Foreign Affairs Magazine: Latin America's Left Turn (Amazing admission!)

New York Times ^ | April 25, 2006 | JORGE G. CASTAñEDA

[GodGunsGuts]

Foreign Affairs Magazine: Latin America's Left Turn

By JORGE G. CASTAñEDA From the May/June 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs.

...The reasons for Latin America's turn to the left are not hard to discern. Along with many other commentators and public intellectuals, I started detecting those reasons nearly fifteen years ago, and I recorded them in my book Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War, which made several points. The first was that the fall of the Soviet Union would help the Latin American left by removing its geopolitical stigma. Washington would no longer be able to accuse any left-of-center regime in the region of being a "Soviet beachhead" (as it had every such government since it fomented the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz's administration in Guatemala in 1954); left-wing governments would no longer have to choose between the United States and the Soviet Union, because the latter had simply disappeared.

[GodGunsGuts]

My eyes practically popped out of my head when I read this!

[GodGunsGuts]

Ping!

[robowombat]

This is an interesting book in spite of the author's obvious leftist biases. It provides a lot of background on the new wave of collectivists coming to power in many places Latin America.

[marron]

Good article.

He makes the point I've tried to make several times. The default political philosophy in Latin America is a kind of populism that sometimes manifests itself as "left-wing", sometimes "right-wing", and often a combination of the two (as in Chavez' regime).

It always leads back to the same thing, further centralization of power, further undermining of already weak legal structures. Further destruction of the kind of legal and cultural foundation required for economic prosperity. These regimes create a self-fulfilling hostility toward wealth, where wealth is viewed as proof of a corrupt relationship with power, and where without such a relationship anyone investing in the country runs a very real risk of losing his assets.

Chavez, Lula, Humala, Morales, these guys are not a new development, they are a continuation of the cycle, they are more of the same. The coup that eventually overthrows them will usher in a new era of... populist government, and the cycle will continue.

The people who are forced into exile by these creatures ought to understand them best, but they do not. In their eyes the problem with a Chavez is that he has failed to live up to his promise; even the emigres who have had to run for it can not bring themselves to understand that it is the model that is wrong, not the dictator de jour.

Sadly, not many people read Hernando de Soto, and no one reads Locke or Hayek. You have left-wing socialists, right-wing socialists, pro-business and anti-business socialists, pro-church and anti-church socialists, but there is no classic liberal equivalent to the GOP anywhere in Latin America. Limited government, bottom-up rule is a foreign notion. Propose it, and they just shake their heads sadly, you clearly don't understand, such things work only in rich countries, they would never work in ours.

[Unam Sanctam]

At the same time, Chávez is driving his country into the ground. A tragicomic symbol of this was the collapse of the highway from Caracas to the Maiquetía airport a few months ago because of lack of maintenance. Venezuela's poverty figures and human development indices have deteriorated since 1999, when Chávez took office. A simple comparison with Mexico -- which has not exactly thrived in recent years -- shows how badly Venezuela is faring. Over the past seven years, Mexico's economy grew by 17.5 percent, while Venezuela's failed to grow at all. From 1997 to 2003, Mexico's per capita GDP rose by 9.5 percent, while Venezuela's shrank by 45 percent. From 1998 to 2005, the Mexican peso lost 16 percent of its value, while the value of the Venezuelan bolivar dropped by 292 percent. Between 1998 and 2004, the number of Mexican households living in extreme poverty decreased by 49 percent, while the number of Venezuelan households in extreme poverty rose by 4.5 percent. In 2005, Mexico's inflation rate was estimated at 3.3 percent, the lowest in years, while Venezuela's was 16 percent.

The word on this needs to get out to counteract the Left's Chavez worship in this country.

[GodGunsGuts]

Ping!

[Yardstick]

I found it pretty interesting, too. Here's the author's bottom line:

"So instead of arguing over whether to welcome or bemoan the advent of the left in Latin America, it would be wiser to separate the sensible from the irresponsible and to support the former and contain the latter."

He sees the Latin American left as consisting roughly of a "right left" and a "wrong left". The right left consists of the high-minded, formerly-doctrinaire-but-now-reformed (as the author sees it) communist left that intellectual types (like the author) tend to like. The wrong left is made up of hamfisted populists like Chavez. As above, the author says our best policy would be to support the former and contain the latter.

If we could tap into the writer's inner dialogue and hear his unspoken thoughts I bet we would find that he, a leftist himself, is embarrassed by the Chavez types and wishes they would go away. On the other hand he would like to see the "right left" nurtured so that it can serve as a successful demonstration of soft-socialist third-wayism, elements of which he would like to see adopted by the United States. The left likes to point to socialist success stories in other parts of the world in the hope that maybe we'll give it a try.

