Almost three decades into what came to be known as “dual transition” to democracy and neoliberalism in the Latin American region, both processes seem to be undergoing profound change; they have also proved not to go solidly hand-in-hand, as many have claimed throughout the period and others still claim.
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Whether it is a revitalized relationship with indigenous movements and the disenfranchised or a severed relationship with the mainstream media, archaic parties and traditional political structures, evolving relationships are at the heart of all of these political turns.
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The following is a draft of something shortly to be published in Radical Philosophy...
La Paz is the world’s highest capital city, at 3,636 meters above sea level. So it is all the more surprising that to get there, you have to descend: it is located is what the locals call a hueco, a hole or a hollow. When I visited in December, I arrived from across the Altiplano, a broad almost perfectly flat plain that stretches out towards Lake Titicaca in the Northwest. Snow-capped mountains loom up on the horizon. The plain itself is dotted with small subsistence farms and apparently run-down huts and houses that gradually coalesce as you approach the city, to form the sprawling shantytown of El Alto.
With almost a million inhabitants, almost all of whom are migrants from the countryside, El Alto is now a city in its own right and comprises the largest concentration of indigenous people in the Americas. It is here, where the ground is still level, that the international airport is located. And then suddenly, the ground drops away and you find yourself looking down into the hueco itself, a cliff-lined bowl packed with buildings of every type. Five hundred meters beneath you are the sky-scrapers of La Paz city center.
Commentary on the recent Venezuelan referendum, particularly among foreign observers, has turned into a rather tiresome to and fro between self-satisfied opponents of Chávez, who like to think that the Bolivarian revolution has been stopped in its tracks, and equally self-satisfied supporters, who think they have refuted the claims of Chávez's dictatorial tendencies.
The referendum has also been interpreted as a weathervane for the region's Left Turns as a whole. With the Bolivian constitutional process also stymied, Lula quiescent, Bachelet unpopular, and the Kirchners apparently reinstating Peronist husband-and-wife politics as usual, have we reached the high water mark for Latin America's renascent left movements?
But in all this discussion, the central point has been lost: that the process of setting constitutions registers a balance of forces between constituent and constituted power.
In "The Failure of Political Theology", a review essay for Mute of Forrest Hylton's Evil Hour in Colombia and Achille Mbembe's On the Postcolony, Angela Mitropoulos (aka s0metim3s of the archive) skewers the assumptions of "failed state" theory.
She points out, on the one hand, that the notion of "failed states" presupposes the norm of the "successful" state as a more or less harmonious instance of the social contract at work. This is a presupposition shared by liberalism and by Gramscian hegemony theory alike. And obviously enough I thoroughly agree with her assessment of hegemony theory as no more than "a variant of social contract theory with Marxian pretensions." Indeed, as Mitropoulos's reading of Hylton's book shows, if anything so-called progressives are more wedded to the social contract (and so to the repression of the state's founding and ongoing violences) than are liberals. The (populist) demand to refound the state by means of an organic representation of subaltern classes is a ruse of the state's feigned self-cancellation.
I've been surprised that in Peru they haven't made more of Dick Cheney's recent gaffe. The US Vice-President apparently confused Peru with Venezuela, suggesting that Hugo Chávez was President of the former rather than the latter. But Peruvian friends I've talked to weren't even aware of the incident.
Typically enough, Chávez himself has capitalized on the confusion. "Those who govern the United States are a bunch of ignorant fools," he declared. "They don't know where Venezuela is, nor do they know where Peru is." (Via LANR.)
The story can be read as a simple slip of the tongue, or perhaps as typical of the myopia of an administration run by a man who famously had never left the USA before he became President, and who as presidential candidate was unable to name the leader of Pakistan.
