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Editor’s letter newint.org
A mark on history
The last time I wrote an editor’s letter, Hugo Chávez had just been re-elected president in Venezuela. This time, his death, after weeks of mounting speculation, has been announced.
During the media blackout while he lay in hospital, his opponents exercised their vituperation, his followers offered prayers. According to the country’s Constitution, fresh elections will need to be held within 30 days.
For now, amid fears of public disorder and political succession, it is difficult not to wonder what the mark of his leadership will be on history. The sheer scale of the deployment of the nation’s wealth (mainly oil resources) towards provision for the poorest is impossible to ignore, despite the criticisms of megalomania or even corruption. Will the Bolivarian revolution that he spearheaded, which has brought land reform, free healthcare, education and, more recently, free or affordable housing to millions, now falter, at a time when the world is more ready than ever for a genuine politics of equality?
If Chávez’s claims sometimes seemed grandiose, the venom of his moneyed opponents was usually more unreal. One Venezuelan expatriate I met insisted that everything Chávez claimed to have achieved was lies regardless of proof; wealthy parts of the country should secede; the poor were being misled. The conviction with which this was said reinforced a cliché – money does strange things to people.
In this edition we discuss the amazing Venezuelan project to build three million homes – public housing to shelter the most vulnerable. Its future will depend on Venezuela’s political leadership after Chávez.
Also in this issue, Jeremy Keenan offers an alternative explanation for what happened at the Tiguentourine gas plant in Algeria in January – with Algeria’s secret service heavily implicated in both the kidnappings and the bloodbath that followed. And fi lm director Ken Loach talks to us about his political passions and inspirations.
Next month our focus moves from housing to land and the urgent issue of what massive land grabs in the Majority World mean to the people on the ground. ■
DINYAR GODREJ for the New Internationalist Co-operative newint.org
This month’s contributors include:
Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore, originally from Britain, is Books Editor for Time Out Beijing. She has lived in China since 2009 and has written for a wide variety of publications, mainly on the arts, culture and current affairs.
Miguel Araoz Cartagena is a visual artist born in Cusco, Peru. He lives and paints life from the South. For more about his work, see miguelaraoz.com
Lindsey Collen originally South African, has lived in Mauritius since 1974 and wrote the NI’s monthly Letter from... column in 2006-7. A journalist and activist, she is also an award-winning novelist whose books include The Rape of Sita and Boy.
Iris Gonzales is a Filipino journalist. She covers economic news for a Manila broadsheet, and is a regular blogger for New Internationalist. She also has her own blog covering various issues including human rights. irisgonzales.blogspot.co.uk
Coming next month
Land grabs It’s been labelled ‘the Earth’s final round-up’. Investors are seeking to annex forests and farmland, anticipating food shortages, dwindling oil stocks and poor financial returns elsewhere.
We are four years into the phenomenon. And while the pace has slowed, the global rush for land in the developing world is still on. In next month’s issue of New Internationalist, we travel to Mozambique – one of Africa’s fastest-growing economies, where the drive to investment is intense. We meet rural communities dispossessed by powerful companies, speak to subsistence farmers at odds with Scandinavian foresters, Indian rice giants and biofuel projects. But, as well as the woes, we will hear about growing SouthSouth resistance to unbalanced deals.
Land grabs lie at the heart of development debates today. Will Majority World nations take the easy option, outsourcing agriculture and buying into the quick-fix private-sector promise to end poverty? Or will they tackle hunger direct, by supporting long-neglected smallholder farmers? Do ‘win-win’ deals even exist? The path that governments choose will determine whether the peasants of today hold on to community land rights or become landless labourers of the future.
N e w I n t e r n at i o n a l i s t ● A P R I L 2 013 ● 3
