neoliberalism in latin america:
A precondition for the privatization programmes imposed across successive Latin American countries in the 1980s and 90s was the defeat and disarming of earlier movements of the left and organized labour. During the decades of development the emphasis was on import-substitute industrialization—in particular in Mexico, Argentina and Brazil, but also to a lesser extent in Colombia, Peru, Chile, Uruguay and Costa Rica. These developments were underwritten by broad politico-ideological projects that encouraged the strengthening of the working class and its trade unions, backed by local party formations and democratic-national blocs, in a context of nationalistic ideologies and identities. The potential this built up burst onto the political scene in the 1960s as a radical force, when the long cycle of growth petered out in conflicts over workers’ rights, at a time when the Cuban example was pointing towards alternatives that transcended the limits of capitalism and us imperial domination. The response to these struggles was an era of military coups, first in Brazil and Bolivia in 1964, in Argentina in 1966 and 1976, and finally in Uruguay and Chile in 1973.
(...) The first cycle, from 1959 to 1967, saw the triumph of the Cuban revolution and the spread of the rural guerrilla movement to Venezuela, Guatemala and Peru, in emulation of those of Colombia and Nicaragua. The period saw mass mobilizations in several countries, including Brazil during Goulart’s 1961–64 government and broad resistance to the dictatorship that followed the military coup there in 1964. For the Latin American left this was a period of upswing, directly influenced by the success of Cuba, but cut short by the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967. The second cycle runs from 1967 to 1973. It saw the decline of the rural guerrilla movements and the rise of new urban guerrillas in Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina. Allende was elected president in Chile (1970–73); the same years saw the government of Juan José Torres (1971) in Bolivia, and nationalist governments under Juan Velasco Alvarado in Peru (1967) and Omar Torrijos in Panama (1968). In summary, this was a mixed period inaugurating an era of reverses, marked by military coups and dictatorships.
(...) The years 1973 to 1979 saw the consolidation of military dictatorships across the Southern Cone. As in Brazil, juntas came to power in Bolivia in 1971, Chile and Uruguay in 1973 and Argentina in 1976. Velasco Alvarado was overthrown in Peru. The neoliberal model was rolled out in Pinochet’s Chile. This was a period of unmitigated downturn. By contrast, the long decade of 1979 to 1990 brought Sandinista victory in Nicaragua, revolution in Grenada and a nationalist government in Surinam. Castro was elected president of the Movement of Non-Aligned Countries, and guerrilla forces expanded in El Salvador and Guatemala. The 1980s were a period of overall progress.
(...) In another switch, the years from 1990 to 1998 saw the Sandinista defeat, the start of the ‘special period’ in Cuba, and the entrenchment of neoliberal hegemony across the continent, with the collaboration of the pri in Mexico, Menem in Argentina, Pérez in Venezuela, Cardoso in Brazil, Fujimori in Peru and the continuation of Pinochetist economic neoliberalism in Chile under the Concertación coalition of Socialists and Christian Democrats. This was definitively a period of net regression. Yet from 1998 onwards, the wind turned in the other direction with the election of Chávez in Venezuela, followed by the launch of the World Social Forums in Porto Alegre in 2001, Lula’s election victory in 2002, and further gains for the left and centre-left in Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Ecuador and finally Paraguay. Mercosur was expanded to incorporate Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador while the Alternativa Bolivariana para las Américas—or alba, ‘dawn’—brought together a new left grouping of the Andean–Caribbean axis. So far, this has been a period of appreciable progress.
(...) Cross-cutting these political cycles, three overall strategies of the Latin American left can be discerned. The first sequence, dating back to the 1940s, was one of major structural reforms contemporaneous with the hegemony of the import-substitution model. The left opted for an alliance with sectors of the national business elite in the name of economic modernization, agrarian reform and a certain autonomy with respect to Northern imperialism. This strategy was implemented by legendary nationalist leaders such as Getúlio Vargas of Brazil, Lázaro Cárdenas of Mexico and Juan Perón of Argentina, in concert with parties of the left or centre-left. In Chile, textbook cases of this approach were the Popular Front of 1938 and the Allende administration in 1970–73. But the programme failed at the same time as the industrialization effort, when the internationalization of economies pushed the corporate elites into solid alliance with international capital, laying the groundwork for the eventual neoliberal model. These same entrepreneurs also supported the military dictatorships of the Southern Cone, making no secret of their readiness to liquidate the popular movement for the sake of an export-centred economy geared to luxury domestic consumption by way of intense labour exploitation.
