 Good afternoon on this lovely spring day. A couple of announcements. One is cell phones, please turn them off. Second is that there are some feedback forms on the table in the hall. They're a little early, but next week is our last lecture. And so if you pick up a feedback form, tuck it in a pocket, but remember to bring it back next week. And speaking of next week, you lovely people, privileged people who are members, get to come to our annual meeting. And if you have been a member in the 2017 fall semester or this spring semester, you are eligible to listen and vote at our annual meeting. So it starts at one. You really don't want to miss it. What exciting things you will learn. And afterwards we'll have some wonderful goodies, and then the speaker will come at two. And now Sandy, you will introduce the speaker. Today is Ben Dongle, who is a professor at... Sorry. The speaker today is Ben Dongle, who is a professor at Champlain. He is a journalist also and the editor of a magazine called Toward Freedom, which you can get if you actually talk to him, but he'll give you the source of that. Ben is a specialist in Latin American studies. He's a reporter. He has written many articles on Counterpunch and other journals. He is a very active reporter on Latin American issues. He is one of the few people I think that would call himself an expert on Bolivia, and that's one of the reasons that I've asked him to be here, because he's lived there and he knows much about Bolivia, but he also knows much about Latin America, which I think is a rather understudied part of our hemisphere. So this is Ben Dongle. As I mentioned, he is a professor at Champlain, and he has a whole pile of books which are over there, correct? And available. Okay, thank you. You can all hear me well? One, two, three. Great. Great. Thanks a lot, Sandy, for introducing me. Thanks a lot for having me here. As Sandy mentioned, I teach at Champlain College. I teach journalism there, and I live here in Burlington. Well, we're in South Burlington now, but I live in Burlington proper. And today I'm going to be talking about the leftist shift in Latin America that took place from roughly 2000 to 2012 in the halls of power as leftist presidents entered office, and then more recently the rightward trend in government around Latin America from pretty much 2012 onward. So to give a panorama of about six different countries, some key characteristics of each government and the protest movements operating there, and point us a few ways forward that I think will be, point to a few developments that may be happening in the next few years. So to start, throughout the 1990s, before this leftist shift from Venezuela to Argentina, there was a lot of the governments throughout Latin America were under neoliberal presidents, under governments that wanted to undermine workers' rights, that wanted to privatize natural resources and public services, and worked against human rights, and were working hard to insert their economies into the global corporate economy throughout the 1990s. And toward the end of the 1990s, you saw a rise of various protest movements that were against this in the streets, fighting for workers' rights, fighting for socialism, fighting for human rights and justice, following the shadows and the legacy of a lot of dictatorships that were in power throughout the Cold War in Latin America. And from Venezuela to Argentina, these groups took to the streets, and they defeated multinational corporations, multinational lending institutions in a lot of very exciting and inspiring David and Goliath type of scenarios. So for example, in Bolivia, where Sandy mentioned I've spent a lot of time, there was this great, iconic protest that took place in Cochabamba, the city of Cochabamba in central Bolivia in 2000. And it was against a plan that was pushed by the World Bank to privatize that city's water. It was under public control, they wanted to privatize it in order to balance the budget. People rose up against this plan because the World Bank was recommending that Bechtel, a huge multinational corporation, was going to take over the city's water and put everything from water cisterns to farmers' small irrigation networks under the thumb of this multinational corporation based in San Francisco. So the price for water was going to raise, and they rise dramatically for people across classes. So in this country that a lot of people in the U.S. had never even heard of, and during this period of economic neoliberalism across the globe and people cheerleading corporate globalization, there's this amazing story in 2000 and April of 2000 when these people in Bolivia rose up, protested, blockaded roads, went on strike, and pressured their government and actually kicked Bechtel out of the city and put the water back into public hands. This is an amazing unprecedented story, especially in Bolivia. And in Bolivia and throughout the region during this time there were a lot of similar cases of such protest movements taking place. In Argentina at roughly the same time there was an economic crisis in the country that resulted in the crash of the economy where people went from having their incomes, their savings, one day to having nothing the next day. And I lived in the country in Argentina during that time as a student. And people were... This was at a time when Argentina was relatively stable, the economy was strong in the late 90s, early 2000s, and then all of a sudden people across economic divides were in the same boat, they had nothing. And