WENTY YEARS of neoliberalism social structure of Latin America. The neoliberal model has struck hard at the interests of urban workers, peasants, indigenous peoples, landless labourers and sections of the middle classes. This is turn has propelled Latin America into permanent political crisis and turmoil.
One anecdote illustrates the problem. In the year 2000 hundreds of indigenous peasants from the Zapatista base communities went to Mexico City as part of a national political campaign. The big crowds that gathered in the city centre to greet them were shocked that more than half were ill, with all kinds of conditions which a few antibiotics could solve. This, the Zapatistas explained, was just the normal situation in the Chiapas hill villages where they live.
If we examine the curve of political development on that vast continent, we can easily see that a decade ago the picture was one of defeat and demoralisation for the working class and popular movements. Contrary to bland optimism at the time, it is now Argentina shows what can happen when there is no broad socialist party clear that the Central American revolution was completely crushed.
This was not mainly due to the political mistakes of the revolutionary organisations in Guatemala, EkSalvador and Nicaragua, although of course they made many. The overwhelming might and crushing genocidal violence of US imperialism and its local allies defeated these revolutions. These terrible defeats led over time to the political degeneration of key organisations and leaders. Look at what Daniel Ortega and the remnants of the Sandinista have become - social democrats at best.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was a shattering blow to Cuba and further demoralised the Latin American popular movements. The brutal crushing of the Bolivian tin miners, one of the historic bastions of militant class politics and revolution, was symbolic of the fortunes of Latin American radicalism in the Reagan era.
Everything changed on january Ist 1994 when the Zapatista guerrilla movement, the EZLN, burst onto the scene. Mexican president Carlos Salinas had boasted at the NATA treaty signing that 'there are no guerrillas' in Mexico. That's why the young on the walls of the town hall in the central square of San Cristobel when they occupied the town. It was a total shock to everyone, and it re-energised and re-inspired radical movements throughout the continent - and beyond.
you cannot explain Seattle and the mass emergence of the anti-capitalist movement without seeing how the Zapatista rebellion changed the world situation. That's why people who start simply with the Seattle demonstrations are being a bit simplistic - before Seattle you had the Zapatistas and the decade-long series of demonstrations at G7 and EU summits against the debt.
The dialectic of the sectors of the world revolution had started to work again. The Seattle demonstrations had a profound impact on Latin America. The banner of rebellion raised in the Chiapas selva impacted on workers and youth in the advanced countries and this is turn has changed the situation in Latin America, which is characterised by crisis, rebellion and above all the re-emergence of populism as a key political force.
If you look at Ecuador, you can see the election of Lucio Guttierez as president had some similarities to what happened with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Like Chavez, Guttierez is a former military officer, and like Chavez he led a failed military coup some years ago.
Both of them seem like throwbacks to the 1930s, 40s and 50s era of Latin American radical populist leaders like Lazaro Cardenas in Mexico and Juan Peron in Argentina - leaders who mobilised whole sections of the poor and oppressed within a cross-class alliance incorporating sections of the bourgeoisie.
However the Guttierez government has gone to the right much further and much faster than that of Chavez - there's nothing like the Venezuela land reform which promises to settle 100,000 peasants by the movements throughout the continent .... autumn
Radical populism takes measures to attempt to alleviate the situation of the poor, but within the framework of capitalism. The difference is that this new populism emerges in the era of neoliberal globalisation, not in the era of the 1930s recession or the last world war, when it was much easier to erect tariff walls, to make a certain development of local industry, and to find local resources to alleviate poverty.
In Ecuador now there is a tremendous class polarisation. The teachers, who everywhere in Latin America are poor, very militant and tremendously respected in the popular movements, are leading a hunger strike to demand an increase of $20 a month in the minimum wage.
Trade unions, popular organisations and left parties are uniting to enforce antiright wing parties and the employers' organisations have formed a common front to pressurise Guttierez in the other direction. It's an absolutely classic polarisation and crisis.
In Peru, president Alejandro Toledo used a populist 'mask', playing heavily on his indigenous origins, to get elected. Of course really he's a former IMF advisor, and a straight down the line neoliberal. The immediate result has been an upsurge in struggles, the declaration of a 30-day state of emergency and clashes all over the coun try. Toledo's government put everything down to the Pol Pot-type guerrilla movement Sendero Luminoso. The truth is that the upsurge of mass struggles has nothing to do with them.
n Venezuela sections of the bourgeois
grip of an anti-popular and antiChavez frenzy, whipped up by the US and the right wing. The Bolivarian revolutionary committees, the base of the Chavez movement, undoubtedly contain strong anti-imperialist and revolutionary trends. • • • •• Chavez has repeatedly called on the masses to come to mobilise and defend the government, facing down two attempted coups orchestrated with the imperialists.
