The following is a revised text of an address given at Rutgers University on March 21st as part of a forum on Socialism in Latin America today, sponsored by the Central and South American Alliance (CASAA) a Rutgers Student group.

What is happening today in Latin America? First let us look at the facts. What Europeans and Latin Americans call “neo-liberalism,” (Americans would call it big business conservatism), that is the free” market capitalism and compete or starve policies associated with the IMF-World-Bank have been an unprecedented disaster for the people of Latin America, as they have been for the overwhelming majority of the world's peoples

Nearly 215 million people in Latin America are living in poverty: 41% subsist on 2 dollars a day; 18% “live” on a dollar a day. To put this in perspective for Rutgers students, an annual income of two dollars a day is roughly one tenth of one percent of the annual income of our University President, and one twentieth of one percent of the income of our football coach.

The gap between per capita annual incomes in rich countries like the U.S. as against a “rich Latin American country like Argentina is 7 to 1. For a poor country like Ecuador, it is 30 to 1. This income gap, while always large, has grown substantially over the last three decades, just as the income gap between the top ten percent of U.S. income earners and the rest of the population has grown massively in the same period.

“Neo liberalism” has produced destitution poverty, insecurity and instability in Latin America. Through the continent, mass struggles, demonstrations and protests have risen to challenge conservative or “neo-liberal” governments subservient to the IMF-World Bank--Trade and Investment System and they have succeeded in defeating a number of these governments.

While the results are very uneven, the trends have been to the left, in a radicalizing direction with socialist orientations in terms of real policies in many countries.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, born in 1954, the year Jacobo Arbenz was overthrown in a CIA created coup in Guatemala, and his Bolivarian movement, a complex grassroots radical movement, has been the most significant manifestation so far of this left trend.

Although U.S. media vilifies Chavez as it has Fidel Castro for nearly 50 years and ignores the U.S government's previous support for a coup against him, the Bolivarian movement is seeking to involve the masses of people in a dialogue about socialism and is moving in a militant socialist direction. Today Venezuela is, after Cuba, the leading force advocating socialist transformation, not only in Latin America but in the world.

In Brazil, Luis da Silva's government (elected president in 2002) has enacted significant reforms after generations of U.S. supported military dictatorships and rightwing governments. Lula was a worker and trade union leader who helped to found the Workers Party while the military dictatorship was still in power at the beginning of the 1980s. The Workers Party which elected him contains many militant socialist groupings who have established innovative worker and peasant collectives and also militant socialist oriented regional leaders

Certainly, Brazil today is a very different place than the U.S., IMF-World Bank supported military dictatorship that was long hailed as a model for “development” and Lula's post dictatorship predecessors who followed the “Trickle Down” model of economic development at the behest of domestic and foreign capital.

The Communist Party of Brazil, participating with other left forces in the demonstrations against the U.S. president they refer to as “the undesirable visitor,” made this nuanced argument: “as its been the case in the past, our criticism would've also been toward the host governmen. However Lula's government has much credit in conducting {foreign affairs} and we trust that his treatment of Bush will be pragmatic and formal.' For Brazilian Communists, the enemy is Bush who has “nothing good to offer us” and the Brazilian “neo liberal” ideologues and right-wing forces, not Lula, his party or his government.

From my observation of Lula's public meeting with Bush, the Brazilian president was both formal and pragmatic while Bush tried to put on his “good ole boy” act.

In Argentina, Nestor Kirchner, pursuing left-oriented policies defeated the corrupt adventurer; Carlos Menem in 2003 has nevertheless opened up political space and movement on the left, advancing democracy and workers rights.

In Chile, Michelle Bachelet, a Socialist Party leader, was elected President in 2006. Bachelet's father, an official of the Allende government, died at the hands of former fascist dictator General Pinochet's torturers. Bachelet and her mother were also victims of torture at the hands of the Dina, Pinochet's Gestapo. She found refuge in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), a country founded by German Communist exiles from Hitler fascism which gave political asylum to many refugees of the Pinochet dictatorship as an essential part of its concepts of proletarian internationalism and anti-fascism. She studied medicine there and became a pediatrician, a staunch defender of women's rights and a clear opponent of the Catholic social conservatism on marriage and family which has been a powerful force in Chile.

Bachelet's policies have advanced workers rights and reduced what many Latin American socialists and communists call Chile's “hard democracy” which followed after the ousting of Pinochet, that is, a “democracy” where the open dictatorship is gone but where workers and students still face substantial police brutality in their protests and workers rights are not effectively protected. This “hard democracy” or democracy with only limited real civil rights for working people is, at best, what the U.S. government and its IMF-World Bank compatriots support in Latin America and the rest of the world, with military dictatorship as the other and more traditional option.