they, again, in this place, took to the streets, protested, they went through, I think, six presidents in two weeks and occupied... When their factories and businesses went bankrupt, which many of them did, there was a stipulation in the Argentine Constitution that said that if people... If a company went bankrupt and the owner fled the country, the workers could take control of the business and form a cooperative. And a lot of people did. A lot of these workers did literally occupy ceramic textile factories, hotels, book publishing companies, and turned them into workers' cooperatives. So that was really another exciting example of this grassroots politics during this time. In Chile, at the same time, you have a country that's grappling with the... the shadow of the Pinochet dictatorship. It's still... So we're talking early 2000s, 2003 was the 40th anniversary of the coup against socialist president Salvador Allende in Chile. And in that country, where I was traveling also in 2003, right around this time of the anniversary, there was still a great sense of fear and censorship and a surprising lack of awareness about what even took place under Pinochet in the country in 2003 at that time. So I'm talking about younger generations of people who hadn't necessarily lived through it. And I was coming to the country, having read a few books about Pinochet and Allende, and I sometimes knew more simply because I lived in the U.S. and was able to read books based on declassified government documents and watched some documentaries about this. But I went to Chile and I was just really struck by the hold that the dictatorship's culture of censorship and silencing people still had. So in 2003, there was still this great... this awakening was still happening about how do we come to terms with the crimes of the dictatorship? There were some 3,000 people that were disappeared and murdered under the Pinochet dictatorship. How do we bring the criminals of this dictatorship to justice? And there were huge mobilizations around Santiago, the capital city of the country around this, to demand justice, awareness. They were showing the Battle of Chile, which is a great documentary about the Pinochet dictatorship on television. So there was this rising awareness of what actually went on under the dictatorship and a push for human rights. So that was in Chile. In Brazil at the same time, following this regional kind of awakening and grassroots push, there was this group that became more and more powerful over this period called the Landless Workers Movement, the MST in Brazil. Brazil is a place with a huge amount of land, a huge amount of underutilized land, a huge amount of land that is owned by large landowners, cattle ranchers, cotton farmers, soy farmers. And meanwhile you have a large number of small farming communities that don't have any land and they need land to survive. So what the MST did was say, well, we need land. We want to work land. There's all this land in Brazil. We want to take it over and own it for ourselves. So they operate under a slogan called occupy, resist, produce. So they would take over land, resist the eviction of themselves from the land by the police and thugs and paramilitaries, and then start working the land. And also here there's a part of the Constitution in Brazil that I think was reformed in the 1980s that said that if there is underutilized land that isn't serving any social purpose, peasant farmers can take it over and actually work it. And it takes a lot of legal work to actually gain the ownership. But under that slogan of occupy, resist, produce, the landless workers movement has settled hundreds of thousands of families on land across Brazil. So this was also happening in the streets outside the halls of power during this period. And it really helped pave the way to a lot of the leftist victories to come, the leftist electoral victories to come later on in the 2000s. So these are some examples of grassroots movements, grassroots victories. But what was also so notable about this period from roughly 2000 to 2012, as I mentioned, was out of these struggles, presidents, political parties, electoral currents came to win power from Venezuela to Ecuador to Brazil to Chile and Argentina. So first, in Venezuela in 1999, Hugo Chavez was elected president. And he came from a poor background, a military background, and from the very beginning had a populist political vision that he wanted to govern towards. And as his presidency evolved by 2000, after they'd passed the new constitution, his government made a lot of very progressive changes in the country that helped redistribute political power around the country, redistribute economic wealth. And Venezuela is a huge oil producer. It has a lot of crude oil. And what Chavez did was nationalize the oil industry in Venezuela and redistribute a lot of that oil wealth to poorer sectors of society and use the funds to start schools, start hospitals, start different programs called missions where literacy and occupational training programs were instituted around the country. And besides this type of redistribution of wealth and political power, his government also helped institute programs like communal councils and neighborhoods where neighborhoods had the power to organize their own budget, have more of a voice in local politics. And in a place like Venezuela where the income inequality is so stark, this really empowered the poorest sectors of society to be part of government work out of multi-generational poverty. And Chavez became