LATIN AMERICA

mid-2008, the FARC drew criticism from Brazil's Lula and Venezuela's Chavez, an armed guerrilla movement is out of place."

brother Adan, in MIR a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla, later, Party of the, Venezuelan Revolution, an urban underground with Douglas Bravo.

Adan put it to Alan Woods, did not have contact with the masses, to allow the taking of power, needed influence within popular masses and Armed Forces

self-criticism of the Venezuelan Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN)
"infantile subjectivism...

Hugo Chavez attempted a coup in 1992, por ahora, Chavez converted his popularity into a mass movement. between 1992 and 1998 their gloom was evident.

Guerrilla warfare had ended by the mid-1990s, for the Maoists it was the Shining Path, Guzman, was captured, in 1991, in Ayacucho

The Venezuelan left was unable to see the barrios, the slums that ring the city

Against US pressure and machinations of the oligarchy, Chavez's movement held firm. It began the "long march through the institutions," and culminated in the revision of the Constitution. The new Bolivarian Constitution (1999) draws from the liberator Simon Bolivar, the Marxist Jose Carlos Mariategui, and from Marxist theory (notably the remarkable Soviet jurist Evgeny Pashukanis). Provisions for deeper democracy at one level, and for the widest recognition of human rights.

Barrio Adentro, to provide healthcare. Now, the Constitution directs the government to provide healthcare funded by the oil revenues. It threatened the oligarchy with extinction and the US with the loss of its own power in its backyard

Distracted by the middle east, the US was unable to extend itself against the Bolivarians. US pushed for coup in 2002. The Bolivarians, they had been organized for just this eventuality. Chavez would not fall like Pinochet with support of the military and he had not allowed the population to remain demobilized, neighborhood committees, self-defense leagues, the time to unholster the gun, was not yet at hand

Lula was nineteen, the military deposed Joåo Goulart. The military rule that ran from 1964 to 1985. During this long era the urban middle class that leaned left went either into clandestine trade union organizational work or into gclandestine urban guerrilla units.

The most spectacular was Carlos Marighella's National Liberation Alliance
Marighella was the author of the influential Small Manual of the Urban Guerrilla (June 1969), a touchstone for the urban guerrilla from Montevideo to Mexico City. The police killed Marighella the same year as his manual came out (he was 57 years old, a veteran of the Brazilian CP who had broken with it over the strategy of violence)

The urban guerrilla did not influence Lula. The lessons went with him and the other labor activists into the Workers' Party (PT). In 1980 Brazilian campesinos formed National Confederation of Agricultural Workers and Movimiento Los Sin Tierra (MST), eleven million members. The fundamental constituents of the PT

Lula remained with mass organizing. this long campaign resulted in the Diretas Ja! (Direct Elections Now) movement of 1984 which toppled the dictatorship. Not once did Lula move to the gun. This despite the Roosevelt Corollary (1904), the right to intervene. From the 1846 invasion of Mexico
to the soft coup of 2009 Honduras it came equally with its Dollars and Free Trade Agreements clear Uruguayan Communist Party leader Rodney Arismendi by 1947 "Anglo-Yankee financial oligarchies," same tonic from the local oligarchs and their North American allies

deliverance came in 1959 with the Cuban Revolution. luck and pluck enabled them to enlarge their base (their foco), create alliances with urban mass movements which had been awoken by Castro. Che Guevara's call to revolt (his Guerrilla Warfare, 1961)

Regis Debray wrote a manifesto for Castroism 1965. Che Guevara ultimately went to Bolivia, to try out his method for the last time. Not only were the guerrillas isolated geographically, but also they were isolated from the people. this image provoked Teododo Petkoff of Venezuelan CP then of the MAS
In 1976 'stony eyes' of the Bolivian peasants.

guerrilla movements had dissolved into driblets took root in the Andes, Shining Path. FARC in 1964 rump group Colombian Communist Party (and led Manuel Marulanda, Tiro Fijo went deep Colombia profunda rural leadership Massive assault could not destroy it, 1980s Colombian Left signed a peace agreement with the oligarchy. FARC did not leave the mountains. The accord failed, politicians of the Left were killed. FARC restarted. It was FARC that pushed the Plan Colombia. The situation went to a stalemate. FARC pays little attention to the building up of mass struggles. Colombian activist and economist Hector Mondragon put it recently. Chavez and Lula's plea to FARC. They want the muscle of this organization to come above ground. The Bolivarian project to build electoral-parliamentary movements in concert with social movements power of the majority to seize state power

ALBAm the mechanism to bring the 1999 Venezuelan Constitution to the hemisphere. Chavez's callm a Fifth International, as "an instrument for the unification and the articulation of the struggle of the peoples to save this planet,"

This is Marxism without the Blanquist move to the gun, using what institutions exist to move a progressive agenda