Tag Archives | Chávez

As if there were not enough reasons to go mad, the proliferation of acronyms related to the crisis is such that one can hardly understand them. The first was the G20, a selected group meeting in Washington that pretended to represent all. The second was the also selective APEC group which met in Lima. There was the richest country, the United States; this is number one, with a per capita GDP of 45 thousand dollars a year. But there was also the number 100 country, the People’s Republic of China, with a per capita GDP of 2,483 dollars; this is also the number one investor in US Treasure bonds.

He returned from his trip to Europe on Friday. He was away for only four days. Flying west, he arrived at Caracas at 11 at night, at sunrise in Madrid, the point of departure. The call from Venezuela came in early on Saturday. I was told he wanted to speak to me over the phone that day. I replied that I could speak to him at 1:45 in the afternoon.

Raul had invited him. He replied he didn’t want to come see me so I wouldn’t catch the flu he had. That was nothing but a pretext to avoid the torture of my habitual questions…

Venezuela, whose people are heirs to Bolivar’s ideas which transcend his era, is today facing a world tyranny a thousand times more powerful than that of Spain’s colonial strength added to that of the recently born United States which, through Monroe, proclaimed their right to the natural wealth of the continent and to the sweat of its people.

Last November 15, I referred to a third reflection on the Latin American Summit which, as I then wrote, “I have yet to publish”. It strikes me as timely, however, to do so before the referendum of December 2.

I have been working on the many reflections that I have promised. One of them deals with the main ideas of a book by Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, making use of his own words. His book clearly reveals how imperialism seeks to continue buying up the world’s natural and human resources with perfumed paper bills.

All physical, geographic and time barriers disappeared. It seemed unreal. Never before had a dialogue of this nature taken place between heads of State and government, most of whom represented nations that had been pillaged by colonial and imperialist powers for centuries. Nothing could have been more instructive.

Che was a man of ideas.

It would have caused him profound pain to hear the speeches that, expressing traditional leftist positions, were delivered at the Latin American Summit held in Santiago de Chile.