Left Turns? Progressive Parties, Insurgent Movements, and Policy Alternatives in Latin America
Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, UBC, Vancouver
May 27-30, 2007
Minutes by Hepzibah Muñoz
Participants: Benjamin Arditi, Victor Armony, Carmen Rosa Balbi, Jon Beasley-Murray, Alejandra Bronfman, Maxwell A. Cameron, Alec Dawson, Fernando Filgueira, John French, Gastón Gordillo, Rita de Grandis, Paul Haslam, Judith Adler Hellman, Eric Hershberg, Anil Hira, Tanya Korovkin, Juan Pablo Luna, Andrés Mejía Acosta, Gerardo Otero, Igor Paunovic, Pablo Policzer, Phil Resnick, Luis Reygadas, Pilar Riaño-Alcalá, Juan Sosa, Carlos Toranzo Roca, Martín Tanaka, Donna Lee Van Cott, Hannah Wittman.
After a review of the agenda and introductions, Eric Hershberg opened the workshop by posing key questions regarding contemporary political trends and the Left (or Lefts) in Latin America:
1. Is the shift to the Left in Latin America a reaction to 25 years of neoliberalism or the result of a natural evolution of democratic politics?
2. How do we address the particularities of the Left turn in Latin America without resorting to the dichotomy between good (democratic) and bad (populist) Left?
3. What is distinctive about particular sub-regions? Are regional categorizations useful?
4. Are Left policies creating alternatives above and beyond the Washington consensus?
Max Cameron framed the discussion by suggesting the need to address Jorge Castañeda’s work on the Left in Latin America while avoiding Castañeda’s conceptual dichotomies. Cameron also emphasized the importance of defining the Left in terms of its intersections with populism and social movements and recognizing the hybridity and complexity of Latin America’s Left turns. For example, in certain cases populist leaders create conditions for social movements to emerge, and vice versa. We should also then define the political projects that encourage social movements to articulate themselves with the Left. The failures of neoliberalism are crucial to understanding the Left turns, particularly in its exacerbation of the difference between the país real and the país oficial. Cameron further noted that Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) began as a spontaneous strategy. Only later did it become a policy and then an explicit development model. Can current Left experimentation produce a new model? Arditi argues that the Left’s public affairs and participation mechanisms constitute an open-ended process. Does this mean that Left alternatives are similarly open-ended?
Discussion then opened up with Judith Hellman asking whether the charismatic leaderships of Correa in Ecuador and Chávez in Venezuela were in fact at odds with freedom of speech and the press. She also suggested that Castañeda´s analysis of the Left might not be as influential in understanding the Latin American Left as Cameron had suggested. Hellman noted that but for the misfunctioning of institutional devices, we would be discussing Mexico as yet another case of a “turn to the left.” That we were not doing so stems from a series of choices locked into place when the Federal Electoral Institute was formed as part of Mexico’s democratization process. Thus she suggested that when we analyze the Left, we also need to think about institutional reforms.
Fernando Filgueira suggested that there are several analytical issues confused in the debate over the so-called “populist” versus the “responsible” Left. The key questions to resolve this analytical confusion are: How does this Left turn in Latin America change the way in which power is reproduced? How is the Left’s power base constructed? And how close to or far from the markets can Left governments operate? Some countries have more institutional venues of participation while others have more creative alternative mechanisms that might not necessarily translate into traditional representation. Countries that have charismatic leaderships and social movement-supported governments tend to formulate policies that are further from the market than those with traditional representation. Filgueira observed that a taxonomy that takes these questions into account can help to overcome Castañeda’s dichotomy.
Gerardo Otero’s view was that Castañeda’s social democratic Left was not in fact part of the Left. He also argued that the populist Left should not only be analyzed in terms of its leadership, but rather in terms of changes in civil society. This can take us beyond electoral politics, to look at broader social processes.
For Tania Korovkin, a major problem in Castañeda’s work is the absence of any analysis of the inner workings of the new social movements. So Castañeda’s work cannot explain the rise of the social Left, which is not populist: rather, it is a social movements-based project. This Left, according to Korovkin, is involved in local governance and development projects. The three lefts – populist, social democratic, and social – operate in overlapping circles, and such a conceptualization can help us overcome the dichotomy between good and bad Lefts.
