Across Latin America, the working class, indigenous peoples and the rural poor are rising up, forcing the pace of political change on the continent. Over the past two years we have seen: sustained mobilisations in Chile for a new constitution; the defeat of the coup government in Bolivia; strikes and uprisings in Colombia; the ousting of four presidents in five years in Peru; strikes in Ecuador and Panama; and mass anti-IMF protests in Argentina. This pressure for change has been reflected in the election of leftist presidents in countries including Chile, Colombia, Honduras and Peru, riding the wave of protest. How far these leaders are prepared to go in implementing the demands of the movements that brought them to power will now be the question. Will the masses be able to sustain enough momentum to force their new leaders to confront the imperialist behemoth on their doorstep? Or will they instead capitulate to it, using their new powers to contain, divert and repress the working class? SAM McGILL and CAT WIENER report.
A simmering crisis
Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, across Latin America living costs had risen in the wake of the 2008 credit crunch and 2014 oil crash. A report by the United Nations’ Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean describes the region as the most indebted of the developing world, with gross general government debt averaging 77.7% of regional GDP, and debt repayments representing 59% of exports of goods and services. The coronavirus pandemic is estimated to have pushed an additional five million people in Latin America into extreme poverty. Higher prices for fuel and fertiliser and shortages of wheat are driving up inflation and hunger. The working class and poor are no longer willing to live in these conditions. The soaring cost of living has meant success at the ballot box for anyone promising a vaguely anti-neoliberal agenda.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) was elected president in Mexico in 2018. Argentina followed, electing Alberto Fernandez, with former president Cristina Kirchner as Vice-President. Rural activist Pedro Castillo was elected in 2021 in Peru, as were former student protest leader Gabriel Boric in Chile and Xiomara Castro, wife of ousted left-wing former president Manuel Zelaya, in Honduras. The success of Gustavo Petro in Colombia in June 2022 was the first time a left-wing candidate was elected in a country that has historically been the closest ally of the United States in the region. In Brazil, the region’s biggest economy, Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party is on course to return to power in October. These electoral victories are significant: they reflect a widespread rejection of the neoliberal austerity forced on Latin America over decades. However, it is increasingly clear that this apparent ‘leftist’ wave represents an attempt by social democratic forces to contain the continent’s emerging movements.
A trail of betrayal
In 2018, Argentina’s then President Mauricio Macri agreed a notorious $57bn IMF package – the biggest in the country’s history – that locked Argentina deeper into a debt which reached 90% of GDP. Poverty soared. Campaigning for the presidency in 2019, the coalition between President Alberto Fernandez and Vice-President Cristina Kirchner won mass support with its promise to end hunger. Fernandez pledged he would not ‘kneel before the IMF’ but in March 2022 signed a debt refinance deal with it. Today 50% of the country’s population lives below the poverty line. In July, tens of thousands of people mobilised in protests in the capital Buenos Aires against the IMF deal. It now seems likely Fernandez will lose next year’s election.
Meanwhile in Peru, former rural teacher President Pedro Castillo has demobilised the class forces, particularly the indigenous movements, that erupted onto the streets in 2021 demanding change. Lacking direction, unable to govern and forced to resign from his Peru Libre party, Castillo has instead attempted to appease business interests and Peru’s military, sacking cabinet ministers for being too left-wing and backing mining multinationals over the rights of indigenous peoples. This has left him unable to deliver his promised radical reforms in a right-wing controlled congress that has blocked his every move. Castillo and his Vice President Dina Boluarte face constant scrutiny for corruption, treason and more as the congress inches towards impeachment.
Chile’s new president Gabriel Boric wears his left-wing credentials lightly. Socially liberal, this former student protest leader is something of a poster boy for the social democratic left. But he has shown his true colours in response to the revolutionary and mobilised indigenous working class. Despite election promises to defend the indigenous Mapuche people’s historic struggle for land rights and self-determination, Boric has instead declared the Mapuche terrorists, imposing an extended state of emergency on the Araucania region and sending in militarised police.
He has been ruthless in defending the interest of large estate landowners and logging companies in Araucania. He used June’s Organisation of American States (OAS) ‘Summit of the Americas’ to denounce Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba – a clear sop to the dictates of US imperialism. He has said if the radical new constitution that goes to referendum in Chile in September is rejected, a new one should be written from scratch, an ominous sign that he would be willing to water down the process of throwing out the current right-wing Pinochet-era constitution.
