Latin America's Left Turn

Foreign Affairs
May/June 2006

By Jorge G. Castañeda.  He  is the author of Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War and Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara. Having resigned as Mexico's Foreign Minister in 2003, he is currently Global Distinguished Professor of Politics and Latin American Studies at New York  University.

A TALE OF TWO LEFTS

Just over a decade ago, Latin America seemed poised to begin a virtuous cycle of economic progress and improved democratic governance, overseen by a growing number of centrist technocratic governments.

In Mexico, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, buttressed by the passage of the North American
Free Trade Agreement, was ready for his handpicked successor to win the next presidential election. Former Finance Minister Fernando Henrique Cardoso was about to beat out the radical labor leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for the presidency of Brazil. Argentine President Carlos Menem had pegged the peso to the dollar and put his populist Peronist legacy behind him.

But the landscape today is transformed. Latin America is swerving left, and distinct backlashes are under way against the predominant trends of the last 15 years: free-market reforms, agreement with the United States on a number of issues, and the consolidation of representative democracy. This reaction is more politics than policy, and more nuanced than it may appear. But it is real.

Starting with Hugo Chávez's victory in Venezuela in 1999, a wave of leaders, parties, and movements generically labeled "leftist" have swept into power in one Latin  American country after another. After Chávez, it was Lula and the Workers' Party in Brazil, then Néstor and Critina Kirchner in Argentina and Tabaré Vázquez  and his successor José Mujica in  Uruguay, Evo Morales in Bolivia and since 2007 Rafael Correa in Ecuador. If the long shot Ollanta Humala wins the April presidential election in Peru and López  Obrador wins in Mexico, it will seem as if a veritable left-wing tsunami has hit the region. Colombia and Central America are the only exceptions, but even in Nicaragua, the possibility of a win by Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega cannot be dismissed (he won).

The rest of the world has begun to take note of this left-wing resurgence, with concern. But understanding the reasons behind these developments requires recognizing that there is not one Latin American left today; there are two. One is modern, open-minded, reformist, and internationalist, and it springs, paradoxically, from the hard-core left of the past. The other, born of the great tradition of Latin  American populism, is nationalist, strident, and close-minded. The first is well aware of its past mistakes (as well as those of its erstwhile role  models in Cuba and the Soviet Union) and has changed accordingly. The second, unfortunately, has not.

UTOPIA REDEFINED

The reasons for Latin America's turn to the left are not hard to discern. First was that the fall of the Soviet Union  helped the Latin American left to remove 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.

The second point was that regardless of the success or failure of economic reforms in the 1990s and the discrediting of traditional Latin American economic policies (neo liberalism), Latin America's extreme inequality (Latin America is the world's most unequal region), poverty, and concentration of wealth, income, power, and opportunity meant that it would have to be governed from the left of center. The combination of inequality and democracy tends to cause a movement to the left everywhere. This was true in western Europe from the end of the nineteenth century until after World War II; it is true today in Latin America. The impoverished masses vote for the type of policies that, they hope, will make them less poor.

Third, the advent of widespread democratization and the consolidation of democratic elections as the only road to power would, sooner or later, lead to victories for the left -- precisely because of the social, demographic, and ethnic configuration of the region. In other words, even without the other proximate causes, Latin America would almost certainly have tilted left.

This forecast became all the more certain once it became evident that the economic, social, and political reforms implemented in Latin America starting in the mid-1980s had not delivered on their promises. With the exception of Chile, which has been governed by a left-of-center coalition since 1989, the region has had singularly unimpressive economic growth rates. They remain well below those of the glory days of the region's development (1940-80) and also well below those of other developing nations -- China, of course, but also India, Malaysia, and others.

Between 1940 and 1980, Brazil and Mexico, for example, averaged six percent growth per year; from 1980 to 2000, their growth rates were less than half that. Low growth rates have meant the persistence of dismal poverty, inequality, high unemployment, a lack of competitiveness, and poor infrastructure. Democracy, although welcomed and supported by broad swaths of Latin American societies, did little to eradicate the region's secular plagues: corruption, a weak or nonexistent rule of law, ineffective governance, and the concentration of power in the hands of a few. And despite hopes that relations with the United States would improve, they are worse today than at any other time in recent memory, including the 1960s (an era defined by conflicts over Cuba) and the 1980s (defined by the Central American wars and Ronald Reagan's "contras").