Juan Pablo Luna suggested a conceptual reframing around Castañeda’s categorizations. What does this theorizing of institutions and leaderships tell us about the Left? How can we move beyond dichotomies to see the articulation between institutions, social movements, and leaderships?
Pablo Policzer raised concerns about fetishizing Castañeda’s general typologies. Instead, he suggested directing attention to domestic factors that might be at play in this Left turn, and their articulation to international and transnational processes. This is how the debate on democracy has evolved: democratic processes in Latin America are now regarded as the result of a combination of domestic, international and transnational factors. Is this Left turn similar?
For John French, Castañeda’s description of social democracy in Latin America is misleading. He argued that the European social democratic experience has not taken place in Latin America. Instead, the region’s peculiarities are related to mid-twentieth century populism. French also noted that Castañeda’s early work in the 1980s posed a dichotomy between populists and communists. Now Castañeda’s distinctions pit populism against social democracy.
Jon Beasley-Murray observed that Castañeda’s work represents the common sense of the Left prior to the rise of the Zapatistas in Chiapas. In Castañeda’s work, social democracy is often defined as a moderate revolution. Is this the case in the current Left turns? Are we seeing this regardless of the populist or social democratic tendencies of the Left governments?
Luis Reygadas considered that the region’s Left turn is the outcome of the cultural defeat of neoliberalism. It results from the critique of those governments such as Menem’s and Salinas’s that got wealthy at the expense of the people. This led to a situation where people elected those leaders they believed were going to solve poverty problems rapidly. The cultural defeat of neoliberalism, Reygadas argued, raises further questions regarding the cultural advantages and disadvantages of the Left.
Gaston Gordillo mentioned that the dichotomization between the revolutionary and the reformist Left prevailed 20 years ago. This, however, was a categorization made within the Left itself. Currently, the dichotomy between good and bad Left is formulated outside the Left. In order to go beyond dichotomies, it is relevant to look at the level of the Left’s confrontation with national elites and the West.
Victor Armony argued that the concept itself of bad and good Left depicted in Castañeda’s work might not be as important as questioning why this argument is put forward. Instead of demonizing populism, we should look at the different concept of democracy and raise the following questions: Why are we focusing on distinctions between different kinds of Lefts? What is common about the Left? What dichotomies between Left and Right exist as well?
Benjamin Arditi argued that Castañeda’s account of radical and accommodating Lefts in Latin America in fact signals Casteñeda’s recognition of the Left as a powerful actor in the region. Furthermore, Otero pointed out that Castañeda’s categorization of social democratic and populist Lefts is based on the assumption that the former accommodates to US interests and the latter is anti-neoliberal. The new Left should not be defined as populist but rather as a popular democratic movement with a focus on internationalist nationalism. In other words, and unlike the inward looking and isolationist ISI model, this new Left’s emphasis on local politics does not disregard international solidarity.
Martin Tanaka expressed the need to look at institutions in order to explore alternative forms of participatory democratic regimes, personalistic leadership, and social movements. For instance, Bachelet’s government in Chile has strong institutions while Lula’s in Brazil combines strong institutions with personalistic leadership. In contrast, Chávez’s and Correa’s governments are based on personal leaderships without the support of social movements, whereas Evo Morales combines alternative forms of participatory democracy with social movement support.
In Bolivia, Carlos Toranzo argued, the Left turn has brought political citizenship but not economic and social citizenship. He also illustrated the problems with portraying Bolivia’s Left turn as an indigenous movement. First, being indigenous does not necessarily mean an affiliation with the Left. Second, Morales is an indigenous person who grew up in the city and not the countryside. Third, most of the Bolivian population is in fact mestizo. Rather than this indigenous discourse, Toranzo suggested that the history of revolutionary unionism in Bolivia and its goal to create an entrepreneurial state (estado empresarial) was the key variable in understanding the current politics of the Left in Bolivia.
