☫ Iran in Latin America II

Analysis  Iran in Latin America | Part 2

Imam Ali and The Fearless Tiger

This victorious system of ideas [Islamic Revolution] can be considered under two headings: populism and religion. The use of the word populism, however, calls for an explanatory note: it means what democracy used to mean and is still assumed to mean -- namely, government by the people, direct or representative. However, since the word democracy is now almost universally applied to states which are not democracies as defined in the dictionaries, it can only be said to have ceased to be "lawful tender."

Ivor Benson (Some Angles on the Islamic Revolution)

ALBA Bloc: Communism Or Justice?
 
The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America (ALBA) is a Latin American con­glomerate of 8 nations, wrapping up 70 million people, boasting friendly ties with Iran, in­cluding Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, with Paraguay, Uruguay, Grenada, Syria, and Haiti as observers.

The numbers were slightly higher in 2009, until the Obama administration scored its first military coup: A Honduran plebiscite threatened to turn the US Palmerola Air Base into a civilian airport, and the US wouldn't tolerate giving up on a key airfield along the co­caine silk road. So a president kidnapped, a military junta legitimized by our West, dozens of opposition journalists assassinated, and zero mentions of it in the Reporters Without Borders NGO later, Honduras no longer belonged to ALBA.

Even so, Honduran folk singers of the resistance did have chance to coin the motto “Nos tienen miedo porque no tenemos miedo (They are scared of us because we are fearless),” a slogan that has become more of a defining feature of the ALBA members than Communism or left-wingery. An adjective that right-and-left-wing journalists and academics still stuck in the Cold War era insist on branding onto ALBA, failing to give consideration to the un­derlying inspirations of the members of the bloc.

As the most categoric example, in the same Bolivia where Guevara's enthusiasm failed to enforce a reductionist Marxism based on materialistic and hateful class' struggles -totally alien to a nation where the land is vast and the population scarce, and peasants are the owners of their own land-, Evo Morales has very successfully brought back respect and dignity to the indigenous majority of the country neglected and discriminated for centuries by European settlers and their descendants. The latter's racist slurs in the public trans­portation of La Paz against the Amerindians are now only echoes of a sour past, informs me a white Bolivian graduate student here in Tokyo, proud of Morales' Plurinational State.

While Guevara attempted to inject in Bolivia the artificial ideas of the European Karl Marx by force of arms, Morales has incarnated the struggle for equality of the Aymara and Quechua ethnic majorities of the southern fringe of the former Inca Tawantinsuyu who never settled under the subjugation and discrimination of a white minority, and has repre­sented their world view which advocates deep respect for the 'Pachamama' or Sacred Cre­ated Nature.

While the Communist Party of Ecuador suffered constant splits reacting to the death of Stalin in Russia -rather than answering to the needs of the Ecuadorean people-, Rafael Correa has actualized the will of his own Andean nation and its historic reality through what he has called a 'Citizen's Revolution,' replacing the Soviet Atheism with the Mono­theism of the Christian faith he shares with the 98% of Ecuador.

These examples of nations replacing Marxism apologists with justice-seeking popular movements, paralleled in almost every member of ALBA, serve to illustrate the nature of those that Iran is setting strategic alliances with. Attempts to restore human dignity and resist to foreign oppression and its impositions, rather than proletarian/master struggles rooted in the selfish ideas of a cohort of Europeans and Russians from the outdated era of reductionism.

//End of part 2 (Next; Iran in Latin America: 

A threat to which United States?)