---

Latin America

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North (Jeremy Corbyn), who has few peers in Parliament in terms of his commitment to the people of Latin America. What is so interesting about Latin America is that it was the first continent to have neo-liberalism imposed on it, beginning with the coup in Chile on 11 September 1973. It is heartening that the mass of people on whom the neo-liberal experiment has been tried have rejected it, and we can draw some lessons from that as we face the current economic crisis. I will avoid the temptation to praise the 50 years of the Cuban revolution and to be slightly critical of our policy in Columbia, because—surprise, surprise—I want to deal mainly with the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Venezuela is a pretty inoffensive country; indeed, the only two facts that I knew about it before I became involved were that it quite often won the Miss World competition and that it never qualified for the World cup. However, I have now dug a bit deeper, and it was a question to our former Prime Minister that got me really interested in Venezuela. As I said, Venezuela is a pretty inoffensive country. We have never been at war with it; in fact, Venezuelans feel historical connections with Britain because of our support for them in the war of independence and because Bolivar lived in London for a time. However, if I were a Venezuelan—certainly a supporter of the majority—I would be slightly uneasy about the British Government's stance towards Venezuela in the past few years. Let me begin with former Prime Minister Blair's reply to my question. He said:""It is rather important that the Government of Venezuela realise that if they want to be respected members of the international community, they should abide by the rules of the international community."—[Official Report, 8 February 2006; Vol. 442, c. 873.]" There was no substantiation of those comments, which were not well received in Venezuela. In addition, a Foreign Office Minister was—how can I put this diplomatically?—ambivalent about the coup in Venezuela. I will push it no further than that. We then have the dodgy statistics. Another previous Foreign Office Minister—the Minister's predecessor—used a series of statistics from something called Transparency International in Venezuela to substantiate claims of corruption there. Unfortunately, some of the personnel who staffed Transparency International in Venezuela took part in the coup against Chavez. The organisation is hardly independent, and I urge Ministers to stop using such dodgy statistics. It is important to address some of the misinformation that the international and British media have perpetuated about Chavez and the process of change in Venezuela. It is worth knowing that there were no halcyon days of neo-liberalism, when private companies were rampant across Latin America. Venezuela tried the neo-liberal model, but it led to deep inequality and poverty, despite the country's vast potential wealth. I have checked the figures, and more than 50 per cent. of the population lived in poverty, with 20 per cent. in extreme poverty. One in five children suffered from malnutrition. In 1995—before Chavez—the figures peaked, with 75 per cent. of the population living in poverty. The experiment with neo-liberalism and free-market capitalism was not a success, which explains the victory of Chavez in the late 1990s.