Several lefts in Latin America

The problems with neoliberalism encouraged the turn to

the left among voters in Latin American countries, and

the record of populist and pragmatist leftwingers alike

has been impressive. Poverty and inequality have fallen

in nearly all left-led countries, according to a recent

UN report, with Venezuela narrowing the gap most, by

increasing the wealth of the poorest by 36 per cent.

Chile and Brazil's GDP has grown by 5 per cent annually

over the last couple of years, Argentina's by 7 per

cent; even desperately poor Bolivia has seen more than

4 per cent growth under Morales. Critics attribute

Venezuela's pace-setting 8 per cent yearly increase to

high oil prices, which makes one wonder why petroleum-

exporting countries such as Saudi Arabia and Mexico

grew at only 3 per cent. The answer is that Chávez's

massive spending on public works, education,

healthcare, housing, co-operatives and small businesses

has worked as a scattershot stimulus package. Much of

this expenditure may be wasteful, chaotic or corrupt,

but the country's unemployment rate has fallen from

nearly 20 per cent in 2004 to 9 per cent, the fastest

drop in Latin America. As Keynes himself pointed out,

the waste involved in public works projects is

infinitely less of a vice than the waste of intractable

unemployment. `Two pyramids', he said, are `twice as

good as one'.

There is variation in style and policy among Latin

America's new leftists, but it has more to do with

regional history than ideology. In the southern cone,

civilian and military dirigisme from the 1930s to the

1970s created complex, relatively diverse societies.

The neoliberalism introduced in the 1980s deepened

inequality and generated new social organisations -

such as Brazil's landless workers movement - but there

wasn't a complete collapse of the old political order.

In Chile, Bachelet is the fourth civilian president

since Pinochet left power in 1990, and has continued

her predecessors' efforts to rebuild a social safety

net. Lula also rose within an established political

system, and now presides over Latin America's largest

economy, with successful financial, agricultural,

energy and financial sectors. In the Andes, especially

in Bolivia and Ecuador, where racism is more

entrenched, class power more extreme and foreign

control more barefaced, privatisation and deregulation

stripped the economy to its core and destroyed the

existing order. The region's new leaders have

established unapologetically fortified executive

branches held accountable by elections and a mobilised,

socially diverse rank-and-file. They are more willing

to challenge the rules of the global political economy,

to nationalise industries, push land reform and

negotiate higher royalties from petroleum and gas

exports.

Along with Venezuela, Brazil has played a key role in

establishing Latin America's growing independence from

Washington. When Brazil announced last September, after

Morales's right-wing opponents in Bolivia tried to

destabilise his government, that it would not accept a

coup in South America, it was an act of solidarity as

well as an assertion of its own regional doctrine;

Washington's silence was taken as a show of support for

the plotters but also an indication of the inattention

of a declining superpower. If Obama normalises

relations with Cuba, as Lula has been pushing him to

do, Brazilian and not US agro-industry is set to become

the major developer of the island's sugar economy, and

will gain access to US markets. Lula has advanced his

country's economic interests in Bolivia, Ecuador,

Paraguay and Uruguay - `Brazil's backyard', according

to the Uruguayan analyst Raúl Zibechi - while at the

same time defending Morales, Correa and Chávez, not

just from Washington but from Brazilian investors

threatened by resource nationalism, land reform and

higher taxes. The Brazilian president is as popular

abroad as he is at home, becoming the Third World's

proxy at international financial summits like the G20,

a prominence just ratified by the International Olympic

Committee's decision to pick Rio over Chicago and

Madrid for the 2016 games. Washington will be paying

close attention to Brazil's 2010 presidential election,

hoping that whoever wins will share Lula's moderation

but not his charisma.

Whatever direction Latin America's new left takes, the

global economic meltdown might just bring about the

long-sought convergence between Latin America and the

United States, though not in the way that might have

been imagined: `On bad mornings,' Paul Krugman recently

remarked, `I wake up and think we are turning into a

Latin American country.' As to the election of the

first African American to the US presidency, Lula

called it an `extraordinary gesture', and hoped that

Obama would transform it from one exclusively for the

`US people into a gesture for Latin America . . .

respecting our sovereignty and an equitable

coexistence'.

[*] All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation

in the Iberian Atlantic World (Yale, 352 pp., £30, July

2008, 978 0 300 12580 1).

Greg Grandin is the author of The Last Colonial

Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War and, most

recently, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's

Forgotten Jungle City