The War on Democracy

Hugo Ch?vez:
[speaks Spanish; subtitles read:] I was born in a very poor home, a peasant home. And so I experienced poverty. I was a poor child, barefoot. My father was a teacher at a rural school, and my mother too.

Hugo Ch?vez:
[speaks Spanish; subtitles read:] I had a beautiful grandmother, she was Indian, she filled me with love. She taught me a lot, and I learnt from her about solidarity with other people. About sharing bread, even if there's little to eat.

Narrator:
Simon Bolivar is venerated in Latin America as the liberator from Spanish colonialism. Bolivar believed that freedom only came when people united against *all* invaders, no matter their disguise.

Narrator:
Today, the people of Latin America are again rising up, against an empire built on an extreme form of capitalism known as the Washington Consensus. Whole countries have been privatized, put up for sale, their natural wealth sold to foreign companies for peanuts. In Venezuela they have said "No more!"

Narrator:
Now, all over Venezuela, ordinary people have free health care, many seeing a doctor for the first time in their lives... Under the constitution, the poorest housewives are now paid as workers.

Phillp Agee:
The true goal of the U.S. government is control. And they feel that if the U.S. did not control the governments of Latin America, then somebody else would. And the principle of "government by the people for the people" that is... that's just silly.