Cameron noted the tendency of radical governments from the Left to establish constituent assemblies as in Venezuela, new constitutions as in Bolivia and referenda as in Ecuador. The effort to create constituent assemblies might come from the sense that neoliberalism has been constitutionalized. There is a positive element to this radical process pursued by constitutional means. Open rupture with the existing legal order has largely been avoided and processes remain faithful to a concept of constitutionalism. Paul Haslam, however, suggested that the constraints (e.g. economic) a regime faces are also relevant to understand why constitutional elements are changed.
Beasley-Murray pointed out that any discussion of constitutionalism should attend to the difference between constituent and constituted power. To what extent are constituent assemblies or constitutional changes the expression of power from “below” and the result of the creative, generative and constitutive power of people themselves? Arditi argued that an analysis of constituent power should not be limited to constitutional design. More specifically, can we talk about democracy only in terms of procedural and constituent power?
French and Hershberg both noted the need for an analysis of the international context and globalization. Hershberg and Alec Dawson commented that the end of the Cold War is an important reference to understand new forms of the Left. In Dawson’s view, populism aimed at smoothing over class distinctions during the Cold War. How then does populism function in a post-Cold War context? Hershberg also suggested situating the Left in the context of US hegemony in order to understand Left trajectories. Then there is the question of how Latin American countries can successfully integrate in a global economy. Is the Left against neoliberalism or is it that neoliberalism has been unable to integrate Latin American economies to the global economy? Hershberg noted that the 1980s literature on Latin American democracy claimed out that democratic transitions were going to consolidate in a conservative direction. However, this has not occurred. While democracy has now to some extent pervaded Latin America, will the Left facilitate the expansion of democratic politics?
Movements
Beasley-Murray began his commentary by discussing issues of periodization in French’s and Hellman’s papers. In French’s paper, Beasley-Murray argued, the recent Left turns are traced back to the late 1970s. Hellman likewise takes a long view in her discussion of the Mexican Left, in her case taking us back to the 1960s and 1970s and long-standing complex imbrications of parties and movements. Beasley-Murray acknowledged that the periodization proposed in the original outline of the workshop is misleading. More specifically, it is wrong to suggest that Latin America’s Left turns began in 1998. As French demonstrates with the case of Lula, Hellman shows of Mexico, Balbi in her discussion of the Andes, and Toranzo in Bolivia, the recent elections of Left leaders were the result of complex historical processes in which movements and parties continually contended as well as collaborated. A better periodization would locate the origin of Latin America’s Left turns in the Caracazo of 1989. The Caracazo announced a new form of political action: violent, unexpected, disorganized and radical. Above all, it challenged the entire system of political and discursive representation. Subsequently, Latin America has witnessed with increasing frequency similar explosions, whose links with the organized Left and traditional parties are weak or non-existent: the 1994 Zapatista uprising; the Argentine events of 2001; and the Bolivian gas protests of 2004. In each case, there is a marked distance, a gap between the insurgency and the organized Left’s claim to represent it.
Here, Beasley-Murray addressed the question of the relationship between parties and movements, indicating that the four papers differed markedly. Where Balbi claims that the radicalization of the vote in the Andes is the product of organic movements with new leadership and French argues that party leaders can be empowered to represent collectives, Hellman focuses on the disarticulation of the Left and Toranzo on the gap between its presumed leadership and the movements that constitute it. Siding with Hellman and Toranzo, Beasley-Murray argued that in these Latin American Left turns, there is an always excessive post-liberal and post-hegemonic politics too. This is why the dichotomy between populism and social democracy is unhelpful: it assumes that this New Left is a return to the irrationality of populist caudillismo or a correction of the excesses of neoliberal faith in the market. In fact, these movements reject liberalism, caudillismo, and social democracy with the same vehemence that they cast off a decade of neoliberalism. The attempts of Left-wing parties to channel these forces are mere crisis management, a rearguard action to re-establish governability. They are an expression of constituent power, upon which all constitutions are necessarily only parasitic.
