[southnews] Fidel Castro: The Liberator Bolivar awakens Date: Thu, 6 Mar 2008 09:56:29 -0600 (CST) The Organization of American States (OAS) approved a resolution March 5 declaring the Colombian military raid into Ecuador a violation of sovereignty following the governments of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Rafael Correa in Ecuador to break off diplomatic relations with Colombia and to prevent the increasing militarization of the Uribe government. Organisation of American States secretary Reinaldo Rodriguez Gallad says Correa is now being backed by the organisation, after an emergency meeting in Washington. "We reaffirm the principle that a state's territory can't be violated and can't be the subject of military occupation, nor any other forceful measure taken by any other state, whatever the motive may be, even temporarily." The United States was the only nation in the OAS to offer Colombia unqualified support. Ecuador has since rejected a Colombian apology as insufficient and President Correa has mobilised thousands of Ecuadorian troops towards the border. _______________________________________-- The Raid on Ecuador Underestimating Rafael Correa CounterPunch, CA March 5, 2008 By FIDEL CASTRO I remember when Rafael Correa visited us, months before the electoral campaign when he was thinking of running as a candidate for the Presidency of Ecuador. He had been the Minister of the Economy in the government of Alfredo Palacio, a surgeon with professional prestige who had also visited us as Vice President, before becoming the President in an unexpected situation that took place in Ecuador. He had been receptive to a program of ophthalmologic operations that we offered him as a form of cooperation. There were good relations between our two governments. A while earlier Correa had resigned from the Ministry of the Economy. He was unhappy with what he called administrative corruption instigated by Oxy, a foreign company that explored and invested important sums of money, but was holding on to four out of every five barrels of oil that it extracted. He didn't talk about nationalization, but about taxing them heavily; these taxes would be assigned in advance to specific social investments. He had already approved the measures and a judge had declared them to be valid. Since the word "nationalize" had not been mentioned, I thought he felt apprehensive about the concept. It didn't surprise me because he had graduated as an economist with much acclaim from a well-known U.S. university. I didn't bother getting into much depth; I bombarded him with questions from the arsenal accumulated in the struggle against the Latin American foreign debt in 1985 and of Cuba's own experience. There are high-risk investments that use sophisticated technology and that no small nation like Cuba or Ecuador could take on. Since this was already in 2006 and we were determined to promote the energy revolution, --ours was the first country on the planet to proclaim this as a vital issue for humankind-- I had dealt with the subject particularly emphatically. But I halted, as I understood one of his reasons. I related to him the conversation I had had a while ago with the president of REPSOL, a Spanish company. This company, associated with other international companies, would undertake an expensive operation to drill the ocean floor, more than 2000 meters down, using sophisticated technology, in Cuba's jurisdictional waters. I asked the head of the Spanish company: How much is an exploratory well worth? I ask you this because we would like to participate, even if it is for one percent of the total cost and we would like to know what you want to do with our oil. Correa, for his part, had told me that for every one hundred dollars taken out by the companies, only twenty remained in the country; it didn't even get into the budget, he said; it was left in a separate fund for just about anything other than improving the living conditions of the people. I abolished the fund, he told me, and directed 40 percent towards education and health, technological and highway development, and the rest towards buying back the debt if the price was favorable, and if not, investing it in something more useful. Before, every year we had to buy a portion of that debt which was becoming more expensive. In the case of Ecuador -he added- oil policies verged on treason against the country. Why do they do it? I asked him. Is it because they are afraid of the Yankees or due to unbearable pressure? He answered: If they have a Minister of the Economy who tells them privatization would improve efficiency, you can just imagine. I didn't do that. I encourage him to go on and he calmly explains. The foreign company Oxy is one that has broken its contract and according to Ecuadorian law it requires an expiration date. It means that the oil field operated by this company must go over to the State, but because of Yankee pressure the government does not dare to occupy it; a situation is created which is not contemplated by the legislation. The law just states that an expiration date must be set, and nothing more. The judge at the court of first instance at that moment was the president of PETROECUADOR and he made it happen. I was a member of PETROECUADOR and they called an emergency meeting to expel him from his position. I didn't attend and they couldn't fire him. The judge declared the expiration date. What did the Yankees want? I asked him. They wanted a fine, he quickly replied. Listening to