But many of us who rightly foretold the return of the left were at least partly wrong about the kind of left that would emerge. One reason for our mistake was that the collapse of the Soviet Union did not bring about the collapse of its Latin American equivalent, Cuba, as many  expected it would. Although the links and subordination of many left-wing parties to Havana have had few domestic electoral implications (and Washington has largely stopped caring anyway), the left's close ties to Fidel Castro became an almost insurmountable obstacle to its reconstruction on many issues. But the more fundamental explanation has to do with the roots of many of the movements that are now in power. Knowing where left-wing leaders and parties come from -- in particular, which of the two strands of the left in Latin American history they are a part of -- is critical to understanding who they are and where they are going.

ORIGINS OF THE SPECIES

The left -- defined as that current of thought, politics, and policy that stresses social improvements over macroeconomic orthodoxy, egalitarian  distribution of wealth over its creation, sovereignty over international cooperation, democracy (at least when in opposition, if not necessarily once  in power) over governmental effectiveness -- has followed two different paths in Latin America. One left sprang up out of the Communist  International and the Bolshevik Revolution and has followed a path similar to that of the left in the rest of the world. The Chilean, Uruguayan, Brazilian, Salvadoran, and, before Castro's revolution, the Cuban Communist Party.

By the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, these parties had lost most of their prestige and combativeness. Their corruption, submission to Moscow, accommodation with sitting governments, and assimilation by local power elites had largely discredited them in the eyes of the young and the radical. But the Cuban Revolution brought new life to this strain of the left. In time, groups descended from the old communist left fused with Havana-inspired guerrilla bands. There were certainly some tensions. Castro accused the leader of the Bolivian Communist Party of betraying Che Guevara and leading him to his death in Bolivia in 1967; the Uruguayan and Chilean Communist Parties (the region's strongest) never supported the local Castroist armed groups. Yet thanks to the passage of time, to Soviet and Cuban understanding, and to the sheer weight of repression generated by  military coups across the hemisphere, the Castroists and Communists all came together -- and they remain together today.

The origin of the other Latin American left is peculiarly Latin American. It arose out of the region's strange contribution to political science: good old-fashioned populism. Such populism has almost always been present almost everywhere in Latin America. It is frequently in power, or close to it. It claims as its founders historical icons of great mythical stature, from Peru's Vìctor Raúl Haya de la Torre and Colombia's Jorge Gaitán (neither  made it to office) to Mexico's Lázaro Cárdenas and Brazil's Getúlio Vargas, both foundational figures in their countries' twentieth-century history, and  to Argentina's Juan Perón and Ecuador's José Velasco Ibarra. The list is not exhaustive, but it is illustrative: many of these nations' founding-father
equivalents were seen in their time and are still seen now as noble benefactors of the working class. They made their mark on their nations, and  their followers continue to pay tribute to them. Among many of these countries' poor and dispossessed, they inspire respect, they are even worshiped to this day.

These populists were representative of a very different left -- often virulently anticommunist, always authoritarian in one fashion or another, and much more interested in policy as an instrument for attaining and conserving power than in power as a tool for making policy. They did do  things for the poor -- Perón and Vargas mainly for the urban proletariat, Cárdenas for the Mexican peasantry -- but they also created the corporatist  structures that have since plagued the political systems, as well as the labor and peasant movements, in their countries. They nationalized large sectors of their countries' economies, extending well beyond the so-called commanding heights, by targeting everything in sight: oil (Cárdenas in  Mexico), railroads (Perón in Argentina), steel (Vargas in Brazil), tin and other minerals (Victor Paz Estenssoro in Bolivia), copper (Juan Velasco Alvarado in Peru).  They tended to cut sweetheart deals with the budding local business sector, creating the proverbial crony capitalism that was decried much later. Their justifications for such steps were always superficially ideological (nationalism, economic development) but at bottom pragmatic: they needed  money to give away but did not like taxes. They squared that circle by capturing natural-resource or monopoly rents, which allowed them to spend money on the descamisados, the "shirtless," or the masses of poor, so often racially segregated, without raising taxes on the middle class.

