A Latin Love Affair
This article is published in the May edition of Diplo Magazine
The way certain sections of the media have been reporting Latin America, you’d be excused for thinking that the body of Che Guevara had been exhumed and was whipping up revolution from the Rio Grande to Patagonia. For some years now, events across the Western Hemisphere – where a number of centre-left governments are electorally successful – have prompted a sort of lazy journalism in the West. The Peruvian election on 9 April offered commentators yet another excuse to peer under the rock at the state of play in Latin America, and congratulate yet another bout of anti-American rhetoric.
This was no more apparent than in the week of programming that BBC’s Newsnight devoted to what it described as the ‘world’s most underreported story’. A team of correspondents were sent down to the region, where interviews with key figures such as Peruvian nationalist and presidential front-runner, Ollanta Humala, and the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, were interspersed with overwhelmingly positive coverage of the ‘revolution’ that the region seems to be undergoing. The theme of the week was a simple one, viewed through the prism of revolutionary fervour. Peru’s new nationalist hero was set to follow the trend of the last five years by throwing off the shackles of the Washington consensus – the set of International Monetary Fund-mandated policies that dictated Latin American politics through the 1990s.
Discussion in the media of Latin America is incomplete without the word ‘Bush’; as the BBC delighted in claiming, the US president is aghast at the fact that his own ‘back yard’ has turned so wilfully against him while events in the Middle East dominate the horizon. Indeed, every single facet of politics in the region was interpreted through this meme. Yet this is far from being a unified trend. In Chile, for example, the centre-left candidate Michelle Bachelet was elected President this past January. Far from lobbing ideological missiles towards the White House, Bachelet has pledged to continue with the policies of her admired predecessor, Ricardo Lagos, who forged a pro-market agenda – including a bilateral trade deal with the United States – while simultaneously addressing the social needs of his country. The result is that Chile is the region’s most successful economy.
Meanwhile, the situation in other countries is far less clear-cut than suggested by the BBC. While politicians such as Humala, Chavez and Evo Morales of Bolivia may enjoy playing up their revolutionary zeal and decrying the influence of Washington, the fact remains that they are intimately tied to the United States and, indeed, to market capitalism. Venezuela currently supplies about 15% of America’s oil needs. This figure has remained stable throughout Chavez’s presidency, and, despite the rhetoric from both sides, it is unlikely to change in the near future. The social projects and healthcare that Chavez funds – and that make up his electoral capital – are kept afloat by the healthy condition of the oil market. Should this change, then the Bolivarian revolution, as it has been dubbed, will be compromised.
The democratic credentials of some of the region’s major players are far from watertight. The BBC’s hagiography of Ollanta Humala neatly omitted a number of relevant facts. His brother, Antauro, languishes in jail, having failed in an attempt to depose President Alejandro Toledo (similarly, Hugo Chavez spent time in jail in the early 1990s following an abortive coup attempt). Meanwhile, Humala’s father, Isaac, was the founder of a racist, pro-indigenous movement that Humala was briefly associated with, and Humala has himself been accused of xenophobia. He was also implicated in the torture and ‘disappearing’ of peasants whilst serving in the armed forces during the early 1990s. It seems strange that most of the reports that champion Humala’s leftist credentials ignore these aspects of his career,
At press time, the first round of the Peruvian election had finished with Humala as the front-runner. He will do battle in a run-off election, scheduled for May or early June, most likely against the former leader, Alan Garcia. As has been noted, neither option is a particularly good one for Peru, lying as it is between a failed president and a nationalist with questionable democratic credentials. Yet if Humala wins, he will no doubt be celebrated as another American ‘neighbour’ (a strange word to use, given the thousands of miles separating Washington and Lima) of hostile mien. Yet it is worth remembering that the triumphalist populism that dominated Latin America throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century led, inexorably, to the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s that the region has only recently emerged from. It would be better for Western commentators to put their analysis in context, instead of moulding the facts to fit their romantic visions.
