The Meaning of Humanitarian Aid
February 26, 2019
A poem by the late Salvadoran radical Roque Dalton helps to clarify what is
going on in Venezuela, writes Vijay Prashad.
By Vijay Prashad
Tricontinental: Institute
for Social Research
As the United States and its allies put pressure on Venezuela, a poem by the
Salvadoran radical Roque Dalton (1935-1975) clarifies the structure of
politics in Latin America.
Dalton came from one of Latin Americas smallest countries, El Salvador,
which he used to call the little finger (pulgarcito). A deeply compassionate
poet, Dalton was also a militant of the Peoples Revolutionary Army, whose
internal struggles claimed his short life. El Salvador, like so many other
Latin American states, struggles to carve out its sovereignty from the
tentacles of U.S. power. That hideous Monroe Doctrine (1823) seemed to give
the U.S. the presumption that it has power over the entire hemisphere; our
backyard being the colloquial phrase. People like Dalton fought to end that
assumption. They wanted their countries to be governed by and for their own
people an elementary part of the idea of democracy. It has been a hard
struggle.
Roque Dalton, Cuba 1967. (Wikimedia)
Roque Dalton, Cuba 1967. (Wikimedia)
Dalton wrote a powerful poem OAS named for the Organization of American
States (founded in 1948). It is a poem that acidly catalogues how democracy
is a farce in Latin America.
The president of my country
for the time being is Colonel Fidel Sanchez Hernandez
but General Somoza, president of Nicaragua
is also the president of my country.
And General Stroessner, president of Paraguay,
is also kind of the president of my country, though not as
much as the president of Honduras,
General Lopez Arellano, but more so than the president of Haiti,
Monsieur Duvalier.
And the president of the United States is more the president of my country
Than is the president of my country,
The one whose name, as I said,
is Colonel Fidel Sanchez Hernandez, for the time being.
Is the president of Venezuela the president of Venezuela or is the president
of the United States the president of Venezuela? There is absurdity here.
Collapsed oil prices, reliance upon oil revenues, an economic war by the
United States and complications in raising finances has led to
hyperinflation and to an economic crisis in Venezuela. To deny that is to
deny reality. But there is a vast difference between an economic crisis and
a humanitarian crisis.
Rafael Enriquez, Foreign Debt, OSPAAAL, 1983.
Rafael Enriquez, Foreign Debt, OSPAAAL, 1983.
Most of the countries on the planet are facing an economic crisis, with
public finances in serious trouble and with enormous debt problems plaguing
governments in all the continents. This years meeting of the World Economic
Forum at Davos, Switzerland, focused attention on the global debt crisis
from the near-trillion-dollar deficit of the United States to the debt
burdens of Italy. The IMFs David Lipton warned that if interest rates were
to rise, the problem would escalate. There are pockets of debt held by
companies and countries that really dont have much servicing capacity, and
I think thats going to be a problem.
Hyper-inflation is a serious problem, but punitive economic sanctions,
seizure of billions of dollars of overseas assets and threats of war are not
going to save the undermined Bolivar, Venezuelas currency.
Eradication of hunger has to be the basic policy of any government.
According to the UNs Food and Agricultural Organization, 11.7 percent of
the Venezuelan people are hungry. Hunger rates in other parts of the world
are much higher 31.4 percent in Eastern Africa. But the worlds attention
has not been focused on this severe crisis, one that has partly generated
the massive migration across the Mediterranean Sea.
The picture above, is from the European Parliament in Strasbourg, where in
2015 activists laid out the 17,306 names of people who have died
attempting that crossing (the number is now close to 40,000 drowned).
Members of the European parliament had to walk to their session over these
names. They are harsh in their attitude to start a war against Venezuela,
but cavalier about the serious crises in Africa and Asia that keep the flow
of migrants steady.
Venezuelas Anti-Hunger Programs
The government of Venezuela has two programs to tackle the problem of
hunger:
1.Comité Local de Abastecimiento y Producción (CLAP). The Local Committees
for Supply and Production are made up of local neighborhood groups who grow
food and who receive food from agricultural producers. They distribute this
food to about 6 million families at very low cost. Currently, the CLAP boxes
are being sent to households every 15 days.