Gustavo Petro won Colombia’s presidential election in June and will be sworn into office on 7 August. Another ostensibly left-wing leader, with a background in the M-19 guerrilla movement, he depends on a fragile coalition that encompasses sections of the banking and business elite alongside radicals. He has been keen to be seen by imperialism as a safe pair of hands, committing his government to ensuring stability in a country that under the former right-wing president Ivan Duque was considered by US President Biden as a quasi-NATO member. ‘Colombia doesn’t need socialism, it needs democracy and peace’, he has said – and has been sure to burnish his credentials with the United States by lambasting Venezuela under socialist President Nicolas Maduro. Nonetheless, his election offers a breathing space for the FARC movement, as he has promised to implement the 2016 peace deal blocked by Duque. He says he will implement a radical environmental transformation away from extractivism. And, despite his public hostility to Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, in practice there will be some important concessions in terms of renewed diplomatic and trade relations and the formal recognition of Maduro as legitimate president of Venezuela instead of Duque’s recognition of the sham ‘interim presidency’ of imperialist stooge Juan Guaido. Given Colombia hosts seven US military bases and has been a launchpad for US intervention against Venezuela, re-establishing relations is a significant step. How far Petro sustains even his modest reforms may depend on how much power is afforded to his vice president, Francia Marquez. The first black woman to hold such office in Colombia, she is a respected land activist and social movement leader, who could ensure the continued mobilisation of the masses in support of real change.
Lessons from the past
We know from the successes of other movements in Latin America that the decisive factor in achieving radical social and economic transformation is always the pressure the working class brings to bear on its representatives. The election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in 1998 reignited anti-imperialist resistance in Latin America. But it was only after the US backed a coup in 2002 against even modest reforms by the Chavista government, and the working class of Caracas mobilised in their thousands to defeat it, that Chavez wholeheartedly embraced the concept of the socialist revolution. One of his immediate steps was to strengthen Venezuela’s links with Fidel Castro and Cuba’s socialist revolution. Together they founded ALBA – the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas – trading oil in exchange for healthcare. ALBA brought together the leaders of other progressive governments in Latin America, including Bolivia’s Evo Morales and his Movement Towards Socialism party, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa and Daniel Ortega, leader of Nicaragua’s Sandinistas. ALBA grew into a programme for mutual development and regional integration, providing social programmes and investment in return for goods in kind, building unity against US intervention. Though the region remained dependent on natural resource exports, a legacy of colonialism and imperialist under-development, the profits clawed back from private and foreign investors were channelled into poverty-busting social programmes.
Venezuela spearheaded important initiatives, including the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States as an alternative to the US-dominated OAS. BancoSur, a regional alternative to the IMF, and PetroCaribe, which offered cheap Venezuelan oil to struggling Caribbean countries at low repayment rates, or goods in kind, helped build solidarity between countries attempting to challenge US hegemony in the region. Outside ALBA, the centre-left governments of Lula in Brazil and Nestor and Cristina Kirchner in Argentina furthered regional integration and ‘south-south’ trade, creating UNASUR – the Union of South American Nations – and expanding the MERCOSUR trading block. Inspired by socialist Cuba, supported by the radical governments of Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua, this movement constituted a real threat to US imperialism in Latin America. Millions of dollars were poured into fomenting opposition, especially against the anti-imperialist ALBA alliance. Successive US governments backed coups and imposed sanctions. In 2009, the progressive president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, was deposed in a coup backed by Washington; legal and electoral chicanery in Paraguay and Brazil, again backed by imperialist propaganda, brought extreme right-wing governments to power and rolled back social progress. Yet despite all its efforts, through lethal sanctions, destabilisation, sabotage and propaganda, the United States has failed to destroy socialist Cuba or overthrow the progressive governments of Venezuela and Nicaragua, which continue to have the backing of the majority of the working class.
The 2019 coup in Bolivia was overthrown by the mobilisation of the masses of the indigenous and rural working class. The lessons are clear. Meaningful social change in Latin America depends upon wresting control of vast resources from imperialism’s robber multinationals and their domestic lackeys. This will provoke a ruthless reaction from imperialism, especially from the US. The only guarantor of carrying through the economic and social change so desperately needed on the continent is the continued mobilisation of the masses to prevent the new wave of leaders from reneging on their commitments. The history of Latin America shows us that only those leaders who trust and empower the working class prove capable of resisting imperialism’s predations. Nonetheless, the election of a broad swathe of social democratic leaders signals that the working class is mobilising in Latin America, leaving US power in the region threatened and opening up new spaces for political debate and action.
US isolated
The United States continued its attempts to delegitimise and attack Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua by refusing to invite them to the summit of the profoundly reactionary OAS in Los Angeles in June. But the temperature in Latin America has been changed through recent events. Mexico’s AMLO, who has in the past vacillated in his relations with the United States, has increasingly taken an overtly anti-imperialist public stance. He led the rebellion against the US decision, after a historic visit to Cuba in which he denounced the illegal US blockade. His announcement that Mexico would boycott the OAS summit unless all states were invited was followed by Bolivia, Honduras and Saint Vincent & the Grenadines refusing to send their own heads of state to Los Angeles. The summit was a failure. As ALBA secretary Sacha Llorenti noted ‘Things are changing…What we are seeing is an empire which is losing its power’.
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 289 August/September 2022