[backhoe]

-The Fire Down South...( Latin America--)--

[Chi-townChief]

Nothing at all right-wing about Chavez.

[Mikey_1962]

I think it is the same old Left when you examine them by their actions and not their Ideology.

When you look at the history of the Left, and a bloody one it is, you have to conclude Left is as Left does.

What does Left ALWAYS do?

Confiscate
Repress
Promise that "Better World" just over the horizon

[RoadTest]

Not everyone agrees with me, but I see the political spectrum as a circle, not a straight line. Visualize that straight line, with Communism on the left end and fascism on the right end, bent down into a circle until both ends touch. Fascism and Communism are the same thing: A tyrant takes over in the name of largesse to the masses, then dealing all the largesse to himself, his cronies and his AKers.

[Onelifetogive]

Propose it, and they just shake their heads sadly, you clearly don't understand, such things work only in rich countries, they would never work in ours.

Chicken or the egg? Freedom, rule of law and limited government only work in rich countries, because when you implement them, it is impossible to remain a poor country!

[Mike Darancette]

Although Chávez does very little for the poor of his own country (among whom he remains popular), he is doing much more for other countries: giving oil away to Cuba and other Caribbean states, buying Argentina's debt, allegedly financing political campaigns in Bolivia and Peru and perhaps Mexico.

Typically a Communist Dictators' ploy. Give massive amounts of foreign aid to other socialist countries while ignoring your own people.

[marron]

Nothing at all right-wing about Chavez.

By "right-wing" I'm referring to his aggressive appropriation of nationalist symbols, wrapping himself in the flag, trumpeting Bolivar, pushing all the nationalist buttons that get Venezuelan hearts thumping.

There are differences between fascists and communists, but there is also a huge overlap, they are two sides of a single coin. Your typical dictator will embody elements of both in his rhetoric, but the actual implementation usually comes down to the same thing.

American "conservatives" are no where on that continuum, between supposedly "left-wing" communism and "right-wing" fascism. Like I say, those two are left and right sides of a single coin. We're another coin altogether. Anyway, thats how I see it.

[Mike Darancette]

The word on this needs to get out to counteract the Left's Chavez worship in this country.

You must realize that the Chavez worshipers will either say that this is a lie or that it is the fault of the United States and more specifically George Bush.

The US press through fellow travelers like Duranty and Snow lauded the Stalin and Mao regimes against the overwhelming evidence that Communism was a dismal failure and it's leaders monsters.

[headsonpikes]

Bump your very astute post.

[GodGunsGuts]

All very good posts. However, I was drawing attention to something very different. Read the following quote from Georgi Arbatov and then re-read the Castenada excerpt from the original article.

---

The Soviet purpose in propagating this theme was made clear in late 1987 by Georgi Arbatov, the head of the Soviet Academy of Science's Institute on the United States and Canada, who wrote in a letter to the editor published in the December 8, 1987 issue of the New York Times that:

...We have a "secret weapon" that will work almost regardless of the American response - we would deprive America of The Enemy. And how would you justify without it the military expenditures that bleed the American economy white, a policy that draws America into dangerous adventures overseas and drives wedges between the United States and its allies, not to mention the loss of American influence on neutral countries? Wouldn't such a policy in the absence of The Enemy put America in the position of an outcast in the international community?

http://intellit.muskingum.edu/russia_folder/pcw_era/sect_08c.htm

[bassmaner]

bump for later

[x]

He makes the point I've tried to make several times. The default political philosophy in Latin America is a kind of populism that sometimes manifests itself as "left-wing", sometimes "right-wing", and often a combination of the two (as in Chavez' regime).

Good point.

Sadly, not many people read Hernando de Soto, and no one reads Locke or Hayek. You have left-wing socialists, right-wing socialists, pro-business and anti-business socialists, pro-church and anti-church socialists, but there is no classic liberal equivalent to the GOP anywhere in Latin America.

Race or ethnicity has a lot to do with it. There are Latin American classical liberals. The writer Mario Vargas Llosa and his son come to mind. But such people are easily dismissed by the majority as affluent Whites. And I don't think either lives in Latin American now.

But even where race is less of a factor, as in Chile or Argentina, the libertarian "right" is too often assumed to be a species of the "right-wing" that was behind the military dictatorships and oligarchies.

[DeweyCA]

I look on governments as a continuum based on degree of control. In brief, on the far left are totalitarian governemnts such as communistm, next to the right is fascism, then socialism, then republics (USA), pure democracies, and finally anarchy (no control). This is a brief summary, but I think that it will give you a useful way of looking at governments. Fascism is to the right of communism, in that it allows more freedom for business, it is still on the far left in terms of the degree of control that the government maintians over the people.