this kind of iconic, charismatic leader that a lot of Venezuelans came to really love and admire. And I'll get to how things have evolved since that period. But this was a major development in the early 2000s in terms of leftist victories in the region. At the same time that Chavez worked for a kind of socialist transformation of Venezuela, he also was, importantly, a leader of this rising leftist block in the region where he said he was a part of a group of presidents who said, we don't want to bow down to U.S. military or political power. We don't want to bow down to the World Bank and the IMF. We want to form different organizations, different relationships among Latin American countries to build economic sovereignty and self-determination so that we can control our own militaries, our own economies without just following what the U.S. tells us to do. So Chavez was a big part of that Latin American solidarity effort within Latin America. Can everybody hear me? Okay. Give me a little feedback. That's all right. Okay. Okay, cool. And then in Argentina, shortly following this economic crash, Nester Kirschner was elected in 2003. He helped bring Argentina back from its economic crisis by strengthening the welfare state, building up a safety net for the poorest people in society, led the fight, led the regional fight against the free trade area of the Americas, which was a plan by George Bush to extend NAFTA, North American Free Trade Agreement between Mexico, the U.S. and Canada, extend that all the way throughout Latin America. And so that was something that many presidents and Latin Americans looking at NAFTA said, we don't want that throughout Latin America. We reject this and Kirschner really led the charge with that resistance effort specifically against the Bush administration and Nester Kirschner as the president of Argentina, a very powerful country economically. His participation as well as Brazil's participation helped shut that plan down. So there is no FTA, free trade area of the Americas. There are various bilateral agreements, but this was another major leftist victory to shut that plan to extend NAFTA down. So Nester Kirschner made historic advances for justice for the crimes of the dictatorship in that country, which was roughly 1976 to 1983 under the Videl regime, the military junta, and raised the minimum wage, turned his back on the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, empowered unions, expanded social security, and he passed away in 2007 and his wife ran for election and she was president until I believe 2017. So she carried on many of the same policies, the same kind of political trajectory. Meanwhile, in other countries around the region, you have president Lula in Brazil who comes from auto union struggle and was leader of the Workers Party in Brazil and he as another quasi socialist president, it was a huge event when he was elected in 2003. Brazil is such a powerful country, a major world economy and he led the country from 2003 to 2011 lifting millions out of poverty, also redirected a lot of state funds to programs to alleviate hunger and worked with unions and the landless workers movement to work for a better land reform and worker empowerment in the country. Chilean president Michelle Bachelet was president in the country in Chile from 2006 to 2010 and then 2014 to 2018 because of the laws in Chile where they don't allow presidents to run to consecutive terms, she had a break there and she also coming out of this, she was someone who was tortured under the Pinochet regime and fought for this dictatorial legacy. Her election was a huge accomplishment, political accomplishment for the Chilean left that was working for justice in Chile. The same time you have the election of Rafael Correa in Ecuador in 2007 and he was another person who identified with Hugo Chavez as a style of politics, Nestor Kirchner style of politics in Argentina in asserting Latin American sovereignty and saying I don't want the U.S. to have a military base in Ecuador and he kicked out the U.S. military from the base in Monta Ecuador he said unless we can have a military base in Miami we won't let you have a military base in Ecuador. So he did that, he granted asylum to Julian Assange the person who started WikiLeaks early on and that's where Julian Assange is still based in the Ecuadorian embassy. That story has evolved Assange but back then it was like a huge symbol of where Correa stood on these issues. And many countries including Venezuela and Ecuador at this time also passed constitutions that were very progressive and one of the elements of the constitution in Ecuador that was so exciting was that he passed, his government passed a constitution that respected the rights of nature and in Ecuador a big chunk of the Amazon is though not as much as in Brazil. That was a huge victory for environmentalists and indigenous communities in the country. And meanwhile in Paraguay, Fernando Lugo Bishop and Practicer of Liberation Theology in Paraguay was elected I think it was 2009 and he moved forward on important land reform in the country also helped to prosecute people involved in the dictatorship in that country and Pepe Mujica in Uruguay was elected on the front de amplio party and he was also somebody who was tortured under the dictatorship in Uruguay worked toward justice in his country he was called the poorest president in the world because he refused to accept a lot of his salary and just lived had a VW bug and a moped that he wrote around and was a very humble guy