[A-List] Venezuela and the Latin American "New Left"

["tony black" <tal@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "grok" <grok@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <llo@xxxxxxxxxxxx>; <labor-l@xxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2005 7:26 PM
Subject: Venezuela and the Latin American "New Left"



> <screed>
> The below article is limited by its fixation on political
> elites only -- most glaring when this error is committed by
> analysts on the "respectable" Left. And one of the many ways
> bourgeois hegemony makes its way into Left thinking is by a
> usually unspoken assumption that _leaderships_ and
> "representative government" are the only things that really
> count in politix. That "the masses" are only there to
> provide a backdrop, and legitimacy and support (I guess
> this is just 'being practical'; and people like me are just
> 'not with the program' I guess...)
>
> Frankly, I have little faith in the new Uruguayan "social-
> democrat" government -- or any of these pseudo-socialist
> governments -- dealing with the pressing issues of the day.
> They're simply social-democrat groups who've taken advantage
> of the growing socialist demands of the people of América
> Latina -- and intend never to stray far from the main
> capitalist line, while talking a BIG "Left" line to the
> rank-and-file whenever required. Sound familiar..? Like a
> Labor Day picnic maybe?
> Where this Frente Amplio actually stands was made pretty
> clear even a year or two ago, when they could be seen to be
> furiously backpedalling politically, Ã la Lula. And I've
> seen for myself for that matter how the north american Left
> has also been largely taken-in by the "Lula Show" -- right
> up to this moment; so I know I don't want to be seeing a
> repeat performance of any of that foolishness!
> >:<
> North american Leftists still put too much of their hopes in
> the "Left" leadership in América Latina -- without
> understanding that if these people _can_ be called "Left" at
> all, it is mostly because they are being PUSHED Left "from
> below" ("from below", for that matter, is a term & concept
> widely overused in North America as ideological cover for
> the petit-bourgeois Left...)
>
> Bottom line: support *the workers*. Essentially JUST the
> workers (and farmers and poor, etc.)! Don't necessarily
> trust the leaderships: they must EARN our trust first. And
> often. That it's so hard to work directly with our fellow
> komrad workers in other countries IS "the issue of the day"
> for us. As for "leaders": what have they done for us lately,
> huh..??
> Chávez is _earning_ his stripes at this moment. Quite a bit
> at that. *Lula isn't*. And I'm not holding my breath
> concerning Vázquez & crew.
> - -- grok.
> </screed>
>
 <www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1391>
>
> VENEZUELA AND THE LATIN AMERICAN NEW LEFT
>
> Tuesday, Mar 08, 2005
> By: Seth R. DeLong - COHA
>
>
> The inauguration of Tabaré Vázquez in Uruguay shows that
> Latin America's democratic march to the left continues, and
> could be a forerunner to Mexico's 2006 presidential
> election.
>
> The Bush administration, already uncomfortable with Latin
> America's new left, would become apoplectic if this movement
> reached the U.S.-Mexican border. A López Obrador victory in
> the Mexican election would signal the ultimate domino
> falling.
>
> Bush's Latin America team fails to understand that the model
> of the new left in Latin America today is less Che Guevara
> than FDR and Tony Blair's British Labor Party.
>
> The growing center-left ideological tilt among Latin
> American states is symptomatic of a growing movement towards
> a continental alliance and a political stance markedly
> different from that being fielded by the U.S.
>
> On March 1, Uruguayans inaugurated their first ever
> left-of-center president. This event shattered the
> power-sharing arrangement that had existed for the last 170
> years between the moderate Colorado and Blanco parties. This
> arrangement, which in many ways mirrored the near half
> century reign of the similar power-sharing Punto Fijo pact
> in Venezuela between the Christian Democrats (COPEI) and
> Democratic Action (AD), ended last October when Uruguayans
> elected Dr. Tabaré Vázquez, an oncologist, who ran on an
> anti-neoliberal platform. Vázquez was not the standard
> bearer of any well entrenched political party but the leader
> of a medley of relatively small movements that joined
> together under his Broad Front (Frente Amplio) coalition.
> The major issue Washington will be watching in the months
> ahead is not whether Vázquez will chart a leftist course,
> but just how left-of-center that course will be. Will he
> adopt a concertación style of government as seen in Chile, a
> balancing act between populist demands and IMF mandates as
> in Brazil, or a frontal assault on Washington -- at least
> rhetorically -- like Venezuela under Hugo Chávez?
