October 23, 2019, Strategic Culture Foundation (Russia)
Neoliberalism
is – literally – burning. And from Ecuador to Chile, South America, once again,
is showing the way. Against the vicious, one-size-fits-all IMF austerity
prescription, which deploys weapons of mass economic destruction to smash
national sovereignty and foster social inequality, South America finally seems
poised to reclaim the power to forge its own history.
Three
presidential elections are in play. Bolivia’s seem to have been settled this
past Sunday – even as the usual suspects are yelling “Fraud!” Argentina and
Uruguay are on next Sunday.
Blowback
against what David Harvey has splendidly conceptualized as accumulation
by dispossession is, and will continue to be, a bitch. It will
eventually reach Brazil – which as it stands continues to be torn to pieces by
Pinochetist ghosts. Brazil, eventually, after immense pain, will rise up again.
After all, the excluded and humiliated all across South America are finally
discovering they
carry a Joker inside themselves.
Chile
privatizes everything
The
question posed by the Chilean street is stark: “What’s worse, to evade taxes or
to invade the subway?” It’s all a matter of doing the class struggle math.
Chile’s GDP grew 1,1% last year while the profits of the largest corporations
grew ten times more. It’s not hard to find from where the huge gap was
extracted. The Chilean street stresses how water, electricity, gas, health,
medicine, transportation, education, the salar (salt flats)
in Atacama, even the glaciers were privatized.
That’s
classic accumulation by dispossession, as the cost of living has become
unbearable for the overwhelming majority of 19 million Chileans, whose average
monthly income does not exceed $500.
Paul
Walder, director of the Politika portal and an analyst for the Latin-American
Center of Strategic Analysis (CLAE) notes how less than a week after the end of
protests in Ecuador – which forced neoliberal vulture Lenin Moreno to ditch a
gas price hike – Chile entered a very similar cycle of protests.
Walder
correctly defines Chile’s President Sebastian Pinera as the turkey in a
long-running banquet that involves the whole Chilean political class. No wonder
the mad as hell Chilean street now makes no difference between the government,
the political parties and the police. Pinera, predictably, criminalized all
social movements; sent the army to the streets for unmitigated repression; and
installed a curfew.
Pinera
is Chile’s 7th wealthiest billionaire, with assets valued at
$2.7 billion, spread out in airlines, supermarkets, TV, credit cards and
football. He’s a sort of turbo-charged Moreno, a neoliberal Pinochetist.
Pinera’s brother, Jose, was actually a minister under Pinochet, and the man who
implemented Chile’s privatized welfare system – a key source of social
disintegration and despair. And it’s all interlinked: current Brazilian Finance
Minister Paulo Guedes, a Chicago boy, lived and worked in Chile at the time,
and now wants to repeat the absolutely disastrous experiment in Brazil.
The
bottom line is that the economic “model” that Guedes wants to impose in Brazil
has totally collapsed in Chile.
Chile’s
top resource is copper. Copper mines, historically, were owned by the US, but
then were nationalized by President Salvador Allende in 1971; thus war criminal
Henry Kissinger’s plan to eliminate Allende, which culminated in the original
9/11, in 1973.
Pinochet’s
dictatorship later re-privatized the mines. The largest of them all, Escondida,
in the Atacama desert – which accounts for 9% of the world’s copper – belongs
to Anglo-Australian giant Bhp Billiton. The biggest copper buyer in world
markets is China. At least two-thirds of income generated by Chilean copper
goes not to the Chilean people, but to foreign multinationals.
The
Argentine debacle
Before
Chile, Ecuador was semi-paralyzed: inactive schools, no urban transport, food
shortages, rampant speculation, serious disturbances on oil exports. Under fire
by the mobilization of 25,000 indigenous peoples in the streets, President
Lenin Moreno cowardly left a power void in Quito, transferring the seat of
government to Guayaquil. Indigenous peoples took over the governance in many
important cities and towns. The National Assembly was AWOL for almost two
weeks, without the will to even try to solve the political crisis.
By
announcing a state of emergency and a curfew, Moreno laid out a red carpet for
the Armed Forces – and Pinera duly repeated the procedure in Chile. The
difference is that in Ecuador Moreno bet on Divide and Rule between the
indigenous peoples’ movements and the rest of the population. Pinera resorts to
outright brute force.
