Staff Reporter
Windhoek-Affirmative Repositioning (AR) co-founder Job Amupanda is in Caracas, Venezuela on the invitation of that country’s government which said it needed him to join voices against supremacist ideologies of the West.
The Venezuelan Embassy in Windhoek extended the invitation to Amupanda, a University of Namibia political science lecturer and an activist, who has been on collision course with the Namibian government over the issue of land distribution in the country.
Amupanda yesterday told New Era that one of his contributions upon arrival in Caracas was to call for an inward-looking declaration of the Third World, which continues to be at the mercy of neo-liberal foreign policies of powerful capitalist nations.
He observed that there were concerted efforts under way to roll back the gains of the Bolivarian Revolution – an ongoing leftist political process in Venezuela initiated by late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez.
The revolution is named after Simón Bolívar, an early 19th-century Venezuelan and Latin American revolutionary leader, prominent in the Spanish American wars of independence in achieving the independence of most of northern South America from Spanish rule.
According to Chávez and other supporters, the Bolivarian Revolution seeks to build an inter-American coalition to implement Bolivarianism, nationalism, and a state-led economy.
Chávez, Amupanda observed, was trying to use the revolution to unite the Global South – as middle and lower-income countries are sometimes referred to as.
“Before he died, he wrote a letter to Africa not only tracing historical links between Africa and Latin America – biological and ancestral – but also calling for a new solidarity with and amongst nations of the Global South,” Amupanda explained.
He believes the Caracas Declaration, adopted at the 10th Inter-American Conference in Caracas, held from 1954, March 1 to 28, presents an opportunity for what he termed “diplomacy of the people”.
“This is what Hugo Chávez would want to see us do, as we visit his homeland, from his revolutionary seat he is occupying from ancestry,” he said. He described the gathering as “progressive” and said it aroused a sense of radical politics in him.