Posted on 03/30/2006 11:16:05 AM PST by anglian
Venezuela and the Latin American New Left: Chávez’s Influence Continues to Spread Throughout the Continent
• The inauguration of Tabaré Vázquez in Uruguay shows that Latin America’s democratic march to the left continues, and could be a forerunner to Mexico’s 2006 presidential election.
• The Bush administration, already uncomfortable with Latin America’s new left, would become apoplectic if this movement reached the U.S.-Mexican border. A López Obrador victory in the Mexican election would signal the ultimate domino falling.
• Bush’s Latin America team fails to understand that the model of the new left in Latin America today is less Che Guevara than FDR and Tony Blair’s British Labor Party.
• The growing center-left ideological tilt among Latin American states is symptomatic of a growing movement towards a continental alliance and a political stance markedly different from that being fielded by the U.S.
On March 1, Uruguayans inaugurated their first ever left-of-center president. This event shattered the power-sharing arrangement that had existed for the last 170 years between the moderate Colorado and Blanco parties. This arrangement, which in many ways mirrored the near half century reign of the similar power-sharing Punto Fijo pact in Venezuela between the Christian Democrats (COPEI) and Democratic Action (AD), ended last October when Uruguayans elected Dr. Tabaré Vázquez, an oncologist, who ran on an anti-neoliberal platform. Vázquez was not the standard bearer of any well entrenched political party but the leader of a medley of relatively small movements that joined together under his Broad Front (Frente Amplio) coalition. The major issue Washington will be watching in the months ahead is not whether Vázquez will chart a leftist course, but just how left-of-center that course will be. Will he adopt a concertación style of government as seen in Chile, a balancing act between populist demands and IMF mandates as in Brazil, or a frontal assault on Washington – at least rhetorically – like Venezuela under Hugo Chávez?
Nothing too Radical It is difficult to divine how Uruguay’s new president will deal with the threefold challenge posed by his country’s crippling debt, widespread poverty and high unemployment rate, all of which were exacerbated by Argentina’s 2001 crash. Those in the coalition’s far left-wing will want him to challenge the IMF’s prescriptions at every turn; but, unlike Argentina under Nestor Kirchner, Vázquez has given no indication that he will default on his country’s foreign loans. To the contrary, his choice for economy and finance minister, Danilo Astori, is viewed by observers as cautious and conservative. Astori, as reported in the Economist, believes that “Brazil played a central role to prove that a leftist government can be compatible with rigorous fiscal behavior.” Given that Vazquez’s likely economic model will be similar to the Keynesian model to which other new left governments in the region have turned, what does the Uruguayan leader’s victory mean for the future of the continent’s resurgent left-leaning movement?
Will the Region’s New Left Movement March North? In an interview with COHA, Professor Peter H. Smith of the Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies at the University of California in San Diego said “The greatest significance for Latin America is whether Vázquez’s victory is part of a trend that culminates in a win for López Obrador in the upcoming Mexican elections.” In the event of a López Obrador victory, Smith continued, “Washington would really start to worry. That would mean a major tilt in the [ideological] balance of the hemisphere.”
So far, Latin America’s leftward shift has been relegated to the southern continent. However, a López Obrador victory could precipitate a tectonic shift for the Bush administration’s ill-reputed Latin America team from grudging acceptance of South America’s left-of-center governments to the use of Cold War-style tactics against them. Even though López Obrador, as the candidate of Mexico’s left-leaning PRD party, appears to be moderate, the prospect of another new left administration – this time right on the U.S. border – would be all but intolerable to the administration’s nostalgic cold war ideologues. A López Obrador victory particularly would upset Eliot Abrams, that self-confessed perjurer and booster for Central America’s death squads in the 1980s who now serves as Bush’s Deputy National Security Advisor and Roger Noriega, the assistant secretary for the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs. Both men see regional policy exclusively through an anti-Havana prism and hardly can be comfortable with Latin America lurching in the direction of everything they loath.