In response to Beasley-Murray’s commentary, Hellman argued that the fragmentation of the Left in Mexico does not mean that the different movements and grassroots organizations that constitute it do not coalesce. Indeed, all these movements have converged in their contestations of inequality and poverty. Yet she agreed that unlike the Workers’ Party in Brazil, the Mexican Left-wing party, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), does not have the same level of support of social movements, although many urban popular movements ultimately decided to support the candidacy of Cuauhtemoc Cardenas in 1988. She went on to comment that even though the PRD has not won the presidential elections, it is still part of the Left turn in Latin America due to the PRD’s significant advances at the local and state level; plus, of course, one could read the 1988 presidential elections as a victory for the PRD that was denied through fraudulent manipulation by institutions controlled by the PRI.
French observed that in order to address issues of periodization and chronology, it is important to analyze the initial formation of movements and their new forms, their convergences, their moments of insurgency, and also their survival in subdued moments. Social movements turn into institutions in order to further advance their goals. The Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT) is an interesting case since it has been in power before and after winning the presidential elections. In response to Beasley-Murray, French considered that the Caracazo was not a unique urban riot in the context of globalization, but rather these insurgencies existed after WWII in Latin America. Most importantly, nothing comes out of the Caracazo in six years. And Chávez was a leader that came from within the state. Lula, in contrast, negotiated with the government and did not have the same degree of confrontation as Chávez. Instead, Lula created a space of convergence for several struggles, avoiding the polarizing politics of Chávez. In this respect, Lula was also able to use the power of words to create these spaces of convergence. For instance, Lula redefined the defeat of one of the most important workers’ strikes in Brazil as a victory.
In the case of Bolivia, Toranzo considered that the country has seen a powerful process of social rebellion that has brought about important social changes. In the Bolivian context, social movements and the union federation have replaced political parties, which do not represent a crisis of the party system but rather a crisis of the partisan politics form of representation. This is due to the failure of political parties to address the negative outcomes of inequality of structural adjustment policies, which have taken a regional form in Bolivia. In Bolivia, there are two political imaginaries of change: change through revolution and change through the law. What is missing is the political imaginary of processes. Such absence is due to the country’s lack of experience of representative democracy. It is also worth noting that revolutionary nationalism has been resurrected in Bolivia. This, however, has not solved social problems. The country receives a large inflow of dollars and yet these funds are managed through corporatist clientelism. As a result, an economic boom disguises state inefficiency.
“Left Turns? Political Parties, Insurgent Movements, and Policy Alternatives in Latin America”
Exploratory Workshop, 25-27 May 2007
Jon Beasley-Murray and Maxwell Cameron, with Eric Hershberg
Summary
“Left Turns? Political Parties, Insurgent Movements, and Policy Alternatives in Latin America” took place in May 2007, bringing together scholars and researchers from throughout the Americas and Europe to analyze the recent turn to the Left in Latin America. All papers were circulated in advance, allowing ample time for discussion and debate. The workshop was therefore very productive indeed, and plans both for publication of selected papers and for follow-up activities are already well advanced.
Co-sponsors
“Left Turns?” was co-sponsored by the Latin American Studies program at Simon Fraser University, which was also integral to the workshop planning and organization. Further, we benefited from generous financial contributions from the Department of Political Science and the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions at UBC.
