Latin America’s two left wings

And indeed, except in Chile, these policies — trade liberalisation, conservative monetary and fiscal policies, privatisation, subsidy cuts, foreign investment — have not delivered. Growth rates in Latin America remain well below those of other areas, and lower than those of Latin America itself between 1940 and 1980. Social indicators have barely improved; there is still plenty of corruption, a decline of law and order, and submission to a US administration seen as indifferent or hostile. After the meagre results of the rightward drift of the ’80s and ’90s, the region is responding as it often has — by voting the rascals out.

But this broad-brush categorisation of the left in Latin America is misleading. In fact, things are more complicated. There are two different lefts in the region. One consists of those leaders and movements that spring from a communist, socialist or Castroist past, and who precisely because of these radical origins have been able to reconstruct themselves. They understand what went wrong in the former Soviet Union and Cuba, what has not worked before in Latin America and the constraints that globalisation and poverty impose on policy. The left in Chile, Brazil, Uruguay and possibly even Nicaragua can be seen in this light. This left will emphasise social policy — education, anti-poverty programmes, health, housing — but within an essentially orthodox macroeconomic framework. It will deepen and broaden democratic institutions, though on occasion it can go astray.

It will disagree with the US frequently. Chile opposed Washington on Iraq in the UN Security Council, Brazil rejects US trade policy and Uruguay has renewed diplomatic relations with Havana. But it will rarely take matters to the brink. Chile signed a free-trade agreement with the US just as President Bush was invading Iraq; Tabare Vazquez is negotiating an investment protection agreement with the US now, and Lula welcomed George Bush at his home in Brasilia while demonstrators burned Bush in effigy across the street. This left is a good thing for Latin America. Its political landscape is mainly where the region must be governed, and, if Chile is an example, it is the way out of poverty, authoritarian rule and, eventually, inequality.

The other left is very different: it traces its roots to that peculiar Latin American contribution to political science and governance: old-fashioned populism. Chavez is not a Castro, he is Peron with oil. Evo Morales is not an indigenous Che, he is a skillful and irresponsible populist. Lopez Obrador in Mexico is neither Lula nor Chavez: he comes straight from the PRI of Luis Echeverria, Mexico’s president from 1970 to 1976, the political base where the former mayor of Mexico City learned his trade as a cash-dispensing, overspending, authoritarian-inclined populist. Kirchner is a true-blue Peronist, and proud of it.

For all these leaders, economic performance, democratic values, programmatic achievements and getting along with Washington are not imperatives; they are bothersome constraints that miss the point. The point is to exhibit rhetorical incontinence, to maintain popularity at any cost, to pick as many fights as possible with Washington and to exercise as much control as possible over sources of revenue, including oil, gas and foreign-debt payments. This left is disastrous: its rule will, as in the past, lead to inflation, greater poverty and inequality, confrontation with Washington and the gradual dis-mantling of the region’s most important achievement of recent years: democratic rule and respect for human rights.

Only by distinguishing between these two left-wing currents in Latin America and understanding where they come from will it be possible to ascertain where they are going. More than welcoming or bemoaning the advent of “the” left in Latin America, it might be wiser to separate the wheat from the chaff, the new from the old and, most important, the sensible from the irresponsible.

Newsweek