|
The radicalization that has been underway in
Latin America for a decade, producing a series of mass
explosions, keeps showing new signs of extending and deepening.
A leader promising reforms to benefit the
poor has just been elected to head the government in Paraguay, which
had been ruled by the longest-lasting right-wing dictatorship in Latin
America, if not in the world. A former Catholic bishop, Fernando Lugo,
scored a decisive victory in the April 20 presidential election.
The New York Times reported April 21: "While he has sought to
reject being labeled, Mr. Lugo has socialist tendencies resembling
those of South American leaders elected in the past decade, including
Evo Morales of Bolivia and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. Mr. Lugo has
talked about reforming the agrarian sector and redistributing wealth to
more of Paraguay's poor. He said in an interview that he might consider
increasing export tariffs on agricultural producers."
Lugo is evidently a product of the of the Catholic Church's attempted
adaptation to mass radicalization, which became known as
"Liberation Theology." The hierarchy has increasingly tried
to reverse this process, but it is not so easy to get the genie back in
the bottle. Clerics make up an important part of the intelligencia in
underdeveloped countries, and they can be influenced by the impact of
popular anger and struggles, like other intellectuals who feel a need
to understand what is going on in their countries.
The New York Times, like most of the capitalist media, usually calls
any reformer socialistic. That has a certain logic, since any reforms
that benefit the masses tend in the direction of socialism and raise
hopes among the oppressed and exploited that can only be achieved under
socialism.
But the relationship is not so simple. The predominant reform tradition
in Latin America is not socialist but populist. That is, it does not
base itself on the historic interests of the working class, but
presents itself as multi-class and tries to balance between the workers
and the capitalists and their imperialist backers.
So far, the radicalization in Latin America has not been captured by
leaders who go beyond the populist tradition in the region. In fact,
these political leaders have generally fallen short in practice of the
radicalism exemplified by the prominent populist figures of the 1930s
and 1940s, such as Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico and Juan Perón in
Argentina, although they have tended to talk a more radical language
than their predecessors, particularly in their denunciations of U.S.
imperialism.
(The example of the Cuban Revolution, so far the only enduring
challenge to U.S. domination of Latin America, is certainly an
encouragement to militant talk and even to invocations of socialism.)
Most of the Latin American countries, with the notable exceptions of
Mexico and Colombia, now have governments that are populist to varying
degrees. Lugo seems to want to be one of the most conservative of them.
But it remains to be seen what sort of mass pressure is going to be
brought to bear on him.
As in the past, today's populist regimes are subject to the pressure of
the masses, even though by nature they try to avoid decisively taking
the side of the oppressed and exploited against the ruling classes.
That is why that have always been regarded as a danger by U.S.
imperialism and the local rich, who are subordinate to it, and, in most
cases, have been eventually removed by right-wing military coups.
Anti-imperialist measures in Ecuador
Rafael Correa, the president of Ecuador, elected in 2006, an ally of
the Chávez regime in Venezuela, is a typical populist. He is a
politician who held high positions in preceding bourgeois governments.
But he has taken some anti-imperialist steps, mainly nationalizing some
holdings of Occidental Oil.
Recently, Correa strongly denounced the government of Alvaro Uribe in
neighboring Colombia, the closest U.S. ally in Latin America, for
carrying out a raid against a camp of the Colombian FARC guerrillas on
Ecuadoran territory. He has recently taken another anti-imperialist
move, announcing that he is going to purge direct collaborators with
the U.S. military from his defense establishment and expel an American
base.
The New York Times reported April 21: "Mr. Correa—who this month
dismissed his defense minister, army chief of intelligence and
commanders of the army, air force and joint chiefs—said that Ecuador's
intelligence systems were 'totally infiltrated and subjugated to the
C.I.A.' He accused senior military officials of sharing intelligence
with Colombia, the Bush administration's top ally in Latin America.