him I realized that I had underestimated him. I was in a hurry because of a great number of commitments. I invited him to sit in on a meeting with a large group of highly qualified Cuban professionals who were leaving for Bolivia to be part of the Medical Brigade; it had staff for more than 30 hospitals including 19 surgical positions that could do more than 130 thousand ophthalmologic operations per year; all in the manner of free cooperation. Ecuador possesses three similar centers with six ophthalmologic positions. Dinner with the Ecuadorian economist took place into the morning hours of February 9, 2006. There were scarcely any view points that I didn't cover. I even spoke to him about the very harmful mercury that modern industry scatters throughout the planet's oceans. Consumerism was of course a subject that I emphasized; the high cost of the kilowatt/hour in the thermoelectric plants; the differences between socialist and communist forms of distribution, the role of money, the trillions spent on advertising which people had no choice but to pay for in the prices of goods, and the studies made by university social brigades who discovered, among the 500 thousand families in the capital, the number of elderly folk lived alone. I explained the stage of university courses for all that we were involved in. We became friends even though he perhaps received the impression that I was self-sufficient. If that happened, it was truly not my intention. Since that time I have observed his every step: the electoral process, focusing on the concrete problems of Ecuadorians and the people's victory over the oligarchy. In the history of our peoples there are many things that bring us together. Sucre was always a highly admired figure, along with The Liberator Bolivar; as Marti said, what he hasn't done in America remains to be done, and as Neruda exclaimed, Bolivar awakens every hundred years. Imperialism has just committed a monstrous crime in Ecuador. Deadly bombs were dropped in the early morning hours on a group of men and women who, almost without exception, were asleep. That has been deduced by all the official reports right from the beginning. Any concrete accusations against that group of human beings do not justify that action. They were Yankee bombs, guided by Yankee satellites. Absolutely no one has the right to kill in cold blood. If we accept that imperial method of warfare and barbarism, Yankee bombs directed by satellites could fall on any group of Latin American men and women, in the territory of any country, war or no war. The fact that this happened on undisputed Ecuadorian territory is an aggravating circumstance. We are not an enemy of Colombia. Previous reflections and exchanges demonstrate how much of an effort we have made, both the current President of the Council of State of Cuba and I, to abide by a declared policy of principles and peace, proclaimed years ago in our relations with the rest of the Latin American states. Today, with everything at risk, we have not been transformed into belligerent people. We are determined supporters of that unity among peoples which Marti named Our America. If we keep quiet we shall become accomplices. Today they would like to have our friend, the economist and President of Ecuador Rafael Correa, seated in the dock; this is something we couldn't even conceive that morning of February 9, 2006. At that time it seemed that my imagination was capable of embracing all kinds of dreams and risks, but never anything like what has occurred in the early morning of Saturday March 1, 2008. Correa has in his hands the few survivors and the rest of the bodies. The two which are missing prove that Ecuadorian territory was occupied by troops that crossed the border. Now he can cry out like Emile Zola: J'accuse! http://www.counterpunch.org/castro03052008.html ________________________________________________ The secret history of Simsn Bolmvar By Richard Lapper The Financial Times : March 1 2008 00:19 It was difficult to find the old sugar estate at San Mateo where Simsn Bolmvar had once lived. But when we finally did arrive the old plantation house and an adjoining museum were according to the makeshift signs pegged to their gates closed for fumigation. This was emblematic in a way. I was in the middle of a trip across Venezuela to find out more about the countrys 19th-century independence hero who has achieved more recent fame as the moral and intellectual inspiration behind President Hugo Chavezs Bolivarian Revolution. It had been easy enough to research his life before I arrived. Two recent accounts by British writers Robert Harveys racy The Liberators and John Lynchs more scholarly Simsn Bolmvar: A Life had been especially useful. But it was proving much more difficult to get a sense of what all this meant today to Venezuelans, as well as putting some flesh on the bones of dry historical fact. This seems paradoxical because back in Caracas, Venezuelas capital, the image of Bolmvar was all over the place, stencilled or roughly painted on the sides of public buildings and urban motorways. Its usually the same representation: with his sideburns, tight white riding breeches, blue tunic, red breast plate and golden epaulettes, dismounted, his sabre at the ready, Bolmvar looks like a stern aristocrat. It was also easy to catch some words of wisdom from Chavez himself, who wastes no opportunity to express admiration for a man who led half of Latin America to independence after an epic military campaign. On the