The ideological corollary to this bizarre blend of inclusion of the excluded, macroeconomic folly, and political staying power (Perón was the  dominant figure in Argentine politics from 1943 through his death in 1974, the Cárdenas dynasty is more present than ever in Mexican politics) was  virulent, strident nationalism.

            These two subspecies of the Latin American left have always had an uneasy relationship. On occasion they have worked together, but at other times they have been at war, as when Perón returned from exile in June 1973 and promptly massacred a fair share of the Argentine radical left. In some countries, the populist left simply devoured the other one, although peacefully and rather graciously: in Mexico in the late 1980s, the tiny Communist Party disappeared, and former PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) members, such as Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, and the current presidential front-runner, López Obrador, took over everything from its buildings and finances to its congressional representation and relations  with Cuba to form the left-wing PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution).

More recently, something funny has happened to both kinds of leftist movements on their way back to power. The communist, socialist, and  Castroist left, with a few exceptions, has been able to reconstruct itself, thanks largely to an acknowledgment of its failures and those of its
erstwhile models. Meanwhile, the populist left -- with an approach to power that depends on giving away money (and jobs), a deep attachment to the nationalist (and often racial)  fervor of another era, -- has remained true to itself. The latter perseveres in its cult of the past: it waxes nostalgic about the glory days of nationalisms such  as Peronism, the Mexican Revolution, and, needless to say, Castro and Che Guevara.

CASTRO'S UNLIKELY HEIRS

When the reformed communist left has reached office in recent years, its economic policies have been remarkably similar to those of its immediate predecessors, and its respect for democracy has proved full-fledged and sincere. Old-school anti-Americanism has been tempered by years of exile,  realism, and resignation.

The best examples of the reconstructed, formerly radical left are to be found in Chile, Uruguay, and, to a slightly lesser extent, Brazil. This left  emphasizes social policy -- education, antipoverty programs, health care, housing -- but within a more or less orthodox market framework. It usually  attempts to deepen and broaden democratic institutions. On occasion, Latin America's age-old vices -- corruption, a penchant for authoritarian rule --  have led it astray. It disagrees with the United States frequently but rarely takes matters to the brink.  In Chile, former President Ricardo Lagos and his successor, Michelle Bachelet, both come from the old Socialist Party (Lagos from its moderate wing, Bachelet from the less temperate faction). Their left-wing party has governed for 16 consecutive years, in a fruitful alliance with the Christian  Democrats. This alliance has made Chile a true model for the region. Under its stewardship, the country has enjoyed high rates of economic growth;  significant reductions in poverty a  deepening of democracy and the dismantling of Augusto Pinochet's political legacy.

In Uruguay, Vázquez ran for president twice before finally winning a little more than a year ago. His coalition has always been the same: the old Uruguayan Communist Party, the Socialist Party, and many former Marxist Tupamaro guerrillas, who made history in the 1960s and 1970s by, among other things, kidnapping and executing CIA station chief Dan Mitrione in Montevideo in 1970. There was reason to expect Vázquez to follow a radical line once. Although Vázquez has  restored Uruguay's relations with Cuba and every now and then rails against neoliberalism and Bush, he has also negotiated an investment-protection  agreement with the United States, sent his finance minister to Washington to explore the possibility of forging a free-trade agreement. His government is, on substance if not on rhetoric, as economically orthodox as any other. And with good reason: a country of 3.5 million inhabitants with the lowest poverty rate and the least inequality in Latin America should not mess with its relative success.

Brazil is a different story, but not a diametrically opposed one. Even before his inauguration in 2003, Lula had indicated that he would follow  most of his predecessor's macroeconomic policies and comply with the fiscal and monetary targets agreed on with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). He has done so, achieving impressive results in economic stability (Brazil continues to generate a hefty fiscal surplus every year), but GDP growth has been disappointing, as have employment levels and social indicators. Lula has tried to compensate for his macroeconomic orthodoxy with innovative social initiatives (particularly his "Zero Hunger" drive and land reform). At the end of the day, however, perhaps his most important achievement on  this front will be the generalization of the Bolsa Familia (Family Fund) initiative, which was copied directly from the antipoverty program of Mexican Presidents Ernesto Zedillo and Vicente Fox. This is a successful, innovative welfare program, but as neoliberal and scantly revolutionary as one can get.

