance from intractable differences between the US and Brazil as well as other countries that parallel the conflicts that sank the Cancun WTO meeting in September.

Brazil’s government has criticized Washington for pursuing a unilateralist approach on trade—insisting that the Latin American countries open up all areas of their economies to unrestricted foreign investment, while refusing to make concessions on its own protectionist policies.

More broadly, however, the summit in Miami takes place in the wake of a series of explosive social struggles in Latin America against the very policies of privatization and foreign economic control that the FTAA is designed to promote. Most recently, this growing popular opposition to the economic framework envisioned in the FTAA was seen in the mass revolt that toppled the government in Bolivia after it struck a deal to place the country’s natural gas reserves under the effective control of US-based energy conglomerates.

In an attempt to pressure Brazil and the other member nations of the Mercosur—the southern cone trading bloc, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay—to bow to US demands, the Bush administration’s chief trade negotiator Robert Zoellick announced that Washington is moving ahead to negotiate bilateral deals with a group of Andean countries—Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia—as well as with the Dominican Republic. He also touted “significant advances” toward forging a Central American Free Trade Agreement, or CAFTA, with Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.

Though Zoellick claimed that these deals were merely an attempt to accommodate the wishes of “some [countries] that want to move more rapidly” toward free trade and were not an alternative to the FTAA, some analysts have pointed out that the effect is to diminish the demand for a hemisphere-wide agreement and pose the threat of regional trade wars. The main incentive for Latin American countries to forge an FTAA pact is to gain preferential access to the US market. To the extent that this is achieved through a bilateral agreement, those countries that have forged such a deal have a definite interest in keeping other potential Latin American competitors from achieving the same advantage.

After Brazil joined with China and India to lead a bloc of lesser-developed countries in opposing trade policies pursued by the US, the European Union and Japan at the WTO meeting in Cancun, Zoellick had described the Brazilian government as the leader of the “won’t do” countries, and said that the US would seek separate agreements with “can do” countries in Latin America and elsewhere.

Upon his arrival in Miami, the Brazilian minister gave vent to his government’s irritation over the US attempts to pressure Latin America’s largest economy by forging side deals with weaker countries. “When we offered to negotiate a four-plus-one agreement (Mercosur and the US), the United States voiced concern that this would mean the fragmentation of the FTAA. Curiously, or not curiously, they do not have this same worry about these other agreements. I do not know why they announced them now.”

Brazil and the rest of the Mercosur, as well as Venezuela and the member states of the CARICOM trading bloc in the Caribbean, have chafed at US proposals drafted with the direct participation of US-based multinationals to promote their interests in the region. These include rules guaranteeing open investment, protecting intellectual property rights, and subjecting government procurement to foreign competition.

Outside of the US, Mexico and Canada, which are already joined by NAFTA, Mercosur accounts for 65 percent of the gross domestic product of the region. Brazil, with a population of 180 million, is the world’s 10th-largest economy.

The principal aim of the FTAA is to subject the most profitable areas of Latin America’s economies to privatization and control by the transnationals. These include not only major state-owned natural resources, such as oil industries in Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador, but also public sector services, including health care, education and pension systems.

While the ruling elites in Latin America have joined in implementing these policies in the past two decades, the opposition of Brazil and other countries to signing the deal stems from the belief that they are getting little in the bargain.

The Brazilians had demanded that Washington negotiate on agricultural subsidies and anti-dumping regulations, measures that prevent Brazilian oranges, sugar and soybeans, as well as steel and textiles, from competing on the US market.

With less than a year before the presidential election, the Bush administration has no intention of making concessions that would affect either farmers or the steel industry in hotly contested states. Instead, as this week’s imposition of quotas on Chinese textile goods indicated, the administration is attempting to fend off Democratic criticism over the loss of manufacturing jobs by pursuing an increasingly protectionist policy.