Objectives
The workshop had five inter-related objectives:
1. To question and complicate the notion of a Latin American “left turn.”
2. To identify the differences and commonalities between Left parties.
3. To examine their origins and their relations to social movements.
4. To analyze the consequences of the election of left-wing governments.
5. To offer predictions and policy recommendations.
Continuation of the Report to the Peter Wall Institute of Advanced Studies
By Andy Hira
See the flyer for upcoming book by the author
18 June 2007
We have seen this all before in Latin America. A sudden rise in commodity prices, a restive nationalistic reaction claiming equity will finally be on the way, and a hope for massive, if not revolutionary change in short order. At the turn of the 20th century, during the period now called the primary product export boom period, we not only had a prolonged commodity boom but also “tecnicos” in Brazil and “cientificos” in Mexico claiming on the basis of science and positivism that a new age was dawning for Latin America based on market principles.
It is clear that market principles have been exposed for what they are, a charlatan’s fool’s gold (pyrite) that exposes more problems than it solves. To be sure, neoliberalism has brought the enormous weight of state corruption, inefficiency, and economic mismanagement to the light of day. However, it has not replaced those aspects, for the most part, merely put them into new compartments. So, LA has traded an oligopoly of bloated and corrupt state enterprises for a turn backwards towards an oligopoly of foreign and large private conglomerate interests, not unlike the turn of the century. The World Bank and mainstream economists claim that institutional stability and property rights, a 2nd generation of reforms, is what is missing from the equation.
So, why aren’t those reforms, going back to a simple one of balancing fiscal budgets, carried out? The answer is that they ignore political reality and legitimate aspirations. The reality is the Latin Americans intuitively react to their economic history in the form of anti-imperialism. Hugo Chavez (like Fidel) is more about what LA is against than what it is far; Chavez continues to depend on the US and foreign companies (as does Castro). He offers no plan or vision for a more independent Latin American future. The inability to move past introspection and leveraging deep-seated emotional reactions to vulnerability and internal disquiet is what condemns such a resource-rich region to perpetual under-performance.
It is these circumstances that pushed me to write this book, a book that I expect will (and already has) continue to elicit strong emotional reactions. The book suggests that LA can form its own independent vision using the lessons of East Asia. These lessons include the idea that there is a spectrum of intervention between state and market; that elites and masses are not at perpetual odds, rather a configuration that brings them together in the nation and region is missing; and that technological advancement is a requisite to escape from the commodity trap. I know that there will much resistance by many mainstream Latin Americanists to this suggestion. Some seem to want to focus on negative conspiracy theories and the externally-created problems than offer a pragmatic solution.
They do not see that actors and contexts that create problems, including the state and global capitalism, can not be defined in one colour, but in their complex possible reincarnations offer possibilities as well as constraints. Others claim that there are all kinds of loopholes to the East Asian miracle that proves it in no way, shape, or form can be reproduced in LA. I have tried to address these concerns systematically in this book. To those critics, I say, read this book as a challenge, and if you disagree, let us discuss it and your alternative proposal seriously. Latin American can not afford to continue to repeat past cycles with no real long-term plan.
Download file to read a more recent version of the paper presented by Cameron in the 2007 conference.
In a result that surprised many, the opposition to the proposed constitutional reforms won the referendum of December 2, 2007. Preliminary results were announced just after midnight local time. The referendum was done in two blocks. With 87% of results counted, in block A, “no” gained 50.70%, and “yes” 49.29% and in block B, “no” received 51.05% and “yes” 48.94% of votes.
This is Chavez's first loss in an election or referendum since becoming president in 1998. Until now, he had enjoyed increasing popular support at the polls. The referendum does not directly affect Chavez's Presidential term, which continues until the end of 2012. Campaigns for the yes side, however, were clear that a vote against the reform was a vote against Chavez. Chavez accepted defeat in the referendum, but vowed to continue with far-reaching reforms. With a national assembly almost entirely aligned with the governing administration, it is unclear how this recognition of opposition strength, led by university students, will impact the government's agenda.
