Let’s Not Be Simplistic about Latin American Elections
Michael Shifter opines in the LA Times about the ridiculousness of using just a two-color palette (left and right) to paint a portrait of the new leadership in Latin America:
Despite these labels, viewing Latin America through a strictly “left-right” lens doesn’t make sense today. It is too simplistic, and it obscures the region’s highly differentiated political landscape. Latin America is undergoing considerable social and political ferment. Street protests have forced a string of presidential resignations — in Bolivia and Ecuador, for example. Economic and political reforms haven’t tamed the unrest. As poll after poll has shown, Latin Americans are disenchanted with politics of all colorations and with the lack of remedies for mediocre economic growth, scant job creation and stubborn poverty.
The political responses to this sour mood are far from monolithic. The prescriptions promoted are so varied as to render suspect any overarching, catch-all term — including “leftist.” Politically, Latin America is, and will likely remain, a patchwork, marked by hybrid social, economic and foreign policies.
As I have argued before on this blog, Mexican presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador is a victim of this sort of simplistic categorizing, often getting mentioned in the same breath as Hugo Chavez. Yet the political contexts in which they operate are dramatically different.
Back in 2000, I stopped by New York to visit my cultural anthropologist brother, Baron, on the way back to DC from Mexico City. I had just done a poll for the then-PRI candidate for president, Francisco Labastida. I was explaining to Baron why the leftist candidate in the race, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas of the PRD (AMLO’s party), had no chance.
My brother earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, having written a soon to be published dissertation about the interaction between Miskito Indians, Creoles, Mestizos and Europeans on the Mosquito Coast of our mother’s home country of Nicaragua. So his question about my poll was perfectly logical: “Did you test for the possibility of a peasant revolution?”
I hadn’t really tested for the possibility, I had to admit. But for all the public frustration with socioeconomic inequality in Mexico evident in my poll, the place as a whole was not a powder keg of insurrectionist zeal (Chiapas notwithstanding). Nor is it one today.
Venezuela, on the other hand, has a very different political climate. As does Bolivia. My brother’s question would have been very apropos had I been doing polls in either of those countries. And it’s that difference that is one of the key reasons why putting AMLO in the same category as Chavez (or Evo Morales) makes little sense. Venezuela and Bolivia are much more fragile democracies than Mexico, a fact reflected in the very different rhetoric and proposals employed by the political leaders looking to change the status quo in their home countries.
As Shifter points out, there are consequences when policymakers put conspicuously distinctive Latin American politicians in the same category:
Besides Chavez, Morales is probably most deserving of the leftist label among the new crop of leaders (unless one counts Ortega, who is a hangover of the Cold War and whose prospects appear to be declining). Yet despite his affinity with Chavez’s populist rhetoric, Morales’ “revolutionary” options are more limited than those available to the Venezuelan president. Venezuela’s well-developed energy sector allows Chavez to rake in windfalls from record oil prices and to carry out his social programs. In return for 90,000 barrels per day of Venezuelan oil, Castro provides thousands of Cuban doctors and teachers to work in Venezuela’s poorest barrios. Bolivia, despite its natural gas reserves, has no such bargaining chip. The United States can help shape the overall political environment in the region to promote moderation in Bolivia and the rest of Latin America. Treating Morales as a threat, irredeemably allied with Chavez and Castro, would be unwise and could well become self-fulfilling. Instead, Washington should engage Morales and give him some time. And rather than blindly pushing a U.S. economic and anti-drug agenda, it should join with Bolivia and other Latin American nations to devise alternatives that address their problems and ours.
