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LATIN AMERICA: LEFT OF THE WORLD

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MIAMI, Mar 17 2009 (IPS) - The victory of Mauricio Funes, El Salvador’s president elect and candidate of the Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation (FMLN), completes a striking movement to the left in Latin American politics. The configuration of the continent had steadily shifted since the time the majority of countries emerged from military dictatorships and elected centrist or conservative governments. Today, with the exception of Mexico and Colombia on one side and Cuba on the other, the continent is governed by either the moderate left with social democratic leanings or by neo-populists. And then there is the Dominican Republic, which is governed by liberals with social concerns.

The case of El Salvador, which was ruled for almost two decades by the right-wing authoritarian ARENA party, is important for two reasons: first, because the victory of Funes is due in part to the fact that he jettisoned his party’s radical component, which is still guided by the star of guerrilla ideology; and second, because it completed the total domination of Central America by parties that are considered leftist or social democratic. These include the National Liberation party of Costa Rica, founded by Jose Figueres, now under the prudent leadership of Oscar Arias; the governments of Honduras and Guatemala, seen as more left-leaning (and admiring of Castro); the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, who chose a dangerous path, close to dictatorship; and in Panama the party of Martin Torrijos, a member of the Socialist International.

In South America, the neo-populist inclination is led by Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and the Kirchners (former president Nestor and his wife and current president Cristina) in Argentina, imitated by Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador. Then there is Lula in Brazil, flanked by the socialist-Christian democratic coalition in Chile, the difficult balance of Peru’s Alan Garcia and the APRA party he leads, and the moderation of the governments of Uruguay and Paraguay, led by a doctor and a bishop, respectively. In Colombia, Alvaro Uribe remains unopposed, faced with the perennial problem of drug-trafficking.

It is hard to say what will happen to this configuration. However, foremost in any analysis must be the effects of the economic crisis. The most that can be done is to study comparisons with the experience of other continents, where recent decades have seen the movement of many countries towards democracy. The fundamental and elusive question is whether economic progress favours the consolidation of democracy.

In Europe, the economic crisis has not resulted in any cases of regression from democracy. Evidence of this can be found in an exhaustive study by Ethan Kapstein and Nathan Converse called “The Fate of Young Democracies”. The contrast with Asia in this context is alarming: there, more than half of the burgeoning democracies reverted to authoritarianism. Most significant is the fact that two-thirds of the latter cases took place in countries with a dominant, omnipresent executive and a weak congress and judiciary. This should be a warning for Latin America, where a substantial number of the presidents seem more interested in being re-elected than in governing effectively.

Now it should also be noted that (as is already true in Venezuela) the pressure of the crisis could deprive authoritarian populists of their primary weapon: subsidies. As the CIA has found, outside of Europe and the US the current crisis has already produced higher levels of poverty and inequality than Latin America is prepared to deal with. A higher level of helplessness on the part of governments has increased the pressure to emigrate and to resort to criminal activities, like kidnapping and drug trafficking. The chaos that has descended on Ciudad Juarez on the Mexican border is a clear warning bell. The use of the Mexican army for police actions may be echoed by the exceptional step of sending US troops to the border.

It is a sobering scenario: what was originally no more than a by-product of human avarice and financial incompetence may grow into a greater threat than international terrorism. To claim today, borrowing Bill Clinton’s phrase, that “It’s the economy, stupid!” is a correct but incomplete diagnosis. Politics is, after all, a matter of human choice. It is thus better not to allow one’s self to be carried away by the conclusions drawn around the world from the elections in El Salvador (and the lessons of other elections before it). It should be remembered that the triumph of the FMLN is the result of the support of just over 50 percent of the electorate; meanwhile, the other half of the country (48,7%) remains unconditionally supportive of ARENA. The same can be said of the victory of Chavez in the last referendum: the country is viscerally divided in two. One need only remember that the election of Barack Obama did not override the fact that almost half of the voters voted for McCain. Such a clear-cut division is not ideal for these tormented times. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Joaquin Roy, ”Jean Monnet” professor and Director of the European Union Centre of the University of Miami (jroy@Miami.edu).

 
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