The article below is an edited version of Seumas Milne's contribution at Latin America 2010. Seumas is a journalist at the Guardian.
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| Seumas Milne, Latin America 2010 |
Twenty years ago, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War came to a close, we were told that we were witnessing the end of history, the triumph of the free market, the emergence of a unipolar world and the death of socialism — in fact, the end of any systemic alternative to neo-liberal capitalism at all.
Two decades on, that all looks pretty foolish. Four things in particular have changed the picture fundamentally. The first has been the war on terror, the strategic defeat of the US in Iraq and Afghanistan and the failure of its attempt to impose its will by force on the Arab and Muslim world. The second has been the rise of China. The third has been the crash of 2008 and the discrediting of the neoliberal economic model. And the fourth, and most underestimated shift, has been the progressive tide that has swept Latin America.
All four elements are closely interconnected. But crucial to this whole process has been the fact that Latin America was the first region of the world to experience the full force of neoliberalism — during the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile in the 1970s — and also the first to revolt against it, in the wake of the financial crisis of 1998.
That led in turn to the wave of change which swept the old elites from politics and brought to power a succession of radical socialist and social-democratic governments, from Ecuador to Brazil, Paraguay to Argentina: challenging US domination and neoliberal orthodoxy, breaking down social and racial inequality, building independent regional integration and taking back resources from corporate control.
For decades, Latin America was mired in US-backed rightwing dictatorships, and socialist Cuba stood alone. The transformation of the past decade is symbolised for me by the fate of Che Guevara’s killer, Sergeant Mario Teran. On 9th October 1967, Guevara faced a shaking Teran in La Higuera, Bolivia, and told him: “Shoot coward, you’re only killing a man”. The moment is the climax of Stephen Soderbergh’s film Che, and in real life it marked the defeat of the attempt to spread the Cuban revolution in Latin America.
But forty years later, the blind, reviled Teran had his sight restored by Cuban doctors, paid for by revolutionary Venezuela in the radicalised Bolivia of Evo Morales. That’s part of a programme that has seen 1.5 million free eye operations carried out in 33 countries in Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa, courtesy of the Cuban and Bolivarian revolutions.
It’s an emblem of the humanity of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s legacy – but also of the passing of the Cuban torch to a new generation of Latin American revolutionaries and progressives.
And the radical change they are making in Latin America is multi-dimensional. First of all it has a social and class dimension: at the cutting edge, Venezuela has halved poverty, massively expanded free health and education and boosted public ownership and control – echoed across the continent.
Second, it has a democratic core, reflected in the constitutional transformation and experiments in direct democracy in a string of Latin American countries. Then there is the ethnic dimension, seen in the political awakening of the indigenous population of the entire region and symbolised by the previously unthinkable election of Morales, an Aymara Indian, as president of Bolivia.
On top of that there is the regional dimension, made clear by the powerful new drive towards autonomous Latin American economic integration. And finally, there is the vital international dimension, played out in the ejection of US military bases, such as the Manta airbase in Ecuador, and the assertion of an independent foreign policy by almost every state across the region, notably including Brazil.
But most important of all, there has been the global impact: Latin America has shown that there can be systemic alternatives, that a 21st century socialism can be constructed, that people make their own history — and another world is not only possible, but is being created right now.
Of course none of these advances is settled or irreversible. Some are more radical than others. There are, naturally, many internal weaknesses and challenges in all the countries where progressive change is taking place. And the process is threatened from both within and without.
In particular the US, which has long dominated Latin America, was distracted fighting its war on terror in the Arab and Muslim world while this movement of transformation was gaining strength. But now, even under the Obama administration, the US foreign policy establishment has made clear that it is committed to rollback, building new bases in Colombia, potentially to intervene again across the region.
Despite Obama’s warning that it risked creating a “terrible precedent”, the 2009 coup in Honduras was allowed to stand with US support – or, as Hillary Clinton put, “managed to a successful conclusion”. Honduras was a signal that the democratic and radical tide could be turned back, and was followed by the failed coup against Rafael Correa in Ecuador.
That’s one reason why the Latin American left needs international solidarity. Such support should include pressure on the British government and the European Union to oppose any anti-democratic backlash or foreign intervention against a movement for social justice that any decent person should be able to back, along with the demand that our media report fairly what’s actually going on in the region.
But we also need to learn from what is taking place in Latin America. Of course these are diverse societies which face some very different problems from our own. But the common sense about the bankruptcy of neoliberal capitalism that was first recognised and acted on in Latin America has now gone global.