One would think the Bush administration would not get so flustered by Latin America’s new left regimes, as they are all democratic, practice at least a ‘soft’ neoliberalism and are only in the earliest stages of coalescing into a regional EU-like bloc. While most other administrations would likely brush off the continent’s new left tilt as a natural consequence of the region’s disenchantment with the unfulfilled promises of free trade and free markets as the guarantors of social justice, the current White House will see it as a frontal challenge. This is because Bush’s Latin America team, led by Noriega and Abrams, make no distinction between Fidel Castro and anyone who sports a red beret or spouts anti-Yanqui rhetoric.
A New Left Oil Bloc? While the U.S. is forced to barely tolerate Chávez so long as he keeps the oil flowing, a López Obrador victory in Mexico next year would likely scorch Washington policymakers, especially if he reverses Vicente Fox’s policy and reaches out to Castro as have Chávez, Lula, Kirchner and Vázquez. If he wins, the administration will then be faced with four left-of-center hemispheric powerhouses: Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. The nightmare scenario for the Bush team would then be Chávez inviting López Obrador and Mexico’s state owned oil company, Pemex, into a cooperative arrangement with the Venezuelan leader’s oil trading bloc, “Petrosur,” which already includes Argentina and, as of March 2, Uruguay. Given that Mexico and Venezuela are two of the U.S.’ top four sources of foreign oil imports (behind Saudi Arabia and Canada), a combined Obrador-Chávez alliance would account for upwards of a quarter of all U.S. petroleum imports. One can pretty easily anticipate how the Bush administration would react to such a petro bloc emerging, recalling Henry Kissinger’s old adage that any threat to Saudi oil exports to the U.S. would be a casus belli.
Regime change – Cold War style The archetypal models for Washington-orchestrated regime change in Latin America against left-leaning democracies were Guatemala in 1954 and Chile in 1973. In the latter instance, Salvador Allende – a man as devoted to constitutional democracy as to his socialist ideals and who didn’t jail even one political prisoner in his three years in office – was toppled by a coup with the Nixon administration’s blessing and support. In Kissinger’s infamous words, “I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.”
The theoretical justification for this view can be found in the work of another Reagan era cold war zealot, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Jeane Kirkpatrick. In her book, Democracy and Double Standards, Kirkpatrick wrote that, “rightist authoritarian regimes can be transformed peacefully into democracies, but totalitarian Marxist ones cannot. They can be changed only by aiding armed opponents of communism. In the final analysis these enemies of freedom can only be deterred from greater aggression . . . by the military capacities of the United States.” Translation: better dead than red. It was precisely this jesuitic justification for supporting any tin-horn dictator or death squads that simply claimed to be anti-communist that lead to U.S. complicity in the hundreds of thousands of deaths in Central America’s “dirty wars” of the 80s.
Though the current administration has so far not done anything as brazen in Latin America as Nixon and Kissinger routinely did in terms of destroying democracy in order to save it, when confronted with a choice between backing authoritarian regimes friendly to U.S. interests or free-wheeling democracies, it has unfailingly opted for the former. In 2002, the Bush administration, after having channeled funds to the Venezuelan opposition, openly endorsed the coup against Chávez before hastily retracting that position once the coup failed. As usual in interventions of this kind, U.S. support of the minority opposition resulted directly into swelling the majority of the population’s support for Washington’s self-denominated foe.
In February of last year, the administration arranged the de facto ouster of Haiti’s first democratically elected leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Since then, it has failed to publicly condemn human rights violations under interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue’s bankrupt regime, nor has it tried to ensure that the island’s majority party, Fanmi Lavalas, can participate safely in next fall’s scheduled elections. These examples demonstrate that contrary to President Bush’s words in his last inaugural address that “America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling. Our goal, instead, is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom, and make their own way,” his administration is quite firmly prepared to sabotage Latin America’s ‘own way’ to democracy if it differs from Washington’s.
