25 June 2012 By Reason Wafawarova In December 2005, CITGO, the Houston-based
subsidiary of PDVSA, Venezuela's state-owned national
oil company flighted a full page advert in major US
newspapers with a screaming header "How Venezuela Is
Keeping the Home Fires Burning in Massachusetts." The advert was about a program initiated by Hugo
Chavez's government to sell heating oil at discounted
prices to low income communities in Boston, the South
Bronx and other parts of the United States. This was
of course an ironic gesture in the strained relations
between Washington and Caracas. The background to this development was an
initiative by a group of U.S senators who decided to
send a letter to nine major oil companies requesting
them to donate a portion of their record profits to
help poor Boston residents to cover their bills.
Ironically, the only response came from CITGO,
eliciting stinging criticism from U.S politicians and
a legion of commentators who accused Chavez of
overlooking the needy people in his homeland Venezuela
in pursuit of illicit political ends, sought by
cheaply reaching out to desperate US citizens. This of course is unlike USAID which runs purely
humanitarian programs across the world, regardless of
the fact that there are desperate and needy people in
the United States. Even Britain can afford to give
Malawians hundreds of millions of pounds in the midst
of a crumbling economy back home, a purely
humanitarian commitment righteously inspired by the
genuine charity of the white man towards a hopeless
black population. There is no pursuit of illicit
political ends whatsoever in these cases and Lady
Banda of Malawi is convinced about this. Chavez's oil heating program became a scathing
challenge to Washington's planners of grand strategy,
following as it did the noisy protests against George
W. Bush when he visited Argentina to attend the Summit
of the Americas in November 2005. Chavez's help for desperate and poor Americans was
like salt to soaring wound, coming at a time the
Southern hemisphere began its triumphant fallout with
the US, with left-centre governments taking power
almost all the way throughout South and Central
America. Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador are
triumphantly leading the efforts at independent
nationalism against US hegemony in the hemisphere. This has been compounded by the increasing economic
integration of Latin American states, further
strengthened by the South-South cooperation featuring
major powers like Brazil, South Africa and India, as
well as the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China)
alliance. China has made significant inroads in the
acquisition of raw materials from countries like Chile
and Venezuela and the dependency of Latin American
countries on the US has drastically reduced in the
last decade, a development not so impressive for
Washington foreign policy planners. The major headache for Washington in the Americas
is Venezuela, a net provider of 15 percent of US oil
imports, whose leader President Chavez is after the
kind of independence defined by the US as defiance. Right now the United States is so distressed over
countries like Zimbabwe and Venezuela for their
stubborn pursuance of people-oriented policies at the
expense of profiteering Western corporations,
nationalising industries and refusing Western
corporations free access to their natural resources. The rise of Venezuela under the leadership of Hugo
Chavez at a time Europe is reeling under an
excruciating financial crisis has generated debate on
the viability of capitalism, just like it has become
increasingly questionable to hold in esteem the
imposed notion that Western representative political
systems are the standard paradigm for democracy. Questions over the efficiency of capitalism arise
when one looks at protests by thousands of people in
Europe against the much talked about austerity
measures being forced on a resistive population by
sheer police brutality and the power of the bayonet.
The Economic Restructuring Programs are so unpopular
that they have so far cost France's pygmy
war-mongering leader Nicolas Sarkozy a second term
election loss, as what happened to Berlusconi of Italy
earlier on. European governments have very little choice in the
wake of pressure from the IMF and the World Bank –
institutions that have been forced by circumstances to
keep cracking the whip on European politicians in
order to force through reforms that favour the
survival of Western corporations. Increasingly liberal democracy is shaping up to be
a huge hoax in the face of a China-dominated market,
and it is turning out that Western secularism is no
full proof panacea to governance challenges. In Venezuela the popular revolution started in 1999
and it is called the Bolivarian revolution, reclaiming
vast tracts of land from foreign holders and giving it
back to indigenous Venezuelans as well as
nationalising the oil industry and even the financial
sector, of course for the benefit of the local people.