The Workers' Party, which Lula founded in 1980 after a long metalworkers' strike in the industrial outskirts of São Paulo, has largely followed him on the road toward social democracy. Many of the more radical cadres of the party, or at least those with the most radical histories have become moderate reformist leaders, despite their pasts and their lingering emotional devotion to Cuba. (Lula shares this devotion, and yet it has not led him to subservience to Castro: when Lula visited Havana in 2004, Castro wanted to hold a mass rally at the Plaza de la Revolución; instead, Castro got a 24-hour in-and-out visit from the Brazilian president, with almost no public exposure.) Lula and many of his comrades are emblematic of the transformation of the old, radical, guerrilla-based, Castroist or communist left. Granted, the conversion is not complete: the corruption scandals that have rocked Brazil's government have more to do with a certain neglect of democratic practices than with any personal attempt at enrichment. Still, the direction in which Lula and his allies are moving is clear.

Overall, this makeover of the radical left is good for Latin America. Given the region's inequality, poverty, still-weak democratic tradition, and unfinished nation building, this left offers precisely what is needed for good governance in the region. If Chile is any example, this left's path is the way out of poverty, authoritarian rule, and, eventually, inequality. This left is also a viable, sensitive, and sensible alternative to the other left -- the one that speaks loudly but carries a very small social stick.

POPULISM REDUX

The leftist leaders who have arisen from a populist, nationalist past with very little formal political training -- Chávez with his military background,  Kirchner and his wife with his Peronist roots, Morales with his coca-leaf growers' militancy and indigenous agitprop,      Rafael Correa in Ecuador, López Obrador with his origins in the PRI -- have  proved much less responsive to modernizing influences.  For them, rhetoric is more important than substance, and the fact of power is more important than its responsible exercise. The despair of poor constituencies is a tool rather than a challenge, and taunting the United States trumps promoting  their countries' real interests in the world. The difference is obvious: Chávez is not Castro; he is Perón with oil. Morales is not an indigenous Che; he is a skillful and daring populist. López Obrador is neither Lula nor Chávez; he comes straight from the PRI of Luis Echeverrìa, Mexico's  president from 1970 to 1976, from which he learned how to be a cash-dispensing, authoritarian-inclined populist. Kirchner is a true-blue Peronist, and proud of it.

For all of these leaders, economic performance, democratic values, programmatic achievements, and good relations with the United States are not imperatives but bothersome constraints that miss the real point. They are more intent on maintaining popularity at any cost, picking as many fights as possible with Washington, and getting as much control as they can over sources of revenue, including oil, gas, and sometimes suspended foreign-debt payments.
 

            Argentina's Kirchner is a classic (although somewhat ambiguous) case. Formerly the governor of a small province at the end of the world, he was elected in the midst of a monumental economic crisis and has managed to bring his country out of it quite effectively. Inflation has been relatively controlled, growth is back, and interest rates have fallen. Kirchner also renegotiated Argentina's huge foreign debt skillfully, if perhaps a bit too boldly. He has gone further than his predecessors in settling past grievances, particularly regarding the "dirty war" that the military and his Peronist colleagues waged in the 1970s. He has become a darling of the left and seems to be on a roll, with approval ratings of over 70 percent.

But despite the left-wing company he keeps, Kirchner is at his core a die-hard Peronist, much more interested in bashing his creditors and the IMF  than in devising social policy, in combating the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) than in strengthening Mercosur, in cuddling up to Morales,  Castro, and Chávez than in lowering the cost of importing gas from Bolivia

Chávez is doing much the same in Venezuela. He is leading the fight against the FTAA, which is going nowhere anyway. He is making life increasingly miserable for foreign -- above all American -- companies. He is supporting, one way or the other, left-wing groups and leaders in many neighboring countries. He has established a strategic alliance with Havana that includes the presence of nearly 20,000 Cuban teachers, doctors, and cadres in Venezuela. He is flirting with Iran and Argentina on nuclear-technology issues. Most of all, he is attempting, with some success, to split the hemisphere into two camps: one pro-Chávez, one pro-American.

