Why Stop at Two?
Greg Grandin
London Review of Books
October 22, 2009
Leftovers: Tales of the Latin American Left edited by
Jorge Castañeda and Marco Morales
`The people of South America are the most ignorant, themost bigoted, the most superstitious of all the RomanCatholics in Christendom,' John Adams, the second
American president, wrote in 1815. The notion that theycould form a `confederation of free governments', asthe Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda hadproposed, was as `absurd as similar plans would be toestablish democracies among the birds, beasts andfishes'. Until recently, scholars pretty much agreed. The region had plenty of liberals, but a category thatincludes both Miranda - who corresponded with Thomas
Paine, participated in the American and FrenchRevolutions and led Venezuela's break from Spain– andPorfirio Díaz, Mexico's strongman for around 30 years at the turn of the 20th century, is as volatile as thepolitics that the term `liberalism' seeks to explain.
Historians tended to think that liberalism, which hadno roots in the continent, masked a colonial legacy ofpatrimonial royalism and Catholic monism which produced
authoritarians like Díaz and utopians like Miranda, aknight errant, Adams wrote, `as delirious as hisimmortal countryman, the ancient hero of La Mancha'.
After the 1959 Cuban revolution, figuring out how tostop the swing between authoritarianism and utopianism- and how to prevent the spread of Communism - became acentral preoccupation of social scientists in the US.Latin America served as a testing ground formodernisation theory, a project aimed at shepherdingdeveloping countries to democracy. In the early 1960s,the goal was to set up functioning welfare states. Thepurpose of society, Walt Rostow wrote in Stages of Economic Growth, published in 1960, is not `compoundinterest for ever'; human beings were not `maximizing units' but `pluralist' beings who deserved to live indignity. `The future of the hemisphere did seem brightwith hope,' Arthur Schlesinger Jr wrote after JFK
announced the Alliance for Progress, which promised`homes, work and land, health and schools - techo, trabajo y tierra, salud y escuelas'. JFK `pronouncedthe Spanish manfully', Schlesinger said, `but with adistinct New England intonation'.
By the mid-1970s, however, nearly all of South Americawas ruled by juntas and Central America was convulsedby civil wars. Union members, peasant activists,reformist politicians, priests and teachers werepersecuted; hundreds of thousands were killed by thesecurity forces; more than a million people in CentralAmerica alone were driven from their homes.Keynesianism had given way to neoliberalism, and LatinAmerica was now the laboratory for a more stringentform of modernisation. Samuel Huntington was frank:`democracy,' he wrote in 1989, `is clearly compatiblewith inequality in both wealth and income, and, in somemeasure, it may be dependent on such inequality.' By
the time the Berlin Wall came down that November,almost every Latin American country had returned tosome form of constitutional rule. Manuel Noriega heldout in Panama, but he was dispatched a month later byUS troops in Washington's first post-Cold War invasion. There was still Fidel Castro, but Cuba was isolated,having lost its Soviet Bloc trading partners. By June 1990, Bush páre could claim that a `rising tide of
democracy, never before witnessed in this belovedhemisphere' would soon make possible a `free trade zonestretching from the port of Anchorage to Tierra delFuego'.
Latin America's conversion to free trade was short-lived, however. In 1998, Hugo Chávez was electedpresident of Venezuela, and Latin America began another
turn to the left. In one country after another, self-described socialists, from Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva inBrazil and Michelle Bachelet in Chile to Evo Morales inBolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, came to power. InApril 2008, Fernando Lugo, a priest, became presidentof Paraguay, ending more than six decades of one-partyrule, 35 of them under the dictatorship of GeneralStroessner. Morales broke through Bolivia's politicaldeadlock in August 2008 by submitting to a recallreferendum, which he won with nearly 70 per cent of thevote; he then presided over the ratification of a new
social-democratic constitution. A year earlier, morethan 65 per cent of Ecuadorians had voted for a newcharter. In February this year, Venezuela'sconstitution was amended, allowing Chávez to run forre-election when his term ends in 2012. And in March,
Mauricio Funes, of the Farabundo Martí NationalLiberation Front, was elected president of El Salvador.
