by GLEN FORD
The darker majorities of Latin America mourn the passing of the people’s champion, President Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías, the man whom the racist white Venezuelan elite called ese mono – “that monkey.” Since 1998 – with a 48-hour break during the 2002, U.S.-sponsored coup – the four-fifths of Venezuela that is some variety of Indigenous-mestizo-mullato-African – like Chavez – has known power for the first time since the conquistadors of Western Europe launched their 500-year war against the rest of planet Earth.
South America’s emergence as the most promising zone of resistance to U.S. imperial savagery is inseparable from the dark awakening in the barrios, favelas, rural villages and native highlands of the continent. Chavez’s triumph, and that of the Aymara-descended Bolivian president, Evo Morales, in 2005, are the most dramatic expressions of what has been called the “Latin Spring” – a reclamation of national patrimony that is, by historical necessity, socialist. As a result, a large majority of South Americans now live under relatively progressive governments.
The Cuban Revolution of 1959 was, of course, the great hemispheric breakaway from Yankee empire in the 20th century, the seminal event in the disintegration of what later came to be called the “Washington Consensus” in Latin America. Chavez’s victory, almost 40 years later, was the other shoe dropping, a phenomenon nearly as racially-weighted, in Latin American terms, as the Haitian Revolution that culminated in 1804. Fidel, the son of a Spanish soldier, declared that “the blood of Africa runs deep in our veins” and that Cuba is an “African Spanish” nation. However, that reality was hardly visible in the Cuban hierarchy. Not so, with Chavez, the pardo whose lineage was obvious and proudly worn. “My Indian roots are from my father’s side. He is mixed Indian and black, which makes me very proud,” said Chavez – a circumstance of birth and pride that made the whites of affluent east Caracas neighborhoods like Altamira spitting mad, hysterical in their hatred. The racial-political color line has long been plain to see in the complexions of pro- and anti-government demonstrations in Venezuela.
Black Agenda Report for more