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. 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. He also frequently picks fights with Fox and Bush and is buying arms from Spain and Russia. This is about as close to traditional Latin American populism as one can get -- and as far from a modern and socially minded left as one can be.

Ecuador's leftist President Rafael Correa elected president in 2006, has already said that he will run again in 2013.Correa defaulted on billions of dollars of foreign debt in 2008, a move that alienated foreign investors, but was applauded by locals. He backed the re-writing of Ecuador's constitution  (as Bolivia)to tilt the balance of power towards the executive.  After the default, Correa strengthened financial ties with China, and debt commitments to the Asian country total about $7.3 billion, including loans, advance payments for oil sales and energy projects. Correa has olso boosted spending on infrastructure and social welfare projects, which has made him popular among the poor in shanty towns and rural areas. High oil prices and increased tax revenues have allowed Correa to continue spending heavily in the months leading to the election, but he has acknowledged that the country is set to suffer badly if crude prices fall.

Correa comes across as a feisty leader who never shies away from a fight. He has taken on international bondholders, oil companies, local bankers, the Catholic Church and private media companies. His ongoing spat with local media has made Correa the target of freedom of expression groups. He has sued several journalists and newspaper owners for libel, but pardoned them after winning the cases. Political foes denounce his style as "caudillismo," a term used in Latin America to describe governments led by strongmen who stamp out opposition to their rule.

Correa's relationship with Washington has been stormy. He expelled the U.S. ambassador in 2011 after U.S. diplomatic cables disclosed by WikiLeaks alleged that his government turned a blind eye on police corruption. In 2007, he refused to extend a lease letting the U.S. military use the Manta airbase for counter-narcotics flights, and in 2009 he expelled two U.S. Embassy officials in another case involving the police.

Other  populist left leaders  look likely to deliver much the same. Morales in Bolivia has already made it to power and he picked a long awaited and tumultuous fight to reform constitution in order to grant certain autonomy and funds to 53 indigenous nationalities that have been recognized in the country. Morales has deftly played on his indigenous origins to ingratiate himself with the origins of the majority of his country's population, to whom he promises a lot, but sometimes attacks to favor certain political sectors that backs him. In addition. Morales has nationalized key sectors of Bolivian economy (big and small), so his party could retain and expand his ever growing following among Bolivian population. One of Morales first measures has been to abolish punishments and harsh controls on coca growers and to expel DEA from the country. These measures has given an unreal boost to Bolivian economy, fragile and dependant on funds generated by informality and drug traffic, since large foreign investment has almost stopped.

            Humala(today Peru´s president) have  said that  he will attempt either to renationalize their countries' natural resources  (gas, oil, copper, water) or renegotiate the terms under which foreign companies extract them.. Morales and Humala have received at least rhetorical support from Chávez, and Morales' first trip abroad was to Havana, his second to Caracas. Humala, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Peruvian army, has confessed to being an admirer of the Venezuelan president. Like Chávez, he started his political career with a failed coup, in his case against Alberto Fujimori in 2000.

            What will prove most damaging is that the populist left loves power more than democracy, and it will fight to keep it at great cost. Its disregard for democracy and the rule of law is legendary. Often using democratic means, it has often sought to concentrate its power through new constitutions, take control of the media and the legislative and judicial branches of government, and perpetuate its rule by using electoral reforms, nepotism, and the suspension of constitutional guarantees. Chávez (and now Nicolás Maduro) is the best example of this left, but certainly not the only one.

            This populist left has traditionally been disastrous for Latin America, and there is no reason to suppose it will stop being so in the future. As in the past, its rule will lead to inflation, greater poverty and inequality, and confrontation with Washington and extreme polarization within their borders. It also threatens to roll back the region's most important achievement of recent years: the establishment of democratic rule and respect for human rights.