The likely re-election of Hugo Chavez this weekend in Venezuela will mark a new stage in the process. His opponent, Manuel Rosales, described in the Financial Times (November 30) as a "centre-left" candidate was heavily implicated in the defeated coup attempt to topple Chavez in 2004. Rosales claims that "I will not sit on anyone's lap" but it is hardly a secret that he is firmly attached to the White House.

The wave of revolts and social movements spreading unevenly across the South American continent today are the inevitable result of the Washington Consensus, the economic enslavement of the world. Latin America was the first laboratory for the Hayekian experiments that finally produced the Consensus. The Chicago boys led by the late Milton Friedman, who pioneered neo-liberal economics, used Chile after the Pinochet coup of 1973 as a laboratory. It was a good situation for them. The Chilean working class and its two principal parties had been crushed, their leading cadres killed or "disappeared". Six years later, the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua was crushed by a US-backed Contra counter-revolution.

Earlier this month, the Sandinista leader, Daniel Ortega won the Presidency in his country. Blessed by the church, flanked by a former Contra as his vice-president and still loathed by the US ambassador, Ortega may be a sickly shadow of his former self, but his victory undoubtedly reflects the desire of Nicaraguans for change. Will Managua follow the radically redistributive policies of anti-imperialist Caracas or confine itself to rhetoric and remain a client of the International Monetary Fund?

There was even better recent news from Quito. The substantial electoral triumph of Rafael Correa, a dynamic, young, US-educated economist and former finance minister, who pledged in his election campaign to reverse Ecuador's participation in the US-backed free trade area for the Americas, to ask the US military to vacate its base at Manta, and to join Opec and the growing Bolivarian movement that seeks to unite South America against imperialism.
Correa's victory comes at a time when Latin America is on the march again. There have been some spectacular demonstrations of the popular will in Porto Alegre, Caracas, Buenos Aires, Cochabamba and Cuzco, to name but a few cities.

This has offered a new hope to a world either deep in neoliberal torpor (the EU, the US, the Far East) or suffering from the military and economic depredations of the new order (Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan, south Asia).The struggle spearheaded by the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela against the Washington consensus has attracted the fury of the White House. Three attempts (including a military coup backed by the US and the EU) were made to topple Hugo Chávez.

Chávez was first elected president of Venezuela in February 1999, 10 years after a popular insurrection against the IMF readjustment programme had been brutally crushed by Carlos Andrés Peréz, whose party was once the largest affiliate of the Socialist International. In his election campaign Peréz had denounced the economists on the World Bank's payroll as "genocide workers in the pay of economic totalitarianism" and the IMF as "a neutron bomb that killed people, but left buildings standing".

Afterwards he caved in to the demands of both institutions, suspended the constitution, declared a state of emergency and ordered the army to mow down the protesters. More than 2,000 poor people were shot dead by troops. This was the founding moment of the Bolivarian upheaval in Venezuela.

Chávez and other junior officers organized to protest against the misuse and corruption of the army. In 1992 the radical officers organised a rebellion against those who had authorized the butchery. It failed because it was soon after the traumas of 1989, but people did not forget. That is how the new Bolivarians came to power and began to slowly and cautiously implement social-democratic reforms, reminiscent of Roosevelt's New Deal and the policies of the 1945 Labour government. In a world dominated by the Washington consensus this was unacceptable. Hence the drive to topple him. Hence the demand by Pat Robertson, the leader of political Christianity in the US, that Washington should organise the immediate assassination of Chávez. Venezuela, till now an obscure country as far as the rest of the world was concerned, suddenly became a beacon.

The majority of the people who elected Chávez were angry and determined. They had felt unrepresented for 10 years; they had been betrayed by the traditional parties; they disapproved of the neoliberal policies then in force, which consisted of an assault on the poor in order to shore up a parasitical oligarchy and a corrupt civilian and trade-union bureaucracy. They disapproved of the use that was made of the country's oil reserves. They disapproved of the arrogance of the Venezuelan elite, which utilised wealth and a lighter skin colour to sustain itself at the expense of the dark-skinned and poor majority. Electing Chávez was their revenge.

