Indigenous Resistance Day celebrated with collective land titles given to Indigenous Communities

Protection of native languages and elderly pensions for minimum wage earners

By Z.C. Dutka

Santa Elena de Uairen, October 15th, 2014 - In celebration of the nationally acclaimed Day of Indigenous Resistance, Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro established a presidential council for indigenous peoples, handed over collective land titles to 14 original communities, lowered the threshold age for indigenous pensioners, and announced the creation of an institute to protect the country’s 44 native languages.

Housing pledged to poor

The South American leader also pledged 5000 new homes for indigenous communities for 2015 through the national housing mission Mision Vivienda, and announced the investment of 575 million bolivars (about $7 million) to address extreme poverty in 396 of those communities.

Aloha Nuñez, the Indigenous Peoples’ Minister, noted that the presidential council was formed as a result of elections held in 2,194 indigenous communities after the idea was discussed in 1,589 countrywide assemblies.

Delia Gonzalez, a spokesperson for the Wayúu community of Zulia state, said that the debates leading up to the creation of the council were conducted with respect, tolerance and spirituality, in the interest of enabling diverse indigenous peoples to make significant contributions to the transition towards socialism.

Language institute dedicated to indigenous languages

Nuñez also explained how the language institute is the product of many years’ collective efforts. Of the 44 different original peoples that exist in Venezuela, Nuñez said, 34 speak their language and 10 have lost theirs through lack of use.

“We should immediately found and motivate a team systematically [that can] permanently, scientifically, register, rescue and revive all indigenous languages that exist in Venezuelan territory,” said Maduro from Miraflores presidential palace where Monday’s ceremony was held.

Amoar Myor Mission - pensions for retired indigenous minimum wage earners

Shortly after, the Venezuelan president announced the incorporation of all indigenous above the age of 50 into the Amor Mayor mission for special elderly pensions. Nationwide, the mission applies to women over 55 and men over 60 who live in family homes maintained by minimum wage workers.

Land titles that encompass six ethnic groups and 14 communities of Anzoategui state were presented to community representatives; 1,891 hectares to the Guatacarito people, 438 to the Cumanagoto, 983 to the Capachal, 3,294 to the Pedregal, 657 to the Guayabal and 1,119 hectares to the Kariñas of Mapiricurito.

From 2011 to 2013 the Committee for the Demarcation of Land and Habitat, of the indigenous ministry, has signed 40 property titles for collective lands, including over 1.8 million hectares of land.

In a similar ceremony in July, Nuñez declared, “Today, the Bolivarian government recognizes the lands that ancestrally belonged to us and have been our home for many years."

Venezuelanalysis.com

Terrorism and right-wing Assassins in Venezuela

Silence From the Media as the Paramilitaries Go Rogue

by María Páez Victor
October 8, 2014

Last Friday, the centre of Caracas was filled with thousands of mourning citizens as they accompanied two flag draped coffins loaded with flowers they had cast upon it in homage.

If a Member of Parliament representing the Venezuelan opposition had been brutally tortured and stabbed to death in his own home, the Western press – including Canada’s- would have splashed the news in headlines around the world. Yet this has just happened to a Member of Parliament from the governing party of Venezuela, but the international press is mostly silent. International politicians have not wrung their hands with indignation or regret, as they have about the lawful incarceration of opposition leader Leopoldo López who publicly and repeatedly incited mobs to violence and caused has at least 47 deaths.

On Wednesday, October 1, 2014, Robert Serra, 27 years old, a lawyer and legislator from the governing party PSUV, the youngest Member of Parliament of Venezuela, and his partner Maria Herrera, were assassinated in their own home in a central area of Caracas.

It was an outrageous and deliberate act of terror. Robert Serra and María Herrera were tortured, stabbed and then bled to death. He specialized in criminology, and was engaged in the task of helping to curb crime in the country. María Herrera assisted him in this vital work. Robert Serra came from a poor family; his mother worked as a street hawker to help him go to law school. He was famous for his insightful interventions in parliament and was much beloved, some referred to him as “ a future Chávez”.

