Claudio Lomnitz: «Latin America’s Rebellion»

«Over the past decade, the left in Latin America has made spectacular gains. Since the election of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in 1998, leftist parties or coalitions have won the presidency in Brazil (2002), Argentina (2003), Uruguay (2004), Bolivia (2005), and Chile (2006). In July’s congressional elections, Mexico’s Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) became the second electoral force in the country, overtaking the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which governed the country for 70 years. The PRD’s presidential candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, lost the election by only half of a percentage point. In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas are poised to win the presidential election.
This is an unprecedented development. During the Cold War, countries that elected leftist presidents, like Guatemala in the 1950s or Chile in the 1970s, faced deep financial instability and CIA-backed military coups. Today’s electoral gains have gone hand in glove with mass mobilization of a scale that was only rarely seen in the past, but markets seem relatively resilient.

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For 25 years states and financial institutions forcefully imposed an unbridled capitalism on Latin America. Today’s collective resistance is important on a global scale; the only way to stop deregulation and the pauperization of the working and middle classes is to restrict capital’s freedom of action. Even if some Latin American democracies are unlikely to build robust internal economies, they still generate criticism and competition that shames the great powers and corporations into curbing their excesses.

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Specters of the past haunt every step in Latin America’s turn to the left. Political arguments regularly appeal to a rectification of history, the return to an origin or founding moment, a second chance at achieving some project previously derailed. Because the specific histories being rectified are, each of them, presented as national histories, the imaginary points of reference vary from country to country. Thus, Evo Morales’s victory in Bolivia is supposed to rectify 500 years of colonial imposition of whites over Indians.

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Hugo Chávez, in contrast, found the source of national redemption not in the pre-colonial past but in a return to the founding of the nation-state, under Simón Bolívar, almost 200 years ago. In Mexico the rise of the new left occurred first in 1988, under the leadership of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, in a movement that harked back to the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas, Cuahtémoc’s father, and a period of agrarian reform and the nationalization of oil. Six years later, the Zapatista movement cast itself as continuing the radical struggle of Emiliano Zapata, in the armed phase of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920). In Chile Michelle Bachelet is redeeming the democratic socialism of Salvador Allende, killed in 1973, along with Bachelet’s own father. In Argentina, as Beatriz Sarlo has argued, the secret of the posthumous life of Peronism lies in the obsession with lost opportunity that is the key motif in the cult of Evita. The crisis of 2002 made Peronism the only political force, the only powerful political idiom, in the country. In Brazil Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s electoral triumph was widely received as the symbolic conclusion of that nation’s democratic transition from military rule, which formally ended in 1981. And in Uruguay, Tabare Vázquez’s triumph, the first presidential victory of the left in that country, is also understood as a vindication of that country’s early social-democratic legacy of the 1920s.

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But the current rise of the left occurs without an alternative economic project, which makes the very meaning of “left” and “right” difficult to pinpoint. And that difficulty may in turn explain why the “lost moments” all appeal to specific national traditions and images of autonomy and self-governance.

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The new focus on civic virtue has brought with it a sentimentalism—which was perhaps most gushingly deployed by the Zapatistas—that plays on the image of civil society as the site of everything that is true, pure, and good. The ideal of dignity resonates deeply.

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The tension between a form of democratic politics that excludes many of the poor and one based on mass mobilization—which can transgress legally sanctioned civil rights—is focused on the presidential body and its own transgressions. Thus, race is important for Chávez, single-motherhood for Bachelet, ethnicity for Morales, and a lower-class ethos for Lula. There is, in other words, a politics of identification between the body of the president and the irruption of the people into the democratic process.

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Many of the characteristics of the Latin American left are common to the region’s democratic politics as a whole. One such characteristic is the shift away from the corporate state to flexible forms of social distribution, beginning with programs such as the “social liberalism” of Salinas’s Solidaridad Program in the Mexico of the early 1990s and moving through López Obrador’s distribution of pensions, Lula’s Zero Hunger Program and Chávez’s misiones. Each of these programs provides direct, targeted distribution of resources from the federal government (for money, food, construction materials, health, or education), unmediated by union membership or employer-based social security.

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Today, the Latin American left is riddled by contradictions: it is a form of democratic politics that challenges some of the core precepts of liberal democracy; it is a rebellion against unbridled globalization that constantly risks falling back on nationalism and the developmental state; it seeks to strengthen state intervention and regulation but must rely on “flexible” forms of redistribution that it shares with neo-liberal parties; it seeks to produce alternative models of reality and development but is insufficiently invested in science, technology, and environmentalism.

These contradictions are not unacknowledged in Latin American public discussion, but they are too often hurled as partisan accusations rather than engaged as urgent policy debates. Until they are taken seriously, the Latin American left will remain a promising ideal of global resistance but a practical failure.»

(Claudio Lomnitz na Boston Review.)