Presenting a viable alternative
August 28, 2009
From Mexico City
The Sevilla Palace Hotel on Mexico City’s magnificent central avenue, the Paseo de la Reforma, is a grand, modern hotel. Entering, it is quite a shock to see a huge banner reading: “Las alternativas de la Izquierda Latinoamerica frente a la crisis Capitalista” as it welcomes the 15th Sao Paulo Forum to Mexico City. The lobby fills with people brandishing pamphlets and placards. Portraits of Fidel, Chavez and Morales abound.
While the avenue outside is meticulously clean and manicured as befits a city centre, only three years ago over a million people occupied it for more than a month in protest at the conduct of the 2006 presidential elections in which President Felipe Calderon was controversially declared the winner over the united left candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Mexico has a strong tradition of protest and activism. The Sao Paulo Forum was initiated in that city in 1990 as the PT (Workers Party) of Brazil rose to power.
Delegations from parliamentary groups and unions, as well as political parties throughout the continent, have come to Mexico to try to hammer out an alternative strategy to protect the poorest from the effects of the global crisis. It is easy to assume a sense of almost European normality at an event like this, until one listens to the contributions and hears the names.
Delegates have been victims of the continent’s many military governments as the US bankrolled many of the dictatorships of the past 50 years. A spokesperson for the FMLN in El Salvador explains the process, from the vicious civil war of the 1980s to its election victory earlier this year, combined with the huge economic and social problems the country now faces.
But this is not just a jamboree of emerging political parties. It is a serious examination of the political issues facing the left on the continent and an evaluation of the economic crisis.
While the recession in Europe and the US is clearly serious, it is devastating for vulnerable and fragile economies. In Mexico, there has been a 10 per cent reduction in economic activity in the past three months alone, as the combination of lost markets and the enormous drop in remittances from migrants hits home. The smaller countries of central America are suffering even more. It is estimated that almost a quarter of the gross national product of Nicaragua and Honduras comes from remittances.
In the US, Canada and Europe, migrants are often in marginal jobs, many without documents and vulnerable to unemployment and denial of any state help when destitute. However, the political power structures in Latin America are very different now from those that the founders of the Sao Paulo Forum encountered in 1990. At that time Cuba stood alone in the face of the supreme reign of US hegemony. The Sandinistas had just been defeated in Nicaragua, ushering in a decade and a half of privatisation and poverty.
Now, most countries have left or left-leaning governments in power. The ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance) system of mutual anti-poverty aid is a real alternative to the free markets asserted by the US. Honduran President Manuel Zelaya signed the ALBA pact as he believed the extreme poverty of his country was better resolved by a Latin American process than yet more US-based multinationals coming in to remove the natural resources and exploit the land. The coup that ousted him was shocking in its brutality and the president was exiled. It used to be normal to hear of coups throughout the continent and the military leaders always looked after each other. This time there has been near universal condemnation of the coup and huge demonstrations against Roberto Micheletti’s de facto government.
Many believe that the coup is part of a fightback by the right throughout the continent, pointing to the presence of US troops in Colombia and the enormous amounts of US money invested in the drug wars in Colombia and Mexico. Neoliberalism was first experimented in Chile in 1976, when Milton Friedman and the Chicago school enforced cuts in public spending, privatisation and low export prices, and enormous power was handed to the police to ensure that wealth redistribution towards the rich went ahead. The debt crisis of the 1980s allowed the world’s financial institutions to impose similar solutions on most other countries. This time, in the crisis of 2009, the US has less power and influence, while the examples of successful anti-poverty programmes in Venezuela and Bolivia offer a realistic and obvious example of a different way of doing things. As I sit here, I am aware that the Sao Paulo Forum provides a viable alternative.
Who pulls the strings of government?
August 4, 2009
The latest parliamentary joint committee on human rights report is a surprising and interesting document. It raises issues concerning the treatment of individuals who have been tortured and the potential complicity of the security services. The committee bluntly criticises ministers and the head of MI5 for refusing to testify in parliamentary hearings concerning the claims made by British resident Binyamin Mohamed, who was imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay.
Foreign Office Minister Ivan Lewis has loudly proclaimed that torture is “unacceptable and abhorrent.” On yesterday’s BBC Today programme he said: “We neither engage with, collude in or condone torture,” going on to say that he did not believe there had been any British complicity in torture. But there are a number of problems with Lewis’s remarks.
The High Court has heard that an MI5 officer visited Morocco three times to see Mohamed, who he says he was horribly tortured there before being taken Guantanamo.
Then there’s the deal that prime minister Tony Blair negotiated with various north African countries. This allowed terror suspects to be deported to countries which had not signed the UN convention on torture. These two points cast doubt on government denials of complicity.
The joint committee said that it was disturbed about British government complicity in torture but has been unable to investigate because MI5 and ministers refuse to testify. It was this that led the committee to call for an independent inquiry.
Beyond that, there is the question of the role of Parliament as a whole. With one exception, all select committees are appointed by the House of Commons. They report to the Commons and are required to hold to account the relevant department of state. The glaring exception to this rule is the security services select committee, which was created during Blair’s time as a sop towards accountability.
But this committee is appointed by the prime minister and reports to the prime minister. Most of its proceedings are held in private and there is the increasing impression of a rather cosy relationship between hand-picked long-serving MPs and the head of the security services.
And so we come full circle, back to the complicity of security services - they are not held to account by the relevant parliamentary committee.
In their refusal to co-operate with the human rights committee, the secrecy remains, posing the obvious danger of future torture of British citizens or residents.
The government said yesterday that the current oversight of the security services is already sufficient, repeating the tired mantra that the government unreservedly condemns the use of torture. One has to wonder whether it’s the government that runs the security services or the security services that run the government.
A letter from Mandy
Business Secretary Peter Mandelson has waxed lyrical about the need for more people to have access to higher education. The government’s policy is to ensure that more students go to university who do not come from university-educated families. I couldn’t agree with him more on this.
But how can he advocate this policy when, at the same time, London Metropolitan University is facing over 500 staff redundancies, including teaching and technical and support staff, and a permanent loss of 5,000 student places. This follows an audit carried out by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), which disputed course completion figures put forward by the university and asked for repayment of some of the grant over the past three years. The HEFCE then went on to cut the grant for future years and thus the student numbers.
I’ve just had a letter from Mandelson’s department telling me that ministers are not allowed to intervene because this is a matter for HEFCE as established by Conservative legislation in 1992.
