PING – Hugo is at it again!
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HugoPing Archive
Posted on 04/06/2006 4:44:06 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
A recent interview with Ollanta Humala, the anti-free market former army officer who is leading in the polls in Sunday's presidential election in Peru, left me with two basic impressions: He's more articulate than I thought and much more like radical populist Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez than I suspected.
Why do I say that? Not just because Chávez has openly endorsed him. It's because -- either by coincidence or because he may be listening to his Venezuelan friends -- he comes across as following Chávez's script very closely.
Like Chávez, Humala is a former lieutenant colonel who first drew public attention when he led a military rebellion. After his 2000 arrest and subsequent release, Humala joined his father Isaac and his brother Antauro in an anti-corruption, anti-free market, anti-imperialist and ''copper-skin color'' supremacy crusade.
His father calls himself a hard-line Marxist, but also has kind words for Adolf Hitler, according to the Associated Press. The candidate's brother Antauro, in jail for a 2005 attack on a police station that left four dead, has called for the execution by firing squad of President Alejandro Toledo, his wife and 120 members of Congress.
The latest polls give Ollanta Humala 32 percent of the voters' support, followed by free market candidate Lourdes Flores with 26 percent and former populist President Alan Garcia with 23 percent.
Although Peruvians may have to go to a second-round election in May if none of the candidates receives 50 percent of the vote, Humala critics fear that many voters who describe themselves as ''undecided'' may end up casting their votes for an anti-establishment candidate, much like what happened earlier this year in neighboring Bolivia.
AGAINST GLOBALIZATION
In a recent taped-for-television interview, Humala told me he is a ''nationalist'' who wants to defend Peru against the ''negative effects of globalization.'' His campaign calls for the ''nationalization'' of major industries -- a formula his critics see as a recipe for greater corruption, more public spending and economic disaster.
He told me that the free-market globalization model ''is helping rich countries export their industrial overproduction to developing nations,'' which hurts Peruvian companies.
Sounds great, except that it doesn't hold up, I said. In fact, developing countries are flooding rich countries with their exports. And thanks to globalization, China has been able to lift 250 million people from poverty. India, Vietnam, Poland, the Czech Republic, Spain, Ireland and many others have been able to dramatically reduce poverty, I added.
''You explain that in your book,'' he said, referring to my latest book. ``But I think I haven't heard you ever mention one single Latin American country that has been able to succeed against the negative effects of globalization.''
Sure I did, I said. Chile has been able to reduce poverty from 39 percent in 1990 to about 18 percent now, since it began opening up its economy.
Humala struck back: ``Chile has things we should copy. For instance, Chile maintains a state monopoly over copper. That's a Chilean model we should emulate.''
You are playing games, by taking one exception to Chile's policies and making it sound as if it was the rule, I said. He responded, ``The Chilean case is a complex case.''
Asked about Venezuela, Humala said that its political process ''is producing some results,'' such as ''eradicating illiteracy.'' On Cuba, he conceded that ''according to international standards, I would not describe it as a democracy.'' But he said that ''Mr. Fidel Castro deserves significant credit'' for his health and education policies.
My conclusion: Humala's anti-globalization arguments don't hold.
There are dozens of countries that have succeeded in reducing poverty by opening up their economies and embracing globalization, and not one single example of a country that has made similar gains by embracing a nationalist-statist model.
CONVINCING RHETORIC
But his anti-system rhetoric may sound convincing to millions of Peruvian poor who have not yet seen the benefits of Peru's recent macro-economic gains, and who -- like in Venezuela seven years ago -- want an iron-fisted ''savior of the fatherland'' to take over, punish the rich and give away cash to the poor.
It's a movie that Latin America has seen many times, and that in the long run has only helped scare away investment and increase poverty.
That ain't good.
Definite leftward shift in South America across the continent.
Will Central America and Mexico be next?
It's what Thomas Jefferson feared the most -- mobocracy.
Ollanta Humala's father Isaac fancies himself to be a political philosopher and espouses something he calls "etnocacerismo" in which the copper-colored people will triumph over "the whites and their sidekicks the blacks."
The default political philosophy in Latin America is essentially populist, and it is this philosophy that every successful politician must appeal to.
Once in power, having discovered reality, they must either abandon it and try to govern successfully, or actually try to achieve their populist goals and consequently drive their economies even further into the ground at an even faster rate. The fact that it never works never gets through to anyone; the masses are always convinced that it would work if only they could find the right guy and give him enough brute power to make it happen.
When that brute power is pointed at them, and when they sink even deeper into poverty, they simply begin to hatch the next revolution.
The only successful populist governments are the ones that preach one thing and do another; that is, the classic corruptocracy, where corruption provides the escape valve to policies that don't work, couldn't work, and would destroy the country if one didn't bribe one's way around them.
Corruption, in this case, is the lubricant that makes an otherwise unworkable system work.
Humala is a Chavist agent. He is different only in the fact that, in place of the old Cold War marxist conspiracies that we understood, we have new Cold War marxist conspiracies that we have yet to recognize. It is forming right under our nose, but until we feel actual existential fear in our guts, we aren't going to know what to do about it.
Chavez already overthrew the Bolivian government, and the Ecuadorian government (although his man has been thrown out since then). Chavez is just about to see his pals in the Sandinistas return to power in Nicaragua. A Chavist in Mexico is inches from the presidency.
We have a lot on our plate at the moment. But ignoring Latin America is going to cost us. We don't want to give it too much public importance, but we do need to learn to tend our garden quietly and competently. That seems to be a lot to ask for these days.
That's because the two are not mutually exclusive. Do a little research, Andres.
Just like in Iraq, give these bozos democracy and they elect another dictator...
That's what they will do SOON OR LATER!
Bring back Fujimori
The marxist's poll numbers resemble the percentage of property and business still not carried on the national tax rolls. Shantytown and unregistered business. Peru has been trying to get property recorded and business registered, but the procedures and time are unreal.
This doesn't make a lot of sense to the author, who easily refuted it, but the "overproduction" model is one of two classic interpretations of Marxism and hence it doesn't have to be physically true if it's theoretically true. And it makes for great demagoguery.
The idea is that developed nations take undeveloped nations' natural resources in return for surplus production that they can't sell domestically, thereby "exporting" poverty. In practice this doesn't actually happen - the buyer exchanges his products for money and that money for goods he desires. The only economy under which this import of undesired goods may be accomplished is, in fact, a centrally-planned socialist one. It floated Cuba for decades until the sugar daddy went under. And that's just where these folks are heading.
[Hopefully this doesn't spread to Mexico.]
If it should spread it'll make our current immigration problem with Mexico seem like it was a picnic. Also, the argument of our troops being put on the border will no longer be debated.
The plot thickens
Communism will swallow its next crop of victims.
How long is it going to take until these people understand that communism is against human nature, against development and success, against competition and free market, against anything that's good and positive.
Dunno, some people grow up and others simply grow old!
>>>>His father calls himself a hard-line Marxist, but also has kind words for Adolf Hitler, according to the Associated Press.
>>That's because the two are not mutually exclusive. Do a little research, Andres.
Bingo. Check the 3rd quote on my FR home page, the two-paragraph one, about their similiarities of Communists and Nazis, from F.A. Hayek.
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