Morning Star editor BEN CHACKO reports from the start of Kunming’s Belt and Road media forum, where 200 journalists from 71 countries celebrated a new openness and optimism, forged by China’s enormous contribution to global development

ON February 3, exactly 25 years ago, Hugo Chavez Frias was inaugurated as president of the then Republic of Venezuela. Under his political leadership it would, in less than a year, become the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, unleashing a process of radical transformation that would not only transform his country but that would catapult him and his nation into the vanguard of the struggle against neoliberalism.
In fact, the 1999 Bolivarian constitution of Venezuela was the first anti-neoliberal constitution of the whole continent after a brutal three decades of savage capitalism imposed under the dominant Washington consensus that followed the US-led military coup which ousted democratically elected president Salvador Allende in 1973.
The appeal of Chavez’s Bolivarian revolution was so strong that other countries, in their own nationally specific ways, in what is known as the “pink tide,” followed suit by adopting similar policies to address the inequities created by capitalism in their own states.

US baseless accusations of drug trafficking and the outrageous putting of a bounty on a president of a sovereign country do not bode well, reports PABLO MERIGUET


