Foreign
Affairs
May/June 2006
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.
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.
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.
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.
