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Good Left, Bad Left Compliance and Defiance in US Press Coverage of Latin America By Kevin Young Saturday, July 17, 2010 On the one side are countries like Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, where voters have given much greater power to their populist presidents, partly by allowing them to extend their time in office and sometimes eroding the function of Congress and the Supreme Court, institutions portrayed as allies of the old oligarchy. On the other side are nations of varying ideological hues, including Brazil, Latin America's rising power, where resilient institutions have allowed for more diversity of participants in politics, ruling out the so-called participatory democracy that Mr. Chavez, the Venezuelan president, has been eager to promote in the region. —Simon Romero in the New York Times, June 2009 <1> In the past decade Latin America has witnessed the election of roughly a dozen left-leaning presidents of varying ideological inclinations and leadership styles, who have been propelled into power by some combination of grassroots citizens’ movements and deep popular disillusion with the neoliberal policies of previous pro-US leaders. Faced with this tide of protest against the US and US-allied leaders, the US government has tried to limit its loss of control over the hemisphere. One strategy for doing so has involved promoting what it considers the “good,” responsible Left and isolating the anti-democratic, “bad” Left. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton explained the difference during a visit to Brazil this past March, when she criticized Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez for undermining democracy and called on him “to restore private property” and “return to a free market economy.” Clinton contrasted Venezuela with the good Left, saying that “ e wish Venezuela were looking more to its south and looking at Brazil and looking at Chile” <2>. The major press organs in the US, including the more liberal ones, have echoed this characterization, often drawing the contrast even more sharply. News articles and editorials in the New York Times have distinguished between those who “aggressively push a leftist agenda” and “Brazil’s more moderate, leftist approach,” while insisting on the need for a “counterweight” to “Chavez and his protégé, the Bolivian president, Evo Morales” <3>. The Washington Post has contrasted the region’s “fervently anti-American leaders” with “democratic Brazil” <4>. The Christian Science Monitor has implicitly pitted “the region’s hard-left, Chavez-led bloc, which also includes Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Cuba,” against Brazil, Argentina, and others <5>. The New York Daily News recently expressed outrage that democratic Brazil had joined “Venezuela’s revolutionary strongman and narcoterrorist Hugo Chavez” and “Bolivian dictator-in-the-making Evo Morales” in pursuing diplomatic and commercial relations with Iran (efforts which, in their manifest common sense and efficacy in promoting peace, stand in bold contrast to most Western politicians’ saber-rattling over Iran’s nuclear program)<6>. The aggressive, authoritarian Left is embodied by Hugo Chávez, who is held responsible for the entire region’s leftward shift; the election of left-leaning leaders has nothing to do with the fact that Latin America is the most unequal region in the world, that it has long been dominated by the US and domestic oligarchies, and that most Latin Americans disagree with the neoliberal economic policies promoted by Washington and the international financial institutions. With the help of a few “poodles” like Evo Morales, Chávez has duped tens of millions of people into supporting his agenda by “buying support” among irrational populations who are “largely blind to results,” while sending anyone who disagrees with him to the Gulag <7>. The June 2009 military overthrow of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya occurred in part because “the Honduran president had lately fallen under the spell of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez,” who presumably tricked Zelaya into raising the country’s minimum wage and implementing other measures beneficial to Honduran workers and the poor <8>. News coverage following the coup rarely failed to emphasize Zelaya’s friendly relations with Chávez, but usually omitted all discussion of Zelaya’s socioeconomic policies <9>. Press discussions of Latin American economic policies likewise contrast the “profligate state spending” and “nationalization of industries” under the bad Left with the “middle-of-the-road policies” of the good Left in Uruguay, Brazil, and elsewhere. Chávez’s “pathological mismanagement has run the economy into the ground,” whereas the good Left (and the good Latins, more generally) have “embrace(d) globalization” and consequently expect strong growth in their economies this year <10>. These sharp binary distinctions between good and bad Left contain an element of truth: Venezuela’s Chávez and Bolivia’s Morales have been the most outspokenly anti-imperialist and have also made the boldest attempts to break from neoliberal economic doctrine by regulating or nationalizing big business and increasing social spending. But in many ways the US press exaggerates the contrast and distorts basic realities. First, Venezuelan and Bolivian citizens do not rate their governments more harshly than most Latin Americans rate their governments—and in fact, by most measures they deem their countries to be considerably more democratic, egalitarian, and respectful of human rights than the regional average. Any objective comparison of the human rights records of US friends and foes would certainly fault US allies Colombia and Mexico far more than Venezuela and Bolivia <11>. Second, in the realm of economic policy, the real contrast is not between “socialist” and “middle-of-the-road policies,” but between different variants of capitalism; Venezuela and Bolivia are still fundamentally capitalist, though they have found ways to mitigate some of capitalism’s most destructive consequences (and incidentally, those very policies have produced relatively strong economic growth as well) <12>. And finally, the US press exaggerates the degree of diplomatic separation between Venezuela and Bolivia, on one hand, and countries like Brazil, on the other. For example, during several recent crises, including the Honduran coup and the wave of right-wing violence in Bolivia in fall 2008, Latin American governments have united to condemn the affront to peace and democracy (while Washington has wavered) <13>. Brazil’s Lula has recently defied the US by opposing sanctions against Iran and helping to negotiate a peaceful uranium transfer deal. More: http://www.zcommunications.org/good-left-bad-left-by-kevin-young
Editorials: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x548739
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