and he just left office so they were all working together a lot of these presidents and then last but not least Evo Morales was elected in Bolivia in 2005 and Evo is an indigenous Imara man, a former coca grower coca in Bolivia is used for medicinal purposes and cultural purposes it's also a key ingredient in cocaine so it's the focus of a lot of drug anti-drug efforts but in Bolivia coca goes to a legal market where a lot of people buy coca to chew it in the mines Bolivia is a huge mining country and it's kind of like the equivalent of having a cup of coffee and taking an aspirin or something but drinking in tea and it's used in different indigenous ceremonies so the leaf went to this legal market Evo Morales came out of that peasant production sector as well as that coca growers movement which resisted the U.S. militarization of coca growing areas in the war on drugs for so many years the U.S. and Bolivia focused their efforts on the violent eradication of coca crops and Evo said we don't believe, Evo Morales said we don't believe in the production of cocaine we want to stop the production of cocaine but we have the right to grow coca for this legal market in peace and so he rose out of that anti-U.S. militarization movement and out of that movement grew the movement toward socialism the MAS and talking about the 1990s early 2000s in 2005 Evo Morales was elected president of Bolivia so this was a huge event for a country that had such a divide between where the vast majority of indigenous people in the country were living in poverty and the fact that Evo Morales could be elected president as an indigenous Aymara man was a huge watershed moment in the country and he helped he was a part of this regional shift and he did a lot of exciting things including nationalize the country's natural gas reserves to redirect that wealth and income toward leaving leaving poverty in the country and extending access to education and health care to the country's poor majority he oversaw a new constitution the rewriting of the constitution in a constituent assembly so that the constitution was the new constitution was very progressive he kicked out the drug enforcement agency in Bolivia and helped to construct a program of eradication of coca that was voluntary, not voluntary but what they call community control rather than US troops or US trained Bolivian troops violently eradicating coca crops the Bolivian government has now developed a program without the US's help to control coca production per family in the communities that grow coca and it's been incredibly effective so that the local government and the local coca growers union controls that eradication and so there's a much you don't see the same level of violence that used to be present when the US was in charge of eradication and so that was an amazing anti-imperialist move from Morales he moved forward with a lot of land reform coordinated with the country's vibrant social movements and and worked with these various leaders throughout the region so while all these governments were different during this time they all shared a lot of the same values principles and vision many of them were against US imperialism US military bases they wanted Latin America to break free of trade agreements such as NAFTA and they emphasized regional cooperation to build multinational Latin American institutions that helped resolve diplomatic problems without the US meddling in the region's politics for example in 2008 a destabilization effort in Bolivia to basically destabilize the country of Bolivia, the government of Bolivia and that effort was led by right-wing groups in the eastern part of the country and they were very violent in the streets and attacking indigenous people and basically trying to foment a kind of civil war in naval Morales rather than what would have been the norm in the past calling upon Washington to help solve the situation called Michelle Bachelet in Chile Hugo Chavez in Venezuela Rafael Correa in Ecuador Néstor Kirchner in Argentina and they all worked together to try to solve this problem diplomatically as a region without the US getting involved so those kind of problems, national and multinational within Latin America were resolved by this new coalition of presidents summed through UNISUR which acted as a kind of climate alternative to the organization of American states and also through ALBA a kind of Venezuelan-led network of socialist governments that helped to create more economic and political independence in the region so it was a really incredible time at the same time there were plenty of contradictions and problems under these governments so not all the leaders listened to the social movements that helped them get elected in the first place some of them, for example Lula in Brazil didn't always work that closely with the landless movement and they were unhappy with the pace of land reform change in his country Bachelet in Chile cracked down on student protests for progressive educational reform even Morales in Bolivia sidelined indigenous critics that were critical of his pro-mining stance so indigenous movements, indigenous communities would say well we don't want these mining operations poisoning our land poisoning our rivers we want more input into where they go how they're operated and if they exist at all and Morales has really silenced that aspect of the indigenous movements critics to say we want to move forward the gas industry to generate more income to help with these poverty relief programs and then similarly