In Zimbabwe the revolution is called the Second
Chimurenga and it started with the popular reclamation
of colonially stolen farmlands in 2000, culminating in
the current economic empowerment program targeting to
ensure 51 percent local ownership of all huge
businesses in the country, and full control of
national resources by the locals. Such popular revolutions are destined to create a
new era for the livelihoods of any people, the way the
land reforms of both Zimbabwe and Venezuela have done
for the traditionally maligned indigenous peoples. Both Zimbabwe and Venezuela have been resilient
victims of manic efforts by Western media to discredit
both the popular pro-people policies and the
individual leaders of the two countries, Presidents
Robert Mugabe and Hugo Chavez Frias. The idea here is not only to discredit political
systems of the two countries, but also to destroy the
embryo of an alternative society independent of the
grip of traditional imperialistic powers. A Zimbabwe
with a people reliant on Western investment and aid is
naturally more democratic in the eyes of the West than
a truly independent Zimbabwe in full control of its
resources and wealth. Both Zimbabwe and Venezuela are facing elections in
2012, with Venezuela heading for the polls on 7
October while Zimbabwe is yet to announce a date for
an election meant to end the lifespan of an unworkable
coalition between the revolutionary ZANU-PF and the
Western-sponsored MDC factional groupings. In Zimbabwe ZANU-PF is confidently pushing for an
election while the West is backing a weakened MDC-T in
its cowardly efforts to push for the postponing of
elections until the party feels it stands a better
chance of winning. The propaganda pretext being
peddled is that a new constitution must be ushered in
first so that it "creates an environment for free and
fair elections." This is despite that the hotly
disputed draft constitution could fail to pass the
vote at a referendum to be held any time soon, or
worse still fail to make it to the referendum stage, a
situation that could mean that elections would have to
be held under the current Constitution. That scenario
would thwart Tsvangirai's idea of a free and fair
election, ostensibly reliant solely on the notion of a
new constitution. Morgan Tsvangirai is scared of the electorate and
the military, both groups sharing resentment for the
MDC-T's treacherous politics of pandering to Western
diktats, as well as for the puppet stigma that
Tsvangirai carries in the eyes of Africans across the
continent. Despite being significantly popular in parts of
Zimbabwe, the MDC-T leader commands an aura of
encyclopaedic confusion, passing himself as a
politician of legendary inconsistencies, like his
recent call that Zimbabwean Army Generals must stay
out of politics, at a time that he himself finds it
logical to hold a political meeting with US General
Wesley Clark in Austria– a political meeting whose
agenda had a direct bearing on the Zimbabwean Generals
that Tsvangirai beseeches to be apolitical, simply on
the basis that Clark is the face of an enemy to those
tasked with defending Zimbabwe, being a former NATO
commander. Despite profuse rhetoric from Western mouthpieces
against the personality and character of Hugo Chavez,
the man continues to command impressive approval
ratings, like the April rating of 57 percent,
something that infuriates so much most of his foes in
the West. As expected Western media have embarked on a
furious disinformation campaign against both Chavez
and President Robert Mugabe, attacking unabatedly both
the Bolivarian and Chimurenga revolutions. For Chavez there have been shameless efforts at
peddling baseless and biased manipulative stories
about the persecution of the man's opponents,
especially opposition leader Capriles Radonski, whose
party is curiously named "Justice First," a clear
message that a people's fundamental livelihood can be
shelved in pursuit of Western-sponsored rhetoric on
justice and human rights. This is why the rhetoric
about alleged human rights abuses and retributive
justice has become the MDC-T's idea of governance
policy and election manifesto, vainly trying to
impress upon Zimbabweans that matters of civil
liberties are more pressing than land and economic
empowerment, essentially that civil liberties
supersede food and welfare rights. There have been widespread complaints that the 39
year-old Radonski has been a victim of a "government
smear campaign," and "government-inspired hate" in
Venezuela. The West has soulfully lamented the
"negative remarks about his (Radonski) sexuality," and
also about his "privileged" Jewish background. However, the UK's Independent was forced to retract
a piece titled "Chavez's Homophobic Rant against
Challenger," saying in a retraction apology, "We now
accept that President Chavez did no such thing. We are
happy to set the record straight." Although these fabrications originated from outside
Venezuela, the opposition aligned media in Venezuela
gleefully reprinted and rebroadcasted the lies in full
knowledge that no such thing had ever happened. The
pro-MDC media in Zimbabwe is notorious for this kind
of behaviour. Such lies are never backed with evidence, apart
from the quoting of endless streams of fanatical
opposition political activists and Western funded NGOs
– always elevated to the level of authorities over the
affairs of countries governed by people classified as
enemies of the West. One can look at the interviewees in Simon Bright's
documentary "Robert Mugabe: What happened?" or in Ben
Freeth's "Mugabe and the white African," and this
trend of mistaking interviewing political opponents
for genuine gathering of evidence becomes quite
apparent. Real pieces of evidence can be contested in a court
of law while the utterances of political opponents are
not admissible as evidence from a true perspective of
justice. What these quotations can do is ruin the
political characters of those targeted through the
slander, but they never really make it as evidence
from a justice point of view. This writer was once labelled a murderer and rapist
by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and the
evidence provided was nothing but a series of
quotations from rogue activists and other Western
propagandists, like Zimbabwe's clownish Job Sikhala
and the BBC Panorama's Hillary Andersen, who
notoriously hired South African actors to incriminate
members of Zimbabwe's National Youth Service program
through a thoroughly discredited documentary in 2002.
Of course the allegations were mere fabrications
and could not stand as evidence in Court and the ABC
was forced into a retraction and an out of court
settlement. Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome.
It is homeland or death! • Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based
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