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=**Che's Bolivia worries Bush**=


 * Decades of economic dogma have achieved the opposite of what globalisation was supposed to do**


 * The Star, Johannesburg, January 12, 2006**


 * By Hans Pienaar**

Bolivia is one of the more insignificant countries in South America, best known as providing the jungle stage for one of the most dramatic executions ever, Che Guevara's.

Now, almost 40 years after his death at the hands of a CIA-assisted hit squad, the revolutionary will at least see justice of some sorts, when firebrand activist Evo Morales becomes president.

Ever since Guevara travelled through the highlands of South America - the subject of the hit movie The Motorcycle Diaries - Bolivia remained a cornerstone of his belief that a world revolution could be sparked by small-scale guerilla activity.

Morales defiantly wears a Che T-shirt, and also speaks of one America, meaning the south. He has been preceded by other recently elected left-wing leaders in a rapidly changing South America, who have drastically improved living conditions and prospects of citizens in several countries.

But for several reasons his election is the one that has powerful US leaders like Condoleezza Rice "very worried". George W Bush has publicly stated that he would accept the outcome of December's election, which for the first time propelled an indigenous South American into power.

But the real question is: Will the Central Intelligence Agency accept it, or will Bolivia soon become the terrain for another massive campaign similar to the one that led to the murder of Guevara?

If Morales becomes a target of Western capitalist ire, he will become the fall guy for a world that is changing beyond the control of Washington and its consensuses.

After a quarter of a century of what Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul calls "globalism", governments all over the world are waking up to the fact that their citizens are not so enamoured with the putative benefits of globalisation anymore. Recent polls - also in the US - have shown that a majority now prefer greater intervention by their governments to protect them from the international economy.

Decades of economic dogma, to the exclusion of all other social factors, have produced the opposite of what it claimed globalisation would bring. Central to the faith of globalism has been the idea that opened-up global markets would render national governments obsolete, for free trade to bring liberty and progress to all. That hasn't happened. Instead, faced with monsters created by free trade, such as rampant dumping by Sino-American joint ventures, political parties and activists are calling for a return to the social democracy models that preceded globalism. That's why agents of global capital, such as Bush and Rice, dislike Morales.

The more they denigrate him, the more popular he becomes, much like Guevara himself, whose execution transformed him into a modern myth after his suicidal and, in reality, incompetent mission. Morales turned the coca plant - a favourite bugbear of the US and its alibi for what amounts to military occupation of several South American countries - into a central plank of his MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo) campaign.

Rejecting the US demonisation of coca as the cause of social instability by providing the raw material in the production of cocaine, Morales called it a "healthy herb" and punted it as an integral part of Bolivian culture, promising to increase its cultivation, not contain it as the US wants.

Observers such as US economist Mark Weisbrot pointed out that such a policy was much more sensible as a social stabiliser than the global cocaine market, where crime-inducing high prices are maintained by international criminalisation.

But Morales' success also illustrates a central tenet of Ralston Saul's critique of globalism, that economic considerations should not be the be-all and end-all of political leadership. Morales was voted in because Bolivia's 60% majority indigenous "Indians" bought his message - without paying more than a trip to the ballot box - that indigenous culture should be brought onto the centre stage.

The country's resources, he said, should be utilised for the growth of its citizens in other ways than just the financial progress of its small white elite. To that end, its huge natural gas reserves should be nationalised.

And when US propagandists argue that the gas should be extracted by foreigners because only they own the technology and skills, he hit back that its harnessing could wait for the future.

When it comes to seizing his country's gas, Morales finds himself in the company of Hugo Chavez of oil-rich Venezuala, who is also a favourite target of US propaganda. Chavez has been painted as a rabid revolutionary in the mould of the US's favourite bÃ¡te noire, president Fidel Castro of Cuba.

In the years of global rhetoric ruling the airwaves, nationalisation has acquired the same aura as the gulags of communism in the pantheon of revolutionary evils. Such scaremongering flies in the face of the sober facts, such as provided by the case of Norway. The world's most developed country for two years running started out as a basket case in the 1950s but was able to prosper in the 1970s due to state ownership of oil fields in the North Sea.

Conversely, privatisation, presented as the golden wand to kickstart undeveloped economies, has been shown to cause much more damage through job losses and takeovers of traditional industries and enterprises by bloodsucking conglomerates.

That Morales is not really the revolutionary devil Rice fears he is, is clear from the make-up of his party's constituencies. The impoverished peasant classes are not exactly admirers of violent revolution, in which they would suffer the most. Morales is rather driven by traditionalist ideals of using "ancestor models" in reforming the political system.

His other big support group is the country's liberals, as opposed to "neo-liberal" foreigners and corporate businessmen. His talk of also nationalising industry is tempered by a clear acceptance of capitalist practices as the basis of a new dispensation - which is also what distinguishes Chavez's philosophy from Fidel Castro.

Of course, Morales is yet to be inaugurated; much could go wrong and many things will. Morales wants to launch claims of restitution for centuries of slaughter and exploitation of South America's indigenous peoples. This could easily create the same cultivation of victimhood and entitlement that is bedevilling African politics. - Independent Foreign Service

From: http://www.thestar.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=225&fArticleId=3062153