The irony has not been lost on the political leaders of Latin America’s insurgent left movements that the governments of Europe and the US are now taking measures that involve far deeper state intervention in the economy than actions they themselves used to harshly criticize when attempted in other regions.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez joked that George Bush “is finally beginning to understand the road to socialism” and notes that “he isn’t criticized for nationalizing the largest bank in the world.”
“What’s up, Comrade Bush,”* he said.
Jabs coming from the leaders of left-leaning governments, which now run the vast majority of the countries of Latin America, have flowed freely as they feel vindicated in their criticisms of neoliberal policy prescriptions and as some of their interventions into their economies have sheltered them to some extent from the colossal global crisis.
But they are coupled with a deepening of resentment over the vigour and force with which certain forms of free-market policies were proposed to them in the last thirty years, often imposed as the necessary conditions for crucial loans from international organizations such as the IMF.
Their anger at opposition coming from the north to their recent attempts to re-introduce elements of regulation and protection into their economies has only intensified as global market forces and unrestricted capitalism brought even the most powerful states in the world to their knees.
Soon after important election victories for the left in Ecuador and Paraguay, the influence of neoliberal economic and ideas and of the United States, already by all accounts at an all-time low, have taken another hit in the region with the economic crisis.
John Ross, who along with Ken Livingstone is providing advice to the Venezuelan government, said that “they have abandoned every policy that they’ve advocated that other governments should follow over the past 20 years. And they’ve adopted the measures that they’ve condemned other governments for taking.”*
These sentiments are echoed by even the most centrist of the region’s left-of-centre governments, such as Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva. “We did our homework — and they didn’t, they who’ve been telling us for three decades what to do,” he complained.
And the normally reserved Chilean president Michele Bachelet felt secure enough in the changed political climate to make the following joke, in the US, about the country’s history of intervention in the region.
“Why has there never been a coup in the United States?” she asked a group of investors.
“Because there is no U.S. embassy in the United States.”
Bachelet, the country’s first female president and member of the Socialist Party, was imprisoned and tortured by the government of Augusto Pinochet who took power in a US-supported military coup in 1973.
She was forced into exile as the government killed thousands of supporters of the democratically elected socialist Salvador Allende. The Pinochet government ruthlessly imposed neoliberal prescriptions and counted on Milton Friedman as an economic consultant.
But in the case of Chile at least the country did experience strong economic growth during the dictatorship. However, the movement of left leaders elected in the last ten years in the region was a self-conscious movement against neoliberalism, which in most cases led to unprecedented levels of inequality and historically low rates of economic growth in Latin America.
In many cases these polices were imposed under duress when these countries had their own crises. In 1982 when many Latin American countries defaulted on their huge debts to the developed world, rescue packages from international organizations influenced by the governments of Reagan and Thatcher were conditional on the acceptance of austere structural adjustment programs.
In theaftermath of the Asian financial crisis of 1997, the response from the IMF caused many commentators, especially in Asia, to complain that the measures imposed would never be so harsh if something similar happened in the West. Now that it has, leaders of the Latin American left are seeing it this way and many are disgusted at how easily the banks and rich are getting off.
Nicaraguan Congressman Edwin Castro said that “We think the Bush administration should follow the same policies that they and the International Monetary Fund have always told us to follow when we have economic problems.
“One of our economists was telling us that Bush has just implemented communism for the rich.”
The Nicaraguan party to which Castro belongs is the Sandinistas, the leftist party violently opposed by the Reagan-backed Contras in the 1980s and which returned to power in 2006.
Hugo Chavez, elected in Venezuela in 1998, was the first of these left-leaning leaders to come to the fore and receives the lion’s share of attention due to his country’s oil money and his unique and controversial approach to public speaking. But since then, left-of-centre governments have also come to power in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and most recently, Paraguay.
Though the region will certainly be hurt by depressed commodity prices, to the extent that these governments have been able to push reforms past local and international opposition, taking forms ranging from political opposition, military coups to threats of capital flight, they have ironically served to insulate them somewhat from the current crisis.
For example, the FT’s Benedict Mander called the Caracas stock exchange an “oasis of calm” due to the country’s currency controls, implemented in 2003.
Reuters pointed out that: “Venezuela has suffered little direct effect from the market chaos because Chavez nationalised the most important companies that once traded on the minuscule Caracas stock exchange and because its currency is fixed by exchange controls.”
These kinds of economic policies, like those of Ecuador’s recently approved new constitution which allows greater government control over banks, are the exact opposite of the unregulated free-market policies promoted quite powerfully by international organizations and institutions influenced by the U.S., Europe and Japan. And pushing them through required facing stiff international opposition.
Eric Wingerter of left-leaning Latin America blog borev.net raised a comparison between the financial sector’s treatment praise of the U.S.’s recent forced nationalization of major banks and its reaction to Hugo Chavez’s decision two months ago to purchase a single and profitable bank on the open market.
The Wall Street Journal then claimed that move could lead to “mass withdrawls” that could “snowball into a systemic bank run that puts the economy and political system at play.”
Policymakers and analysts in the US and Europe will probably be concentrating on their own countries for the next weeks, or perhaps months. But if they ever turn back to Latin America, they will find they face a very difficult task if they would like to restore their credibility.
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