The way certain sections of the media have been reporting Latin America, you’d be excused for thinking that the body of Che Guevara had been exhumed and was whipping up revolution from the Rio Grande to Patagonia. For some years now, events across the Western Hemisphere – where a number of centre-left governments are electorally successful – have prompted a sort of lazy journalism in the West. The Peruvian election on 9 April offered commentators yet another excuse to peer under the rock at the state of play in Latin America, and congratulate yet another bout of anti-American rhetoric.
This was no more apparent than in the week of programming that BBC’s Newsnight devoted to what it described as the ‘world’s most underreported story’. A team of correspondents were sent down to the region, where interviews with key figures such as Peruvian nationalist and presidential front-runner, Ollanta Humala, and the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, were interspersed with overwhelmingly positive coverage of the ‘revolution’ that the region seems to be undergoing. The theme of the week was a simple one, viewed through the prism of revolutionary fervour. Peru’s new nationalist hero was set to follow the trend of the last five years by throwing off the shackles of the Washington consensus – the set of International Monetary Fund-mandated policies that dictated Latin American politics through the 1990s.
Discussion in the media of Latin America is incomplete without the word ‘Bush’; as the BBC delighted in claiming, the US president is aghast at the fact that his own ‘back yard’ has turned so wilfully against him while events in the Middle East dominate the horizon. Indeed, every single facet of politics in the region was interpreted through this meme. Yet this is far from being a unified trend. In Chile, for example, the centre-left candidate Michelle Bachelet was elected President this past January. Far from lobbing ideological missiles towards the White House, Bachelet has pledged to continue with the policies of her admired predecessor, Ricardo Lagos, who forged a pro-market agenda – including a bilateral trade deal with the United States – while simultaneously addressing the social needs of his country. The result is that Chile is the region’s most successful economy.
Meanwhile, the situation in other countries is far less clear-cut than suggested by the BBC. While politicians such as Humala, Chavez and Evo Morales of Bolivia may enjoy playing up their revolutionary zeal and decrying the influence of Washington, the fact remains that they are intimately tied to the United States and, indeed, to market capitalism. Venezuela currently supplies about 15% of America’s oil needs. This figure has remained stable throughout Chavez’s presidency, and, despite the rhetoric from both sides, it is unlikely to change in the near future. The social projects and healthcare that Chavez funds – and that make up his electoral capital – are kept afloat by the healthy condition of the oil market. Should this change, then the Bolivarian revolution, as it has been dubbed, will be compromised.
The democratic credentials of some of the region’s major players are far from watertight. The BBC’s hagiography of Ollanta Humala neatly omitted a number of relevant facts. His brother, Antauro, languishes in jail, having failed in an attempt to depose President Alejandro Toledo (similarly, Hugo Chavez spent time in jail in the early 1990s following an abortive coup attempt). Meanwhile, Humala’s father, Isaac, was the founder of a racist, pro-indigenous movement that Humala was briefly associated with, and Humala has himself been accused of xenophobia. He was also implicated in the torture and ‘disappearing’ of peasants whilst serving in the armed forces during the early 1990s. It seems strange that most of the reports that champion Humala’s leftist credentials ignore these aspects of his career,
At press time, the first round of the Peruvian election had finished with Humala as the front-runner. He will do battle in a run-off election, scheduled for May or early June, most likely against the former leader, Alan Garcia. As has been noted, neither option is a particularly good one for Peru, lying as it is between a failed president and a nationalist with questionable democratic credentials. Yet if Humala wins, he will no doubt be celebrated as another American ‘neighbour’ (a strange word to use, given the thousands of miles separating Washington and Lima) of hostile mien. Yet it is worth remembering that the triumphalist populism that dominated Latin America throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century led, inexorably, to the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s that the region has only recently emerged from. It would be better for Western commentators to put their analysis in context, instead of moulding the facts to fit their romantic visions.
posted by DN at 8:03 PM
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