To avoid any substantive talks on these issues, US negotiators insisted that they should be left to the WTO to resolve, arguing that they could not be settled outside of a common agreement with the EU and Japan, which are not represented in the FTAA negotiations.

Brazil and the Mercosur countered that the same should be done with the issues that the US is pressing—investment rules, intellectual property and patent rights, and government procurement.

The reaction of US big business and its representatives left no doubt that the “flexible” agreement struck in Miami is an empty shell. Major corporations are determined to break down barriers to their penetrating Latin America’s largest market, Brazil, which still maintains some restrictions on foreign investment. They likewise see a hodge-podge of bilateral agreements limiting their ability to function profitably in the region.

Ten US business groups representing the manufacturing, pharmaceutical, semiconductor, information technology and other industries issued a joint statement criticizing the draft cobbled together by the US and Brazil.

“We urge negotiators at this critical time to focus on achieving a comprehensive agreement that will yield the highest level of liberalization and rules across the board,” they said.

“This is not the way we want to go,” said Frank Vargo, international vice president of the National Association of Manufacturers. He threatened that the politically influential employers’ group would lobby against any deal that did not meet the trade demands of US big business. “If it is not a high-quality agreement, we are not going to support it.”

Similarly, Senator Chuck Grassley, the Republican chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, declared himself “skeptical about any FTAA agreement that establishes only a minimum base line of commitments for all participants.”

Clayton Yeutter, who negotiated for the US in the Uruguay Round trade negotiations under the Reagan administration, joined with other former US trade representatives in warning that the pick-and-chose agreement could be in violation of rules set by the WTO, which might view the pact as discriminatory. Under these conditions, he added, the FTAA “becomes something not worth doing.”

Among the strongest opponents of flexible accord are those countries that have already entered free trade pacts with the US, including Mexico and Canada—Washington’s partners in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)—and Chile.

On the eve of the summit, these countries had threatened to scuttle any deal. “It’s not worth saving Miami and letting the FTAA fail,” one Canadian negotiator told the Brazilian daily O Globo. In the end, however, they have apparently bowed to US pressure, allowing the draft to be presented for a vote. Their objections stem from the fact that they will get no benefit from any partial deals struck between different Latin American countries and the US, while they have paid a steeper price to win preferential conditions for themselves. The three countries advocated a system of penalties against countries that failed to comply with all of the FTAA proposals.

Critics of the proposed free trade deal have warned that it would place broad sectors of Latin America’s social infrastructure on the auction bloc, leading to the privatization of schools, hospitals, water and power industries, and resulting in sharp price increases.

Many point to NAFTA’s impact in Mexico after its introduction in 1994. While the country recorded sharp increases in overall economic growth and productivity, the principal social effect was that of a vastly accelerated polarization between wealth and poverty. In the manufacturing sector, real wages have fallen by 12 percent in the last nine years.

Moreover, as two reports issued Tuesday indicate, far from producing the job growth promised when it was signed, NAFTA’s impact has been negative on both sides of the US-Mexican border. A study by the Washington-based think tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace found that “The agricultural sector, where almost a fifth of Mexicans still work, has lost 1.3 million jobs since 1994.”

“NAFTA has not helped the Mexican economy keep pace with the growing demand for jobs,’ the study, entitled NAFTA’s Promise and Reality, reported. While jobs were created by increased manufacturing, the study found, the growth was substantially slower than before the trade agreement went into effect. Thus, while the decade before NAFTA recorded a 6 percent growth in manufacturing, the growth rate slumped to 4 percent in the decade afterwards.

The other report, Unfair Trade, released by Public Citizen and the Global Resource Action Center for the Environment (GRACE), said that by eliminating 99 percent of Mexico’s agricultural tariffs, NAFTA cleared the way for the US dumping of subsidized agricultural goods on the Mexican market and driving Mexican farmers under.

“Farms by the hundreds of thousands have been driven into bankruptcy, creating havoc in the Mexican countryside,” the report said. “Three-fourths of the Mexican population now lives in poverty, up 80 percent since 1984.”

