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Now
The South American Summit of Nations
and the Social Forum for the Integration of Peoples took place
last week, stirring visions of continental unity. Both events-one
of government leaders and one of civil society-showed there are
new winds of change on the continent.
Talk of alternatives for regional
integration and the state's role in development, which used to
take place on the margins of the dominant discourse of neoliberalism,
has now moved to the center of public debate. Although comprehensive
and viable alternatives are still a ways off, the discussion
has moved from the podium to the streets.
In the end, the official summit
failed to resolve the split between leaders who see regional
integration as a springboard into the current system of corporate-led
integration, and those who envision something different. However,
debate continues both between nations and within them.
Elections in the region continue
to be an important gauge of change. With the exception of Mexico,
which on closer examination is not so much of an exception, the
balance continues to shift to the left.
But a deeper analysis of elections
in Ecuador, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Mexico indicates that the
"pink tide" interpretation-that a diluted trend leftward
is sweeping the continent-may be insufficient to understand the
complexity of what's really taking place in each country and
the region as a whole.
What is considered "left"?
How much leeway do self-professed leftist governments really
have for making change in a globalized world? How do progressive
governments relate to social movements and vice versa? And what
do these changes mean on a regional level?
These questions, still unanswerable,
obstruct any attempt to color in Latin American states according
to dominant political tendencies, like a red-blue post-electoral
map of the United States. The challenge is to respect the specificity
of each political process while drawing out ways to characterize
the obvious regional shift taking place.
The New
Leaders
The re-election of Hugo Chávez
in Venezuela by an overwhelming margin and the triumph of center-left
candidate Rafael Correa in Ecuador both mark breakthroughs in
Andean politics dominated by narrow political and economic elites.
Chavez, always quick with a
provocative phrase, has announced that the next step of the Bolivarian
Revolution is to construct "socialism of the XXI Century,"
without providing many details as to what that would look like.
In practice, his government continues to combine radical anti-U.S.
rhetoric, Latin American solidarity, and an active state role
in redistribution of wealth, with significant private sector
involvement and export-oriented concepts of integration.
Ecuador's Correa now joins
the growing list of Latin American leaders who are looking south,
instead of north to the United States, for opportunities in trade,
development, and international alliances. He plans to strike
a blow against U.S. hegemony through his opposition to a Free
Trade Agreement and the continued presence of the U.S. military
at the Manta Base.
Daniel Ortega's return to power
in Nicaragua and the re-election of Lula in Brazil send slightly
more cryptic geopolitical messages.
Ortega has maintained his leftist
credentials largely on the basis of the animosity he instills
among U.S. government officials. In domestic politics, however,
he supported the nation's incredibly restrictive anti-abortion
law. Although his party voted against the Central American Free
Trade Agreement (CAFTA), Ortega became increasingly pro-free-market
policies during the campaign and, soon after being sworn in,
pledged to uphold and strengthen CAFTA despite popular protest.
Lula enters his second term
with debts to the powers-that-be on the one hand and social debts
to the poor on the other. His second term signals the end of
an increasingly acrimonious honeymoon with the grassroots organizations
that make up his constituency base. At the same time, Lula doesn't
seem willing to risk the loss of the economic elite's support.
Pleasing both will be impossible.
Finally, Mexico's disputed
elections last July seemed to buck the regional trend by sending
a rightwing party government back to power. Yet subsequent events
make it very difficult to state that Mexican society reaffirmed
the course. Accusations of electoral fraud persist, the one-half
of the population that voted against the right remains mobilized
and unconvinced, and one state-Oaxaca-is in open rebellion.
Parties
vs. Movements?
Latin America is a mixed bag,
to say the least. With ideological differences blurred, pragmatism
competing on a daily basis with principle, and grassroots movements
seeking to avoid the opposing poles of marginalization and cooptation,
it's difficult to make neat pronouncements.
A few basic premises can, however,
be surmised.
First, the poor continue to
be the majority despite over a decade of neoliberal promises.
In most Latin American countries over half the population lives
below the poverty line. This is the natural constituency of the
new left.
Second, this majority has reached
the limits of its patience with the promises of the economic
model. The hope-killing combination of poverty inherited from
generation to generation, growing unemployment and under-employment,
and an in-your-face concentration of wealth has led inevitably
to opposition. In some countries this opposition has been expressed
at the ballot box, in others there has been an outpouring in
the streets, and in most it's a combination of the two.
Third, leftist parties in many
cases have little to offer that really addresses the demands
and the discontent of the poor majority. Whether it's the corruption
scandals of the Lula administration, the social conservatism
of Tabaré Vázquez's Uruguay, or the unprincipled
opportunism of Ortega in Nicaragua, leftist "populists"
have reproduced politics-as-usual with disappointing frequency
once in government. The right and the left are not identical
twins, but acquisition of power usually reveals some family traits.
Despite progressive governments
that refuse to form part of a U.S. Backyard Club, the region
has not managed to become an alternative pole in a multipolar
world.
The great hope of Latin America-and
what it has to offer to the world-is a vast collection of vibrant
social movements that dare to question everything from their
own governments to the way corporations pollute their lands.
Sometimes they express themselves in the polls, sometimes they
don't. Sometimes they call themselves the "left," and
sometimes they call themselves the people or nothing at all.
Labels don't matter. What matters is the search for new ways
of governing that reduce the inequality, increase real democracy,
and end the hunger and poverty.
Call it pink, red, blue, purple,
or chartreuse: to get anywhere, social movements will have to
display all these colors and more. Whatever its hue though, the
tide in Latin America seems to be rising.
Laura Carlsen is director of the IRC
Americas Program in Mexico City, where she has been a writer
and political analyst for more than two decades.
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