But Just How Left-wing Are They? In contrast to right-wing jitters over Latin America’s “rising red tide,” a sober look at these governments – certainly Brazil, Argentina and even Venezuela – reveals a significant gap between their anti-neoliberal rhetoric and their actual economic policies. While bashing the IMF and the World Bank has become the region’s polemical norm, no leader – not even Chávez – is seriously contemplating a wholesale rejection of the basic principles of Keynesian economics even if some, like Kirchner, challenge IMF mandates. What this means is that Latin America’s new left governments will favor mixed markets modeled on the post World War II monetarist policies of social democratic European states, like Clement Atlee’s Britain. Befitting this pattern, as Latin America’s new left-of-center states go about creating safety nets for the poor, they continue to court foreign investment and encourage capitalist ventures to help pay for them. As the Economist rightly notes, “While Mr. Castro makes it spitefully difficult to set up even the smallest of micro-enterprises as a private business, his Venezuelan counterpart is cheerfully ploughing funds into the creation of as many small entrepreneurs as possible.”
Latin America’s New Deal On the gap between the theory and practice of the new left in Latin America, as can be seen in Chávez’s government, Dr. James Petras of the University of New York at Binghamton has written that, “The euphoria of the left prevents them from observing the pendulum shifts in Chávez’s discourse and the heterodox social welfare and neoliberal economic politics he has consistently practiced.” Confirming Chávez’s progressive bona fides while at the same time calling attention to his standard Keynesian economic policy, Professor Petras writes that the Venezuelan leader’s “policy has always followed a careful balancing act between rejecting vassalage to the U.S. and local oligarchic rentiers on the one hand and trying to harness a coalition of foreign national investors . . . He is closer to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal than Castro’s Socialist revolution.”
None of the above is meant to suggest that the region’s leaders have not made significant strides towards alleviating poverty and hunger. To the contrary, Lula and Chávez have enacted some of South America’s bolder initiatives in order to reduce the region’s draconian levels of inequality. The important point is that while the new left-of-center governments are launching many New Deal-style reformist initiatives, the core free market structures remain intact. Accordingly, if Vázquez follows Latin America’s other neo New Dealers, we can expect the following from his Broad Front administration: first, a neoliberal economic policy coupled with a politically left agenda; second, interest in revivifying the Pan-American ideal, currently modeled on Chávez’s Bolivarian dream of South America as a regional economic hegemon; third, a gradual turning away from Washington politically, if not economically. An amalgam of these three creedal beliefs – Keynesian economics hitched to left-of-center politics, intra rather than interhemispheric integration and a gradual shift towards Europe and Asia is probably the most apt description of the new variant of leftism being displayed in Latin America today. If Vázquez ends up fitting this mold, then we can expect him to be far more like Lula and even Chávez than Fox and Alvaro Uribe of Colombia.
The Drive Toward Intrahemispheric Trade Though efforts to strengthen MERCOSUR, the South American Common Market, have been somewhat disappointing, Brazil and Venezuela have retarded and maybe even shut down Washington’s push for the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). This integrationist approach is likely to advance at least as long as Washington continues its duplicitous subsidization of U.S. agriculture while preaching the virtues of free trade to its southern neighbors. As part of the region’s Pan-American drive for Latin unity, we will see further moves toward solidifying a South American trade bloc, such as Chavez’s proposal for ALBA, the Bolivarian Alternative for America. Eduardo Duhalde, former president of Argentina, already has declared that “our mirror will be the European Union, with all its institutions.” Following this trend, on March 2, Vázquez signed the “Declaration of Montevideo” with Chávez. The significance of this agreement, which brings Uruguay into Venezuela-sponsored Petrosur, is that it is one more step, albeit a small one, in the direction of intrahemispheric trade and cooperation and away from Washington’s preferred plans for multilateral, interhemispheric trade.
What to Look for in the Future Could the next step be a single South American currency modeled after the euro? If López Obrador wins, that possibility could be on the docket and certainly Chávez –notwithstanding Washington’s fear of another debilitating blow against the dollar, as happened with the advent of the euro – will continue pushing for it. Meanwhile, the danger Latin America’s New Dealers face is that Bush’s cabal of neoconservatives does not seem to realize that having an occasional dinner with Castro does not make one a Che Guevara. In Professor Smith’s words, “Vázquez needs to court Castro because if he can’t deliver to his base materially then he can at least deliver symbolically. But politically, he will throw his lot in with Kirchner and Lula.” Unfortunately, if the past is to be our guide, there is no indication that Washington has the patience or wisdom to interpret such courting as merely symbolic.