>
>
> Nothing too Radical
>
> It is difficult to divine how Uruguay's new president will
> deal with the threefold challenge posed by his country's
> crippling debt, widespread poverty and high unemployment
> rate, all of which were exacerbated by Argentina's 2001
> crash. Those in the coalition's far left-wing will want him
> to challenge the IMF's prescriptions at every turn; but,
> unlike Argentina under Nestor Kirchner, Vázquez has given no
> indication that he will default on his country's foreign
> loans. To the contrary, his choice for economy and finance
> minister, Danilo Astori, is viewed by observers as cautious
> and conservative. Astori, as reported in the Economist,
> believes that "Brazil played a central role to prove that a
> leftist government can be compatible with rigorous fiscal
> behavior." Given that Vázquez's likely economic model will
> be similar to the Keynesian model to which other new left
> governments in the region have turned, what does the
> Uruguayan leader's victory mean for the future of the
> continent's resurgent left-leaning movement?
>
>
> Will the Region's New Left Movement March North?
>
> In an interview with COHA, Professor Peter H. Smith of the
> Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies at the
> University of California in San Diego said "The greatest
> significance for Latin America is whether Vázquez's victory
> is part of a trend that culminates in a win for López
> Obrador in the upcoming Mexican elections." In the event of
> a López Obrador victory, Smith continued, "Washington would
> really start to worry. That would mean a major tilt in the
> [ideological] balance of the hemisphere."
>
> So far, Latin America's leftward shift has been relegated to
> the southern continent. However, a López Obrador victory
> could precipitate a tectonic shift for the Bush
> administration's ill-reputed Latin America team from
> grudging acceptance of South America's left-of-center
> governments to the use of Cold War-style tactics against
> them. Even though López Obrador, as the candidate of
> Mexico's left-leaning PRD party, appears to be moderate, the
> prospect of another new left administration -- this time
> right on the U.S. border -- would be all but intolerable to
> the administration's nostalgic cold war ideologues. A López
> Obrador victory particularly would upset Eliot Abrams, that
> self-confessed perjurer and booster for Central America's
> death squads in the 1980s who now serves as Bush's Deputy
> National Security Advisor and Roger Noriega, the assistant
> secretary for the State Department's Bureau of Western
> Hemisphere Affairs. Both men see regional policy exclusively
> through an anti-Havana prism and hardly can be comfortable
> with Latin America lurching in the direction of everything
> they loath.
>
> One would think the Bush administration would not get so
> flustered by Latin America's new left regimes, as they are
> all democratic, practice at least a "soft" neoliberalism and
> are only in the earliest stages of coalescing into a
> regional EU-like bloc. While most other administrations
> would likely brush off the continent's new left tilt as a
> natural consequence of the region's disenchantment with the
> unfulfilled promises of free trade and free markets as the
> guarantors of social justice, the current White House will
> see it as a frontal challenge. This is because Bush's Latin
> America team, led by Noriega and Abrams, make no distinction
> between Fidel Castro and anyone who sports a red beret or
> spouts anti-Yanqui rhetoric.
>
>
> A New Left Oil Bloc?
>
> While the U.S. is forced to barely tolerate Chávez so long
> as he keeps the oil flowing, a López Obrador victory in
> Mexico next year would likely scorch Washington
> policymakers, especially if he reverses Vicente Fox's policy
> and reaches out to Castro as have Chávez, Lula, Kirchner and
> Vázquez. If he wins, the administration will then be faced
> with four left-of-center hemispheric powerhouses: Venezuela,
> Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. The nightmare scenario for the
> Bush team would then be Chávez inviting López Obrador and
> Mexico's state owned oil company, Pemex, into a cooperative
> arrangement with the Venezuelan leader's oil trading bloc,
> "Petrosur," which already includes Argentina and, as of
> March 2, Uruguay. Given that Mexico and Venezuela are two of
> the U.S.' top four sources of foreign oil imports (behind
> Saudi Arabia and Canada), a combined Obrador-Chávez alliance
> would account for upwards of a quarter of all U.S. petroleum
> imports. One can pretty easily anticipate how the Bush
> administration would react to such a petro bloc emerging,
> recalling Henry Kissinger's old adage that any threat to
> Saudi oil exports to the U.S. would be a casus belli.
>
>
> Regime change -- Cold War style
>
> The archetypal models for Washington-orchestrated regime
> change in Latin America against left-leaning democracies
> were Guatemala in 1954 and Chile in 1973. In the latter
> instance, Salvador Allende -- a man as devoted to
> constitutional democracy as to his socialist ideals and who
> didn't jail even one political prisoner in his three years
> in office -- was toppled by a coup with the Nixon
> administration's blessing and support. In Kissinger's
> infamous words, "I don't see why we need to stand by and
> watch a country go Communist because of the irresponsibility
> of its own people.'
