Reorienting the Latin American Left

Great interview in The Nation of Gustavo Petro. In particular, he talks about reorienting the Latin American left.

There’d be a change in axis. Latin American progressivism used to revolve around the Havana-Caracas-Buenos Aires-Managua axis. That was an old progressivism, and I don’t think it gave us any solutions. It revolved around oil and coal, Havana included, since it aligned with Venezuela to get oil. It has since fallen apart, and while it was falling apart, neoliberalism got a second wind and began winning elections in Argentina, Peru, and other countries. But I don’t think that it’s lasted long yet—except in Colombia, where it always has been. Take a look at crisis in Peru, what is happening in Mexico, even in Brazil—they needed a coup to take down Lula.

The existence of the FARC prevented any moderate left from gaining traction in Colombia, and the silver lining there is that Petro has a blank political slate to work with. Eventually the Venezuelan left will face a similar situation since the Chavista left is being discredited.

He provides no details about how to move away from extractionism, and of course even Nicolás Maduro talks about it while doing nothing, but it's still important to begin with a goal of changing how the left views the economy.

It will be an axis that sees the transformations of Latin America toward a productive economy, and not one based the extraction of resources. We aren’t going to be primary exporters, as we have been for five centuries. We can also be an intentional society and produce on the basis of knowledge. 

I am not sure what he means here by "producing on the basis of knowledge." He has said this before.

“Over the last 30 years, Colombia has exported oil, coal and cocaine,” he said. “I don’t see how this benefits humanity. I want to export food and knowledge-intensive industrial products.”

Perhaps he means high tech. Regardless, it shows a recognition that the Venezuelan and Argentine models had serious problems and should not be copied. A reorientation is what the Latin American left needs right now if it is to win votes again in more countries and carry on its core goal of reducing inequality.

Read more...

Reproductive Rights and the Latin American Left

Christina Ewig and Merike Blofield look at reproductive rights from the "left/right" ideological perspective. Just being "leftist" doesn't tell you much about a government's stance on abortion policy. Instead, we have to look at "populist" versus "institutionalized" left.

• Institutionalized parties – like those in Chile and Uruguay – have channels in place for civil society organizations, including feminist ones, to have bottom-up influence. Given their respect for the rules of the game, however, the institutionalized lefts are also likely to face well-organized conservative opposition, which slow down reform, shape final legislation, or even veto it altogether.  In Uruguay and Chile, feminists had a voice, but conservatives were also are able to block, slow down, and water down liberalization.  This is why the Uruguayan reform took so long and why in both cases the final legislation is less liberal than the original proposals.

• By contrast, populist governments, like those of Nicaragua under Daniel Ortega and Ecuador under Rafael Correa, often see advocates for liberalization as political threats – particularly feminists who also represent more general claims for individual autonomy and pluralism. Moreover, an issue like abortion, where the practical costs of a restrictive stance are born almost exclusively by low-income women, is likely to be used by populist leaders as a pawn in a power struggle with well-organized, influential religious forces.

They find this holds over other reproductive issues as well. The right, of course, is adamantly opposed. I wonder whether this will hold in Ecuador, where Correa actually gave up power and Lenín Moreno seems to act in a less populist manner.

Read more...

Discontent and Support for the Left

Nina Wiesehomeier and David Doyle, "Discontent and the Left Turn in Latin America." Political Science Research and Methods 1, 2 (December 2013): 201-221. Link here (ungated).

Abstract:

The electoral success of the left across Latin America has largely been interpreted as a backlash against globalization and a manifestation of anti-market voting of citizens increasingly frustrated with their experience of representative democracy. However, studies trying to test these propositions show rather inconclusive results and face the problem of translating objective economic conditions into observable individual perceptions. This article contends that theories of subjective well-being in psychology and economics can shed light on this left turn. In particular, life satisfaction, as a manifestation of experienced utility, can help explain the electoral outcomes observed throughout the region. The findings show that support for the left is higher the more unsatisfied voters are under a right incumbent.

I am mulling this one over. It employs sophisticated methods to argue that when people are dissatisfied while an incumbent from the right is in the presidency, support for the left will be higher.