Rafael Correa in spite of his progressive constitution in that country said we want to move forward with oil exploration programs in the Ecuadorian Amazon in spite of our respect for nature aspect of our constitution so those are some of the key points that come to some of the points of discord and contradictions up to about 2012 it was this kind of heyday this really incredible period, exciting period for socialism, human rights and leftist politics in the region and then roughly around 2012 2013 this shift was starting to turn toward the other direction and a lot of these same countries now are under control of right wing governments so this happened in a number of different ways and this is going to go through a few different cases of where this has happened so in Paraguay in 2012 Lugo the liberation theologist and bishop in the country who was elected president he was impeached in what many consider a parliamentary coup where the opposition controlled parliament and they impeached him and they've taken power and they're in power now so the same type of oligarchy that has been in control of Paraguay in politics for many many years is now back in power and they remain in power and they've continued to implement conservative economic policies criminalized protests move forward with the destructive with the destructive soy industry so soy the production of soy throughout Brazil, Argentina Paraguay a lot of it goes to feed farm animals in Europe or China and it's just a monocrop that covers a lot of the region now and they're they use very toxic pesticides typically and displace a lot of small farmers and poison the rivers, poison the land and they visit a lot of these places and the small farming communities are just up against a huge challenge and what the Paraguay government is moving ahead with that soy industry and small farmers are really suffering for example Chile's right wing president Sebastian Piniera was re-elected in 2017 he was president from 2010 to 2014 but he's now president again so the right has returned to power in Chile in Ecuador it hasn't been a right word shift but Korea stepped down from office and his party's candidate Lenin Morena won last year so he's still in power but it has made men a shift away from Korea in Venezuela probably one of the most dramatic examples of this of the changes that have happened in 2013 Hugo Chavez died leaving behind Nicolas Maduro as president and by this time the drop in Venezuela's oil prices was so great that it really hurt the economy which was so dependent on oil right wing destabilization efforts really weakened the government's ability to to govern at the same time Nicolas Maduro has repressed a lot of dissidents, repressed a lot of the opposition in the country opposition leader Capriles was denied, was prevented from running for office for corruption charges at the same time Maduro has tried to meet this economic crisis by not bowing down to the IMF and the World Bank but instead creating neighborhood groups to help with the distribution of basic food and commodities at low prices to help offset the problems of the economic crisis and he's working to continue the legacy of Hugo Chavez but there's been so much conflict in the country the economic crisis is so great that a lot of the progress has been coming to a halt and there's been a lot of violence in the country through different political factions in Bolivia Evel Morales is planning to run for a fourth term next year so kind of an interesting situation in the sense that he he there was a referendum last year that said where he said to the population should I run again do you want me to run again do you want the Constitution to run again for a fourth term the referendum said no he's going ahead and he went to the Supreme Court and asked them and he has appointed a lot of the judges on the Supreme Court and they reformed the law and said it would be okay so there's a lot of opposition to this plan in spite of Morales popularity a lot of people even among his supporters believe that it's time for a change a chance for different parties to rise to the top or different candidates in his party to rise to the top but he's planning to move ahead so that election will probably take place with Evel participating next year and this is likely to be a source of a lot of conflict in the country at the same time in Bolivia the GDP, the economy is very strong GDP is growing there's a lot of stability in the country but again there's a similar a crackdown on dissent a crackdown on critics that are critical of Evel Morales' party and also his moving forward with massive mining and oil and gas industries that are displacing indigenous communities across the country in Argentina so there you have the Nestor Kirchner in his wife Christina were in charge from roughly 2003 to 2017 2015 sorry when the businessman Mauricio Macri won the elections and this was the first time a right wing president was democratically elected in the country in nearly 100 years so he has moved he has rolled back a lot of the progressive economic and political policies that the Kirchners instituted rolling back a lot of the social security and healthcare reforms cutting pensions and assistance to poor families raising taxes on the poor lessening taxes for large corporations and he's pushing forward opposite to Nestor Kirchner pushing forward a free trade deal with the European Union which is expected to hurt small businesses and the agricultural and industrial sector and moving forward with new labor policies that