"The dismissals point to a willingness by Mr. Correa, an ally of
President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, to aggressively confront Ecuador's
military, a bastion of political and economic power in this coup-prone
country of 14 million people. Mr. Correa's moves mark a clear break
with his predecessors, illustrating his wager that Ecuador's
institutions may finally be resilient enough to carry out such changes
after more than a decade of political upheaval."
Ecuador shares the distinction with Bolivia of having seen three
governments toppled by mass explosions within a few years. The ground
must certainly feel warm under Correa's feet.
Pressures build in Venezuela
But the most important and the most radical of populist regimes in
Latin America is the government of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Chavez is
not simply a product of parliamentary politics, like Correa or Evo
Morales in Bolivia. His roots are in left-wing anti-imperialist
conspiracy in the armed forces and an attempted military coup in 1992,
for which he spent two years in prison.
Chavez's language has been quite radical, including denunciations of
capitalism and evocations of a socialist future. But in recent times,
the Chavez regime has been showing signs of the decay typical of
populist experiments that have not moved toward socialist revolution.
The erosion was demonstrated dramatically by the defeat of the
constitutional amendments proposed by Chavez in the Dec. 2, 2007
referendum. It was the first election the charismatic leader had lost
since his election to the presidency in 1999.
The "yes" vote was a million and half less than the number
formally signed up for his United Socialist Party of Venezuela, and it
lost notably in the areas that have been strongholds of the regime.
On Dec. 5, one regime supporter explained the setback on the pro-Chavez
website Aporrea: "There is a flagrant contrast between the
revolutionary talk and the practical application. The problems of
supply should have been solved basically in the months following the
oil strike in 2002-2003. They have created disorientation and confusion
among the people.
"In practice, we are living in a war economy, with shortages of
milk, sugar, cooking oil, toilet paper, tomato sauce, flour, chicken,
meat, rice, pasta. Virtually all the basic food items are scarce. And
for a whole year the government has proven completely impotent to solve
this problem.
"Other problems are also very much felt by the population, such as
insecurity and inflation, which the government has also been unable to
control. ... Criminals are operating with impunity throughout the
country, to the extent that the boundary line between the police and
criminal gangs has become very fuzzy....
"Inflation is eating away at workers' wages. The government
predicted 12 percent inflation this year. It is going to end up being
20 percent, almost twice what the government planned. This is
destroying all the gains in wages and other benefits that the workers
have gotten over the year."
Other problems were the growth of corruption among business operators
who have gotten close to government officials and profited from
them—the so-called Bolivarian bourgeoisie. This corruption reached deep
into the Party of the Fifth Republic, the political formation on which
Chavez based his rule, and which became the foundation of his new
party, the PSUV.
At the time of the referendum, Chavez responded to his defeat by claiming
that the Venezuelan population was not yet ready for socialism,
although there was abundant evidence that the opposite was true. That
is, the defeat was owing to the fact that Chavez's socialist rhetoric
was not matched by concrete advances toward socialism.
Now it seems that Chavez himself has been
forced to draw that conclusion. He has recently nationalized the cement
industry and the biggest steel producer, Sidor. In the first case, the
move was needed to meet the demand for cement for building in a country
where there is a desperate shortage of decent housing.
In the second case, the Sidor management had been besieged by a series
of nine strikes in the last three months. On March 13, there had been a
violent confrontation between the National Guard and strikers, in which
dozens of workers were wounded by clubs and 50 were arrested.
In the March 27 issue of its newspaper La Verdad Obrera, the
Argentinian Trotskyist Partido de Trabajadores Socialistas commented:
"The responsibility for this repression falls not only on the
governor of Bolivar state or the commander of the National Guard but on
the Chavez government itself and its antiworker minister of labor, Jose
Ramon Rivero." Sidor was owned by Techint, an Argentinian company,
whose interests were defended by the populist presidents of Argentina,
Nestor and Cristina Kirchner, allies of Chavez in his attempts to
create a bloc of populist governments.
