[News] The Spirit of Carabobo Will Overcome the Stench of Monroe
Anti-Imperialist News
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Thu Jun 24 11:11:20 EDT 2021
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*The Spirit of Carabobo Will Overcome the Stench of Monroe: The
Twenty-Fifth Newsletter (2021)*
Kael Abello, Utopix (Venezuela), Batalla de Carabobo (‘Battle of
Carabobo’), 2021.
Kael Abello, Utopix <about:blank> (Venezuela), /Batalla de Carabobo
/(‘Battle of Carabobo’), 2021.
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social
Research
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this week from Carabobo, Venezuela.
Two hundred years ago, on 24 June 1821, the forces of Simón Bolívar
trounced the Spanish royalists at the Battle of Carabobo, a few hundred
kilometres west of Caracas, Venezuela. Five days later, Bolívar entered
Caracas in triumph; the Spanish fortresses of Cartagena and Puerto
Cabello had been seized by the Liberator’s armies, making a return to
power for Spain impossible. In Cúcuta, a congress assembled to draft a
new constitution and to elect Bolívar as the president.
Bolívar, now the head of the Republic of Gran Colombia (today’s Colombia
and Venezuela), would not rest. He got on his horse and rode south
towards Quito, where Spain’s forces remained and would eventually be
defeated on 24 May 1822 at the battle of Pichincha. It would take two
more years to eject Spain from the hemisphere, but the trend was
inevitable. Carabobo had broken the imperialist spirit of the Spanish
monarchy.
The Spanish monarchy lost its grip on the Americas, but other threats
emerged. On 2 December 1823, US President James Monroe told the US
Congress that the Americas were no longer the domain of the old European
powers. But the Monroe Doctrine
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did not imply that the various parts of the Americas, including Gran
Colombia, would be sovereign. The Doctrine meant that the United States
of America could behave in the hemisphere as if it were an old imperial
power, a trend that would become clearer as US military technology
improved. Clarity regarding the aims of the Monroe Doctrine came in two
ways. First, through the behaviour of the United States, whose armed
forces intervened directly across the continent, from Peru (1835-36) to
Guatemala (1885) to Cuba and Puerto Rico (1898). Second, through US
President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 corollary
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to the Doctrine, which included the right of the US to act – in
Roosevelt’s words – as an ‘international police power’ in the hemisphere.
César Mosquera, Utopix (Venezuela), Pueblos originarios (‘Indigenous
Peoples’), 2021.
César Mosquera, Utopix <about:blank> (Venezuela), /Pueblos originarios/
(‘Indigenous Peoples’), 2021.
Bolívar understood the nature of this new threat. In his 1829 letter to
the British /chargé d’affaires/ Patrick Campbell, Bolívar wrote
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that the United States ‘seemed predestined by Providence to plague
Americas with miseries in the name of liberty’. This is why he called
for a congress in Panama in 1826 to create a platform of political
unity. Unfortunately, few of the new states came to Panama. Regional
unity remained a dream, but one that would punctually find adherents who
tried to make it reality.
In the twenty-first century, Hugo Chávez took up the project for
regional unity in the Americas. For a good reason, he called the
revolutionary processes in Venezuela and in Latin America the Bolivarian
Revolution. ‘What we see in the period of history between 1810 and 1830
are the outlines of a national project for South America’, said Chávez.
This is the project that Chávez developed inside Venezuela and in the
region through the Bolivarian Alliance for Peoples of Our America (ALBA)
and through the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), both founded
in 2004.
Since Chávez’s first electoral victory in 1998, the United States has
attempted to derail the Bolivarian process. The stench of Monroe
pervades US policy, while Venezuelan resistance is lifted up by the
spirit of Carabobo. Vindictive US sanctions
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against Venezuela, precisely defined to overthrow Bolivarianism,
continue despite the pandemic. Last year, pressure from the US Treasury
Department prevented
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the International Monetary Fund from allowing Venezuela to access its
own funds and other emergency pandemic-related money. Between April and
May 2021, Venezuela authorised the Swiss bank UBS to pay the COVAX
mechanism $10 million to buy COVID-19 vaccines. On 7 June, COVAX wrote
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to the Venezuelan government to inform them that UBS had blocked the
payments. The bank felt the heavy weight of US policy on its doors.
Valentina Aguirre, Utopix (Venezuela), Llaneros, 2021.