are weakened unions and workers unions are protesting this move dramatically in the streets there's a lot of unity between sectors of the labor unions that would typically be at odds with each other so right now in Argentina there's a big showdown between the right wing government of Macri and the unions and protest movements against him similar to 2001 when people were rejecting similar type of policies in Brazil in 2006 Dilma Rousseff Lula's successor was impeached because of corruption and but they were tried by it was again what some people consider a kind of parliamentary coup or a soft coup because these very corrupt right wing politicians were going after Dilma Rousseff and ex-president Lula to weaken the workers party weaken their leftist party and their hold on power and they were a part of Rousseff and Lula were a part of this corruption scandal she was brought out of office but it was this situation where these very corrupt politicians were leading this these impeachment proceedings and the Brazilian social scientist de Sousa Santos said the impeccably honest politician in Brazil the one impeccably honest politician in Brazil was being successfully impeached for corruption by the votes of all the most corrupt officials in the land and that quote really sums up where Brazil is at right now to the point where just last week Lula, the very popular president was just put in jail by this government of Michel Temer he wasn't elected, he just assumed office and then called off and rejected to call early elections and just assumed office and there too the landless movement unions and the base of the workers party are mobilizing in the streets in huge protests to demand Lula's release so though the region is going toward this leftist shift there's a lot of resistance with social movements, protest movements unions in Argentina and Brazil some of the most economically and politically powerful countries in the region against this so some of the right that is in power now have won through shady means through parliamentary coups shady impeachment processes some have won through electoral victories some have won through a coup like what happened in Paraguay but I think that moving forward there's going to be a lot of resistance to these governments through social movements as well as the political parties as they reorganize themselves but I think that one of the most hopeful aspects looking forward in the region is the power of the social movements these protest movements and unions that are working for a socialist progressive direction in their country, more participatory greater respect for human rights and I think that that's where a lot of the hope lies in the region now over the next months and years going forward just as these movements transform Latin America in the early 2000s at the turn of the century then they can do it again these days so that's my thanks so I'm happy to answer any questions I find it hard to believe that I heard a lecture now politics I'm saying that I find it hard to believe that I heard a long lecture now on South American politics without any mention of the CIA for instance in Bolivia the no vote was orchestrated by the CIA and the lack of fundia and so on and so forth all throughout Latin America that's a great point the CIA has been obviously very involved in the region in helping right wing governments helping the defeat of the left and WikiLeaks has really helped shed light on what the US government has been doing secretly through a lot of this period WikiLeaks and other declassified documents that have come to light so we can see more about what's gone on what the US has been doing to undermine these countries it's very clear in 2002 there was an attempted coup against Hugo Chavez that was very much backed by the US government there was a declassified document that I remember reading that detailed that the US government through USAID and DEA and the embassy there was working to undermine the the coca growers union and the MAS as a political as a political force in the country and they literally said that because they were afraid of the power that the MAS might have and then MAS went on to win elections and a lot of the right wing groups in Bolivia have been supported by the National Endowment for Democracy and the USAID so these different groups that are tied to Democrats, Republicans our own senators in Vermont are doing some quite nefarious stuff throughout Latin America and some of what the CIA used to do covertly now groups like the NED and USAID are doing overtly to just directly fund opposition candidates opposition politicians whether it's in Venezuela or Bolivia so that's a real issue we have a question on the front here oh I didn't see it you left out any mention of Colombia are there any notable events happening in those countries? I would think so yeah yeah let's see so they weren't a part of the same kind of leftist shift they've remained largely the same with some notable exceptions but in Peru one of the things that has been most notable in terms of indigenous resistance to mining and gas is that Peru has such a huge amount of mineral wealth and there's been major bloody conflicts between indigenous communities in the Amazon northern part of Peru and mining companies that have echoed similar kind of things that have been happening throughout the Andes but that's one of the things that happened even under Ollanta Umala the nominally progressive president of Peru during that time and Colombia is a very important country in the region