2.Plan de Atención a la Vulnerabilidad Nutricional. The most vulnerable of
Venezuelans 620,000 of them receive assistance. The National Institute
of Nutrition has been coordinating the delivery of food to a majority of the
countrys municipalities.
These are useful, but insufficient. More needs to be done. That is clear.
Through CLAP, the Venezuelan government distributes about 50,000 tons of
food per month. The humanitarian aid that the U.S. has promised amounts to
$20 million which would purchase a measly 60 tons of food.
On the issue of humanitarian aid to Venezuela, the international media has
become the stenographers of the U.S. State Department and the CIA. It
focuses on the false claims made by the U.S. government that it wants to
deliver aid, which the Venezuelans refuse. The media does not look at the
facts, even at this fact that $20 million is a humiliating gesture, an
amount intended to be used to establish the heartlessness of the government
in Venezuela and therefore seek to overthrow it by any means necessary. This
is what the U.S. government did in the Dominican Republic in 1965, sending
in humanitarian aid accompanied by US marines.
Vijay Prashad responds to U.S. economic squeeze on Venezuela on Democracy
Now.
The U.S. has used military aircrafts to bring in this modest aid, driven it
to a warehouse and then said that the Venezuelans are not prepared to open
an unused bridge for it. The entire process is political theatre. U.S. Sen.
Marco Rubio went to that bridge which has never been opened to say in a
threatening way that the aid is going to get through to Venezuela one way
or another. These are words that threaten the sovereignty of Venezuela and
build up the energy for a military attack. There is nothing humanitarian
here.
The term humanitarian has been shredded of its meaning. It has now come to
mean a pretext for the destruction of countries. Humanitarian intervention
was the term used to destroy Libya; humanitarian aid is being used to beat
the drum for a war against Venezuela.
Meanwhile, we forget the humanitarian solidarity offered by the Venezuelan
government to the poorer nations and to poorer populations. Why is Haiti on
fire now? It had received reduced-price oil from Venezuela by the
PetroCaribe scheme (set up in 2005). A decade ago, Venezuela offered the
Caribbean islands oil on very favorable terms so that they would not be the
quarry of monopoly oil firms and the IMF.
The economic war against Venezuela has meant a decline in PetroCaribe. Now
the IMF has returned to demand that oil subsidies end, and monopoly oil
firms have returned to demand cash payments before delivery. Haitis
government was forced to vote against Venezuela in the OAS. That is why the
country is aflame. If you dont let us breathe, say the Haitian people, we
wont let you breathe.
Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 2019. (Hector Retamal.)
Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 2019. (Hector Retamal)
In 2005, the same year as Venezuela set up the PetroCaribe scheme, it
created the PetroBronx scheme in New York. Terrible poverty in the South
Bronx galvanized community groups such as Rebel Diaz Arts Collective, Green
Youth Cooperative, Bronx Arts and Dance, and Mothers on the Move.
They worked with CITGO, the Venezuelan governments U.S. oil subsidiary to
develop a cooperative mechanism to get heating oil to the people.
Ana Maldonado, a sociologist who is now with the Frente Francisco de Miranda
(Venezuela), was one of the participants in the PetroBronx scheme. She and
her friends created the North Star to be a community organization that
helped deliver the resources to the very poorest people in the United
States. People had to wear their coats inside their homes during the
winter, she told me. That was intolerable. That is why Venezuela provided
the poor in the United States with subsidized heating oil.
The South Bronx and Harlem, the privations produced by racism all this is
familiar territory in Latin America.
In 1960, Fidel Castro came to New York to attend the United Nations General
Assembly. He was refused a hotel in the city. Malcolm X, a leader of the
African American community, came to his aid, bringing the Cuban delegation
to Harlems Hotel Theresa, whose owner Love B. Woods warmly welcomed
Fidel and his comrades. Four years later, at a meeting in Harlem, Malcolm X
said in connection with his meeting with Fidel, Dont let somebody else
tell us who our enemies should be and who our friends should be.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, journalist, commentator and a Marxist
intellectual. He is the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for
Social Research and the chief editor of LeftWord Books.
