Naomi Klein chronicles Latin America

There is an excellant chronicle of the recent economic experiments in Latin America by Naomi Klein, Latin America's Shock Resistance.

Ms Klein is at her best in tearing into the duplicity involved in the right establishment's railings against the policies of Chavez and Co, "Chávez's many critics have derided these initiatives as handouts and unfair subsidies, of course. Yet in an era when Halliburton treats the US government as its personal ATM for six years, withdraws upward of $20 billion in Iraq contracts alone, refuses to hire local workers either on the Gulf Coast or in Iraq, then expresses its gratitude to US taxpayers by moving its corporate headquarters to Dubai (with all the attendant tax and legal benefits), Chávez's direct subsidies to regular people look significantly less radical."

Klein refers to the Bolivian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), which is the continent's retort to the Free Trade Area of the Americas. She writes, "Though ALBA is still in its early stages, Emir Sader, a Brazil-based sociologist, describes its promise as "a perfect example of genuinely fair trade: each country provides what it is best placed to produce, in return for what it most needs, independent of global market prices." So Bolivia provides gas at stable discounted prices; Venezuela offers heavily subsidized oil to poorer countries and shares expertise in developing reserves; and Cuba sends thousands of doctors to deliver free healthcare all over the continent, while training students from other countries at its medical schools."

She describes Chavez's experiments, "Chávez has made the cooperatives in Venezuela a top political priority, giving them first refusal on government contracts and offering them economic incentives to trade with one another. By 2006 there were roughly 100,000 cooperatives in the country, employing more than 700,000 workers. Many are pieces of state infrastructure--toll booths, highway maintenance, health clinics--handed over to the communities to run. It's a reverse of the logic of government outsourcing: rather than auctioning off pieces of the state to large corporations and losing democratic control, the people who use the resources are given the power to manage them, creating, at least in theory, both jobs and more responsive public services."

Only time will tell whether this experiment will be sustained and succeed. But the emergence of the likes of Evo Morales, has surely resulted in a massive popular (read indigenous) awakening in the continent. For the time being, the "peak oil factor" has sustained the massive social welfare and poverty eradication efforts. The true test of the success or otherwise of these policies will be when the commodity prices fall or stop rising. In any case, the present experiments of Chavez and his comrades is only further proof of the fact that Latin America is the undisputed global "laboratory for economic experiments"!

Update
Richard Gott writes about the Bolivarian Revolution in Hugo Chavez's Venezuela. He says, "The Chávez revolution remains the most original and democratic experiment in Latin America, and is clearly here to stay."