Although the most radical trends have been associated with the Bolivarian movement in Venezuela, there are mass struggles going forward through the continent and the most popular leaders are those who are most committed to finding a socialist solution to their peoples problems.

To begin to discuss socialism in Latin America today we must say something about history. The Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz once said, “poor Mexico: So far away from God, so near the United States.”

Just as Britain and the European powers colonized Africa, the Near East and South Asia, the U.S. established a semi-colonial empire in Central America, the Caribbean and Venezuela, stationing marines in many countries to prevent either leaders or policies that U.S. commercial interests opposed from either taking or maintaining power.

The policy was to tie countries directly to U.S. economic interests by having the U.S. decide whom those countries would accept loans from and even trade with. Unlike the other imperialist powers who said they were subjugating peoples in the name of “progress” and “civilization,” the U.S. ruling class contended that its policies were aimed at defending the “freedom and self-determination” of Latin American nations.

This policy developed rapidly after the Spanish-American War of 1898 as Cuba served as the model “protectorate” for U.S. policy in the Hemisphere.

The Mexican Revolution preceded the Russian Revolution and ultimately did not take a socialist path. One reason is that at an early stage of the revolution, the U.S. intervened, seeking to make it conform to U.S. business and political imperatives.

Mexico however was too big to be controlled with gunboats and marines, and the U.S. ruling class eventually learned to co-exist with the revolutionary government after a fashion. Still, Calvin Coolidge threatened war when Mexico threatened to enforce its revolutionary constitution and nationalize oil deposits in the 1920s.

The right-wing Republican Coolidge administration not only made war threats against Mexico but also invaded Nicaragua to prevent Augusto Sandino, a radical leader influenced by the Mexican revolution and particularly by Emiliano Zapata, from taking power. Coolidge claimed that Nicaragua was a pawn in a “Mexican-Bolshevik” revolutionary plot, a contention that was both a fantastic lie and a harbinger of arguments that U.S. governments would make to support military interventions in many parts of the world.

Eventually Sandino was murdered and the Somoza family established a brutal dictatorship in which a handful of wealthy families allied to U.S. business interests literally exploited and ran the country until the late 1970s. In El Salvador, a revolutionary uprising in the early 1930s led by a Communist, Farabundo Marti, was ruthlessly defeated and suppressed by the landlords and the military.

U.S. policy changed significantly in the 1930s as President Franklin Roosevelt withdrew marines, opposed direct intervention, and sought through a “Good Neighbor” policy to significantly improve relations with Mexico and other nations. The U.S., however, still acted behind the scenes to defeat a liberal revolution against the dictator Machado, who had established his dictatorship with the green light from Calvin Coolidge in the late 1920s, and helped to bring dictator Fulgencio Batista to power.

While Roosevelt did encourage improved relations and reforms in Latin America, he said of figures like Battista, Somoza in Nicaragua and Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, that they were sons of bitches, but our sons of bitches, a fairly honest expression of what was and is the essence of U.S. policy.

The liberalization that did take place in a number of Central American countries in the 1930s and 1940s was shut down by the cold war, as U.S. policy became one of actively supporting dictatorships of the right, “ours sons of bitches,” to defend U.S. economic interests in the name of anti-Communism, even when Communists or socialists were not involved.

In Guatemala, a dictator had been ousted by the people at the end of WWII and a liberal regime seeking to enact New Deal labor reforms was established.

By the early 1950s, that regime, now headed by a more militant democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, went beyond the labor reforms and launched a moderate land reform policy that took away some unused land from the United Fruit Company of the U.S., the leading landowner in the country.

When Arbenz refused to pay the United Fruit Company what it demanded, the Eisenhower administration responded by red-baiting his government. Eisenhower then launched a CIA organized, funded, and administered coup, installing U.S. trained Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, who then embarked upon a widespread campaign of terror and murder against all progressive forces. Armas subsequently eliminated all taxes on foreign investors and made himself president in an election in which 70 percent of the people were disenfranchised (they were illiterate and he was the only candidate). The Eisenhower administration hailed his government as a victory for democracy against Communism.

Finally, a revolution in Cuba in 1959 against the Battista dictatorship, a revolution whose leader Fidel Castro was initially very popular among many Americans because of his vigor and idealism, took a socialist path rather than surrendering to U.S. business interests and the U.S. government as the Eisenhower administration smugly expected it would.

We know what followed. A blockade on trade and travel which began in 1960 and continues today. A CIA invasion similar to the one that the CIA organized in Guatemala seven years earlier at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, which ended in defeat and disaster. CIA assassination plots and attempts against Castro over many years – rooted in the arrogant belief that the U.S. ruling class still holds, i.e., eliminating Castro would mean the end of the revolution. And various raids and attacks that clearly come under contemporary definitions of “international terrorism” that destroyed Cuban facilities, livestock and lives.

