Cemented by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's landslide re-election this month, Latin America's leftward tide rose to the highest levels in 2006, as 12 general elections across this region brought mainly left-leaning parties to power.

With the election of each leftist president in Latin America, though the leftward swing is hardly homogeneous, the political pattern in this region is becoming clear.

Left-wingers are in charge in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba, Chile, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Uruguay and Venezuela, with over 70 percent of the region's population under their governance.

Leftward tide gains momentum

Considering 12 countries south of the US border would go to polls in 2006, Chavez said at the beginning of the year that Latin America was witnessing a major anti-US leftward swing. And the tide, later gaining momentum in country after country, was termed by Latin American media as "successes in succession."

The year started with the left's victory in Chile. The 54-year-old Michelle Bachelet became the first woman president, taking over 53.45 percent of the votes against her center-right rival in the presidential runoff on Jan. 15. She is identified with the left-wing Socialist Party.

A week later, Bolivia's first indigenous Indian President Evo Morales took office with the promise of lifting his nation's struggling indigenous majority out of centuries-long poverty and discrimination.

Morales, a leftist candidate from one of Bolivia's indigenous Indian populaces who want to legalize coca-growing, raised a fist in a leftist solute as he swore to uphold the constitution. He criticized free-market economic prescriptions supported by the US and international donors, saying they had failed to end chronic poverty.

In May, Morales began the nationalization of energy resources to recoup revenues in Bolivia, which holds the second-largest natural gas reserves in South America after Venezuela.

Brazil's left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva won a landslide second term in October, a month after being forced into a runoff by allegations of corruption. Lula, whose election four years ago was regarded as one of the first signs of Latin America's leftward turn, gained an enormous victory for the left by holding his position.

As the largest country and economy in Latin America, Brazil has a large-scale industrial and agricultural setups as well as a big, growing working-class. What happens in Brazil has major implications in the whole region.

Also in October, the Ecuadorians chose Rafael Correa, a left-wing economist and former fiance minister, as their president. Correa, who called himself a Christian leftist, rejected a free trade agreement with the United States, and promised to shut down a US military base at Manta.

He threatened to default on Ecuador's foreign debt and pledged to spend more of its oil revenue on the poor. Above all, he vowed to throw out the country's corrupt traditional politicians by summoning a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution.

November also saw the return of Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega to Nicaragua's presidency. More than 16 years after he was booted out of office, he easily won an outright victory in the first round election.

Finally in Venezuela, Chavez won reelection by a large margin, giving the leftist six more years to redistribute the country's vast oil wealth to the poor, and continue his campaign to counter US influence in Latin America.

Setbacks for the leftwing

In June, Ollanta Humala, a close ally of Chavez, won the first round of the Peruvian presidential elections, but lost the runoff by just 5 percent to the centrist former president Alan Garcia.

In July, Mexico had one of the tightest presidential elections in its history. Leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador lost a hotly disputed vote by less than 1 percent to Felipe Calderon of the governing National Action Party.

Moreover, in an election where only 45 percent of the electorate went to the polls, the right-wing candidate Alvaro Uribe was re-elected president of Colombia on May 26.

No to neo-liberalism

At his first public appearance after the election -- the 2nd summit of the South American Community of Nations (CSN) in Cochabamba, Bolivia, Ecuador's Correa said Latin America had woken up to a new future in which the neo-liberal model had collapsed.

He said there were new ways of thinking and new political parties taking over power in the region, and that they were more just and catering to the region's realities.

Many factors converged to push Latin America to the left, said analysts. Behind the tilt to the left, is mainly popular frustration with the failures of the decade-long reforms under right-wing governments in the 1990s that were supposed to catapult the region toward development.

In the 1980s, most Latin American leaders embraced a neo-liberal economic model advocated by western financial institutions, pushing for fiscal austerity, privatization of state industries and lifting of trade barriers. And the 1990s saw the prevalence of the US-advocated "Washington Consensus," whose 10 measures are de facto supplement and embodiment of the neo-liberal policy.

Latin America has paid dearly for being the test zone for the neo-liberal experiment. Gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in Latin America and the Caribbean declined by 0.7 percent during the 1980s and grew by just 1.5 percent annually in the 1990s, the World Bank said.

Some 40 percent of Latin Americans now live below the poverty line, and inequality rates remain the worst in the world, according to studies conducted by the Inter-American Development Bank.

A quarter of the impoverished people in Latin America are indigenous and the proportion even reaches 60 percent in the Andean and Central American countries -- a huge bedrock of the electorate.

The unfavorable performance of the neo-liberal model have led to a major erosion of public confidence in conservative parties, and resulted in calls for sweeping changes with new political leaders at the helm.

And once taking power, the left or center-left parties managed to deliver on promises, which got them credits from the public and in turn helped boost public expectations for a leftist party to win in other countries in the region.

This helps explain the newfound weight of the region's political left -- not only in Argentina, Chile or Brazil, where social democrats hold the presidency, but also in Peru, Mexico and Colombia, where the left lost presidential races but proved itself a formidable force, analysts said.

Pragmatic policies of the left

Mexican experts on international issues said, the left-leaning leaders are characterized by their adoption of more practical positions on domestic policies and emphasis on social justice and the interests of the poor.

And on foreign relations, the primary task facing the leaders is to safeguard national interests and boost economic development. Though the left-leaning governments, such as Brazil and Argentina, have developed close relations with Cuba and Venezuela, they also maintain normal relations with the United States.

In Nicaragua, Ortega has devoted himself to assuring investors, both foreign and local, that he intends to respect the free trade agreement with Washington, and to follow responsible economic policies. He has also made public his desire to develop a good working relationship with the United States.

This may deal a blow to those who expected that the left-leaning countries would shape "a huge anti-US alliance."

Latin American media have said that Washington was unwilling to see so many left-wing governments in its backyard. And before the election year unveiled its curtains, the Bush administration made it clear that it would not like to see the victory of the left in Latin America.

The United States, however, adopted a pragmatic attitude, showing willingness to maintain "normal, beneficial relations" with the new leftist governments in Ecuador and Nicaragua.

(Xinhua News Agency December 23, 2006)

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