Further:

If current left incumbents are unable to deliver policies that improve the electorate’s well-being, they run the very real risk of losing office at the next election, as the results from our individual-level models suggest. Future research should concentrate on the dynamics behind life satisfaction and policy delivery to fully untangle the implications for the survival of the incumbent president.

I feel like there must be something I am missing. It seems a truism to say that as people feel unsatisfied under an incumbent, they will think of voting for someone else. The net gain here, I think, is measurement of dissatisfaction. But would we expect any other result? Am I being uncharitable?

Read more...

Left or right in Latin America

Al Jazeera has been publishing some editorials about the dilemma of the Latin American left, by academics on the left. William Robinson argues that Rafael Correa and Evo Morales have essentially become prisoners of transnational capitalist forces. Manuela Picq criticizes Morales for ignoring indigenous demands in favor of extractive industry. Those came on the heels of an editorial by an environmental activist labeling Morales a hypocrite.

What's notable is that these sorts of discussions don't penetrate much into the U.S. media (and therefore not the U.S. public either). We remain stuck with the stereotype of leftists who blindly copy Hugo Chávez, or with a tiny bit more nuance are labeled "good" (Lula) or "bad" (Chávez). Yet there are intense debates going on within these countries, Bolivia most prominently, that are largely missed.

Read more...

The lefts in Latin America

Ignacio Walker has a very worthwhile article in Dissent about the Latin American lefts. He is a Chilean Christian Democrat who served as Foreign Minister under Ricardo Lagos. Popular accounts generally congeal the lefts into two--pro-U.S. vs. anti-U.S., undemocratic vs. democratic, or other similar unsatisfying simplifications. Walker sees three: Marxist, populist, and social democratic. Of particular utility is how he places current politics into the Latin American historical context, e.g. "In significant ways, the history of Latin America in the last century can be described as a search for responses to the crisis of oligarchic rule that took place in the 1920s and 1930s." He has a great quote from a letter that Juan Perón sent to Carlos Ibáñez in Chile:

My dear friend: Give the people, especially the workers, all that is possible. When it seems to you that already you are giving them too much, give them more. You will see the results. Everybody will try to frighten you with the specter of an economic collapse. But all of this is a lie. There is nothing more elastic than the economy, which everyone fears so much because no one understands it.

He then discusses the ways in which populism has re-emerged in Latin America, first as neoliberal (e.g. Fujimori, often called neopopulist) and then leftist. One major point he makes is that the current strand of leftist populism came into being at a time when democracy was taking root, so is actually less authoritarian than its predecessors. Nonetheless, there is always a tension between the personalization of populist rule and representative democracy.

At the same time, however, his focus on populism means that he does not discuss his "Marxist" category adequately. He views Chávez as both populist and Marxist, but it's not clear whether he would label anyone else (except the obvious example of the Castros) in that manner. Regardless, given how much latitude Chávez gives capitalism, I'm not sure Marxist is a good way to describe him. He mentions factions of the FSLN, FMLN, and the PT but the dominant tendencies of these parties are no longer Marxist.

At the very least, it is a step forward from the "bad left" vs. "good left" that we normally see.

Read more...

Castañeda article

I’ve often criticized the U.S. media for its portrayal of Latin America. I just read an article in Newsweek International, feeling the same general annoyance at the oversimplification and over-emphasis on the power of Hugo Chávez, then suddenly realized it was written by Jorge Castañeda. He is a very well known political science professor (I liked his book Utopia Unarmed) and former Foreign Minister of Mexico.

In short, the article attributes much of recent Latin American political change to Chávez in ways that defy common sense. The main hypothesis is that Chávez helps other countries, and as a result the presidents of those countries concentrate power and damage democracy. I’m always uncomfortable with analyses that ignore domestic politics this much—does someone like President Kirchner really just respond to Chávez? Further, does Chávez really wield that kind of power? Last year we saw the limitations of doling out oil money, as he could not garner the necessary votes to win the Security Council seat.

What I do agree with is Castañeda's argument that the Bush administration’s refusal to play a positive role in the region encourages Chávez and offers no alternative vision of the future. All the U.S. does is repeat the free trade mantra ad nauseam, while proclaiming the need to build a big wall to keep Latin Americans out.

Read more...