When it became clear that Chávez was determined to make modest changes to the country's social structure, Washington sounded the tocsin. Nowhere has the embittered bigotry emanating from this quarter been more evident than in its actions and propaganda against Venezuela, with the Financial Times and the Economist in the forefront of a massive disinformation campaign.

They are united by their prejudices against Chávez, whose advent to power was viewed as an insane aberration because the social reforms funded by oil revenues - free health, education and housing for the poor - were regarded as a regression to the bad old days, a first step on the road to totalitarianism.

Chávez never concealed his politics. The two 18th-century Simóns - Bolívar and Rodríguez - had taught him a simple lesson: do not serve the interests of others; make your own political and economic revolution; and unite South America against all empires. This was the core of his program, which is unacceptable to the supporters of the Washington Consensus.

The key to a serious Latin American challenge to the US lies in regional cohesion. This is crucial. When the cable channel Telesur was launched in Caracas nearly two years ago, one of their first programs revealed a shocking level of ignorance amongst South Americans. In virtually every capital city vox pop interviews revealed that people knew the name of their own capital and that of the United States. Very few could name even two or three capital cities in their own continent!

So regional unity---the Bolivarian Federation of sovereign states of which Chavez speaks incessantly----is necessary to move forward. Washington will do everything to prevent this since its own interests dictate dealing with countries unilaterally rather than as regional entities (this is even true of the European Union). Regional unity in South America could have a surprising impact in el Norte as well where the Hispanic population of the United States is growing rapidly to the great consternation of state ideologues like Samuel Huntington.

Tariq Ali's new book, Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope, is published by Verso

Even before polls closed, Chávez supporters were celebrating in the streets, setting off fireworks and cruising Caracas, honking horns and shouting: "Chávez isn't going anywhere."

Since he first won office in 1998, Chávez has increasingly dominated all branches of government. His allies now control congress, state offices and the judiciary.

Current law prevents him from running again in 2012, but he has said he plans to seek constitutional reforms that would include an end to limits on presidential terms.

Mr Chávez is the fourth leftwing leader to win an election in Latin America in the past five weeks. Ecuador's Rafael Correa, an ally of the Venezuelan, won a runoff last week after promising sweeping political reforms; Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua also won recent presidential contests.

Mr Rosales acknowledged defeat but promised to keep fighting. He was greeted by cries of "coward" by some upset supporters as he left his campaign headquarters.

"We recognise they beat us today, but we will continue the fight," said Mr Rosales, 53, who drew his main support from the middle and upper classes.

Mr Rosales, a cattle rancher who is now expected to return to his post of governor of the western state of Zulia, called the election a choice between freedom and increasing state control of people's lives. He also decried rampant crime and corruption, widely seen as Mr Chávez's main vulnerabilities.

The country's opposition movement struggled to challenge Mr Chávez after he defeated a recall referendum in 2004. Many opposition supporters believe Mr Chávez has an unfair advantage by controlling key institutions such as the election council.

But his supporters applaud the man they fondly call El Comandante for spending the country's oil wealth on free health and education programmes for the poor majority, who have long felt abandoned under a succession of governments.

Venezuela is the world's fifth-largest oil exporter, and soaring oil prices have made it the continent's fastest growing economy.

A retired army paratrooper who led a failed military rebellion before his first election win, Mr Chávez has survived a brief coup, an oil strike and scores of demonstrations during his seven years in the Miraflores presidential palace.

"We are going to win and we hope that the opposition will accept their defeat," he said.

The leader, who has infuriated Washington with his warm ties to Cuba and Iran and by calling President George W. Bush "the devil" and "asshole," says the United States supports the opposition and is constantly seeking ways to unseat him.

The former army officer, who is known as "El Comandante," has pledged to use the military to put down any post-vote disorder.

He has provided only vague, circumstantial evidence of a plot, which is typical of his often wild accusations.