(...) A second great strategy emerged with the Cuban revolution. Any revolutionary victory—above all when it is the first of its kind in a whole region—carries charismatic persuasive force, as we know from the Russian and Chinese experiences in 1917 and 1949. The Cuban triumph coincided with the end of the cycle of Latin American economic expansion under the popular governments and democratic regimes that had prevailed over much of the continent during the 1940s and 50s. The first Argentine coup was carried out in 1955, the second in 1966; the Brazilian and Bolivian coups took place in 1964, and already by 1954 Guatemala was in the throes of counter-revolution. It seemed that the cycle of democratic governments had run its course, in parallel with the economic crises. It was then that Cuba unexpectedly presented an alternative route, in contrast to the impasse that popular struggles in other countries had reached under their traditional leaderships. Latin America was no stranger to guerrilla movements; it had known rural insurgencies such as those of Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 1930s, as well as the national-revolutionary struggles in Mexico in the 1910s, or in Bolivia in 1952. Yet events in Cuba radiated a special appeal, pointing the way to a new epoch for the left. Due to the similarity of levels of development reached at that period by most of the countries of Latin America, the Cuban revolution was immediately more influential in the region than the Russian revolution had been in Europe in its day. All the more so, thanks to the way it was presented by such—attractive, if misguided—codifications as Régis Debray’s account of the Cuban experience and how it might be replicated in other countries and continents.
(...) The abandonment of popular forces by former nationalist or social-democratic allies, together with the harsh social consequences of free-market economics, have propelled social movements into the forefront of the resistance to neoliberalism—the third and latest strategy from below. The Zapatistas, the landless peasant movement (MST) in Brazil, the indigenist movements of Bolivia and Ecuador, the piqueteros or unemployed workers’ activists in Argentina—these are just some of the groups that have pioneered the new militancy.
(...) There are two main problems with this position. Firstly, it blurs the boundaries with neoliberal discourse, since as we pointed out above, the latter likewise regards the state and party politics as its great enemies. Secondly, given that neoliberalism is characterized by the wholesale expropriation of rights, it can only be overcome in the political sphere: through the universalization of rights enacted by the governing authority of the state. Otherwise, the struggle against neoliberalism would remain perpetually on the defensive, having discarded the political instruments necessary for its own realization. Some movements have remained trapped in this paradox, ostensibly embodying hubs of resistance yet unable to move forward into challenging neoliberal hegemony, via a fresh articulation of the social with the political. Their critique of the state is subordinated to the terms of the theoretical discourse of neoliberalism, structured around the polarization of state versus private. This polarity is designed to demonize the state, take control of the private sphere (in which market relations are embedded) and abolish the indispensable framework for the democratization and defeat of neoliberalism: the public sphere.
(...) Faced with this crisis of hegemony for the traditional political parties—the Partido Radical in disarray after De la Rúa’s resignation, the Peronists bitterly divided—the social movements coined the famous slogan, ¡Que se vayan todos!: Out with the lot of them! This amounted to a refusal to take part in the electoral process, yet without suggesting any way in which power might be rethought or reorganized. It was a quintessential expression of the ‘autonomy of social movements’, disdainful of politics but lacking any alternatives. From a position of strength, one can indeed get rid of ‘the lot of them’. Without organized political forces, the slogan is merely a way to bow out from the fight for an alternative hegemony... In all these instances, the notion of the autonomy of the social served not to help the regrouping of mass forces intent on organizing new forms of political action, nor as a way to construct alternative forms of power, but rather as a refusal to confront the issue of power. The clearest theoretical expositions of such tendencies are to be found in the works of Toni Negri and John Holloway. They argue explicitly for the abandonment of power, of the political sphere, on grounds that power corrupts everything since its forms of representing the popular will are intrinsically tainted and distorting; the will of the people can only be legitimately represented within the social sphere. Furthermore, Negri portrays the state as a conservative brake on globalization. Yet neither makes any attempt to construct concrete anti-neoliberal strategies; their prescriptions lead only to the inertia of the social movements. The wsf, for its part, made the need to regulate flows of finance capital one of its founding theses; yet this can only take place—as, for example, in the case of Venezuela—through state action.