Colombian election and the left in Latin America

As predicted by everyone, Uribe won the Colombian presidential election, though he received an even larger share of the vote (62 percent) than generally predicted. The candidate of the left, Carlos Gaviria, won 22 percent, the largest share the left has ever received.

I know I am sounding like a broken record, but I do get tired of the conventional wisdom about the left that keeps getting repeated without analysis. In this case, the Washington Post article argues that Uribe’s election “bucks the trend of leftist leaders taking office across South America in recent years.” It adds:

Recent years have seen left-leaning leaders take office in Bolivia, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile. But the election of the conservative Uribe bucks the leftward trend in South America.

I've said this many times, but it bears repeating: the governments listed there are so diverse that lumping them together makes no sense.

Read more...

The "Left" in Latin America

Given the headlines in today’s Chilean papers, I thought I would comment some more on the “left” in Latin America. President Bachelet is denying that she ever congratulated Evo Morales on nationalization (he says she did), saying that she doesn’t comment on other governments’ policies and simply was confirming a bilateral meeting.

Meanwhile, as NTKLA points out, in Peru Ollanta Humala has distanced himself from Hugo Chávez, and association with Chávez may have damaged the campaign of López Obrador in Mexico, who now seems to be behind in every poll.

Andres Oppenheimer has an interesting Op-Ed about how little the so-called “left” in Latin America agrees on anything.

Read more...

More on defining the left in Latin America

Further complicating the “leftist” label in Latin America, Uruguayan President Tabaré Vázquez has been talking with President Bush about trade, with the ultimate goal of a free trade agreement.

Vázquez is always cited as part of the leftist tilt, yet here he is negotiating trade with the U.S., and even taking a swipe at Evo Morales, saying that “he welcomed foreign investment and noted that his country respected its contractual obligations.” This refers to Bolivia’s recent nationalization of natural gas. Not the sort of behavior you’d expect from a “leftist.”

Read more...

Jorge Castañeda's article on the left and populism

I finally got around to reading the Jorge Castañeda's article in Foreign Affairs, which I think is thought provoking and worth reading, but still incomplete in its analysis of the “two lefts” in Latin America.

Here is Castañeda’s definition of “left”:

“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.”

Is it analytically useful to put Perón in the same category as Hugo Chávez? Or, for that matter, to label Néstor Kirchner as an unrepentant leftist? He argues that populists are ardent anti-Communists, which fits Perón but not Chávez (I am not sure about Kirchner). We are all familiar with Chávez, but is López Obrador in Mexico really the boogeyman that Castañeda makes him out to be, i.e. that he “loves power more than democracy, and…will fight to keep it at great cost”?

I think Castañeda conflates populism and “leftism,” which bring us back to the problem of over-simplifying political realities in Latin America. It is more useful to argue that there are indeed two strands of the left in the region, but that populism (and corporatism) is also present, such that not all leaders can easily be categorized as leftist. As political scientists, we need to dust off these old concepts, which were so prevalent in the 1970s, and rethink them. It would be a great idea for an article (if only I had the time).

Read more...

Chilean Politics

Here is an interesting column by Andres Oppenheimer about the new Chilean cabinet, which will take office in a few weeks. It may be the most “globalized” cabinet in Latin America, since many have lived extensively abroad (often as political exiles during the Pinochet dictatorship), even receiving advanced degrees, and about 70 percent speak English. This will have positive effects, since Chile has been active in negotiating trade agreements (including, but not limited to, the U.S.), participating in UN operations (most notably in Haiti) and generally is seen as the economic leader in the region, so a savvy cabinet is a big plus. The major question, however, is whether this creates a disconnect with the population. Certainly, Chilean economic growth is impressive, but inequalities and poverty are persistent, and the president and her cabinet will need to show they are committed to domestic issues.

I think this should also serve to put to rest the terribly oversimplified and widespread notion that Latin America is “tilting leftward.” In some cases, like Venezuela, that is more clear, but the diversity of so-called “leftists” is considerable. It is very hard to say that President-elect Bachelet should be in the same category as Evo Morales, and that either one resembles Kirchner in Argentina. It is tempting to label Bachelet, because she is from the Socialist Party, but she has assembled a pro-free market cabinet that will likely work very well with the United States.

Read more...