This analysis was authored by COHA Senior Research Fellow, Seth R. DeLong, Ph.D.
March 8, 2005
The Council on Hemispheric Affairs, founded in 1975, is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan, tax-exempt research and information organization. It has been described on the Senate floor as being “one of the nation’s most respected bodies of scholars and policy makers.” For more information, please see our web page at http://www.coha.org/
Frontrunner Andrés Manuel López Obrador begins to extend his lead, and is now coming to dominate all political discourse in the country
The near slanderous attacks by López Obrador’s opponents reflect a growing level of desperation, and are likely to backfire
A disintegrating PRI will profoundly alter Mexico’s political landscape
Spain’s Aznar continues his darkling political path
Nearly two months after the three major candidates in Mexico’s presidential race launched their official campaigns on January 19, attention remains almost entirely riveted on current front-runner, the PRD candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The nearly unassailable popularity of the former Mexico City mayor, who is often identified as the country’s “pink tide” option, has begun to infect his opponents’ campaigns with an increasing dosage of desperation. At the same time, it is more and more unlikely that the obsessive attack strategies that López Obrador’s rivals have adopted in recent days will bear political fruit, and some feel that the salvos of negative campaigning will ultimately consume their authors. What is certain, however, is that the overwhelming focus on the high-riding perredista candidate, both domestically and internationally, has affected every facet of the campaign.
The Aznar Blight The campaign has intensified since the January kick off, and its singular leitmotif has become the negativity and bitterness that has been engendered. The growth of spleen has been spurred by several factors, including the growing acrimony between López Obrador and the ruling PAN government of Vicente Fox and its candidate, Felipe Calderón. Such discord was fostered by the bizarre February 21 visit to Mexico City by former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar, where he publicly endorsed Calderón as the only safe route forward for Mexico. The hard right former political figure, after having become totally discredited at home, and a veritable Flying Dutchman abroad as he bears his ultramontane orb and mace, is now funded by uncertain sources for a variety of unsavory causes with Latin America’s “pink tide” countries drawing his particular ire. With a political message that represents an extreme interpretation of Opus Dei, stresses the institutional virtues of the armed forces, and is infused with an air of Pinochet-like odium for the left, Aznar, like a vulture circling over what he sees as the corruption of the liberal creed, has been laughed out of the Mexican presidential debate.
A Political Fortress López Obrador has maintained his lead in most polls, with recent surveys by the Mexico City daily El Universal suggesting that he has opened a ten point spread over the ruling party (PAN) candidate Felipe Calderón, who has 32%, with the PRI’s Roberto Madrazo fatally lagging at 24%. These numbers certainly project a number of trends. First, López Obrador’s campaign has begun to gather the momentum that it had lost during the tensely dramatic primary contests to be found in both the PRI and the PAN, which attracted concentrated media attention and diverted the focus from the PRD. Second, Madrazo’s inability to approach and go beyond the 30% mark indicates that his party’s toxic reputation for vast stretches of corruption, human rights abuses, and other social pathologies, may be impossible for even his party’s once vaunted political machine to overcome.
Relentless print and electronic campaigns by Calderón and Madrazo – the former has spent close to 20 million dollars on advertising – have failed to dislodge López Obrador. Indeed, the perredista’s decision to build a grassroots campaign centered around personal visits and countless rural and urban meetings across the country appears to be a winning strategy.