Surveying the resurgent Latin American left, policymakers and commentators tend to divide it into socialdemocrats whom Washington can work with, and demagogueswho must be contained. As Michael Reid, an editor atthe Economist, puts it, it is `hard to overstate whatis at stake in this ideological rivalry, this battlefor Latin America's soul' between liberal democrats anda new generation of knights errant who have learned to
manipulate the rites of democracy - that is, elections- while hollowing out its substance. The Mexicanpolitical scientist and former foreign minister Jorge Castañeda also divides the left into two camps:pragmatists, forward-looking reformers such as Lula andBachelet, who have made their peace with a globalisedworld and the reality of US power; and irreconcilables such as Chávez and Morales, nostalgists more thanpopulists who cling to `introverted and archaic'notions of sovereignty and anti-imperialism. `Therevolution, the assault on the WinterPalace,' hewrites, `is still ever gently on their mind.'
But why stop at two lefts? Latin America's presidentsembody distinct traditions: trade-unionism, indigenouspeasant organisation and progressive militarynationalism, in the cases of Lula, Morales and Chávez;left developmentalism with Correa, who has a PhD ineconomics, in Ecuador; middle-class social democracy with Bachelet and Tabaré Vázquez, both doctors, inChile and Uruguay; liberation theology with Lugo inParaguay; and Peronism in Argentina with Cristina Fernández, who along with her predecessor and husband, Néstor Kirchner, has returned her party to its populist
roots after a disastrous embrace of neoliberalism. Theinsurgent New Left has its standard-bearers in RaúlCastro and the still lingering Fidel in Cuba as well asthe tarnished Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. The onlycurrent not represented is old left Communism, thoughCommunist Parties are part of the governing coalitionsin Bolivia, El Salvador and Uruguay.
Latin America's new leftists, led by Lula and Chávez,have brought about a significant realignment ofhemispheric relations, drawing even American alliessuch as Colombia, Peru and Mexico into their orbit andcoming close to achieving Miranda's wished for
`confederation of free governments'. Latin Americangovernments met twice last year, without Washington:they condemned Colombia's US-supported raid intoEcuador to attack a Farc camp and supported Morales inthe face of separatist attacks that left scores ofgovernment supporters dead. On a range of issues -opposition to the war in Iraq, normalisation ofrelations with Cuba and ratification of theInternational Criminal Court - they have shown a degreeof unanimity and an independence from the US that would
have been unthinkable just a decade ago.
In Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, Colombia and Bolivia, indigenous movements have upheld social democratic traditions. In Peru, an indigenous protest recently forced the revocation of laws aimed at openingup large swathes of the Amazon to foreign logging,mining and oil corporations. There have been advancesin gay and women's rights, including access toabortion: Uruguay, for example, this year made it legal
for gay couples to adopt. Rights, it seems, have beenexpanding in Latin America at a moment when they seemto be contracting elsewhere. Despite this, much of the
literature on Latin America continues to emphasise thefragility of democracy in the region. This maysometimes be true of government institutions, but it'snot true of social movements and political culture,where the idea of democracy has proved remarkably
resilient.
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Over the last two decades, social and intellectualhistorians have revised their interpretation ofHispanic liberalism. The revitalisation in Europe ofThomist rational natural law - one of the foundationsof the notion of inalienable rights - has been traced
back to debates among the Dominicans about thebrutality of Spanish conquest and colonialism. StuartSchwartz found an unexpected degree of religioustoleration in Iberian colonial society,* while legaltheorists have come to appreciate the blend of moderateFrench Girondism with an Anglo-American concentrationon rights that defined the first generation ofindependence leaders such as Miranda. Early 19th-century republican constitutions and civil codes inMexico, Argentina, Nueva Granada, Alto Perú and Chilebalanced the liberal imperatives of separate powers andlimiting the role of government with the ideal of promoting a virtuous society.