Apart
from applying the same old tactics of raising prices to obtain further IMF
funds, Ecuador also displayed a classic articulation between a neoliberal
government, big business and the proverbial US ambassador, in this case Michael
Fitzpatrick, a former Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere matters in
charge of the Andean region, Brazil and the Southern Cone up to 2018.
The
clearest case of total neoliberal failure in South America is Argentina. Less
than two months ago in Buenos Aires, I saw the vicious social effects of the
peso in free fall, inflation at 54%, a de facto food emergency and the
impoverishment of even solid sectors of the middle class. Mauricio Macri’s
government literally burned most of the $58 billion IMF loan – there’s still $5
billion to arrive. Macri is set to lose the presidential elections: Argentines
will have to foot his humongous bill.
Macri’s economic model could
not but be Pinera’s – actually Pinochet’s, where public services are run as a
business. A key connection between Macri and Pinera is the ultra-neoliberal
Freedom Foundation sponsored by Mario Vargas Llosa, who at least boasts the
redeeming quality of having been a decent novelist a long time ago.
Macri,
a millionaire, disciple of Ayn Rand and incapable of displaying empathy towards
anyone, is essentially a cipher, pre-fabricated by his Ecuadorian guru Jaime
Duran Barba as a robotic product of data mining, social networks and focus
groups. A hilarious take on his insecurities may be found in La Cabeza
de Macri: Como Piensa, Vive y Manda el Primer Presidente de la No Politica,
by Franco Lindner.
Among
myriad shenanigans, Macri is indirectly linked to fabulous money laundering
machine HSBC. The president of HSBC in Argentina was Gabriel Martino. In 2015,
four thousand Argentine accounts worth $3.5 billion were discovered at HSBC in
Switzerland. This spectacular capital flight was engineered by the bank. Yet
Martino was essentially saved by Macri, and became one of his top advisers.
Beware
the IMF vulture ventures
All
eyes now should be on Bolivia. As of this writing, President Evo Morales won
Sunday’s presidential elections in the first round – obtaining, by a slim
margin, the necessary 10% spread for a candidate to win if he does not obtain
the 50% plus one of the votes. Morales essentially got it right at the end,
when votes from rural zones and from abroad were fully counted, and the
opposition had already started to hit the streets to apply pressure. Not
surprisingly, the OAS – servile to US interests – has proclaimed a “lack of
trust in the electoral process”.
Evo
Morales represents a project of sustainable, inclusive development, and
crucially, autonomous from international finance. No wonder the whole
Washington Consensus apparatus hates his guts. Economy Minister Luis Arce
Catacora cut to the chase: “When Evo Morales won his first election in 2005,
65% of the population was low income, now 62% of the population has access to a
medium income.”
The
opposition, without any project except wild privatizations, and no concern
whatsoever for social policies, is left to yell “Fraud!”, but this could take a
very nasty turn in the next few days. In the tony suburbs of southern La Paz,
class hate against Evo Morales is the favorite sport: the President is referred
to as “indio”, a “tyrant” and “ignorant”. Cholos of the
Altiplano are routinely defined by white landowning elites in the plains as an
“evil race”.
None
of that changes the fact that Bolivia is now the most dynamic economy in Latin
America, as stressed by
top Argentine analyst Atilio
Boron.
The
campaign to discredit Morales, which is bound to become even more vicious, is
part of imperial 5G war, which, Boron writes, totally obliterates “the chronic
poverty that the absolute majority of the population suffered for centuries”, a
state that always “maintained the population under total lack of institutional
protection” and the “pillaging of natural wealth and the common good”.
Of
course the specter of IMF vulture ventures won’t vanish in South America like a
charm. Even as the usual suspects, via World Bank reports, now seem “concerned”
about poverty; Scandinavians offer the Nobel Prize on Economics to three
academics studying poverty; and Thomas Piketty, in Capital and
Ideology, tries to disassemble the hegemonic justification for
accumulation of wealth.
What still remains absolutely off limits for the
guardians of the current world-system is to really investigate hardcore
neoliberalism as the root cause of wealth hyper-concentration and social
inequality. It’s not enough to offer Band-Aids anymore. The streets of South
America are alight. Blowback is now in full effect.
*Pepe Escobar: Independent
geopolitical analyst, writer and journalist
*Abya Yala: Living Land,
the indigenous name of Latin America. In the spirit of José Martí and
the native peoples, Abya Yala is all that is related to Our America, this
living land that goes from Rio Bravo to Tierra del Fuego, passing through the
Caribbean, not forgetting the first nations of North America.
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