Their deaths were carried out systematically. Ernesto Samper, ex-president of Colombia and current president of UNASUR, said: “This crime is evidence of the infiltration of Colombian paramilitary in Venezuela.”

Just a few weeks ago, President Santos of Colombia deported to Venezuela a young man, Lorent Saleh, who had been meeting with paramilitaries in Colombia to conspire against the Venezuelan government. He appears in a video with Alvaro Uribe, ex-president of Colombia, who owes his political career to his connections to Escobar, the head of Colombian narco-traffic, and is accused by the Colombian Senate of being behind the proliferation of the paramilitary there. Saleh stated he was buying arms of war and contracting snipers and explosive experts because “they” were going to carry out selective assassination of 20 leaders of the Venezuelan government in order to bring it down. Then he said who “they” were: leaders of Venezuela’s opposition parties.

In Parliament, days before his assassination, Robert Serra had denounced -in no uncertain terms- the terrorist plans of Alvaro Uribe and Lorent Saleh.

The Venezuelan government of President Nicolás Maduro has been under relentless and continuous attack since it was elected. It has been submitted to economic sabotage with contraband and withholding of food and goods, a deliberate campaign of false rumors, and three months of street violence to create the appearance of chaos and lack of governability. These subversive actions were deftly overcome by a government that stuck to the letter of the law, refused to take the bait of meeting violence with violence, and its call for peace included setting up negotiations with the opposition facilitated by ministers of neighboring countries. The Venezuelan people overwhelmingly repudiated the violent opposition tactics, and gave Mr. Maduro’s popularity an even larger boost.

In an attempt to produce “regime change”, violence has been intensified now to include assassinations. This was agreed upon in a meeting at Guadarrama, Spain at the end of June hosted by the Spanish spy agency CNI and the FAES – a think tank of the party Partido Popular of ex-president of Spain, Jose Maria Aznar. The USA’s CIA carries out the financing and training of the CNI, as Edward Snowdon has revealed.[i]

Two Venezuelan opposition leaders, Julio Borges and Ramon Muchacho, who were also behind the street violence, were present, and a video message from Maria Corina Machado was viewed. She could not be present as she is being investigated for her part in the street violence, which she enthusiastically led. Machado, as a standing member of Venezuela’s parliament, ignominiously accepted simultaneously the position of ambassador of Panama in order to address the OAS in 2014. According to the Constitution, she in effect, forfeited her condition of parliamentarian by representing a foreign government – and one, which at that time - was against Venezuela.

Machado, along with Lopez, instigated the street violence that cost so many deaths and millions in damages. Yet, holding such disdain for the rule of law, she was invited to the Canadian Council for the Americas to speak at the prestigious Canadian law firm of Cassel Brock and Blackwell last May. This was a clear example either of Canadian willful ignorance or connivance.

The imperial forces believe Venezuela’s oil is just too rich a prize to leave in the hands of its people. The sterling leadership that the country has shown in promoting the integration of Latin America for the purposes of solving its common social problems and to protect its natural resources is just unacceptable to the greed of multinationals, the United States, and their subservient allies who seem to think the petroleum is theirs to take.

The assassinations of Robert Serra and María Herrera, of Eliézer Otáiz head of Caracas Municipality 5 months ago, the killings during the street riots of last March that were led by paramilitary (not students as the world press stated) and the bombing death of district attorney Danilo Anderson ten years ago, as well as the hundreds of rural leaders that have been assassinated by paramilitary mercenaries hired by the large landowners, have only fed the determination of the Venezuelan people. They know that their Bolivarian government, no matter how besieged and no matter how big the problems, is a government on their side, not on the side of the powerful elites and their foreign owners that have never in Venezuelan history sided with the poor or the nation’s best interest.

As the crowds wound their slow way towards the cemetery where Robert Serra and María Herrera were to be buried, the ubiquitous cry that was heard at every step was: “Justice! Justice! We want justice!” The Venezuelan authorities dare not ignore this clamor.

María Páez Victor, Ph.D. is a Venezuelan born sociologist living in Canada.

Notes.
[i]Carlos Fazio, “Violencia y terrorismo son ejes de la nueva fase de desetabilizacion subversive”, Resumen Latinoamericano, 2 octubre 2014, http://www.resumenlatinoamericano.org/

Pres. Nicolás Maduro speaks at U.N. on climate change

Change the system to preserve life on the planet
President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro
23 September 2014

...Delegation, heads of delegations…
We are here today in New York five years after the largest meeting of world leaders at the UN to discuss the main threat to human survival in this century which is climate change. That meeting was in Copenhagen, Denmark, where 119 heads of state and government were present, and I remember it well because I attended as Minister of Foreign Affairs accompanying our eternal leader Hugo Chávez, who, along with other leaders of the continent among them President Evo Morales, expressed clear and forceful positions representing the voice of our peoples.

Today, climate change continues with more devastating consequences each day, threatening the global destruction of life on the planet and, unfortunately, we still do not see the light at the end of the tunnel. The environmental crisis that we suffer today is defined by an alarming reality, and meanwhile, the factors that coalesce towards the destruction of the planet advance with acceleration and still we continue without taking the necessary measures of environmental control.

Nature abused by rich capitalist nations
Nature has been giving us clear signals of this grave state of affairs, but the powerful of this world only continue to abuse it systematically. This environmental crisis, the result of human actions, is part above all of the crisis of a model of a capitalist civilization, based on norms of production and consumption that are unsustainable, that produce inequality, injustice, poverty and the destruction of the planet. Capitalism has ignored during decades Nature’s capacity to withstand and to renew, the laws of thermodynamics and entropy. Within the logic of capitalism, economic growth is incompatible with the survival of the planet. The logic of capital exploitation is simply unsustainable.

Today, 20% of the richest countries of capitalism consume 84% of the world’s energy, polluting the planet and destroying its equilibrium. These polluting world powers have in two centuries impacted life in the planet, it is these powerful countries the ones that now want to hoist the banners of environmentalism in order to make more money with pollution by putting a price on emissions and exchange in financial terms, the right to pollute this world. We watch with astonishment how those who are principally responsible for climate change and its terrible consequences, do not have the minimum political will to stop and reverse an evil of planetary dimensions generated by the large economic and financial global corporations.

Human species at risk
It is necessary that we cast our memory back. It is now 22 years since George Bush Sr., at the cusp of the imperial arrogance of the unipolar Word, in Rio de Janerio said, quote; “Our lifestyle is not negotiable.” This was in response to those who were demanding concrete actions against climate change that year of 1992. As well, exactly 22 years ago, on 12th of June 1992 also from Rio de Janeiro, the Cuban and Latin-American Commander Fidel Castro stated: ”An important biological species is at risk of disappearing due to the quick and progressive eradication of its natural life conditions – humans.

Now we have to take consciousness that this problem, 22 years afterwards, has aggravated. If yesterday it was late, soon it will be too late – even if some may be displeased to be reminded of the most conservative scientific predictions, it is still necessary to say it here clearly. We cannot continue under a model of development that abuses drastically the conditions of human life and places in dangers the existence of future generations.

David Orr, professor of Oberlin College University and adviser to President Barack Obama said at the beginning of this year the following:” - “Even much before the climate crisis became the biggest failure of the market that the world has ever seen, it was an enormous political and governmental failure.” He was referring to the idea that was imposed during the 1980s of last century whereby the responsibilities of the state should be reduced to next to nothing and the course for capital and markets should be amplified to infinity.

Scenario of apathy, impotence concern and indolence
In view of this dark scenario made up of apathy, impotence, concern and indolence, it is more timely than ever to remember our Indo-American wisdom from South America that warns: “Only when the last tree has died, and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught will you come to understand that you cannot eat money.”

This is the view of the so called industrialized world that is now being proposed that countries of the South should transition into with the so called green economy. These proposal of the industrialized countries not only go against the right to development that our countries have but also they want to masquerade the same capitalist formulas using the flags of the environmental and ecological movements.

The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela confirms its commitment to advance holistic planning that considers the three fundamental pillars of ecological sustainable development with a concept of a social ecological economy.

Venezuela - 70% hydroelectricity
Venezuela today obtains 70% of its energy from hydroelectricity and has 60% of its territory under some administrative protection. More tan 222 protected areas preserve 58 million hectares of forests, including national parks, biosphere reserves and fauna reserves. The conservation of Venezuelan forests represents emission savings of 12,221 million tons of CO2 and has diminished the loss of forests today by more tan 50%.

Mr. President, Venezuela had the pleasure to receive in our country the PreCop social delegations; more tan 300 delegates from 135 organizations and social movements from 71 countries who approved the Margarita Declaration.

Mr. President, it is impossible to dodge the imminent danger, and we say this from Venezuela, of a climatic collapse that is already afoot. One of the most evident signs is the terrible phenomenon of climate change, which the great German thinker, Walter Benjamin, predicted as he referred to the domination of capital in the third decade of the 20th century.

Change the system to preserve life on the planet
How long are they going to continue to propose to us capitalist solutions of the old destructive model as answers to the gravest problems that have been created in the last 100 years? Can anyone believe, to give an eloquent example, that the transnational corporations can be converted from one day to the next to the protagonists of the saviours of the planet? Are those who turn human life and nature into merchandize going to accept commitments to change their logic in order to save the planet?

From our America, Mr. President, we stand up in protest and in indignation before those models that now are trying to call themselves “green economy”.

Mr. President, we are children of the Pachamama, and from South America we say: Let us look with respectful voices, with respectful eyes, for the changes to a model that is urgently needed by all humanity. We salute the convocation of this meeting on climate change and we repeat, as our Commander Chavez said in Copenhagen, let us listen to the voice of the street, the shouts of the people in Copenhagen five years ago still echo when they said: “If we want to change the climate, let us change the system.” Let us listen to the voices of the people that marched last Sunday in New York who said: “Action now! No more words!”

We at the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela commit to continue to defend the right of the people to change the system so that we can preserve life on the planet. Thank you very much dear friends.
This speech was translated by Louis Riel Bolivarian Circle - Cblriel - @sympatico.ca

Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba and ALBA for Palestinian freedom

Latin America Reacts To Israel’s Massacre In Gaza

By Ramona Wadi

In May 2014, the Jerusalem Post reported on Israel’s intentions to seek stronger economic ties with Latin American countries — with a particular focus on Costa Rica, Colombia, Mexico, Chile and Peru — in an attempt to weaken its dependency on Europe.

“We are making a very concentrated and focused effort to vary our markets, from our previous dependence on the European market, to the growing Asian and Latin American markets, in which Israel needs to take a small market share and bring about growth, employment and social welfare in the State of Israel,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared at a weekly cabinet meeting.

These efforts were apparently paying off as early as February, when Israel was admitted as an observer nation to the Pacific Alliance, a South American trade alliance composed of Peru, Mexico, Chile, and Colombia. In June, prior to the commencement of the ongoing Operation Protective Edge, Colombia signed free trade agreements with Israel, among other countries.

But upon witnessing the tragedies unleashed by Operation Protective Edge, Latin American countries are now moving to sever diplomatic ties with the settler-colonial state — as some have done in the past — and Chile has already suspended its existing free trade agreements.

“We are declaring Israel a terrorist state”
The late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez seems to have triggered a stronger stance in favor of Palestinian rights in Latin America, with various leaders severing ties with Israel or enforcing other detrimental measures.

In 2006, Chavez delivered a strong speech to the United Nations Assembly denouncing U.S. imperialism and Israeli aggression within a Latin American and international context. Regarding Israel’s colonial violence, Chavez stated, “This is imperialist, fascist, assassin, genocidal, the empire and Israel firing on the people of Palestine and Lebanon.”

Speaking about Operation Cast Lead in 2009, Chavez accused Israel of genocide against Palestinians. “The question is not whether the Israelis want to exterminate the Palestinians. They’re doing it openly,” he told the French magazine Le Figaro.

Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012 elicited more strong statements from Chavez. “Another aggression against the Gaza Strip has begun. Savage, savage: the State of Israel bombing the Gaza Strip again.”

The atrocities inflicted by Israel during Operation Protective Edge — an ongoing mission that has left nearly 2,000 Palestinian civilians dead so far — have unleashed a stronger reaction still. Now, however, that reaction is more widespread, going beyond what is usually expected from Venezuela and Bolivia, which severed diplomatic relations with Israel in the past.

President Maduro - sending medical to Gaza
Like his predecessor, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has insisted on describing Israel’s aggression as an extermination program against the Palestinian population.

In addition, Maduro has declared the intention of the Bolivarian Alliance for the People of Our America (ALBA) to establish orphanages to shelter Palestinian children whose parents have been killed in Israeli attacks. The shelters, to be named after Venezuela’s late President Chavez, are to be established in each ALBA country — Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Nicaragua, Antigua and Barbuda, Ecuador, Saint Lucia and Dominica.

According to Cubadebate, Venezuela will also be sending medical aid to hospitals in Gaza.

Evo Morales - Israel is a terrorist state
Meanwhile, Bolivian President Evo Morales, who had previously called for Israel’s indictment at the International Criminal Court, has cancelled a decades old agreement that allowed Israelis to travel to Bolivia without visas, saying, “in other words, we are declaring Israel a terrorist state.”

Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Peru, and Cuba have also adopted firm positions with regard to diplomatic and economic relations, splintering Israel’s previous ambitions of rendering Latin America complicit in its colonial schemes. Of course, how long such stances last and how steadfast they remain will define the extent of Israel’s isolation from Latin America.

Ecuador, as well as Brazil, Chile, El Salvador and Peru, have all recalled their diplomatic envoys to Israel — a move that has angered Israel and generated even more pretentious rhetoric. According to a news report on Haaretz, Israel’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor declared the diplomatic move “hasty” and a step that “constitutes encouragement for Hamas, a group recognized as a terror organization by many countries around the world.”

Cuba - stands by Che Guevara's 1959 visit to Gaza
Cuba, meanwhile, remains a constant reference in the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle, with the best manifestation of Cuban solidarity being Che Guevara’s visit to Gaza on June 18, 1959 following the triumph of the Cuban revolution.

It has maintained its historical stance within an international context. In 1973, Cuba severed diplomatic relations with Israel and has refused to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist ever since — a reflection of the island’s own opposition to colonial domination by the U.S., which Fidel Castro effectively stopped. The Cuban Foreign Ministry released a statement which was published in the Cuban state newspaper, Granma, last week, insisting upon international accountability, an end to the massacres in Gaza, and the restoration of basic services “to preserve the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.”

Given its penchant for supremacy, these Latin American reactions to Operation Protective Edge have infuriated Israel, which is now regurgitating the usual “terror” discourse in an attempt to win back sympathy for its massacre mission. As always, misrepresenting and manipulating facts is taking precedence in Israeli rhetoric, with the expectation that the entire world will designate Hamas a “terror organization.”

Contrary to what Palmor stated, the diplomatic repercussions befalling Israel are not “a prize” to Hamas, but a collective recognition of the necessity of making Palestinian resistance, self-determination, and land reclamation a reality.

http://www.mintpressnews.com/latin-america-reacts-to-israels-massacre-in-gaza/194827/