Uruguay signs deal with Venezuela

[Say_What]

<clips>

A day after his inauguration as Uruguay's first left-wing President, Tabare Vazquez has signed an energy deal with the Venezuelan leader.

Mr Vazquez and President Hugo Chavez agreed to exchange Uruguayan food for Venezuelan fuel, and to work together on a state-run regional TV channel.

President Vazquez restored full diplomatic relations with Cuba immediately after being sworn in.

Uruguay is the fifth Latin American nation to move to the left.

Venezuela, Chile, Brazil and Argentina also have left-wing governments.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4312181.stm

---

Latest report from NACLA:

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: BUILDING FROM THE GROUND UP

By NACLA

One of the major contradictions in the Americas today is that between the included and the excluded—those who can regularly participate in the formal institutions of society, politics and the economy, and those who are able to do so only intermittently, or not at all. This Report examines the self-organization of the excluded into movements struggling for inclusion, and for the creation of “another world” within which that inclusion is possible.

Despite their great diversity, what unites the movements considered in this Report is their common global perspective: their loose integration into a broader global movement fighting against a world order called “neoliberal.” They have been drawn, that is, into global debates about democratic change, universal social justice and meaningful political participation.

In some cases, as with Brazil’s landless or southern Mexico’s insurgent peasantry, the exclusion of vast segments of the population dates back to the Iberian Conquests of the Sixteenth Century, and even earlier. In other cases, as with the working poor in Argentina and Venezuela, exclusion has been built into contemporary urban structures. But in all cases, it has been exacerbated to crisis proportions by the region’s current model of neoliberal social and economic development, a model premised upon the systematic exclusion of certain segments of the population from meaningful participation.

Neoliberalism arose in the early 1980s when, faced with falling commodity prices, rising international interest rates and a sizable debt burden contracted largely under dubious circumstances, most Latin American countries, as a condition for being “rescued” by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), were obliged to adopt a series of “market-based” economic reforms, including zero-deficit public budgets that quickly became “austerity budgets” throughout the Americas.

http://www.nacla.org/art_display.php?art=2526