Yet liberalism did not generate stable and enduringgovernments. By the middle of the 20th century, LatinAmerican countries had approved a total of 186constitutions, an average of just under ten percountry. Venezuela alone had 24. `Treaties are scraps of paper,' Simón BolÃvar said, `constitutions, printedmatter; elections, battles; freedom, anarchy; and lifea torment.' One reason for this volatility was that, inthe decades before independence, profoundly illiberalsocieties had developed in South America in tandem withexport-based economies. Rather than spread power andwealth, Latin American capitalism, which was based onseignorial estates and forced labour, concentrated
privilege. While demands for pure Spanish blood wererelaxed, new forms of cultural racism took their place. The United States is often the standard by which LatinAmerica is judged, but it's important to remember thatLatin America didn't have a `north', a region with afree labour system in which liberalism could develop. In Latin America, every liberalisation was the resultof violent social conflict, from the Túpac Amarurebellion in the Andes in the 1780s, the 1794 Haitianrevolution and the insurgencies led by the priests Miguel Hidalgo and José María Morelos in Mexico in the1810s, to the Cuban independence wars of the secondhalf of the 19th century and the Mexican revolution of1910. These and dozens of lesser-known peasant andslave revolts not only weakened the system of forcedlabour but infused liberalism's abstract promises of
equality with examples of collectivism in action.
Generations of conflict over labour and land rightsmade Latin America famous for its revolutionaries, butless well known is its contribution to socialdemocracy. In 1917 Mexico produced the world's mostelaborate social democratic constitution, prohibiting
child labour, affirming the right to form unions andhold strikes, enacting land reform, abolishing debtpeonage, and mandating healthcare, pensions,unemployment and accident insurance for workers. EveryLatin American country followed suit, ratifying everlonger constitutions with chapter-length sections onsocial rights and duties, labour, education, family andeconomic order. Between 1944 and 1946, Latin Americaexperienced its first, forgotten `transition todemocracy': nearly every country in South America andmost of those in Central America, along with theDominican Republic and Cuba, became a democratic state; those that were already democracies extended the vote,
strengthened labour rights and implemented socialsecurity programmes. Social democracy became synonymouswith modernity. `We are socialists,' Guatemala's first
truly democratically elected president, Juan JoséArévalo, said in 1945, `because we live in the 20thcentury.'
Latin Americans also pushed for reform abroad: 21 LatinAmerican representatives - the largest regional caucus- joined 29 others from around the world in SanFrancisco in 1945 to found the UN, pressing it toconfront the problem of colonial racism and to adopt a
human rights policy. Chile and Panama supplied thedraft charters on which the Universal Declaration ofHuman Rights was based, and the Chilean academic HernánSanta Cruz served on the committee, chaired by EleanorRoosevelt, which wrote the final text. A well-heeled,Jesuit-educated socialist, and a friend of SalvadorAllende, Santa Cruz was the committee's most forcefuladvocate of social rights: the right to welfare, towork, to unionise, to rest and leisure time, to food,clothing, housing, healthcare and free education. Cubainserted into the charter the right to an adequatestandard of living, the Dominican Republic included aprovision on sexual equality, and Mexico had the phrase
`without any limitation due to race, nationality orreligion' added to the clause guaranteeing freelycontracted marriages.
Latin American lawyers, notably the Chilean diplomatAlejandro Alvarez, also challenged the assumptions ofGreat Power diplomacy. Alvarez argued that the `liberal
and democratic spirit of all the nations which composethe New World' provided an opportunity to establish anew co-operative diplomacy. Washington had long
insisted on its right to intervene in its `backyard'.But Franklin Roosevelt, hamstrung by the GreatDepression and forced to extricate the US from a seriesof marine occupations in the Caribbean basin, droppedthis when he recognised the sovereignty of Latin
American nations late in 1933, his first significantforeign policy achievement. Legal theorists in Brazil,Argentina, Chile and Colombia supported his AtlanticCharter, hoping that it would lay the foundation for aninternational social democratic order. By 1943,
Roosevelt was holding up the `illustration of therepublics of this continent' as a model for postwarliberal multilateralism. Though he took credit forovercoming `many times 21 different kinds of hate' to`sell the idea of peace and security among the American
republics', the inspiration could just as well be traced to Bolívar's call in 1826 for the creation of aconfederation of American nations.