Of course there was the “quarantine” of Cuba in 1962 after the Cubans allied themselves with the Soviet Union and permitted the Soviets to install missiles in Cuba to prevent another attack. (The U.S. had hundreds of missiles around the Soviet Union.) These events produced the Cuban Missile Crisis which almost led to a nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in 1962 that would in all likelihood have cost hundreds of millions of lives.

Most attempts on the part of Latin American revolutionaries to emulate the Cuban revolution through guerrilla war strategies were largely unsuccessful. The U.S. government supported the military dictatorship that overthrew progressive Brazilian President Jao Goulart in 1964. The next year the Johnson administration used a force of 25,000 marines to block an attempt by liberal officers to restore the left-oriented democratically elected president, Juan Bosch. The Nixon administration worked to destroy the Popular Unity government led by Socialist Salvador Allende in Chile from 1970 to 1973.

Allende, a medical doctor and Socialist party leader who had served in a Chilean popular front government in the 1930s, was elected president of Chile in 1970 with the support of Communist and progressive parties as part of a coalition government called Popular Unity. The U.S. government, which through the CIA had actively involved itself in elections in 1958 and 1964 in Chile to defeat Allende and the left, did everything in its power, through economic warfare and assassination and coup conspiracies, to bring down the Popular Unity government. It used all of its global influence to support both the 1973 coup and provide economic and military aid to the post-coup the fascist Pinochet regime which, which most historians of Latin America, regardless of their political orientation, consider the most brutal military dictatorship in the history of the region.

From the 1970s on, limited reformist aspects of U.S. and European policy in Latin America and other “third world” regions fell by the way side, and “neo-liberal” or big business conservative policies became the norm. Both military dictatorships and civilian representative governments had and continue to have the IMF-World Bank system put the squeeze on them to eliminate social subsidies and produce goods for “free” export markets.

The resulting intensification of poverty was either ignored by “neo-liberal” pundits and their Latin American allies or seen as a temporary byproduct of progress, much as the horrors of 19th century industrial capitalism and imperialism were seen as necessary evils to advance “progress.” Latin American “middle classes” driving cars and shopping in supermarkets were hailed as the wave of the future, even though they were relatively small components of the Latin American population and often existed as middlemen for and employees of foreign firms.

Military regimes began to be removed in Latin American countries in the 1980s by peoples' struggles. The U.S. even thought that in Latin America, at least, the IMF-World Bank system would do in the present the work that gunboats and marines had done in the past, that is, keep whatever government that was in power in check and make sure that there would be no more Cubas in the hemisphere.

This deep contempt for the people of the region has come up against history in a big way in recent years. Even in Nicaragua, where war weary people voted the Sandinistas out of power at the end of the 1980s, Daniel Ortega has been elected president again, and many of the grassroots projects of the Sandinista revolution, which were not destroyed by anti-Sandinista governments, are once more receiving state support.

As the U.S. ruling class looks at Latin America today, it faces growing militancy and the fresh face of a socialist movement it declared dead when the Soviet Union was dismembered in the early 1990s.

U.S.-supported conservative forces in Venezuela who sought to oust Chavez in a coup failed. He survived and his government is now advancing openly on a socialist road, seeking to involve the people directly in defining and developing socialism, and seeking, as Chavez has recently said, to learn from and prevent the mistakes that led to the collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Venezuela has oil which is much more valuable than Cuban sugar. Like Fidel Castro, Chavez is a bone in the throat of the corporations and the rich in his own country, the region, and the world. He is even offering poor Americans discounted gas, in the tradition of Fidel, who desegregated Havana Hotels and once stayed at Harlem's Hotel Theresa during a famous meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in 1960.

Chavez, Morales, Lula, Kirchner, Bachelet, Ortega, left and center-left governments and movements, continuing in the 21st century the rich progressive and revolutionary traditions of Latin American people, a tradition and a path that stems from the understanding of workers, peasants and intellectuals that looking to the market for salvation is an exercise in futility and a surrender of their freedom and future.

We who are for socialism don't know where these movements and governments will lead, whether they will continue to develop in a socialist direction. But we should support them both in their struggle to achieve socialism and in their right to freedom and self-determination, which our government and ruling class has never supported.

We should also actively oppose our government and our media who seek to demonize and caricature their leaders, especially Castro and Chavez, their movements, and their experiments in socialist and progressive economic and political action.

The advance of socialism in Latin America is in the interest of the North American working class. Opposition to the movements and governments struggling to abolish poverty and advance the economic and social rights of their peoples by the U.S. can lead only to new expressions of gunboat diplomacy that is against the interests of all Americans, North and South at a time that the Bush administration is “celebrating” the fourth anniversary of its exercise of gunboat diplomacy in Iraq.