Chavez's challenger Manuel Rosales, 53, governor of the western oil state of Zulia, denies the president's charge that he is planning to instigate street protests and an army uprising after the election.

He called for a fair election himself on Thursday, urging Venezuelans to be watchful against dirty tricks in polling stations.

"You have got to keep your eyes peeled, act like good Venezuelans and hold your ground to ensure victory," he told his supporters.

With most state institutions dominated by Chavez loyalists, the opposition is worried the vote will be rigged against them.

Although coup accusations are common in the Caribbean state, Chavez fears a repeat of 2002 when he was briefly dislodged by a military putsch. He accuses Rosales of involvement in that plot.

The Zulia governor denies the charge but Chavez cited a guest list at a ceremony for the conspirators as evidence his challenger was a "liar" unfit to govern the country.

Despite the gravity of his accusations, Chavez, 52, was typically folksy at his news conference interrupting his long-winded answers alternatively with bursts of song and long silences while he labored to perform mental arithmetic.

ASSASSINATION PLOT

Deepening talk of murky conspiracies, Chavez said the authorities had intercepted a plot to assassinate Rosales, finding a rifle and sight before one of his speeches

Chavez said the plot was planned by "fascists" wanting to pin the blame on him.

"We have neutralized loads of plots by mad people," he said. Chavez often boasts he has survived numerous attempts on his life but almost never gives any details.

The opposition accuses Chavez, who led a bungled coup himself in 1992, of being a dictator in the making, seeking to turn the country into a Cuban-style one-party state.

Rosales, a father of 10, has fought Chavez on his own populist territory, promising to dole out oil wealth more efficiently and combat Venezuela's vicious crime wave which affects all levels of society.

He also attacks Chavez for selling discounted oil to his mentor, Cuban President Fidel Castro.

"On Sunday you should be up at three in the morning with your drums and bells ... off to win for Venezuela," Rosales said.

The extensive popular support for the statesman is based on most Venezuelan people s recognition of his social policy.

The aim is to distribute better the oil income of the nation, the fifth hydrocarbon exporter worldwide.

For this new mandate, Chavez has repeatedly said his aim is to deepen the country s socialist nature, with new strategic policies, while a main challenge is to train old conservative structures.

This, according to Chavez, but implies the need for cultural change and political-theoretical paradigms in the popular movement.

The concept of a single united party will also focus Venezuelan debates at an ideological congress slated for next year.

In this way, Chavez invites all sectors "to build socialist Venezuela." "Nobody is afraid to socialism, which is mainly human," stated Chavez in his first speech before thousands of followers after being re-elected as Venezuela s President.

"The victory of freedom seekers and independent-minded figures in Venezuela and Latin America points to the love of the people of the region for real independence and their hatred for US officials' arrogant attitude," he reiterated.
Commenting on the impact of the election on Tehran-Caracas relations, Hosseini said Tehran hopes the positive development would lead to further expansion of wide-ranging ties between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Venezuela and other states of the region.

Hosseini also hoped Tehran-Caracas relations would serve as an example for regional states as well as countries of the South.

President Hugo Chavez was re-elected by a landslide victory on Sunday.
The incumbent Chavez, 52, who has served for eight years, obtained over 61 percent of the votes and had a lead of 23 points over his rival -- state governor Manuel Rosales.

National Action Party (PAN) candidate Felipe Calderon had center stage at 12:01 AM, December 1 at the presidential residence of Los Pinos as Mexico's new president addressed the country on national television after a brief stealth swearing-in ceremony for him to the office he didn't win and will now assume illegitimately because of the fraud-laden electoral coup d'etat that gave it to him. He then had to be slipped in a back door of the Congress later that morning to take the oath of office there, as constitutionally required, in a second "lightning-fast" chaotic ceremony preceded by a brawl between lawmakers for and against the new president who then left as fast as he entered and is now off to a rocky start.