From 1947, though, the landed class, along with theirdefenders in the clergy and military, took advantage ofthe Cold War to stage a counter-offensive. Within a few
years, a majority of Latin American countries were onceagain under military rule. The US State Departmentsupported this turn, believing that the region's`excessively rapid trend towards the adjustment ofsocial rights' had resulted in unacceptable levels of
`political instability' that threatened access toresources and paved the way for Communist penetration.George Kennan, the theorist of containment, argued that
it was `better to have a strong regime in power' inLatin America `than a liberal government if it isindulgent' to Communists. And Washington helped makesure things stayed that way, funding and trainingsecurity forces to disastrous ends in one country afteranother. Kennan wrote in a long memo to Dean Achesonthat the US should accept that `harsh governmentalmeasures of repression may be the only answer.' `South
America,' he added, `is the reverse of our own NorthAmerican continent,' its geography tropical, itsmongrel people `unhappy and hopeless', and its history`unfortunate and tragic almost beyond anything everknown'.
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In the debate over what is and isn't different about UShegemony, little attention has been paid to the mostimportant factor in the rise of the US: Latin America.`South America will be to North America,' an essayistwrote in the North American Review in 1821, `what Asiaand Africa are to Europe.' Not quite. Modern capitalistempires - France, Holland and Great Britain in Africa,Asia and the Middle East - ruled over culturally and
religiously distinct peoples. Anglo-American settlers,by contrast, looked to Iberian America not as anepistemic `other' but as a rival in a fight to define aset of nominally shared values. John Winthrop urged thefirst generation of Puritan settlers to build a `City
upon a Hill', yet as they struggled to survive onefreezing winter after another, their thoughts turned tothe rumoured `magnificence' of an already existing New
World metropolis - Americana Mexicana - so advanced itboasted `1500 coaches drawn with mules', as SamuelSewall wrote in his diary in 1702. While Cotton Mathertaught himself Spanish, Sewall elaborated what may bethe earliest version of the shock doctrine. Spotting ablaze in the night sky, he hoped the comet would strike
Mexico City and spark a `revolution' that would lead toa mass conversion. `I have long prayed for Mexico,' hesaid, `that god would open the Mexican fountain.' Within a generation of its independence from Britain,the US would begin to measure its progress against the`deathlike sleep of Spanish dominion', aristocratic inits pretensions, indolent in its industry andsuperstitious in its beliefs. `I hate the dons,' thefuture American president Andrew Jackson wrote in 1806,while he was involved in machinations to separateFlorida and Louisiana from Spain; `I would delight tosee Mexico reduced.'
Pan-American relations developed into an ideologicalcontest over who best represented common principles,which helps explain why Latin America remained socialdemocratic while US liberalism became missionary andevangelical. The very idea of `Latin' America tookshape after Washington's annexation of more than athird of Mexico's territory in 1848. `They wouldconcentrate the universe in themselves,' the Chilean
liberal Francisco Bilbao complained after WilliamWalker's 1856 invasion of Nicaragua, where he broughtback slavery years after it had been abolished: `TheYankee replaces the American; Roman patriotism,philosophy; wealth, morality; and self-interest,justice.' When Washington attempted, at the 1889 pan-American conference, to strengthen the MonroeDoctrine's `America for the Americans' clause – whichLatin Americans tended to interpret as `America for theUS' - Argentina countered by proclaiming `America for
humanity'. As efforts to overcome the region's feudalpast coincided with the US's rise to global hegemony, adiffuse cultural anti-imperialism developed first intosocial democratic non-interventionism, then into NewLeft militancy.
Washington's first experiences with foreign nation-building - a few decades after Reconstruction in theSouth - were in Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic,Nicaragua and Panama. But the `New Latin America' wasas hard to build as the New South. While it was easy todisparage the defeated Confederacy's manorialism andbelief in white supremacy, throughout the 20th centuryUS diplomats found themselves in competition with LatinAmerican nationalists honed in struggle against theirown agrarian lords over who best representedprogressive democracy. During the Cold War, thiscontest forced Washington to respond to Communism andnationalism with social democracy, promoted bymodernisation programmes such as the Alliance forProgress. It was a tough sell, since the US wassimultaneously arming the region's landed class and itsconstabulary. Reagan shifted emphasis, enlisting Bolívar, Augusto Sandino, José Martí and even the`Bolívarian teachings' of Miranda in the new rightcrusade for `political liberty': code, in part, forunregulated capitalism.