On the eve of the Miami summit, a leading Mexican diplomat created a brief firestorm with a speech that sharply criticized both US policy in the region and the effects of NAFTA. The speech touched upon a theme that is widespread throughout Latin America—the sense that Washington has subjected the region to a form of malign neglect as it pursues a policy of global hegemony under the mantle of a war on terrorism.

“The US isn’t interested in a partnership of equals with Mexico, but with a tight relationship of convenience and subordination,” said Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, Mexico’s ambassador to the United Nations. NAFTA, he said, was presented as a “marriage of convenience,” but “never got beyond the level of a weekend fling.”

After US secretary of state Colin Powell denounced the remarks as “outrageous,” the Mexican government of President Vicente Fox announced Aquilar Zinser’s dismissal.

Venezuela confronts the FTAA

Friday, Nov 21, 2003

Print format

By: Michael A. Lebowitz (4 October 2003)

Our principle, announced Ramón Rosales (Venezuela’s Minister of Production and Commerce) is “as much market as possible, and as much state as necessary.” What that statement, released at the September 2003 WTO meeting in Cancun, means in terms of so-called international trade agreements can only be understood in the context of what Venezuela was arguing at Cancun.

Challenging the effects of “free trade” on human development, calling for an end to an unjust economic order, for the prioritizing of the fight against poverty and social exclusion, for putting human rights before corporate rights, the Venezuelan position called for a re-emphasis upon “the role of public policy as a tool without which it is impossible to achieve the stated goal of equitable, democratic, and environmentally sustainable development.

In short, it was a position which directly rejects neo-liberalism and the international institutions intended to enforce it. And, that is precisely the stance taken by the government of Hugo Chavez for the discussions of FTAA. In a statement released in April to delegations participating in the FTAA Trade Negotiations Committee (and oriented to gaining support throughout the continent), Venezuela declared that “the FTAA is not merely a trade agreement”; it establishes “a supranational legal and institutional system that will eventually prevail over the current system in our country.” Precisely because of the implications of FTAA for national sovereignty, Venezuela announced that any FTAA agreement would be the subject of a national referendum. Indeed, it pointed out that Article 73 of the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela requires a referendum: “International treaties, conventions, and agreements that could compromise national sovereignty or transfer power to supranational entities (…) shall be submitted to referendum.

In calling for the people to decide, the Venezuelan government’s own position would be clear. Ever since the defeated coup of 11 April 2002 and the subsequent opposition sabotage that has produced a crisis, the document noted, “Venezuela has a new appreciation of the extraordinary importance of the need for governments to be able to draw on a wide spectrum of public policies to respond to crises (whether environmental, political, or economic), as well as to be able to tackle the challenges and demands associated with fair, sustainable development.” The proposal for FTAA would prevent this. Indeed, the government argued, “The recent sabotage of PDVSA, the national oil industry, is a pathetic example of everything stated in this document.”

Widespread democratic involvement, though, should not be limited to a vote at the end. Precisely because of the vast implications of FTAA, Venezuela declared in its statement to the Trade Negotiations Committee, “we cannot continue to negotiate as if these were just some trade negotiations in which only experts and specialists in the different areas of commercial and international law need participate. Democratic negotiations need to include in an effective manner all sectors of the population continent-wide because every sector will be affected to some extent by the agreements being negotiated.

And, what of those popular sectors in Venezuela at this point? Although trade unions and popular sectors have indicated that they oppose FTAA and all it stands for, the priority is support for the government in its resolve--- support in the face of an opposition aided by the US government and prepared again to do everything possible to remove the Chavez government. The struggle against international capital and its goals at this point in Venezuela is a struggle to maintain and deepen the Bolivarian Revolution.

*** “Free trade lite” deal papers over US-Latin American conflict.

No agreement in Miami on FTAA

“Free trade lite” deal papers over US-Latin American conflict

By Bill Vann 21 November 2003

By Bill Vann
21 November 2003