At the same time, outside in Mexico City's streets, hundreds of thousands of people assembled early in the morning in the vast Zocalo square supporting opposition Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who changed his earlier plans to march on Congress and instead held a peaceful mass-protest march of his supporters through the city center to avoid clashes with the police that might have turned violent. It went as far as Chapultepec Park, the entrance to the secured area, to demonstrate opposition to Mr. Calderon and to support Lopez Obrador who was denied the presidency he won now handed over illegitimately to Mr. Calderon. Obrador told the crowd his fight will continue because "it is not possible that there are no democratic elections in Mexico. We are not rebels without a cause, like the media want to portray us. Sometimes they forget the real issue at hand, they forget that we were robbed of the presidential election."

Earlier on Tuesday, November 28, opposition legislators occupied the speaker's podium in the Parliament's Chamber of Deputies lower house where Calderon was scheduled to be sworn in as is customary. They remained there, humiliating Mr. Calderon and forcing him first to settle for a well-guarded private bewitching hour ceremony, unprecedented in the country's history, and then have to repeat it in the brawling environment of the lower house and mass-opposition controlled anger in the streets outside. Not a good way to begin a presidency that may not get any easier ahead. It led the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA) on December 1 to write an article with the long and ominous title - "With Calderon's Deeply Troubled Inauguration Last Night, Amidst a Deteriorating Security Situation in Oaxaca, the Possibility of a New Mexican Revolution Cannot Be Ruled Out." What COHA didn't say was that it appears that revolution may have already begun and is beginning to spread slowly throughout most parts of the country where "the people the color of the earth" live and are now demanding their rights.

In the earlier wee-hours ceremony COHA referred to, Calderon was presented the tri-color ceremonial sash by outgoing PAN president Vincente Fox, and it now remains to be seen what he can do with it as he assumes his new office in a weakened position against an opposition with vast support determined to continue resisting his legitimacy. For weeks following the fraud-laden July 2 general election, mass protests filled the streets of Mexico City and its vast Zocalo square.

The struggle continued in an atmosphere of post-election turmoil that energized the Mexican public including the courageous people of Oaxaca who've been battling since May for the rights they've long been denied including the removal of the corrupt and repressive state governor Ulises Ruiz and united to do it by forming the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO). They're now faced off against 4500 of the country's Federal Preventative Police (PFP) and thuggish paramilitary assassins sent to the state to target them. Still, they've stood their ground bravely in their determined confrontation that shows no signs of ending despite brutal police harassment on the streets with tear-gassing, illegal home searches and seizures, people disappeared, many dozens or hundreds illegally arrested for protesting injustice and falsely accused of "hindering free passage, sedition, criminal association, conspiracy, theft, rebellion, and threats" and at least 17 killed including American documentary filmmaker and journalist Brad Will and dozens wounded.

Weeks before the early morning stealth inauguration in Mexico City, the ruling PAN party set up a militarized zone around the Chamber of Deputies in the capital preparing for whatever might unfold in the run-up to December 1 and its aftermath still to come. The area was turned into an armed camp with 1200 elite PFP in riot gear along with Police of the Presidential Guard manning checkpoints in the surrounding streets in an atmosphere of martial law that persists and may signal trouble ahead on the streets of Mexico City similar to what's now happening in Oaxaca and beginning to spread elsewhere.

In addition, three-meter high metal fences were erected around the Chamber of Deputies building and remain in place, closing it off like a fortress needing protection from the people of Mexico the elected leaders are supposed to represent but never do in a country with a long tradition of authoritarian rule, corruption, dismissiveness of peoples' rights, and service only to the interests of wealth and power. The scene there represents an ominous symbol of state repression past and more likely to come that Felipe Calderon signaled on November 20 when he said: "My government will make use of all the force of the Mexican state, with the laws at hand and the power of the institutions. This is a war that we are going to win..."

Straightaway, this man shows he means it by his appointment of Jalisco Governor Francisco Ramirez Acuna to the powerful post of Interior Minister that effectively puts him in charge of state-directed repression. He assumes his new office with a well-earned reputation in his home state as a hard line authoritarian known for cracking down on protesters and imprisoning dissidents while, at the same time, allowing narco-traffickers and criminal entrepreneurs safe haven under his jurisdiction and benefitting along with them.