in terms of historically in terms of US-Latin American relations and historically because of the drug trade so a lot of the US drug control efforts have focused on Colombia primarily in the 80s onward, 70s onward through Planned Colombia it started by Clinton in the 90s for example and a lot of the conflicts that used to be centered in Colombia around violence related to drug production and narco trafficking have now dispersed throughout Central America and Mexico so not just for cocaine but other drug production and the trafficking of drugs from Colombia to the US so that sadly a lot of the a lot of that violence has hit linked to drug trafficking as well as the militarization and violence that the states are unleashing on traffickers and related gangs so the situation in Central America and Mexico is pretty catastrophic particularly over the last 15 years there's been tens of thousands of deaths in Mexico alone linked to the drug war the wider drug war of the government versus the narcos and inter-narco violence since about 2010 this is an unbelievable number of people who have been murdered and that's extended throughout Central America with a breakdown in democratic structures and a lot of various coups have happened in well Honduras being the most notable coup that happened against democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya but in terms of Colombia so that's been one part of what's been happening with the drug trade moving up south to north from Colombia but the US the US project of Plan Colombia has also been used sadly as a plan to control drug trafficking in Mexico as well and so that's where a lot of US funding and militarization efforts have focused through Plan Manila which is supposed to mimic Plan Colombia but in terms of in terms of the drug trade a lot of the conflicts in rural Colombia as I understand them now are less about the drug trade and more about palm oil you know palm oil production cattle ranching, land conflicts and this kind of corporate takeover of rural land that's less about the drug trade but more about inserting Colombia into the global market yeah exactly and then there's also the huge news of the demobilization of the FARC which happened I think last year but yeah thanks for bringing that up I have a question on this side these changes that you've outlined are they really homegrown do any of the major powers have interests in South America like Russia or China yeah I think great question I think there's always so obviously during the Cold War there was a lot of support from the Soviet Union for places like Sandinista, Nicaragua a lot of support for Cuba so a lot of conflicts and tensions between Russia and the US played themselves out in South America through Cuba, Chile Nicaragua but with the fall of the Soviet Union that's been less due in terms of a more communist solidarity China has been significant in a lot of ways but I'll get to that in a second but I would say for the most part these are quite homegrown developments the rise of socialism in the 21st century Latin America is quite homegrown and it comes out of a tradition of socialist movements that probably are most directly linked to the struggles in the 60s and 70s and so a lot of these movements from Venezuela to Argentina to Bolivia really talked about and reflected on those socialist struggles in previous decades but whether you're talking about Mgochavez or Emil Morales or Vester Kirschner they're quite homegrown there's a really important shift that happened economically in the region where the US influence has been on the wane economically and trade wise while China has moved in so China is one of the region's biggest trading partners right now I think it's outpaced the US in terms of trade and so that's a major development and it wasn't true 15 years ago so that's been happening and the let's see but that would be my answer they were quite homegrown but they also represented a shifting political and economic landscape but they were totally tied to places like China and Russia independent yep back there again yeah maybe over here just while we're figuring out the mic I heard a couple of days ago that while they were a bit enthralled with China they've changed their mind more recently do you agree with that let's see so China was getting a little too pushy in the area perhaps I'm not really sure probably depend on the country but I don't know if that's news I'd like to read it I'd like to learn about that is there any good news coming out of South America right now I think yeah I mean a lot of the a lot of the gains of the of the first of the like 21st century socialism or the pink tide whatever you want to call it they can't be erased with one new president because an entire generation in a lot of countries went through went to the doctor for the first time or had life changing eye surgery for the first time and a new generation of people are capacitated in terms of getting new job skills or are literate healthy have land, have jobs, have homes that were provided for them through these governments and so that kind of change I think will last for a long time and that was always the hope with a lot of these governments similarly their constitutions Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia are new reflecting these changes going away anytime soon it will take a major reform a major rewriting of the constitution for that to happen so those changes are lasting and I think as I mentioned there's a lot of very exciting and inspiring power from the social