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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