A New Axis of Evil
Jesse Jackson compares Brazil candidate to Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela
Posted on 10/22/2002 5:29:56 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
Even by its own standards, Latin American electoral politics has been throwing up some surprises of late. Lucio Gutierrez, a retired leftwing soldier who led a coup two and a half years ago, won the first round of presidential elections in Ecuador on Sunday.
Next Sunday, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the former lathe operator and rabble-rousing trades unionist, known as "Lula", is poised to win Brazil's presidential elections in a landslide. Earlier this year Evo Morales, a peasant farmer who represents the growers of coca leaf, narrowly missed the Bolivian presidency.
"You couldn't make this stuff up," says Michael Shifter, director of the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue. "Garcia Marquez [the Colombian novelist associated with the genre of magic realism] has been outdone by it."
For some rightwing US commentators, these are also dangerous developments in a region regarded by Washington as its own backyard. Constantine Menges, a former official in the Reagan administration, says these developments are tantamount to the extension of a new "axis of evil" that already includes Fidel Castro's Cuba and Hugo Chávez's Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela.
Brazil's history as a nuclear energy power is particularly worrying, they say. "Combine Brazilian nukes with Venezuelan petrodollars and Cuban subversion, and Washington policymakers will suffer migraines for years," said Deroy Murdock in a column published in the Washington Times, the rightwing daily.
Mr Menges and others make much of the ideological connections that link Mr da Silva's Workers' party (PT) with Mr Castro, Mr Chávez, and the leftwing Farc guerrillas of Colombia. Mr da Silva was a co-founder of the São Paulo Forum, a leftwing discussion group, for example.
"Lula's a supporter of terrorism," Mr Menges said recently. "He will, I believe, permit covert support to be given to bring about anti-American regimes in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru."
The parallels between Mr Chávez and Ecuador's Mr Gutierrez will provide more grist for that mill. Like the Venezuelan leader, Mr Gutierrez is a late convert to electoral politics and a sworn enemy of "neo-liberalism". His January 21 Patriotic Society is named after the date he forced Jamil Mahuad, former president, out of office in 2000 by storming congress with indigenous supporters.
But these ideological views take little account of the enormous differences that separate Latin America's leftwing movements. Many of the links are tenuous. Those involving the PT take little account of its move to the centre ground of Brazilian politics - a factor in the rising fortunes of Mr da Silva, who a few months ago was given only an outside chance of victory. Leftwing members of his party are appalled by by electoral alliances with the centre-right Liberal and other parties. Heloisa Helena, a senator opposed to the party leadership, said many "people are talking about leaving the PT and forming a new party".
In Venezuela, Mr Chávez, for all his confrontational rhetoric, has shied away from the nationalisation and socialist planning introduced by Mr Castro in Cuba in the 1960s. Economic decline - Venezuela's economy will contract by more than 6 per cent this year - has resulted from incompetence and inefficiency rather than ideology. Mr Shifter says Mr Chávez "is running the country into the ground but it is not because he knows what he is doing".
Similarly, US commentators also underestimate the extent to which support for the left is part of a broader rejection of established politicians and the perceived failures of market-friendly reforms. Declining growth, mounting unemployment and an alarming crime wave - linked in part to the illegal drugs trade - are undermining faith in representative politics in the region.
In many countries politics has become fragmented and traditional politicians linked in the public mind with corruption. In some cases established leftwingers like such as Mr da Silva are benefiting from what Mr Shifter describes as an "axis of upheaval".
In others, outsiders like such as Mr Gutierrez and Mr Morales are drawing support from traditionally excluded indigenous groups. In Argentina, Luis Zamora, a Trotskyist whose "throw them all out" slogan is aimed at all "establishment" politicians, attracts high support in opinion polls.
But the mood of disaffection can as easily benefit the right. Earlier this year Colombians elected Alvaro Uribe, a hardliner who promised to step up the war on leftwing guerrillas. Mr Uribe was backed by neither of the country's traditional parties, the first time this had happened in Colombia's recent history.
In Ecuador, Mr Gutierrez faces a second round run-off next month against Alvaro Noboa, a wealthy businessman and something of a political maverick. "When countries are sickened by poverty they sometimes allow themselves to be swept up by populism," says Rodrigo Borja, one of the defeated candidates.
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It's the lack of a large middle class. You either get the elites ruling or the peons ruling and either is a disaster.
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