[NYTr] A New Dawn in Latin Amrica - Alarcon on ALBA

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[sent by Jane Franklin; apologies of this is a dupe and we've already
distributed it under another title. It was written on May 22,
2007 and published on July 7, 2007 by Monthly Review. -NYT]

ZNet - Aug 23, 2007
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=13599

Originally published by Monthly Review - Jul 7, 2007
http://www.monthlyreview.org/0707alarcon.htmALBA

ALBA: A New Dawn in Latin America

by by Ricardo Alarcón

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the political and economic system
it headed brought about an excessive euphoria that caused many—both on
the right and within a “left” subordinated to that failed project—to
believe in the final and definitive triumph of capitalism. So much was
said about the fall of the Berlin Wall that few realized that at the
same time the Caracazo was taking place.

When the impoverished masses took to the streets of the Venezuelan
capital (February 27, 1989) to protest against IMF draconian measures
and were brutally massacred, the western media kept a despicable
silence. However, it was the beginning of a process that no one can
deny anymore: the bankruptcy of the neoliberal economic model and its
political expression—the fictitious “representative democracy”—which
Washington had imposed on the entire continent.

While others were talking about the “end of history,” new protagonists
emerged all over Latin America, who brought the social struggle to
unheard-of levels. Governments in Argentina, Ecuador, and Bolivia
tumbled like houses of cards or were defeated in successive elections
such as those which brought coalitions led by the traditional left in
Brazil and Uruguay to power.

Today true revolutionary processes are consolidating in Venezuela and
Bolivia, where the state is recovering the main levers of the economy
previously handed over to foreign monopolies, and where millions of
indigenous and poor people are receiving, for the first time, free
education and health care while participating actively in political
life. Cuba is successfully weathering its direst economic crisis and
advancing toward perfecting its socialist project. Sandinism is
returning to power in Nicaragua and recovering a path, disrupted by the
“dirty war” waged by Washington. The Ecuadorian people are sweeping
away the oligarchic parties and establishing a government that seeks
deep changes. The Caribbean Community is strengthening and broadening
its cooperation with Cuba and Venezuela. And the South American
countries are carrying out great joint projects on their way toward
full integration.

The Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America (ALBA) has deepened its
roots and spread beyond its initial members. ALBA is a real alternative
to neoliberalism with a strong social and human content. Millions of
Latin American and Caribbean people have freed themselves from
illiteracy and have recovered their sight and health. As Ecuadorian
president Rafael Correa said, we are living a change of era.

Yet we are also living in dangerous times. The main threat comes from
Washington. This historic turning point has to face a U.S.
administration clinging to an irrational policy which purports to
impose its hegemony by any means.

The recent release of Luis Posada Carriles, the most notorious
terrorist of this hemisphere, who currently walks free on the streets
of Miami, proves that Washington continues to encourage the worst
procedures against our peoples. Posada has an extensive criminal
record, registered in detail in U.S. official documents declassified in
the last few years—a history of terrorist activity in which many people
in Cuba, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States itself
have been victims.

The most infamous was the mid-air bombing of a Cuban airliner and the
death of its seventy-three occupants on October 6, 1976.  Posada was
being tried for that heinous crime when he escaped from a Venezuelan
jail to join as a key figure in the Iran-Contra operation, and to
continue a non-stop career of terrorism, which he himself has detailed
in his autobiography—published in 1994, in a front-page interview with
the New York Times in July 1998, and in several interviews in Miami
newspapers and on television. Venezuela demands his extradition to
continue his trial for these crimes.

The international counterterrorism conventions are very clear.
Washington must extradite Posada, or if it does not do so “without any
exception whatsoever” (Montreal Convention, article 7) it is obliged to
try him for such crime in its own courts.

Two years have passed since Posada reappeared in U.S. territory. Bush
has not extradited him, nor has he tried him. Neither Bush nor Alberto
González has identified him as a terrorist. They refuse to do so while
they incarcerate and persecute thousands of undocumented immigrants and
turn the torturing of detainees into a state doctrine.

Next September marks the tenth year of imprisonment of Gerardo
Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, Antonio Guerrero, and
René González, five Cubans who went to Miami to penetrate the terrorist
groups that operate there against Cuba with impunity. They sought to
discover the terrorist plans and help to prevent them and save lives.
The Five did not have arms, they did not cause damage to anybody, and
they sacrificed heroically in an uneven fight against terrorism.

Throughout the process directed against them in a Miami court,
Washington recognized very explicitly that its actions against the Five
were aimed at protecting those criminal groups in the United States.
This is recorded in the minutes of the court and in documents of the
U.S. government that insisted up until the end on expressly
guaranteeing that the Five would be “incapacitated” forever—so they
could never again attempt to expose the criminals. Therefore, besides
the excessive sentences—four life terms and seventy-five years in
prison altogether—at the prosecution’s request, there was added this
unusual sentence: “the defendant is prohibited from associating with or
visiting specific places where individuals or groups such as
terrorists...are known to be or frequent.”

The Five’s case has been utterly silenced by the U.S. media. It is
truly outrageous how those media and many American politicians refuse
to denounce and condemn the Bush regime’s cynical conduct, which
massacres entire populations and sends thousands of young Americans to
kill and die in the name of a false “war on terror,” while providing
protection to Posada, and other murderers, and cruelly and unjustly
punishing five young men who are true fighters against terror.

Today Latin America advances with hope and confidence that sooner
rather than later a new dawn will also arise to light the American
people. 

May 22, 2007