But he has also utilised the power of the repressive apparatuses as well. For example, thousands of oil workers who participated in the strike against Chavez have been sacked; leading opponents of Chavez have been found murdered by 'persons unknown. A big lack in Venezuela is a truly independent revolutionary class movement.
In Argentina the curve of development has been different - and in many ways the Argentinean experience is by far the highest point of social mobilisation and self-organisation on the continent for two decades. Most leftwingers know about the 'argentinazo' - the popular uprising in late 200l and early 2002 against the expropriation of the savings and pensions of millions of workers
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and middle class people by the banks and businesses.
Many will have heard the inspiring stories of the self-organisation, factory occupations, neighbourhood committees and the like. Although our terminology on this is a bit vague, if anywhere was an objectively pre-revolutionary situation, then it was Argentina. But now we have a decline of the committees, and the successful holding of a general election which put in power another Peronist bureaucrat - at least it wasn't Carlos Menem, a degenerate caricature of a fake copy of the original Peronism. The left was divided between standing candidates and a boycott position. Both were abject failures. How do we explain this?
Naomi Klein in an article in several papers, now available on her website (www.nologo.com), argues that the source of the decline of the movement was the revolutionary left. The masses were happily mobilising with all these terribly creative cooperatives and innovative experiments, when along came the sectarian left banging on about political programmes, and they bored everyone to death. So the masses went home and the movement declined. Naomi Klein is fundamentally wrong, but there is a kernel of truth in what she says.
Of course the movement needed a politial outcome, a political
project and progamme at the level of national politics. You can't have revolution without a revolution, without the workers taking state power.
James D. Cockcroft explains the dynamic of the whole thing in a brilliant article in International Viewpoint (I). But because of the splintering of the revolutionary left over two decades - mainly the break up of the large and dynamic MAS (Movement Towards Socialism) the far left consists of warring grouplets, some of them extremely sectarian.
This 'cannibalism' of the left, according to eyewitnesses, seemed to be declining.
Nonetheless no authoritative mass or mini-mass party existed which could act as a decisive political force to give an overall direction to the movement - towards the conquest of power. The masses can't stay mobilised forever without seeing a perspective for the resolution of the crisis in their All over Latin America there are huge popular movements
•• at the hands of the Cardoso neoliberal government. Although there is still a powerful left in the PT, centrally of course the comrades of the Socialist Democracy current, they are not the determinant element in the situation.
n fact they are under attack, through
the attempt to expel three leftist
members of the senate. We used to say that either the PT would become a revolutionary party, or it would degenerate into social democracy. We forgot the old Latin American story of populism.
Lula wants to mobilise resources to fight against hunger. The methods he is using are July 22 will be the start of an those of a cross-class mobilisation of financial resources; didn't Eva Peron do the same thing, on a more radical scale, at the height of Peronism in Argentina?
There are now three key questions around which the struggle inside the PT against neoliberalism will unfold; the reactionary reform of the pensions system, the struggle for land reform and against the reactionary laws targeting the MST (Movement of the Landless), and the fight over the labour statute.
All this means difficult tactical choices for revolutionary socialists. One thing is certain; either there will be a big struggle against the direction of the Lula government involving a substantial section of the PT, or there will be a catastrophic defeat of the PT left.
Argentina and Brazil together pose the question of the political representation of the radical and working class movements -the character of the vanguard. The fight for broad and inclusive militant socialist parties is correct; Argentina shows what happens when you don't have such a formation. But there has to be class struggle and anti-capitalist guarantees and references, now perhaps beginning to emerge.
All over Latin America there are huge and dynamic popular movements which are not at all linked to an overall political project. That is their weakness. Linking ascending struggles to the fight for power is, was, and will continue to be the key to the situation.
A final point. As Ernesto Herrero points out in his excellent article (2) Latin America is subject to increasing militarisation. O f course US military aid and
direct intervention through independent "security' companies linked to the CIA has been ongoing for several years.
The counter-revolutionary war against the FARC and the ELN guerrilla movements has been carefully choreographed with the United States. Now military intervention has gone way beyond Colombia. American imperialism is preparing, through the construction of many new bases throughout
Summer 2003 25 International resistance Anger in Havana: protestors outside the Spanish embassy protest at the EU's moves to scale down links with Cuba. Fidel Castro attacked Spanish Prime Minister Aznar as a little Fuhrer with a moustache and NaziFascist ideology" the region, to be able to intervene anywhere against radical movements.
This aspect of militarisation needs to be brought to the attention of all the forces involved in the anti-war movements and coalitions in North America and Europe We are in a good position to be able to do this in Britain.
After the second Iraq war, we will find a much-expanded audience for this aspect of the anti-imperialist message; and through that the basis for much expanded solidarity - even in a country like ours where Latin America hardly ever makes news in the papers or on TV. • International Viewpoint, February 2003
International Viewpoint, July-August 2002