Niall Ferguson, author of Empire: How Britain Made The Modern World, currently Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University is also a columnist for the new look, revamped Sunday Telegraph, the bastion of the British Conservative establishment. Another of the establishment newspapers, The Times, once described Ferguson as: ‘The most brilliant British historian of his generation’. What will the conservative pundits in the UK and the neo-conservatives in the US say of his journalism I wonder?

For instance, following in the footsteps of the New York Times (see Reg Lee’s ‘“The U.S. Media and Latin American Revolutionary Activity”:http://www.fifth-estate-online.co.uk/comment/usmedia.html’), Ferguson issued a warning to George W. Bush about the revolutionary activity currently underway in Latin America. As revealed in the New York Times the US establishment have for sometime been alarmed by the neglect of the Bush government of what is often referred to as the ‘US backyard’. Ferguson, who is a part of the British establishment with useful US contacts no doubt has decided to join in the chorus for action against the turn to Socialism in Latin America.

Under the headline: ‘Meanwhile … have you seen what’s been happening in the Bush’s backyard?’ (Sunday Telegraph February 12th 2006) Ferguson compiled what at times is quite evidently a British tabloid rant against the changes currently underway in Latin America. Added to the heading is the sub-title: ‘While the White House and the world focus on the Middle East, much of South America is turning against the US’.

Ferguson also claims that whilst the world’s headlines have focused recently on the Danish cartoons and their impact on the Islamic-Western relations ‘a region much closer to home has been quietly spinning out of American control’. It’s an interesting use of the word ‘home’ used within the context of a British Sunday newspaper but with clear reference to the US and Latin America. As far as Ferguson is concerned Denmark may well be geographically closer to the UK, but ideologically and politically it is the US that Ferguson perceives as the spiritual ‘home’.

In the true spirit of tabloid subtlety he refers to the legitimately elected President of Bolivia as ‘coca-chewing populist Evo Morales’. Ollanta Humala of Peru is a ‘militant’ and Andrés Manuel López Obrador is ‘staunchly anti-gringo’. As the Glasgow Media Group’s research on the British media’s approach to employment disputes revealed, trade unionists were often referred to as ‘militants’, whilst the management were positively ‘moderate’ and ‘reasonable’. Ferguson’s smear tactic is an old tried and tested formula to discredit alternative political theories to established norms, but clearly it’s also an overt attempt to join the propaganda chorus currently urging the leaders of the West to take action on what is happening ‘closer to home’.

At the time of writing, perhaps Ferguson was unaware of the recent media developments that have taken place throughout parts of the region. For instance the Venezuelan based pan-American Telesur news channel was launched with the financial backing of Argentina, Venezuela and Cuba and this is a clear indication that alternative perspectives towards society and development are not simply a flash in the pan. Of course the development of Telesur signifies not only opposition to US political and economic dominance but also it signifies a new struggle of ideas. A new historical moment is certainly developing in the dialectic.

Writers such as Ferguson will detest this latest attempt to entrench Socialism and produce an alternative viewpoint to Fox News, CNN etc., and in many ways this development of a pan-American TV channel is a manifestation of the debate concerning who controls not only the means of communication but also the means of production. This is alluded to by Ferguson who alerts us to the threat posed to the basic tenets of Liberal theory in the ‘US Backyard’ where he states that:

‘you don’t need to go all the way to the Middle East – where Palestinians have just voted overwhelmingly for the zealots of Hamas – to find evidence that democracy doesn’t always produce liberal governments. Sometimes it can produce governments that explicitly promise to violate property and political rights’.

Earlier in his article he states that Latin American governments are out to ‘repudiate existing contracts’ or to put it another way, perhaps Latin American governments want only to rethink the process of exploitation by Western companies with the explicit support of their respective governments.

Ferguson has every reason to be concerned because his defence of ‘private property’ and all that entails is increasingly under threat. For Ferguson the large scale ownership of property is a ‘political right’, but in Latin America it has created a huge gulf between rich and poor – large profits for companies who have this ‘right’ pitted against inhumane levels of poverty.

In Bolivia, which is the poorest country in the region, this has led the Morales government to renegotiate prices with big business to alleviate the hardship that the poor have to endure on a daily basis. If talks fail, there is the possibility that land redistribution and nationalisation will be the only option for the Bolivian government.

Take the issue concerning the privatisation of water that started in 1997, increasing prices in the process in a society where seventy per cent of the population live beneath the poverty line. The American company Bechtel was previously responsible for the Cochabamba region and the French company Suez, which partly owns Aguas del Illimani, is responsible for La Paz and the El Alto region. As Jim Shultz has already stated the ‘World Bank made privatisation of water a condition of a loan to the Bolivian government’ (See ‘The Second Water War in Bolivia’ at ZNet). Suez has already initiated legal action against the Bolivian government (See www.funsolon.civiblog.org) for wanting a renegotiation of water charges with a view to producing affordable prices, so that the poor can access clean water rather than having to capture rainwater in the crevices of tin sheeting to survive!

So Mr Ferguson, is it any wonder change is underway in a region where liberal and neo-liberal policies has failed miserably to rid people of the poverty they currently have to endure in order to satisfy profits of foreign companies who seek to exploit Latin Americans?