t is not every day that South American politics penetrates the Chicago City Council chambers. Aldermen, like most people in the United States, barely know what is down there, let alone who is in charge.
The other day Ald. Edward Burke (14th) raised the possibility that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez might be planning to influence U.S. elections through a company that makes voting machines. Burke had a point about Chavez wanting to swing elections; he simply had the wrong geography.
The sneeringly anti-American Venezuelan president, who is squeezing the opposition and the news media at home, is also relentlessly extending his reach in countries of the northern Andes. And the United States, despite its concern about him, is helping.
In Peru, Chavez backed presidential candidate Ollanta Humala (like himself a leader of a failed military coup and a strident populist). Humala leads the returns from Sunday's election and will be the front-runner in a runoff.
In Bolivia, Chavez's tool is President Evo Morales. Like Humala, Morales gained his political edge by appealing to the pride and resentment of the indigenous people, descendents of the Incas, who for so long have been treated not much more generously by the leaders of the country than their ancestors were by the Spanish conquistadors.
A movement of indigenous people in Ecuador has been disrupting transportation by blocking roads (a technique used by Morales in the run-up to his election) in an effort to keep the country's lame-duck president from signing a free-trade agreement with the U.S. It will be a miracle if someone like Morales and Humala, backed by Chavez, does not come to the fore in the next Ecuadorian election.
After a decade of democracy, freedom of expression, and generally free-market economic policies, the situation in the northern Andes suggests the beginning of a period of crackdown on political dissent and press freedom along with a reversal of economic direction toward more protectionism and state control, all of it tinged by racial appeals. Only in Colombia does a non-populist president with ties with the U.S. seem politically strong.
The political drift in Latin America generally (with the exception of Central America) has been to the left. But other than Chavez, Morales and Humala, the change has been subtle and not unhealthy. Brazil, for example, has continued to respect democratic institutions and has avoided the temptation of economic central control. The newly elected leftist president of Chile promises to do the same.
Meanwhile, as in Cuba, the U.S. has made it easier for the very forces it most resists. The invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein touches painful chords of memory in Latin America, with its long history of U.S. intervention. Chavez has played these like a virtuoso, warning that the U.S. government is out to overthrow or assassinate him, that his opposition consists of clandestine U.S. agents, and so forth. Idiocy like evangelist and Republican activist Pat Robertson's call for Chavez's violent removal is a lovely gift to the Venezuelan.
The single-minded U.S. drive to eradicate coca production (the plant from which cocaine is extracted) also helps Chavez in his drive to realize his dream of consolidating power among his neighbors. This most clearly showed itself in Bolivia, where Morales, a former coca grower himself, attacked United States anti-coca policy (a position from which he has more recently been leaning away).
Coca is an issue in Peru as well. The plant has legal uses (as anyone can attest who has stopped in Cusco on the way to Machu Picchu and sipped mild coca tea in the finest hotels to ameliorate the effects of the high altitude). When grown for the cocaine trade, it offers people a dubious brew of money, violence, U.S.-backed eradication and interdiction efforts, and criminal enterprises like the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) reincarnated not as a radical guerrilla movement but as a narco-trafficking organization like the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
Eradication has been a costly failure. It has not and cannot cure addiction. It makes the illegal trade more lucrative and corrupting. And it infuriates many people, who feel the United States is dealing with its own inability to control its people's habit by intervening in their countries. This resentment connects again with the intervention in Iraq, the United States' history in Latin America, and Chavez's sinister suggestions of U.S. plots.
But finally neither Chavez (nor Morales, nor Humala) nor United States policy fundamentally explains the vulnerability of the northern Andean states to the rabid populism that now threatens it. The root lies in centuries of rule by European oligarchs and their mixed-race allies, heedless of the interest and at times even the humanity, of indigenous people.
I have often heard it said by serious observers of the situation that the appeal to indigenous groups by people like Morales and Humala amounts to virulent racism and threatens the kind of violent conflict found in the Balkans and the Middle East.
I hope they are wrong about the consequences. But I am sure that until political, economic and cultural leaders in South America begin to rectify the virulent racism and the enormous disparities of power and well-being within their own borders, the Chavezes, the Moraleses and the Humalas will always be there, just waiting for their moment.
Populismo Overtaking Latin America?
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