The recognition of the opposition win by the National Electoral Council came as a surprise to many. For years, critics have cited abnormal appointment procedures and partisan decisions to discount the National Electoral Council as just another body controlled by the government. The referendum decision may not reverse the widespread distrust the opposition has for governing institutions, but it does increase their hope of impacting Venezuela’s political path. In such a divided society, the construction of a strong, transparent democracy -as is the stated goal- will depend on inclusion, the acceptance of diversity, and a respect for the equal application of the rule of law.
What are Argentines electing? Who are the candidates? A brief introduction to Argentine Elections, the electoral system and possible challenges to be faced by the future administration. By Hugo Passarello Luna
On August 5th the city of San Luis, capital of San Luis Province (835km from Buenos Aires) chose its new mayor. The winner was Alicia Lemme, an architect close to the governing family of San Luis since 1983, the Rodriguez Saá. Lemme received 49.9% of the votes. While the main contender, Alfonso Verges, the incumbent and an ally of the Kirchner administration, came second with 42%. Hugo Passarello Luna
As the presidential race unfolds, internet starts playing a crucial role for candidates to transmit their image and ideas. YouTube is the new diva that joins the tool set of campaigners. Roberto Lavagna has recently inaugurated his video campaign on this site. Hugo Passarello Luna
The lack of continuity in argentine politics florishes during elections times with constant changes of executives members. Hugo Passarello Luna
Over at Insurgent49 there's an interview with independent journalist Benjamin Dangl, entitled "The Price of Fire".
The following set of articles examines Chavez’s economic policy and the effectiveness of his pro-people policies. The first article deals with the proposed monetary reform (removing 3 zeroes from the Bolivar) and weighs the benefits of simplified accounting against the inevitable rounding-up of prices, as well as the psychological factor - that people are likely to spend more when the amounts are smaller.
The next article takes issue with the portrayal of Chavez as a dictator, and points out the continuing support of most of the Venezualan public. It argues that Chavez’s laws are simply an alternative style of development, and, just because they are not endorsed by the World Bank, they do not deserve to be dismissed.
The next article elaborates upon this theme, in describing Chavez’s path to socialism, starting with his “idea of a third way.” After capitalist classes proved extremely reluctant to tolerate any loss of profits in the name of equality and the rights of the poor, it became obvious that socialism was the only option. This article flaunts the wisdom that a highly redistributive state will scare off all international investment by pointing out that corporations will take what they can get, and that less profit is still better than no profit. It concludes by describing how Venezuelan people have been granted much more power through Chavez’s leadership, which has enabled the socialization of a hostile bureaucracy and government.
The last two articles deal with the various shortages that have been experienced in Venezula since Chavez’s policies took hold. The first article simply describes the problems, and suggests some causes, while the second addresses moves the government has made to counteract said problems, including tax breaks and subsidies.
Overall, these articles provide a balanced and nuanced look at the causes and effects of Chavez’s program of socialization.
Roger Burbach, director of the Center for the Study of the Americas based in Berkeley, has just written an informed and comprehensive article preceding President Bush's trip to Latin America. His article focuses on the intentions behind the trip, the reception Burbach anticipated Bush would receive, and the current political attitudes of a number of Latin American nations in the context of both US influence and policy, and the emerging movement of Socialism for the 21st Century. Burbach notes a division within the Left, distinguishing the 'good' from 'bad', and comments that Bush intends to add Uruguay and Brazil to the small bloc of Pro-US Latin American nations, currently comprised of Columbia, Guatemala and Mexico. He goes on to discuss Panema, Ecuador and Nicaragua, nations who have rejected American influence in Latin America and who are committing themselves to Socialism alongside Venezuela and Bolivia. Burbach concludes his article by briefly discussing John Negroponte, who will soon take charge of US policy in the region, and the implications this will have in South America.
Continue to read "Bush Trip Destined to Fail as Hardliner John Negroponte Takes Control of US Latin American Policy"
As George W. Bush was landing in Uruguayan soil, Hugo Chávez was giving a two hours speech across the river Rio de la Plata.