first evening of my visit I turned on the television in my gloomy room at the Alba Hotel to find the burly president, clad in the red shirt favoured by his Bolivarian movement, waxing lyrical: After 200 years Bolmvar has returned to Caracas. Bolmvar has woken up again. Bolmvar is all of us. Bolmvar is our people. We are obliged to triumph. It was, however, proving a good deal more difficult to find anyone who knew anything about the man himself. In Caracas, my first port of call had been the Casa Natal, the restored colonial mansion in the centre of the city where Bolmvar was born in 1783. It was an inauspicious beginning. The house was more or less bereft of visitors and a young attendant stared blankly at first when I asked about a guide. Ramsn Vallecilla, a neatly dressed pot-bellied man in his early 50s, eventually turned up. He had worked at the house for more than 20 years but as we toured its 14 rooms and five patios his monotonous account of Bolmvars early life failed to inspire much confidence. Vallecilla seemed to be getting his dates wrong and had nothing at all to say about the enormous oil paintings the work, I discovered later, of a 20th century artist called Tito Salas showing scenes from the innumerable battles that Bolmvar fought. Skirting Plaza Bolmvar with its 19th-century equestrian statue of the hero and left-wing book stalls decorated by posters of Bolmvar, Che Guevara and a smiling Chavez, I headed for the Pantesn Nacional, the last resting place for Bolmvar and other Venezuelan national heroes. There too, though, was a dearth of explanatory material. A soldier eyed me suspiciously, as I watched a team of four presidential guardsmen wearing wine-coloured tunics and helmets and white trousers, change guard over the sarcophagus that holds Bolmvars remains. Id imagined that the battlefield at Carabobo, three or four hours to the west of Caracas, might have been preserved in the way sites of the American civil war or the first world war had been, with maps, helpful guides or even as I remembered at Vicksburg restored entrenchments with precise details of which unit had attacked where and what had happened. After all, Carabobo was where Bolmvar, at the head of independence troops, had in 1821 routed his Spanish opponents and secured Venezuelas independence. The battle is certainly commemorated. Half a mile away from the entrance to the site is a gigantic arch, beneath which two soldiers in the scarlet and yellow uniforms of the presidential guard watch over a tomb of an unknown soldier. And a hundred metres or so away a massive baroque style monument reputedly the biggest in Venezuela sits above an ornamental lake. It is topped by another equestrian statue of Bolmvar, alongside angels and mythological Gods, and lower down bronze friezes detail scenes from the battle. Explanation, though, is thin and the atmosphere militaristic. Isidro Gonzalez, an 18-year-old guardsman on duty to help tourists, recited before a group of sixth-graders from the town of Guarico a stilted and obviously painstakingly memorised word-for-word account. It was only on the way to Eagle Pass, the site of one of Bolmvars most extraordinary achievements, that I really began to make progress. By 1819 Bolmvar had been fighting Latin Americas Spanish colonial rulers for eight years. He had already led one larger-than-life crusade, known in history books as the admirable campaign, survived innumerable battles of exceptional savagery and lived through a period of exile. Returning to Venezuela he regrouped, raised funds, bought arms and recruited several thousand British mercenaries most of them veterans of the Napoleonic Wars and was starting the whole process over again. Bolmvar marched these troops thousands of miles through flooded lowlands and up through the pass, one of the bleakest, most inhospitable parts of the northern Andes. Many didnt make it. Those that did were forced to survive on raw meat and arrived in Colombia with their uniforms in rags and their boots worn out. Yet this same force was still able to inflict a stunning defeat on defending troops a few kilometres away at Boyaca in a battle that marked a decisive turning point in the war. Not that any of this would be apparent by simply visiting the pass, where the events of 1819 are marked by an enormous statue of a condor the high-flying Andean bird which symbolises freedom and a blue and white chapel. Asdrzbal Pirez, the former national guardsman who had been driven up there from the city of Merida, didn4t know about the history either. But as we drove past hillside verges of yellow cactus flowers and through villages of single-storey ochre, pink and sky blue adobe houses, he did at least offer me a glimpse into the world of popular myth that surrounds the figure of Bolmvar. Well before Chavez came along, the Venezuelan version of Santeria a folk religion developed in slave, free black and indigenous communities that draws on Christian and pre-Colombian influences had incorporated Bolmvar into its system of lesser gods. People light candles for Bolmvar. They say that he is a saint, said Asdrzbal. He was in so many battles and didnt suffer a wound. When we were kids we used to think his jacket was magic ... And just imagine his army came all this way on foot. Richard Lapper is the FTs Latin America editor http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/abf61786-e650-11dc-8398-0000779fd2ac.html The archives of South News can be found at http://southmovement.alphalink.com.au/southnews/