Valentina Aguirre, Utopix <about:blank> (Venezuela), /Llaneros/, 2021.
At the G-7 meeting in Wales, the seven governments from the United
States to Germany agreed to tepid language
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towards the provision of vaccines. Promises of a billion vaccines to be
circulated around the world came without any specifics; it is well-known
that the promises made at G-7 meetings are rarely honoured. The United
Nations Secretary General António Guterres questioned the headline about
the billion vaccines. ‘We need more than that’, he said
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‘We need a global vaccination plan’, which would require increased
production of the vaccines and ‘an emergency task force to guarantee the
design and then the implementation of that global vaccination plan’.
To that end, three important voices from Asia, Africa, and Latin America
– K. K. Shailaja (former health minister, Kerala, India), Anyang’
Nyong’o (governor of Kisumu County, Kenya), and Rogelio Mayta (foreign
minister, Bolivia) – came together to write
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about vaccine internationalism. They laid out three proposals:
1. Remove intellectual property patents on the vaccines.
2. Share the knowledge about how to make the vaccines.
3. Focus on collective disobedience to override intellectual property
rights.
The third aspect requires their own words, imbued with the spirit of
Carabobo:
Certain provisions to override intellectual property protections already
exist, for example, through the 2001 Doha declaration of the WTO. Yet
countries have been hesitant to do so due to fear of sanctions from
certain governments and reprisals from big pharma. We will consider how
we could introduce national legislation to override intellectual
property protections collectively, introducing a credible threat to the
monopoly pharmaceutical model currently at play.
There are two key elements to this point about collective disobedience.
First, it recognises the cold-heartedness with which ‘certain
governments’ will place sanctions on anyone who dares to break the
stranglehold of the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property
Rights or TRIPS, which benefit big pharma above all else. Second, it
puts forth the brave suggestion for nations of the Global South to find
legal means within their countries to set aside big pharma’s capture of
the knowledge commons. There is a hint of realism in this last
suggestion. It would be far more powerful if the countries of the South
– especially the twenty-five states that spend
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more on debt servicing than on health care – would band together and
create a bloc for vaccine internationalism.
But this kind of broad-based regional solidarity is not easily available
today, since the regional and global platforms – including the
60-year-old Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) – are considerably weakened. To
strengthen regionalism was precisely the programme of Chávez and the
Bolivarian movement.
César Mosquera, Utopix (Venezuela), Ejército de Zamora (‘Zamora Army’),
2021
César Mosquera, Utopix <about:blank> (Venezuela), /Ejército de Zamora/
(‘Zamora Army’), 2021.
Regionalism, as Chávez recognised it, is not merely a platform of common
markets and institutions to advance the interests of global corporations
and national elites. This is the kind of regionalism that defines the
European Union, for instance. Nor is it sufficient to develop a
regionalism limited by the ideology of culture, which has often pervaded
in pan-Arabism and pan-Asianism.
The immense power of global corporations provokes the need for some kind
of barriers, which can perhaps no longer merely be erected by individual
countries, since they are vulnerable to sanctions and threats. What is
needed is a broader platform, the unity of entire continents or of
sections of the world that refuse to defer to the authority of the G-7
or of this or that global corporation. Regionalism of this sort does not
merely mean the unity of a set of countries in a continent; it requires
that state power in at least certain key countries be held by the
working class and the peasantry. Only a government backed by the force
of the masses will have the fortitude to stand up to the authority and
the power of ‘certain governments’, as Shailaja, Nyong’o, and Mayta said
with care.
Daniel Duque, Utopix (Venezuela), Comunas socialistas (‘Socialist
Communes’), 2021.
Daniel Duque, Utopix <about:blank> (Venezuela), /Comunas socialistas/
(‘Socialist Communes’), 2021.
As Bolívar lingered on his deathbed in Santa Marta (in modern-day
Colombia), his doctor read to him from French newspapers. They came upon
a song that had been sung by the partisans of the 1830 July Revolution
as they entered the Hôtel de Ville to seize Paris:
America, to cheer us,
Looks on us from afar.
Her fire ring of republics
Was lit by Bolívar.
The memory of Carabobo continues to light those fires in Venezuela’s
communes, in the streets of Colombia, the farmers’ revolt
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in India, and shack settlements
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in South Africa.
Warmly,
Vijay
Website <www.eltricontinental.org>
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