Elections Could Tilt Latin America Further to the Left

[Thom Little]

Starting on Dec. 11 in Chile, voters in 11 countries will participate in a series of presidential elections over the next year that could take Latin America further to the left than it already is.

Since a bombastic army colonel, Hugo Chávez, won office in Venezuela in 1998, three-quarters of South America has shifted to the left, though most countries are led by pragmatic presidents like Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil and Néstor Kirchner in Argentina.

That decisive shift has a good chance of spreading to Bolivia, Ecuador and, for the first time in recent years, north of the Panama Canal. In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas, led by Daniel Ortega, are positioning themselves to win back the presidency they lost in 1990. Farther north, in Mexico, polls show that Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a hard-charging leftist populist, may replace the business-friendly president, Vicente Fox, who is barred from another term.

Traditional, market-friendly politicians can still win in all these countries. But polls show a general leftward drift that could bring policies sharply deviating from longstanding American economic remedies like unfettered trade and privatization, better known as the Washington Consensus.

"The left is contesting in a very practical way for political power," said Jim Shultz, executive director of Democracy Center, a policy analysis group in Bolivia. "There's a common thread that runs through Lula and Kirchner and Chávez and Evo, and the left in Chile to a certain degree, and that thread is a popular challenge to the market fundamentalism of the Washington Consensus."



http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/10/international/americas/10bolivia.html?8hpib

[IndianaGreen]

1. The NY Times is sounding the alarm on behalf of the ruling class!

They know that the longer our military continues to be decimated in Iraq, the more difficult it becomes to use them to put down popular governments elsewhere.

Americans also suffer from this delusion that Latin America is just a whore that they can take, use, and abuse to their liking.

Latin America faces year of change

By James Painter
BBC Latin America analy

Twelve presidential elections are due to take place in Latin America between November 2005 and the end of 2006. They include seven of the region's eight most populous countries: Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Chile and Ecuador.

<snip>

It is probably true that left-wing parties and governments are currently stronger in Latin America than anywhere else in the world. There are diverse reasons for this depending on the country, but there are also some common threads.

Left-wing parties have tended to do well by offering something different from the dominant free market policies which previous governments followed, promising more to the poor, playing the anti-Bush card - the war in Iraq is deeply unpopular in the region - and speaking of Latin American integration.

In the 1980s Latin America led the world in following the so-called Washington consensus, by which governments were encouraged to liberalise and privatise their economies.

Many governments went much further down that path than in other parts of world, but the results have been disappointing.

Out of a population of around 550 million, 220 million are still poor and 100 million are extremely so, living on less than $1 a day.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4435522.stm

[Toots]

2. The arrogance of the right wing is driving this shift

Not that it may not be a good shift. :shrug:

[killbotfactory]

3. so leftists aren't "pragmatic"?

:eyes: