In "Argentina: From Rebellion to Revolution?" [SeeingRed issue 5.1] I wrote:

Today now the no-contagion line lies in ruins. The epidemic, which is the breakdown of neoliberalism, ["Neoliberalism" is the popular term in Latin America for the decade-long wave of privatizations, International Monetary Fund (IMF)-imposed austerity, and cutbacks in social services, wages, and jobs that took hold following the collapse of the Nicaraguan Revolution and the stabilization of pro-imperialist regimes in Central America at the beginning of the 1990s. --Ike Nahem] is spreading to Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile, Mexico, and, and most dangerously for the moneybags, Brazil. Washington and its dependent Latin American bourgeoisies face the onset of full-blown, generalized financial, economic, social, and political crisis.

The deepening financial and economic deterioration in the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan --registered in the turmoil of crashing stock markets-- is accelerating the Argentinization of Latin America. And the breakdown of neoliberalism in Latin America becomes an ever more weighty factor accelerating the financial and economic crisis in the imperialist centers. [In the past few weeks, Uruguay, squeezed between Argentina and Brazil and greatly integrated and dependent on the ups and downs of their economies, has been helpless to avoid a fast and sharp financial collapse. 33% of bank deposits have been withdrawn, prompting a "bank holiday." The U.S. dollar has climbed 50% against the Uruguayan peso increasing the cost of payments on Uruguay’s foreign debt. In the fourth year of a recession, official unemployment in Uruguay has climbed to 15%. The IMF rushed a $840 million "disbursement" to avoid a formal default. As Uruguay’s trade unions took to the streets in demonstrations and four-hour general strike, the right-wing Batlle government has been thrown into a deep crisis. --I..N.]

In an anxious 29 July piece titled "Latin America turns left," Financial Times writer Richard Lapper laments, "Latin America is in turmoil. In recent weeks, there have been anti-privatization riots in Peru and Paraguay, violent strikes in Ecuador and financial crises in Brazil and Uruguay…More than a decade of market-friendly reforms, analysts fear, may be in peril."

The economic and political fallout from the permanent crisis in Argentina has not been --and cannot be-- contained. Now Brazil is supplanting Argentina as the focus of anxiety in the imperialist world.

Brazil dominates the geographic, economic, and political map of Latin America. As large in landmass as the continental United States, it is by far both the biggest territory in South America and the largest population at some 175 million. It has the largest economy --eighth biggest in the world as measured by gross economic output-- but remains dependent in terms of its relationship to the major industrial powers, particularly the U.S.

Brazil is a Third World, semi-colonial country, which is also semi-industrialized. It contains the largest national bourgeoisie and the largest industrial proletariat; the largest class of parasitic, semi-feudal landlords and the largest landless peasantry; and the largest petty-bourgeois and professional layer anywhere in Latin America. Brazil is Latin America writ large.

And, accordingly, Brazil has Latin America’s largest foreign debt at some $300 billion. Its debt is a stunning 80% of the country’s $370 billion economic output.

The Brazilian currency (real --pronounced ray-AHL) has fallen a full 30% since the sell-off and crisis began in mid-April when polls showed Workers Party (PT) presidential candidate Luis Inacio da Silva’s electoral lead had widened to two-to-one over the neoliberal government coalition’s candidate Jose Serra and top U.S. investment banks such as Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley proceeded to downgrade Brazil’s "country rating."

On 3 July, Brazil’s central bank announced plans to inject $1.5 billion --$50-100 million daily through the end of July--into the world currency markets to prop up the real. By the end of the month it was pumping in $200-300 million a day to prop up a plummeting currency which as of 1 August had fallen to record lows of 3.47 to the U.S. dollar.

The 3 July cosmetic gesture did nothing to relieve the unremitting pressure on the real. "Dollar demand will certainly exceed the central bank offer," one brokerage firm director told the Financial Times. The pressure on the real stems from the imperative for Brazilian companies --increasingly unable to afford to borrow more money-- to sell pesos for dollars to pay off dollar-denominated foreign debt. Some $11 billion in private-sector foreign debt comes due by the end of 2002. "The central bank simply doesn’t have enough resources to meet dollar demand," said one Sao Paulo bank executive. It is estimated that 40 per cent of Brazilian public-sector debt is dollar-denominated, which means that as the real nose-dives that debt load increases.

The real drop is "raising the specter of an Argentina-like meltdown in South America’s biggest economy," as put by the Associated Press. Insofar as the total Brazilian debt is largely owed --or "denominated" as they say in the business pages-- in U.S. dollars, the debt burden of Brazil has drastically increased in a matter of a few days and weeks as a result of the speculative buying and selling of currencies on world "money markets" by a handful of super-wealthy parasites, also known as "investors." The 31 July close was the ninth consecutive all-time low for the real, nearly 5% in that one day. [It finally broke the streak on 1 August, rising 10% on word from Washington and the IMF that a "disbursement" would likely be forthcoming, reversing statements from U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill. --I.N.]

Since late May Brazilian stock and bond markets have had sharp drops. Wealthy investors will not buy Brazilian bonds without sky-high yields --17% above U.S. Treasuries, surpassed only by Argentina worldwide-- which means that interest rates are equally in the stratosphere, suppressing consumer spending and borrowing by capitalist firms. The past two months of unremitting financial and economic turmoil means that Brazil is likely already at the beginning of a steep recession.

Such speculations of the "free market" in currencies are one of the ways semi-colonial capitalist countries like Brazil are perpetually kept in a dependent, hat-in-hand position, never able to truly industrialize and truly develop. The increase in Brazil’s debt-servicing charges means that continued payment can only come through new IMF "aid," that is, more loans, still adding to the black hole of debt. Of course, the "collateral" for the new loans will be IMF-imposed austerity --lower wages, increased unemployment, massive purges of public sector employee rolls, less public health-care clinics and hospitals, less and ever-more-wretched public schools, etc.

This is the dynamic of neoliberalism, modern-day imperialist exploitation. This is the mechanism of wealth-extraction from the poorest to the richest. This is the face of modern-day colonial slavery.

This sharp decline obviously increases inflationary pressures. Gasoline prices are up 8 per cent. The currency decline increases the pressure to maintain high interest rates (prime rates are at 18.5 per cent) that choke the credit lines that fuel capitalist production and employment. Loans by foreign banks to Brazilian companies have fallen nearly 40 per cent to $2.9 billion and most of that is to rollover existing loans or finance trade. The 26 June Wall Street Journal quotes "the head of one New York loan desk" as saying that Brazilian "New issue activity has almost come to a standstill." The yield on Brazil’s government-issued bonds --that is, the interest Brazil must pay short- and medium-term to entice anyone with large sums of money to risk buying them-- has soared to the point where debt default is objectively posed.

In this framework the prospect of the election of a new president and political party --which for over a generation was identified with and educated its members in seeing the debt as imperialist exploitation which should be cancelled-- can only exacerbate the crisis mentality among holders of Brazilian debt.

In a debt crisis such as Brazil’s each component of the crisis feeds another. High interest rates are necessary to bring in more foreign buyers of government and company bonds and to thus maintain enough liquidity to continue paying interest on the individual company and collective state debt. But such rates choke credit and industrial production, hit foreign exchange volumes from exports, and thereby obviate the possibilities for firms and state bodies to pay back debt. It is a vicious circle. This situation puts the squeeze on Brazilian firms, from the largest to the smallest.

Clearly the financial and economic crisis in Brazil goes far deeper that the electoral status of a reformist political candidate. This is not to say that such political factors do not become decisive in the consciousness of the addled brains of the managers of foreign banks, currency speculators, and the entire coterie of the vast apparatus of capitalist financial mechanisms.

The $300 billion Brazilian debt --the crisis-level unsustainability of which is often discounted in the big-business press by artificially dividing it into "foreign" and "domestic" categories-- is the motor force driving the financial crisis. The price for continuing to pay interest on the debt is continuous and stepped-up assault on the living standards, jobs, wages, public services of the overwhelming majority of the Brazilian people --all simultaneously blows to economic sovereignty and national patrimony.

With Argentina's thundering financial collapse at the beginning of 2002 --amid mass street mobilizations that brought down the hated neoliberal regime of President Fernando de la Rua and Economy Minister Domingo Cavallo-- the fiction of Argentina maintaining interest payments on its foreign debt was formally ended. For the imperialist world this was a dangerous precedent that everything possible was done to avoid. But that Rubicon was nonetheless crossed. A similar development in Brazil --which together with Argentina holds nearly half of world debt bonds-- would be devastating to world money markets. One top London economist specializing in Latin America told the Financial Times, "People would not be so worried about Brazil if Argentina had not defaulted."

The spreading economic crisis in South America is increasing pressures on Washington from its various dependencies, who complain that U.S. tariff walls --recently deepened to protect steel and agricultural products-- keep out Latin American exports, and that they are being "neglected" by a Washington consumed by the "war on terrorism" and the Middle East. They have been particularly affronted by a series of arrogant comments by Treasury Secretary O’Neill.

This whining does nevertheless expose how dependent the Latin American capitalist regimes are on handouts, bailouts, and bones on "free trade" from Washington. Events are also compelling them to pursue mutual economic ties through the strengthening of the Mercosur trading bloc (formally the world's third largest, composed of full members: Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, and Chile and Bolivia as associate members). On 6 July the presidents of Mercosur-member nations pointedly held discussions with Mexican President Vicente Fox on deepening trade ties which registered the growing conflicts between Washington and its Latin American dependencies who are, in turn, under increasing pressure from workers and peasants as well as their own capitalists who chafe under Washington’s protectionism.

The scheduled October presidential and legislative elections in Brazil have focused attention on the post-Argentina next wave of capitalist instability in Latin America. The prospect of an electoral victory for Workers Party (PT) presidential candidate Luis Inacio da Silva --nicknamed "Lula"-- has unnerved foreign and Brazilian capital markets.

The Workers Party was born out of the mass struggles, led by a numerically exploding and radicalized industrial proletariat, which eventually led to the end of a consecutive series of military regimes that held power from 1964 to 1985. [Following the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Latin American politics and the hemispheric policy of U.S. imperialism revolved around that new shattering fact. Under liberal Democratic Party president John Kennedy, preventing "another Cuba" was the central focus of U.S. policy. In 1961 the elected populist regime of Janio Quadros in Brazil infuriated Washington by siding with Cuba during the Bay of Pigs invasion and giving Cuban Minister of Industry Che Guevara a decoration. Under pressure Quadros resigned from office after eight months and was replaced by his vice-president Joao Goulart, who attempted a series of timid but progressive reforms. Goulart’s three years in power were marked by a sharp rise in class polarization. Mass peasant organizations demanded land and workers demanded nationalizations of imperialist industries and increased social and political rights. Goulart maintained Brazil’s "non-aligned" foreign policy and normal relations with revolutionary Cuba. In 1964 Goulart was overthrown in a U.S.-backed military coup. Brazil was instantly aligned with U.S. imperialism’s regional policy. Relations with Cuba were severed. Democratic and workers rights were shattered, unions and strikes banned, and wages slashed. Huge loans from U.S. banks and imperialist institutions equipped the military and financed Brazil’s rapid semi-industrialization which was facilitated by high protectionist walls. This was the origins of the huge debt that has now become unpayable and unsustainable. Tens of thousands of Brazilians were imprisoned, tortured, "disappeared," and murdered under the military dictatorship, which was the first in a series of U.S.-backed and sustained bloody military governments which swept the continent in the 1970s. --I.N.]

For the last number of years the PT’s orientation has become increasingly electoralist. Elected PT mayors and governors administer a number of major cities, including Sao Paulo and Brasilia, and states. In power, PT administrations have focused on "clean government," minor reforms, and vague schemes of "participatory management" which do little to encroach on the prerogatives of capital.

Da Silva, a powerful orator and leader of the Metalworkers Union, was a central leader of a victorious strike by 120,000 auto workers in Sao Paulo’s industrial belt, defying the dictatorship’s ban on strikes and brutal repression. The victory was a turning point in the massive working-class upsurge that led to the organization of 15 million industrial workers in South America’s largest trade-union federation, the Central Unica dos Trabalhadores (CUT). The Workers Party was born out of those struggles and is closely linked to the trade union movement. In previous presidential elections in 1989 and 1994, da Silva saw huge leads in the polls evaporate by election day through dirty tricks, bribery, vicious media campaigns, and vote-rigging in the semi-feudal countryside. Da Silva won clear majorities in the major cities and industrial centers.

Brazil also has Latin America's most prominent and well-organized peasants movement, the Landless Peasants Movement (MST). Brazil has some 4-5 million landless peasant families. Formed in 1984, the MST, under the slogan "Occupy, resist, and produce," has engaged in mass peasant occupations of land to enforce provisions in Brazil’s constitution that says idle land should be distributed. The MST is historically linked to the urban working-class movement and the PT. MST leaders and activists has faced fierce repression from absentee semi-feudal landowners, backed by cops and death squads. [For a comprehensive and fascinating account of the MST’s origins, history, tactics, and political outlook see the recent interview with an MST leader in the New Left Review. Se also the interview with a leader of the MST in this issue of SeeingRed --I.N.]

At the end of June, da Silva held a 2-1 lead (40% to 20%) over current government Health Minister Jose Serra. Serra is the candidate of the capitalist government coalition of the outgoing, unpopular, neoliberal administration of President Fernando Henrique Cardosa. Serra is the blatantly favored candidate of Wall Street and the "investor community."

The persistence of da Silva’s lead as the election day approaches was the catalyst for the financial turmoil that has broken out. For foreign capital the forthcoming election is cause to increase the pressure on the Brazilian government and ruling classes to increase anti-labor austerity measures, and to divide the Workers Party and push it further to the right.

In recent weeks, Serra has been overtaken by another candidate, Ciro Gomes, a former state governor, who has also positioned himself on the left, as an alternative to da Silva. Gomes was briefly Finance Minister during the first term of President Cardosa until a very public split over Cardosa’s neoliberal economic policies. Gomes formed the social-democratic Popular Socialist Party and formed an electoral bloc with two other leftist groupings. He is campaigning as the candidate of the Workers Front.

He has also attracted the support of conservative forces, including the right-wing Liberal Front Party and the former President Fernando de Collar who resigned from office in 1992 in a lurid corruption scandal. These elements have factional grievances against the Cardosa government, which is a coalition of several competing bourgeois parties, see the Serra campaign as hapless, and are anxious to stop da Silva. Gomes has gone from 9% to 27% in the polls, while Serra has slipped to 14% and da Silva is at 35%. In the distorted prism of bourgeois electoral polling, it is nevertheless clear that a large majority of Brazilians are in favor of radical social change and a break with the neoliberal status quo.

The government and the IMF are stepping up efforts to get the Workers Party to formally back an accord with the IMF prior to the election pledging adherence to "sound economic policies," that is, the interests and demands of U.S. imperialism. The aim is to compromise da Silva and demoralize the PT through pre-election commitments to maintain essential neoliberal policies, especially debt payment.

Whoever is elected, the new regime in Brazil will almost immediately be faced with formal negotiations with the IMF. In December the IMF’s $15.6 billion "loan agreement" with Brazil runs out. It was concluded in 1998 during the last major crisis unleashed by the world panic from the currency crashes and series of economic collapses in a string of Asian countries from Thailand to Indonesia in 1997-98 which quickly spread to Brazil. Both da Silva and Gomes, under heavy pressure, have so far refused to sign an accord with the IMF before the election on the terms of a new "credit facility" when the current agreement expires.

Although da Silva personally has increasingly adapted to the imperialist pressure, the imperialists and Brazilian capitalists --fully aware of the looming economic crisis-- see behind him the growing turmoil in Latin America and the generalized resistance to bankrupt neoliberal measures. Despite da Silva’s repeated, public attempts to tamp down his radical, anti-capitalist history --in late June he selected a leading Brazilian capitalist and garment boss as his vice-presidential running mate-- the Brazilian bourgeoisie as a whole and their superiors in Washington and Wall Street view da Silva and his party, which is rooted in the working class and landless peasantry, as a wholly unreliable instrument.

To the Brazilian rulers and U.S. imperialism, the Workers Party is too close to the industrial working class and landless peasantry, too subject and vulnerable to its left-wing pressure, to protect and defend the interests of international and domestic capital. Minus a working-class upsurge in the streets that da Silva and the Workers Party could move to demonstratively derail, there is little he can do to convince the ruling class and imperialism of his "responsibility." [For an example of the fear and loathing for da Silva held by U.S. rightists see an hysterical piece in the 22 July Weekly Standard by former Reagan Administration National Security Council staff member Constantine Menges --I.N.]

A 27 July profile of da Silva in the New York Times underscores this unreliability of da Silva from the perspective of U.S. imperialism and the Brazilian bourgeoisie. Correspondent Larry Rohter writes, "Mr. Da Silva’s popularity has surged along with the opposition to free markets that is rising across Latin America, as it becomes clear that the wave of privatization and deregulation of the 1990’s did not bring prosperity, or even sustained growth."

Rohter cites an article in a top bourgeois newsmagazine which complains that every time da Silva "reformulates" a programmatic position it is followed by a "‘qualifier clause’ that seems intended to reassure the party’s leftist base that he will not betray them." Rohter describes the Workers Party as a "fractious leftist agglomeration that ranges from an unrepentant Trotskyite faction nicknamed the ‘Shiites’ to a group of European-style Socialists called ‘the pinks'."

The Workers Party platform is quoted as demanding a "necessary rupture" with current economic policies which are said to register "subordination to the interests and moods of globalized financial capital." Rohter quotes da Silva as saying, "Each country has its own economic model, its own tax policy, and Brazil needs to build its own. Brazil can’t be treated as if it were a colony. Brazil needs to think about what it wants, what the Brazilian people want." However vague and contentless such formulations are, they clearly refer to Washington and its IMF, and appeal to Brazilian nationalism and anti-imperialist sentiment that encompasses all social classes in the country.

Rohter cites da Silva as saying Brazil should not join Washington’s push for Free Trade in the Americas Act (FTAA) unless it is "truly fair and just" and does not exclude Cuba. Da Silva has traveled often to revolutionary Cuba and participated there in hemispheric and international conferences denouncing neoliberalism and U.S. policies and domination. He continues to identify with the Cuban Revolution and attack Washington’s economic and political war against the revolutionary island in terms that Washington finds unacceptable. Rohter also quotes da Silva’s opposition to U.S. president George W. Bush’s "war on terrorism," "I think that to want to resolve the problems of humanity by making war is not the best experience for mankind."

The Times piece quotes da Silva as saying, "I’ve changed more in form than in content." Jose Dirceu, the Workers Party president told the Times, that da Silva "is not proposing socialism in Brazil" but that a Workers Party victory would be a "rupture" with Brazilian history where "only the elite…elects presidents and controls power in this country, and we need to break with that so there can be popular participation in the management of the state." Dirceu traveled to New York in mid-July to meet with international bankers. He also set up meetings with U.S. trade-union organizations and activists.

Such statements register the pressure on da Silva from the workers and peasants and the limits on adaptation. In any case Washington requires capitulation, not simply adaptation.

This is doubly true in the context of deepening capitalist crisis and rising class struggle across South America. In addition there is growing nationalist sentiment in Brazil amid mounting pressures on its industry and trade by an increasingly aggressive and protectionist U.S. imperialism.

Da Silva is running on a program of preserving capitalist property relations and maintaining interest payments on Brazil’s $300 billion debt to foreign and domestic capital, and the continuity of current-president Cardosa’s economic policies, including dependency on loans and "guidance" from the IMF. At the same time da Silva appeals to Brazilian workers and peasants who have been the target of these same policies, and promises to alleviate their deteriorating social conditions. In the former stance da Silva adapts to the pressure of imperialism and the Brazilian bourgeoisie; in the latter he adapts to the pressure of the workers and peasants. The Workers Party is thereby an unreliable and inherently destabilizing instrument in the eyes of the Brazilian ruling class and its Washington creditors.

Their reaction --that is the reaction of capital-- to da Silva’s electoral popularity and large lead in the polls has been naked blackmail toward Brazilian voters: vote in Lula and we will make your life miserable, even more miserable than it already is. Reinaldo Gonzalvez of the Economic Institute of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, "These banks have led a neo-liberal sacking of our country and now they are trying to scare people into perpetuating a political order that serves only their narrow interests." [Cited in August 2002 Red Pepper article "Another World is Possible" by Roger Burbach. --I.N.]

Capital has demanded that da Silva publicly renounce his past and assure the super-rich of his "responsibility" to defend their interests above all else.

Da Silva responded on 23 June with a "Letter to the Brazilian People," which pledged he would do nothing to "destroy confidence in the capacity of the government to honor its commitments" and that his government would "respect…the countries contracts and obligations." This promise to continue paying the debt was slightly qualified with abstractions about "renegotiation." All such rhetoric is being overtaken by the sharp drops in the real at the end of July, which is drastically increasing the already unpayable and unsustainable debt. Lula’s obeisance to imperialist prerogatives does not change this objective reality.

According to an 'economic consultant' quoted in the 25 June New York Times, "Lula said everything we wanted to hear. I don’t think its going to change the perception of the market. It’s like a husband who cheats on his wife 365 days a year and then sends her flowers promising to be faithful."

Capital's fear and loathing of a Workers Party victory --despite Lula's increasingly servile opportunism-- stems from the tens of millions of militant workers and landless peasants who view the Workers Party as their own instrument to defend their class interests and the national patrimony of Brazil.

Da Silva referred in his "Letter" to the need for a "new economic model." But, he said, this "cannot be made overnight" or "imposed." This is actually utopian demagogy. There is nothing new about attempts to thread a needle between capitalism and policies that consciously promote a transition from capitalism to socialism. Such "Third Way" policies in the name of a more "humane," "progressive," "Green," or "anti-monopoly" capitalism have been a staple of social-democratic and Stalinist programs in advanced capitalist countries for many decades.

In imperialist-dominated, Third World countries like Brazil, they function as a deadly maneuver periodically used to herd struggling workers and farmers into a dead-end for slaughter. Few countries in Latin America have not been through this disastrous experience.

A policy for Brazil that actually defends the interests of workers and farmers begins with a unilateral cancellation of the debt; nationalization of the land leading to massive distribution to peasant families; public works programs and jobs at union wages to end the scourge of unemployment; the indexing of wages to inflation; nationalization of the banking system, continuing on to and state controls on the export and import of capital --leading to a state monopoly of foreign trade-- and the revolutionary transformation of education and health care. The experience and example of revolutionary Cuba shows that such policies are possible as well as necessary.

Yet however much da Silva adapts to imperialist demands, a Workers Party administration will be in a dynamic position and relation to its mass base, its pressure, interests, and demands --and is far more likely to adapt to these than the other political formations directly rooted in Brazilian capital and its dependent relation to world imperialism.

Rising expectations would thus be an inevitable outcome of a Workers Party victory. Bourgeois politics would shift sharply to the left. Da Silva, caught between conflicting class pressures, will facilitate class polarization, class struggle, and openings for revolutionary regroupment.

The Campaign to Stop Lula

Such a prospect, in the explosive political context of a Latin America gripped by generalized debt meltdown, is not a pretty one for either the Brazilian bourgeoisie or Washington.

Therefore, it can be expected that everything possible, every dirty trick and media slander campaign, every bribe, including the rigging and buying of votes, especially in the semi-feudal countryside (as was done in the 1989 and 1994 elections, where da Silva’s huge poll leads disappeared by election day) will be employed to prevent a Workers Party election victory. If these "moderate" traditional methods fall short this time, then direct police and military repression, reactivation of right-wing death squads carrying out assassination and disappearances will be organized with the covert assistance of Washington. [In recent years three Workers Party mayors have been assassinated along with many MST activists. Many others from both groups have been arrested and tortured by police in cahoots with rightist gangs. --I.N.]

Should all of that fail to prevent an electoral victory for da Silva and the Workers Party, then Washington, its Embassy/CIA, and its "friends" in the Brazilian military officer caste will begin to prepare for a coup should Lula adapt too much to the workers and peasants and not enough to the capitalist class and imperialism.

The persistence and widening of da Silva’s electoral lead undoubtedly sparked the sell-off in Brazilian financial markets and the dumping of its currency on world markets, but it would be one-sidedly formal to say it is the cause of the deepening crisis. Lula’s lead is more accurately the pretext and natural political form for the inevitable surfacing of a problem that is objective and structural --the unsustainability of Brazil’s ever-growing debt payments which is destabilizing social relations.

But no matter how fearful peoples' resistance to debt-driven austerity and collapse is to the imperialists, the crisis-ridden world capitalist order depends on this debt slavery. It requires the permanent transfer of capital and money from the Third World into imperialist banks and other institutions. The never-ending and ever-increasing interest payments from countries like Brazil sustains their entire rotten, exploitative system.

This contradiction between the requirements in the two poles of the imperialist world order is at the center of world politics.

Alongside and intertwined with the impact of the post-bubble burst and the ongoing series of accounting flimflams and mammoth bankruptcies surfacing with the end of the artificial boom, resistance to 'neoliberal globalization' (i.e., imperialist exploitation) in Latin America has become a factor in the vulnerability of the foundations of capitalist confidence and structures in the United States and other top capitalist powers.

Latin America has entered a period of permanent crisis, permanent resistance, and permanent polarization. The foundations of the relatively stable period of semi-colonial parliamentary democracy that set in after more than a decade of military dictatorships and the crushing of revolutionary guerrilla movements is now steadily eroding and has no solutions to the crisis.

Thirty-five years after the heroic Latin American revolutionary Marxist Ernesto Che Guevara failed in his attempt to extend the Cuban socialist revolution on a continental scale through rural-based guerrilla war against U.S.-backed military regimes, the objective conditions for a revolutionary, continental strategy are rapidly emerging again. This time, however, they emerge under the conditions of far greater political space of decaying semi-colonial bourgeois democracy that no longer constrain revolutionaries to guerrilla tactics.

Mounting class battles across the length and width of South America --despite today's lack of competent, revolutionary leadership anywhere outside of Cuba-- register the end of the neoliberal detour of the Latin American class struggle. Out of this, working-class and peasant heirs of Che will step towards assuming his legacy of struggle for the revolutionary transformation of Latin America and the Caribbean from imperialist domination and capitalist misery.

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