>
> The theoretical justification for this view can be found in
> the work of another Reagan era cold war zealot, former U.S.
> ambassador to the U.N., Jeane Kirkpatrick. In her book,
> Democracy and Double Standards, Kirkpatrick wrote that,
> 'rightist authoritarian regimes can be transformed
> peacefully into democracies, but totalitarian Marxist ones
> cannot. They can be changed only by aiding armed opponents
> of communism. In the final analysis these enemies of freedom
> can only be deterred from greater aggression . . . by the
> military capacities of the United States." Translation:
> better dead than red. It was precisely this jesuitic
> justification for supporting any tin-horn dictator or death
> squads that simply claimed to be anti-communist that lead to
> U.S. complicity in the hundreds of thousands of deaths in
> Central America's "dirty wars" of the 80s.
>
> Though the current administration has so far not done
> anything as brazen in Latin America as Nixon and Kissinger
> routinely did in terms of destroying democracy in order to
> save it, when confronted with a choice between backing
> authoritarian regimes friendly to U.S. interests or
> free-wheeling democracies, it has unfailingly opted for the
> former. In 2002, the Bush administration, after having
> channeled funds to the Venezuelan opposition, openly
> endorsed the coup against Chávez before hastily retracting
> that position once the coup failed. As usual in
> interventions of this kind, U.S. support of the minority
> opposition resulted directly into swelling the majority of
> the population's support for Washington's self-denominated
> foe.
>
> In February of last year, the administration arranged the de
> facto ouster of Haiti's first democratically elected leader,
> Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Since then, it has failed to
> publicly condemn human rights violations under interim Prime
> Minister Gerard Latortue's bankrupt regime, nor has it tried
> to ensure that the island's majority party, Fanmi Lavalas,
> can participate safely in next fall's scheduled elections.
> These examples demonstrate that contrary to President Bush's
> words in his last inaugural address that "America will not
> impose our own style of government on the unwilling. Our
> goal, instead, is to help others find their own voice,
> attain their own freedom, and make their own way," his
> administration is quite firmly prepared to sabotage Latin
> America's "own way" to democracy if it differs from
> Washington's.
>
>
> But Just How Left-wing Are They?
>
> In contrast to right-wing jitters over Latin America's
> "rising red tide," a sober look at these governments --
> certainly Brazil, Argentina and even Venezuela -- reveals a
> significant gap between their anti-neoliberal rhetoric and
> their actual economic policies. While bashing the IMF and
> the World Bank has become the region's polemical norm, no
> leader -- not even Chávez -- is seriously contemplating a
> wholesale rejection of the basic principles of Keynesian
> economics even if some, like Kirchner, challenge IMF
> mandates. What this means is that Latin America's new left
> governments will favor mixed markets modeled on the post
> World War II monetarist policies of social democratic
> European states, like Clement Atlee's Britain. Befitting
> this pattern, as Latin America's new left-of-center states
> go about creating safety nets for the poor, they continue to
> court foreign investment and encourage capitalist ventures
> to help pay for them. As the Economist rightly notes, "While
> Mr. Castro makes it spitefully difficult to set up even the
> smallest of micro-enterprises as a private business, his
> Venezuelan counterpart is cheerfully ploughing funds into
> the creation of as many small entrepreneurs as possible."
>
>
> Latin America's New Deal
>
> On the gap between the theory and practice of the new left
> in Latin America, as can be seen in Chávez's government, Dr.
> James Petras of the University of New York at Binghamton has
> written that, "The euphoria of the left prevents them from
> observing the pendulum shifts in Chávez's discourse and the
> heterodox social welfare and neoliberal economic politics he
> has consistently practiced." Confirming Chávez's progressive
> bona fides while at the same time calling attention to his
> standard Keynesian economic policy, Professor Petras writes
> that the Venezuelan leader's "policy has always followed a
> careful balancing act between rejecting vassalage to the
> U.S. and local oligarchic rentiers on the one hand and
> trying to harness a coalition of foreign national investors
> . . . He is closer to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal than
> Castro's Socialist revolution."
