The New Southern Democrats

By Traci Hukill, AlterNet. Posted November 24, 2004.

In "The Motorcycle Diaries," director Walter Salles' tribute to Che Guevara, the hero speeds up the spine of the Andes clinging to his buddy on the back of a wheezing Norton. The year is 1952 and it is dawning on the young Che that the gorgeous vistas of his beloved Latin America conceal a corrosive cancer of greed and oppression. He dedicates himself to fighting for the common people, and the film ends on a hopeful note: change is coming.

The film has been a bright spot in the dark weeks surrounding the U.S. election. But it's just a movie, after all. We know how the real story ends. Che will die in Bolivia before his 40th birthday, betrayed by the peasants he sought to deliver, and right-wing governments throughout the continent will spend the next four decades brutally suppressing liberation movements while transnational corporations plunder the region's wealth unimpeded.

All the more reason to welcome recent real-life developments in Latin America. Chronically ignored by the Bush administration but expected to embrace its free trade proposals, Latin America is pushing back. Over the past weekend, as George W. Bush and other Pacific Rim leaders descended on the Chilean capital of Santiago to press a trade agenda, 30,000 protesters flowed into the streets like lava, chanting against the Iraq war and globalization.

That was a dramatic illustration of anti-American sentiment, but in reality the protest goes much deeper. Citizens throughout Latin America have been steadily turning leftward since the late 1990s, electing leaders in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela with strong social agendas and demonstrated independence from the U.S. Some defied Bush on the Iraq war. Most have displayed deep skepticism of the so-called Washington Consensus, a philosophy originating in the U.S. and upheld by the International Monetary Fund that emphasizes free trade, tightened government spending and the privatization of state-held utilities.

Whether this is a revolution or a momentary spasm is the subject of much speculation. Major media have downplayed the shift, remarking that recently elected leftists are more likely to work within the system than openly challenge it.

Nevertheless, change is afoot. Ariel Perez, a native of Argentina who teaches language at the University of California-Santa Cruz, thinks it's fueled by anger over economic bullying by the global North and the havoc wreaked by a decade and more of globalization.

"There is a pride there," he says. "We can't drop our pants and turn around every time. And that is the attitude of these men, and that is what the people are liking now."

Trading Up for a Leftist

Two days before Americans reelected the most conservative leader ever to sit in the White House, the small country of Uruguay put a leftist president in office for the first time in its 170-year history. Tabare Vazquez, a cancer specialist, ran for office pledging to tackle poverty in the once-prosperous country and to prioritize trade within Brazil's Mercosur trade bloc. This was an implicit jab at the Free Trade Area of the Americas, a Bush project to drop trade barriers throughout the Western Hemisphere (with a key exception that has irritated governments throughout Latin America: Washington wants to keep giving subsidies to American farmers). Vazquez was rewarded with more than 50 percent of the vote in a three-way race against the two U.S.-friendly political parties that had run the country for all time.

As if to hammer home their point, voters also rejected a typical piece of advice from the IMF – the privatization of the state water utility – deciding, in the words of Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, that "water, a scarce and finite resource, must be the right of every person and not the privilege of those who can afford it."

Clearly, the connection between their own miseries and the neoliberal reforms advocated by Washington and the IMF was not lost on the Uruguayans. The country suffered an economic crisis culminating in a run on the banks after neighboring Argentina's economy crashed in 2001 under a staggering debt load made worse by U.S. and IMF dictates. The contagious downturn left the relatively affluent and progressive Uruguayans, who identify closely with Europe and led Latin America in adopting a welfare system and women's suffrage, facing a 30 percent poverty rate and watching their young people leave en masse in search of opportunity.

Traci Hukill is a freelance journalist based in Northern California.

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