López Obrador has been further buttressed by what appears to be the growing possibility that the PRD might emerge as a powerful national political party. While the PRD lacks some of the strong regional affiliations of the northern-based PAN, or the PRI, which has bastions in the center and south of the country, the widening popularity of the PRD’s presidential figure may buoy the hopes of perredistas elsewhere. Pollster Dan Lund of Mundamericas has noted that it is on the strength of López Obrador’s coattails that the PRD candidate for the mayorship of Mexico City, Marcelo Ebrard, is predicted to win in a landslide. Lund further observed that following a López Obrador tour through the state of Hidalgo, “the PRD more than doubled their vote total and increased from holding 10 municipal governments to 23. The gains were in the areas visited by López Obrador.” While the recent legislative and municipal elections in the Estado de Mexico (the small but heavily populated state that surrounds Mexico City) pointed to big gains by the leftwing party – increasing the PRD’s take of congressional seats by 10, winning 23 more municipalities and attracting to its banner an additional 10% of the vote – it remains to be seen whether the trickle-down “López Obrador effect” will be able to fan out farther from the former mayor’s Mexico City stronghold. There are indications, however, that the PRD may fare even better than expected in nationwide legislative elections, and could succeed in splitting the vote equally between the three parties, an important consideration for the ultimate legislative success or failure of a López Obrador government.
Desperate Measures As their campaigns fail to gain traction against the electoral inevitability of a López Obrador victory, both Calderón and Madrazo have gone on the offensive, choosing to launch nasty sorties against the frontrunner, attacking his person and policies, and parroting almost Washington-esque fearmongering allegations. Here is where Aznar’s pitiful performance played out. Such awe and thunder charges, which generally consist of varieties of the old saw that the PRD candidate is a dangerous populist who represents a return to the country’s unstable old ways, have long been voiced (albeit in an imprudent manner) by President Fox, although with seemingly little impact.
An undoubtedly frustrated Calderón was the first to switch to such slash and burn rhetoric, asserting at a March 10 rally in Cuernavaca that López Obrador was receiving support from Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, who was financing “Bolivarian cells” in the country. The panista went on to call for the electoral authorities to launch an investigation of this alleged backing, which he asserted also consisted of financial contributions to the PRD campaign. These outrageously bogus charges, which more have the aroma of invention than serious revelation, are wholly unsubstantiated, and the PAN’s complaint to the electoral commission contained not even a hint of evidence to support the charges. Political analysts are at one in observing that the charges against López Obrador amount to little more than low-grade billingsgate mudslinging and fearmongering.
The allegations were further weakened by the fact that López Obrador has been careful to distance himself from Chávez, if for no other reason than to prevent this ersatz scenario from gaining any traction. The perredista commented as early as 2004 that “each country has its own realities,” and that to compare him to the Venezuelan leader was “simplistic,” a position which he has continually reaffirmed, noting in a January 30, 2006 interview that he does not know and has never even spoken with Chávez, and that the two were fundamentally distinct from each other. Even most outside analysts feel that the men only loosely share an ideology that is far more populist than Marxist. Calderón, increasingly taking to throwing “Hail Mary” desperation passes, would later accuse López Obrador of having authoritarian tendencies, an equally untenable invention and totally unevidenced charge.
Nevertheless, Calderón has dug in his heels and continued the assault, declaring at a meeting of PAN legislative candidates that the campaign was a “war” to avoid a return to past ways marked by corruption and “those who time and again buried the country in debt.” This oblique jab was an unmistakable reference to López Obrador, who some Mexican conservatives fear is a reincarnation of Luis Echeverría (1970-76) and José López Portillo (1976-1982), a genre of populist leaders whose ill-advised spending brought on massive financial crises. Such tactical deployments are unlikely to net Calderón much support, as they do not flow from a position of strength, but one of desperation, and will hardly prove reassuring to voters uncertain of his executive credentials and disgusted by the taint of apparent PAN venality stemming from allegations of corruption regarding President Fox’s wife, Marta Sahagún.
Bringing on Disintegration Roberto Madrazo mimicked Calderón’s worsening manufactured anxieties, announcing on March 16 that, it was “a big risk for Mexico for [López Obrador] to win,” and that “my struggle is precisely to see that [López Obrador] does not win the election and that Mexico moves ahead.” Such a statement is nothing short of rank hypocrisy, given Madrazo’s well-founded reputation for astronomical corruption and anti-democratic deportment, a legacy reinforced by his unyielding support of Puebla governor Mario Marín who has been tied to the scandalous Lydia Cacho press freedom case.