>
> None of the above is meant to suggest that the region's
> leaders have not made significant strides towards
> alleviating poverty and hunger. To the contrary, Lula and
> Chávez have enacted some of South America's bolder
> initiatives in order to reduce the region's draconian levels
> of inequality. The important point is that while the new
> left-of-center governments are launching many New Deal-style
> reformist initiatives, the core free market structures
> remain intact. Accordingly, if Vázquez follows Latin
> America's other neo New Dealers, we can expect the following
> from his Broad Front administration: first, a neoliberal
> economic policy coupled with a politically left agenda;
> second, interest in revivifying the Pan-American ideal,
> currently modeled on Chávez's Bolivarian dream of South
> America as a regional economic hegemon; third, a gradual
> turning away from Washington politically, if not
> economically. An amalgam of these three creedal beliefs --
> Keynesian economics hitched to left-of-center politics,
> intra rather than interhemispheric integration and a gradual
> shift towards Europe and Asia is probably the most apt
> description of the new variant of leftism being displayed in
> Latin America today. If Vázquez ends up fitting this mold,
> then we can expect him to be far more like Lula and even
> Chávez than Fox and Alvaro Uribe of Colombia.
>
>
> The Drive Toward Intrahemispheric Trade
>
> Though efforts to strengthen MERCOSUR, the South American
> Common Market, have been somewhat disappointing, Brazil and
> Venezuela have retarded and maybe even shut down
> Washington's push for the Free Trade Area of the Americas
> (FTAA). This integrationist approach is likely to advance at
> least as long as Washington continues its duplicitous
> subsidization of U.S. agriculture while preaching the
> virtues of free trade to its southern neighbors. As part of
> the region's Pan-American drive for Latin unity, we will see
> further moves toward solidifying a South American trade
> bloc, such as Chávez's proposal for ALBA, the Bolivarian
> Alternative for America. Eduardo Duhalde, former president
> of Argentina, already has declared that "our mirror will be
> the European Union, with all its institutions." Following
> this trend, on March 2, Vázquez signed the "Declaration of
> Montevideo" with Chávez. The significance of this agreement,
> which brings Uruguay into Venezuela-sponsored Petrosur, is
> that it is one more step, albeit a small one, in the
> direction of intrahemispheric trade and cooperation and away
> from Washington's preferred plans for multilateral,
> interhemispheric trade.
>
>
> What to Look for in the Future
>
> Could the next step be a single South American currency
> modeled after the euro? If López Obrador wins, that
> possibility could be on the docket and certainly Chávez --
> notwithstanding Washington's fear of another debilitating
> blow against the dollar, as happened with the advent of the
> euro -- will continue pushing for it. Meanwhile, the danger
> Latin America's New Dealers face is that Bush's cabal of
> neoconservatives does not seem to realize that having an
> occasional dinner with Castro does not make one a Che
> Guevara. In Professor Smith's words, "Vázquez needs to court
> Castro because if he can't deliver to his base materially
> then he can at least deliver symbolically. But politically,
> he will throw his lot in with Kirchner and Lula."
> Unfortunately, if the past is to be our guide, there is no
> indication that Washington has the patience or wisdom to
> interpret such courting as merely symbolic.
>
>
> This analysis was authored by COHA Senior Research Fellow,
> Seth R. DeLong, Ph.D.
>
> March 8, 2005
>
> The Council on Hemispheric Affairs, founded in 1975, is an
> independent, non-profit, non-partisan, tax-exempt research
> and information organization. It has been described on the
> Senate floor as being "one of the nation's most respected
> bodies of scholars and policy makers." For more information,
> please see our web page at www.coha.org; or contact our
> Washington offices by phone (202) 223-4975, fax (202)
> 223-4979, or email coha@xxxxxxxxx
>
> Original source / relevant link:
> Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA)
>
>
> www.handsoffvenezuela.org
>
>
>
> - --
> *** FULL-SPECTRUM DOMINANCE! ***********************************
> *       Boycott the bourgeois Economy: BUY PROGRESSIVE         *
> **** Critical endorsement only *** Gift-giving Year-round ***  *
> *                                                              *
> *                    Consumer-Powered Conservation Products:   *
> * http://www.wildlifeworks.com                Wildlife Works   *
> * http://www.palestineonlinestore.com Palestine Online Store   *
> * http://www.greenpeace.ca/tissue Greenpeace Shopper's Guide   *
> * http://www.leftbooks.com                     leftbooks.com   *
> * http://www.mehring.com                       Mehring Books   *
> * http://www.ufwstore.com          United Farm Workers Store   *
> ****  Where the barricades end -- real democracy begins  *******
> GPG fingerprint = 2830 CEE8 4B63 72A0 F86E  622D 6245 9357 A705 91FA
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.2.5 (GNU/Linux)
>
> iD8DBQFCL5RKYkWTV6cFkfoRAlbZAKDXx+q1IKKuxlnbgt/3tQctVR6e5wCeM5ea
> 2Yk125tz8UL2kvTwC7Jogn4=
> =3Rqx
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>
>
>