Rivero was dropped from the government following the nationalization of
Sidor. And on the day that Chavez announced the nationalization, he
declared that "the workers are assuming a leading role in the
Bolivarian revolution." Chavez had said previously that the
Marxist concept of the leading role of the working class in socialist
revolution was outdated.
Then, following the nationalizations in cement and steel, Chavez
extended the nationalizations in the agricultural sector. The Los
Angeles Times reported April 11: "Venezuelan armed forces occupied
32 sugar plantations Thursday, the latest in a wave of takeovers that
some say is a bid by President Hugo Chavez to regain political momentum
and reverse his recent slide in the polls."
In fact, in the case of Sidor, the workers not only outdistanced
Chavez, but their own union, which is led by bureaucrats who subordinated
themselves to the government. It was the rank-in-file workers who
forced the nationalization, or actually the re-nationalization of
Sidor. It had been previously nationalized under a bourgeois
government, and later (in 1997) sold to the Argentine combine at a
fraction of its estimated value.
Moreover, after the privatization, the new bourgeois owners' profits
were fattened by generous state subsidies. The new bosses kept milking
the Venezuelan treasury. The Sidor workers were infuriated by the state
handouts to a corporation that was inflicting dangerous working
conditions on them. It was a scandal that the Venezuelan state
continued to defend a trust protected by Chavez's tepid populist allies
in Argentina.
So, Chavez found that in order for his government to survive, he needed
more socialist measures and not less. The militancy of the Sidor
workers, in defiance of the government and its labor acolytes, was not
a danger to the regime but it represents the best hope for defeating
the hostility of the big business and its imperialist backers, which is
unrelenting despite Chavez's attempts at conciliation.
Populism is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it frightens the bosses
because it challenges their traditional prerogatives and ideology and
offers encouragement to the oppressed and exploited. On the other, it
serves to buffer social upsurges and deflect the advance away from
socialist revolution. In all the cases, in which populist regimes have
successfully kept the masses from carrying out a thorough-going
socialist revolution, these regimes have eventually lost their popular
support and then been overthrown by vengeful exploiters.
The Chavez regime is the flagship of the new wave of populist
experiments in Latin America. It is the only one that says that
its objective is socialism. If a revolutionary workers movement
develops there that can lead to a socialist revolution, it will not
only restore the hopes of the masses in Venezuela but offer a effective
leadership to the radicalization that has been developing throughout
the continent.
Threat by Bolivian rightists
The regime of Evo Morales in Bolivia, seen as Chavez's main ally among
the new reform governments, is now facing growing threats. They have
been developing for a long time because of the failure of the regime to
attack the roots of the imperialist-dominated capitalist system.
These threats have been crystalized in the unofficial referendum the
rulers of four right-wing-dominated provinces are organizing for May 4.
The objective of the rightists is to seize an extensive
"autonomy" that would amount to, or prepare the way for
secession. These provinces are where the country’s major natural
resources are located.
On April 23, Chavez called for an emergency conference in the Bolivian
capital of La Paz of ALBA, an economic bloc between Cuba, Venezuela,
Bolivia, and Nicaragua—along with Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, and
St. Kitts as candidate members—to discuss the threat of the right-wing
separatists. This seems to be another example of Chavez’s utopian
policy of populist or bourgeois nationalist blocs.
ALBA is significant as an example of international economic cooperation
in the interests of the masses. But it has essentially only a symbolic
importance. Aside from a certain attractiveness of contributions of
Venezuelan oil or oil money, ALBA has no political or economic weight.
The only way to combat the right-wing threat in Bolivia is to mobilize
the workers and the oppressed—in particular, the indigenous peoples who
live on top of the natural resources in the provinces ruled by the
right. That requires a revolutionary orientation, which is different
from diplomatic accords among populist bourgeois governments.
What is needed in Bolivia is a workers movement that can give Morales
the same sort of lesson that the Sidor workers gave Chavez and then go
on to take the leadership itself. Without such developments, the
radicalization in Latin America—despite the mass hatred of capitalism
and U.S. imperialist dominance that it expresses—can peter out in
disillusionment.
|