He, Mr. Calderon, and others in the new government will get plenty of support for what they have in mind from the Bush administration. It has its eye on exploiting all remaining parts of Mexico it hasn't yet gotten its hands on since it grabbed so much of it from the IMF-imposed structural adjustment policies of the 1980s that resulted in large-scale privatizations of state-owned industries, economic deregulation favorable to Washington, and mandated wage restraint that held pay increases below the rate of inflation whenever any were gotten at all.

Calderon and Bush will also be close allies working together to further the business gains already in place from the destructive 1994 NAFTA agreement that predatory corporate giants benefitted hugely from and now want to broaden into a North American union, effectively erasing the borders of the three NAFTA-participating countries and surrendering the sovereignty of the two smaller ones to the hegemony of the one dominant one, adversely affecting the people of all three countries who always end up the losers in deals like this, if it happens.

If the opposition in Mexico has any say about it, post-election schemes cooked up by the PAN in service to its dominant northern neighbor may not go as planned. Opposition PRD candidate Lopez Obrador (ALMO, as he's affectionately known) promises to resist the new illegitimate government, and on November 20 (the anniversary date of Mexico's 1910 revolution) conducted his own swearing-in ceremony in Mexico City's Zocalo as Mexico's "legitimate president" before hundreds of thousands of supporters. He named his cabinet members joining him and told the crowd "There are millions of Mexicans who are not willing to accept more abuses (and that his) legitimate government (would work for the poor)." He added Mr. Calderon (he calls a US "puppet") "cannot feel secure (in the office he didn't win and he's) the lowly servant of the white-collar criminals (who stole it for him)." He also presented 20 measures he intends to work for including preventing the privatization of the nation's energy sector Big US Oil has long eyed to control.

The battle lines are now drawn and began peacefully on the streets near the Parliament building on December 1 in response to Lopez Obrador asking his supporters to come out in them in protest with more sure to follow. Security forces have been there for months and will be aligned against them whenever they're in the streets or square and were joined by hundreds of Navy officers deployed around the Parliament, at least for the inauguration, already protected by several thousand elite police and members of the Presidential Guard. This was just day one of round one as Felipe Calderon begins his potentially turbulent six-year term in office that may hold many surprises as it unfolds.

The people of Mexico have shown they're fed up with decades of fraud, corruption and abuse and for months have taken to the streets in numbers large enough to make a difference and for the world to take note. They're joined in protest by their comrades in Oaxaca, other states, and by Subcomandante Marcos and the many thousands of his supporters and organizations across the country. He's leading them in his national Zapatista Other Campaign organized outside the political process to end Mexico's unjust economic system of neoliberal predatory capitalism wanting to replace it with a democratic system of social and economic justice for the people in a country long denied either.

Events ebb and flow south of the border, but overall the atmosphere's electric and more ripe for change now than it's been since Emiliano Zapata Salazar's heroic efforts led a national revolutionary movement against the Porfirio Diaz dictatorship in 1910 that overthrew him the following year. It was historic and now is a symbol of what courageous people hope will ignite a new spirit of resistance leading to change in what may be a watershed moment in Mexico's history.

It it happens, it won't come without struggle. Mexican governments aren't known for yielding easily to protests against their authority, and this one can expect plenty of help from the Bush administration already reeling from the opposition it faces in a growing number of Latin American nations and sure to become more hostile and determined to resist new threats in the region as they arise. For Washington, Mexico is the cornerstone of the hemisphere it feels it has a lien on and losing it would be another catastrophic blow adding to its strategic defeats in the Middle East brought on by the Bush administration's arrogance, blunders and ineptness.

The people of Mexico have other ideas, they're now playing out in real time, and as events ahead unfold it may be that Mexican history will be made in the hearts of the people and the spirit they show in the streets they take to and not in the halls of power where it usually happens.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.