movements in the region that are trying to fight for Lula's release fight against mockery in Argentina it's really incredible and I think that that's where a lot of that's exciting we're going to try again thanks Ben I'm just curious with all of these countries both in South America, our own country and also in Europe with all these right wing governments being elected have you had a chance recently to be in South America and if so what part and what are South Americans asking you about our government yeah it's always interesting I think I was in sometimes when I was in Bolivia when I was in Latin America during the Bush years I learned a lot about my own government from being outside the country and especially about U.S. foreign policy and role in different coups and dictatorships so it was a big education that I didn't expect and yeah I think that there was a lot so I mean I've traveled in Latin America pretty much every year since 2002 and last year I was in Bolivia and that was the most recent time and yeah and let's see generally people were very excited about the Obama administration and the hopes that it inspired and there were a lot of exceptions whereas policies didn't actually work out that well Hillary Clinton as the secretary of state oversaw the coup in Honduras and Paraguay and the government the Obama administration turned a blind eye to the soft coup in Brazil you know so there are a lot of clear signals from the Obama administration throughout his time in power that the U.S. government wasn't changing too much in its policies toward Latin America from the Bush years on but generally people were very you know glad that Bush was gone and excited about Obama and I don't think anybody anticipated that Trump could ever be president than ever who I ever spoke with and but it's you know there's there was always an understanding in various countries that I visited that I would anticipate people to be upset with me personally for being an American but oftentimes including many trips to Cuba people would always say oh we understand we are different from the government and we don't hold any grudges against you in particular and but a lot of the critiques also centralized not so much on the White House or Washington but whether it was with small farmers in Paraguay or indigenous communities in Bolivia they were against this kind of multinational system of corporate globalization of companies like Bechtel coming into the country and Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland and other multinational huge food and pesticide companies in Paraguay and they recognized that the US was a part of this kind of corporate globalization model and their targets were less sometimes less Washington and more individual companies and their allies in their own nation's government are the population trends in South America and do they affect any of the rest or unrest or political situations yeah I mean they're I'm not really sure I mean it's growing it's definitely a growing population and one of the places where it has the biggest effect are in huge cities like Mexico City has over 30 million people Lima is what 10 million and there has been a shift in terms of that rising population in urban areas a shift in recent years from rural campesino peasant movements being a major force for change toward more urban movements of people without home homeless people's movements rights movements students movements so that so that's been a shift in a kind of toward a new epicenter of social change in Buenos Aires in Rio de Janeiro in Sao Paulo in Caracas, Mexico City which is really have addressed the massive inequality that is so present in places where they're so sensely populated what answer can you comment on what you think is going to happen in Venezuela there are elections right next month or not? I'm not sure if they are I read somewhere that President Trump has said that he would not recognize the elections in Venezuela probably if all is reelected is that have to happen? I don't know about that recent update but I do know that the Trump administration like the Obama administration has been very much against Mododo and against Hugo Chavez previously when Chavez was alive and it's a really difficult situation in the sense that a lot of pressure is coming from Washington from the organization of American states essentially for regime change in Venezuela and I am of the opinion that anything where the US meddling in other countries affairs is a bad idea especially in the case of Latin America under Trump presidency in Venezuela I think only bad things could happen and so while there's this major crisis in Venezuela there's a centralization of power authoritarian strains in the government as there were under Chavez as well and violence in the streets which both sides are implicated in I think that it's up to the US should respect the sovereignty the self-determination of the country and not intervene but it's hard I wouldn't expect too many good things to come from the Trump administration but things are also changing so quickly that for me at least it's been hard to follow exactly what's developing and I know that that Mododo also had canceled previous elections and then not canceled but postponed them which raised some red flags in terms of his commitments to democracy but it's a very complicated situation I would recommend this website for Venezuela called venezuelaanalysis.com which is a great place to follow this really complicated situation there great well thank you very much thanks a lot