The priista’s switch to his current scorched earth strategy most likely marks the end of his viability as a candidate. His party never has been able to coalesce around his candidacy, and the current electoral juncture has provoked nothing short of a massive disintegration of party unity and structure, further driven by Madrazo’s collapse in most opinion polls. After buzz-sawing his way to his party’s nomination – alienating important and very popular party figures such as Elba Esther Gordillo, the head of the teachers’ union, in the process – Madrazo may have mightily contributed to the destruction of the very party infrastructure he was counting on to help carry him to victory in July. Indeed, the elevated stakes created by advances in the country’s democratic process have led to intense internal struggles within the PRI, with the latest example being the contentious attempts to draw up the party’s list of congressional and senatorial candidates, which was seen as a struggle between Madrazo’s desired list, and those preferred by other key PRI figures.
It has long been rumored that party leaders are unhappy with Madrazo’s poor showing up to now and the seeming “reverse coattails” effect he is having on the party, and would prefer to see him replaced as a candidate. For many of them, a change couldn’t come soon enough, as increasing numbers of PRI politicians are now jumping ship. When party spokesman Eduardo Andrade resigned on February 28, citing Madrazo’s authoritarian manipulation of the PRI’s internal processes, he left behind 40 years of party activism. Further contributing to the campaign’s disintegration has been the March 8 decision by dissident Sonoran governor Eduardo Bours to align nearly all the municipalities in his state with Gordillo’s faction, Nueva Alianza. Nine days later, 18 PRI congressmen previously affiliated with the party’s teachers’ union wing (headed by Gordillo until her defection) renounced their party membership and announced their intention to form a new political bloc.
Not all the defectors will land in Gordillo’s lap, however. Some analysts have suggested that there is a distinct possibility that some of the priista vote will ultimately migrate to the PRD, strengthening López Obrador’s hand, and perhaps giving the necessary impulse to propel the PRD’s development into a national political movement.
Down the Stretch For the foreseeable future, López Obrador will continue to be the focal point of the country’s political discourse. This scenario spells further trouble for his opponents, not only because their attack ads inadvertently offer the perredista additional publicity, but because this strategy impedes any inclination for Calderón and Madrazo to more effectively project themselves as dynamic candidates, and to lay out the sort of proposals around which López Obrador has built his campaign. The fallout for the other candidates is likely to be severe. Disintegration and disunity in the PRI should accelerate and perhaps become irreparable, possibly destroying Mexico’s only party with a truly national political reach. Moreover, as the Fox-Calderón slander campaign against López Obrador continues to founder, it will serve to discredit the PAN as a party of democratic ideals, and darken the stain on Fox’s already severely blemished legacy.
This analysis was prepared by COHA Research Fellow Michael Lettieri
Mexico has been left for eighty years. Could anyone seriously call the corrupt crowd in Mexico conservative?
If they weren't left already their people wouldn't be fleeing to the U.S. to find work.
If this Communist wins the Presidency, it will give potential cover to millions of illegals in the U.S. that they are "political refugees" (a la Cuba).
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It's good to keep an eye out for our enemies. Once you can make them out amongst all the rhetoric from the author.. I think we had better keep an eye on this one.
I heard an estimate of five years to build a wall.
Since Fox wants the US to rebuild Mexico...to lure Mexicans back home, what the heck. Why not do it? It looks as if the alternative...a communist Mexico on our used-to-be border...could happen. Along with lots of terrorism. We're better off to rebuild Mexico...with the help of the US military. We've been told we're 'integrating' with Mexico. Fine. (And this without a by your leave from the US people, mind you.) So let's send the army down to make sure things go swimmingly.
That's kind of funny, because at those marches in LA I didn't see a single poster of FDR or Tony Blair being held up, but I did in fact see posters of Che Guevara.
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