(...) Why has a full-fledged challenge to capitalism not emerged? The answer must be sought in the global balance of forces following the victory of the West in the Cold War. The extensive processes of deregulation and marketization that this unleashed did not produce an era of sustained economic growth; instead, productive investment was in large part transferred to the speculative financial sphere. The social and geographical concentration of wealth has intensified. The limits and contradictions of the capitalist system are revealed on a greater scale than ever before. Yet the subjective factors—forms of collective organization and of consciousness, politics and the state—necessary for the construction of alternatives have been disequipped by these same processes. The state and the public domain have withered under the onslaught of rent-seeking capital, backed by international agencies that relentlessly preach the doctrine of free trade. Ideologically, the triumph of liberalism has imposed its own interpretation of the world as a hegemonic monopoly: democracy could only mean representative parliamentarism; the economy could only mean the capitalist market economy; the client and the consumer occluded the citizen and the worker; competition replaced rights and the market subsumed the public sphere. This is why the successive crises of the neoliberal economic model have not prompted an overt challenge to capitalism as such. In Latin America, the countries that have gone furthest in combating neoliberalism are those in which it was least entrenched. In Venezuela the advance of free-market policies was halted by the failure of the Carlos Andrés Pérez and Rafael Caldera administrations; in Ecuador, by the fall of three governments in a row. In Bolivia, indigenous communities managed to preserve their identities not only in the countryside, but also in the urban districts where they are most highly concentrated, cities like La Paz, El Alto and Cochabamba. Ideologically, neoliberalism has put down deeper roots in the relatively more developed countries: Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina. Brazil was ruled by an unbroken sequence of neoliberal governments for ten years; in Argentina, Menem also ruled for ten years; and neoliberal orthodoxy was fully implemented in Mexico as much under the pri as under the pan. In Brazil and Argentina the neoliberal model continues to hold sway, despite certain areas of flexibility.
(...) On the ideological plane, Latin America is better placed to table issues for debate: the pluri-national, pluri-ethnic state; the notion of 21st-century socialism; alternative formulas for regional integration such as alba. But there are few platforms for disseminating the new ideas, raising them against the pensée unique and its theories, incessantly propounded by the mass media. Latin American critical thought, which can boast a long tradition of far-sighted interpretations and theoretical innovations, is faced with fresh challenges in response to issues such as the new nationalism, indigenous peoples, the new model of accumulation, processes of socialization and de-marketization, and the historical and political future of the continent. In some countries—most importantly Bolivia—the experiments under way are accompanied by a rich process of reflection and theoretical elaboration. In others, there is a considerable dissociation, not to say contradiction, between much of the intelligentsia and the process the rest of the country is embarked on: the most striking example is Venezuela. In countries with a strong university-based intelligentsia such as Brazil, Argentina and Mexico, a significant part of the educated elite will not commit itself to participating in the principal areas of social and political struggle, even if it maintains a high standard of intellectual elaboration. The existing theoretical potential may play an important role in the construction of post-neoliberal models.
(...) In retrospect, the international rise, consolidation and jeopardization of neoliberalism falls into three distinct phases. The first was marked by the Thatcher-Reagan tandem, corresponding to the strongest and most openly reactionary ideological expressions, with Pinochet in Chile and Jeffrey Sachs in Bolivia as its most authentic regional equivalents. The second phase corresponded to the governments of the so-called Third Way, represented by Clinton and Blair, which pursued a supposedly ‘light’ version, a consolidation of the model, given that the heavy lifting—privatizations, unlimited predominance of the market, opening-up of the economy—had already been carried out. Now it was as if the green light had been given for governments of similar tendency in Latin America—social-democrat and nationalist—to set out on the same path: from Buenos Aires to Mexico City, the Washington Consensus swept the board. The third phase was inaugurated with the Mexican peso crisis and the onset of turbulence in the globalized economy, while the Bush-Cheney White House imposed a harsher, more conservative tone in response to the attacks of 2001; aggressive policies from Washington combining with an economy in stagnation.