Thank you for your kind remarks. The lbo-talk list is a way to clear my head but I have been thinking about these issues for a long time. Truly though I have learned most of what I know on these things from the people I worked with, mostly in Brazil and El Salvador.
To your question:
I think I was being a little too metaphorical at the end of my post when I said "Opposing a Latin American dictator from the belly of the imperialist beast means opposing our own rulers". This is the point. We in the United States cannot expect to give much aid to the expansion of democratic political and economic alternatives in Latin America without primarily opposing the actions and policies of our rulers at home.
I think this includes grassroots solidarity with those struggling against oppressive systems in Latin America, but in my experience we have more to learn from their struggles than they have to learn from us. I mean this quite literally. I learned more about what it is to want education and to want to educate people democratically in Rio de Janeiro than I think I could have ever learned from people of my own class and educational background. I saw how to organize people into cooperatives in El Salvador and I don't think that I would have had this experience in the U.S. So when I suggest grassroots connections with people in Latin America I am not thinking that we United Statsians are going to go down their and teach them how to organize a union or run a cooperative. We have skills we can bring but that is another question.
So how do these many grassroots movements, some of which I support wholeheartedly, and others less so, have any room to expand at all? First by getting loose from direct physical attacks. This has been accomplished in some places, little by little, over the past 25 years, but unfortunately violence is still a threat to many of the people I know. If the violence is no longer state-directed in some places it is often committed by hired thugs. The people who hire the thugs are usually local business interests who are themselves supported by U.S. business interests. Again the only way to give breathing room to the kind of organizing activities of working people in these countries is by organizing against the ultimate paymasters in the U.S.
Many if not most of the dictatorships in Latin America were installed and or supported by the U.S. at one time or another. Few dictatorships in Latin America since World War II have wholly Latin American origins and, fewer still were actually in opposition to the U.S. Even a caudillo such as Trujillo Molina was originally trained by the U.S. marines and even the quasi-populist Mussolini imitator Peron had some support, at first, in the U.S. State Department because they thought that he could discipline the working class. I will not even go into such examples as Pinochet or Somoza or the various death squad democracies sponsored by the U.S., because it is too obvious to mention that to oppose U.S. support of such dictatorships is to support the opening up of Latin American possibilities. All of this is to say that it stands to reason that the best way for a U.S. citizen such as myself to open up political alternatives in Latin America is to try to restrict or oppose the policies of the rulers in my country. This does not mean it is the only way or that other things can't be done, or that I should remain silent about other things in Latin America. But still a modified version of Karl Liebknecht World War I slogan "the main enemy is at home" seems to me an appropriate rule of thumb for a U.S. citizen.
Jerry Monaco
On 5/20/06, Colin Brace <cb at lim.nl> wrote:
>
> Hi Jerry,
>
> Wow, that was a powerful post, one of the best things I've read on LBO for
> awhile. Reminded me once again that solution for Latin America's problems
> must come from Latin America, as the Peruvian marxist Mariátegui so
> eloquently argued.
>
> At one point, I lost you:
>
>
> On 5/20/06, Jerry Monaco <monacojerry at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Opposing a Latin American dictator from the belly of the imperialist
> > beast means opposing our own rulers.
> >
>
> Not sure what you mean here. Care to expand (either on or offlist)?
>
> Hats off...
>
> --
> Colin Brace
> Amsterdam
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
>
-- Jerry Monaco's Philosophy, Politics, Culture Weblog is Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, and Culture http://monacojerry.livejournal.com/
His fiction, poetry, weblog is Hopeful Monsters: Fiction, Poetry, Memories http://www.livejournal.com/users/jerrymonaco/
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