While We're There - More on Latin America

Well since I'm already on the subject and ordering my thoughts on Iran takes time, I thought I'd expound a little more on Latin America. More particularly on those Latin American states that have participated in Chavez's so called Bolivarian Revolution. That "revolution", and i use the term cautiously because none of its participant leaders came to power through revolutionary means, has entailed the massive centralization of power, the abolition of independent institutional forces within the state, the subjugation of civil society, the stoking of class and racial tensions and the suppression of the media and core popular freedoms. Simultaneously the process has involved pushing for economic nationalization, massive welfare projects, wealth redistribution and confrontation of Latin America's infamous super-oligarchs. The process has now been most obviously played out in Venezuela, but has also manifested in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua, and other countries, such as Honduras under Zelaya, seemed to be heading in a similar way.

I bring all this up because I was reading an article on newsweek's website today, http://www.newsweek.com/id/204835/page/1 , about Venezuela and I was struck by the naivete of the reporting. Or at least the foolishness of the slant taken. Now I am no Chavista. I cannot stand the man or his minions, but those who seek to characterize him as nothing more than a madman despot are missing the point.

These guys, Chavez, Morales, Ortega and Correa, are the product of the still unresolved problem at the heart of most of Latin America. Inequality. Since the colonial era these countries have been constructed on a deeply unequal basis, and maintained on that basis. While progress has certainly been made from the days when a landed (if not titled) nobility of pale-faces lorded over a far browner peasantry, the region still contains large underclasses whose political discontent has latched as tightly to the Bolivarians as it once did Moscow's envoys.

So when that article, or the western thought process in general, bemoans the flight of educated Venezueleans, and the increasing limits on their lives under Chavez, they ignore the questions: where does Chavez come from? Who supported him? Who does now? and most importantly, Who can defeat him?

The answer to the last is not something many of the right wing intellectuals who so stridently denounce Chavez will like. The only way to beat guys like Chavez, and stop them coming back again in the future, is to tackle the social tensions that fuel them. That means supporting the kind of pragmatic center-left politicians that have been successfull in recent times in Chile and Brazil. And it means that we in the West need to support such individuals even as they undertake policies we won't like, policies that at times will look more like Chavez's than our own. It also means not allowing figures from the old oligarchies to take the place of the Bolivarians. We need to accept that the future successful leaders of Latin America are unlikely to be white folks (except in Argentina of course) from the same old established political dynasties. That group are unlikely to ever produce meaningful socio-economic change, because that would be a direct threat to themselves.

Fortunately Obama, in his handling of the Zelaya Affair, seems to have realized that last point and taken a stand against what increasingly to me looks like a coup by an oligarchy made nervous by Zelaya's willingness to address the fundamental issues of the underclass.