There are direct lessons now for countries such as Ireland and Greece from Argentina’s debt default in the early years of the last decade — and its subsequent economic expansion. But the wider question for us is whether some of the progressive and socialist change that has delivered for the people of Latin America in the last decade can be generated here, in this part of the world as well.
Two decades on, that all looks pretty foolish. Four things in particular have changed the picture fundamentally. The first has been the war on terror, the strategic defeat of the US in Iraq and Afghanistan and the failure of its attempt to impose its will by force on the Arab and Muslim world. The second has been the rise of China. The third has been the crash of 2008 and the discrediting of the neoliberal economic model. And the fourth, and most underestimated shift, has been the progressive tide that has swept Latin America.
All four elements are closely interconnected. But crucial to this whole process has been the fact that Latin America was the first region of the world to experience the full force of neoliberalism — during the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile in the 1970s — and also the first to revolt against it, in the wake of the financial crisis of 1998.
That led in turn to the wave of change which swept the old elites from politics and brought to power a succession of radical socialist and social-democratic governments, from Ecuador to Brazil, Paraguay to Argentina: challenging US domination and neoliberal orthodoxy, breaking down social and racial inequality, building independent regional integration and taking back resources from corporate control.
For decades, Latin America was mired in US-backed rightwing dictatorships, and socialist Cuba stood alone. The transformation of the past decade is symbolised for me by the fate of Che Guevara’s killer, Sergeant Mario Teran. On 9th October 1967, Guevara faced a shaking Teran in La Higuera, Bolivia, and told him: “Shoot coward, you’re only killing a man”. The moment is the climax of Stephen Soderbergh’s film Che, and in real life it marked the defeat of the attempt to spread the Cuban revolution in Latin America.
But forty years later, the blind, reviled Teran had his sight restored by Cuban doctors, paid for by revolutionary Venezuela in the radicalised Bolivia of Evo Morales. That’s part of a programme that has seen 1.5 million free eye operations carried out in 33 countries in Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa, courtesy of the Cuban and Bolivarian revolutions.
It’s an emblem of the humanity of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s legacy – but also of the passing of the Cuban torch to a new generation of Latin American revolutionaries and progressives.
And the radical change they are making in Latin America is multi-dimensional. First of all it has a social and class dimension: at the cutting edge, Venezuela has halved poverty, massively expanded free health and education and boosted public ownership and control – echoed across the continent.
Second, it has a democratic core, reflected in the constitutional transformation and experiments in direct democracy in a string of Latin American countries. Then there is the ethnic dimension, seen in the political awakening of the indigenous population of the entire region and symbolised by the previously unthinkable election of Morales, an Aymara Indian, as president of Bolivia.
On top of that there is the regional dimension, made clear by the powerful new drive towards autonomous Latin American economic integration. And finally, there is the vital international dimension, played out in the ejection of US military bases, such as the Manta airbase in Ecuador, and the assertion of an independent foreign policy by almost every state across the region, notably including Brazil.
But most important of all, there has been the global impact: Latin America has shown that there can be systemic alternatives, that a 21st century socialism can be constructed, that people make their own history — and another world is not only possible, but is being created right now.
Of course none of these advances is settled or irreversible. Some are more radical than others. There are, naturally, many internal weaknesses and challenges in all the countries where progressive change is taking place. And the process is threatened from both within and without.
In particular the US, which has long dominated Latin America, was distracted fighting its war on terror in the Arab and Muslim world while this movement of transformation was gaining strength. But now, even under the Obama administration, the US foreign policy establishment has made clear that it is committed to rollback, building new bases in Colombia, potentially to intervene again across the region.
Despite Obama’s warning that it risked creating a “terrible precedent”, the 2009 coup in Honduras was allowed to stand with US support – or, as Hillary Clinton put, “managed to a successful conclusion”. Honduras was a signal that the democratic and radical tide could be turned back, and was followed by the failed coup against Rafael Correa in Ecuador.
That’s one reason why the Latin American left needs international solidarity. Such support should include pressure on the British government and the European Union to oppose any anti-democratic backlash or foreign intervention against a movement for social justice that any decent person should be able to back, along with the demand that our media report fairly what’s actually going on in the region.
But we also need to learn from what is taking place in Latin America. Of course these are diverse societies which face some very different problems from our own. But the common sense about the bankruptcy of neoliberal capitalism that was first recognised and acted on in Latin America has now gone global.
There are direct lessons now for countries such as Ireland and Greece from Argentina’s debt default in the early years of the last decade — and its subsequent economic expansion. But the wider question for us is whether some of the progressive and socialist change that has delivered for the people of Latin America in the last decade can be generated here, in this part of the world as well.
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