HispanicVista Columnists
Will Mexico Add to Latin America's Leftist Leaning?
By Robert Miranda
Chile and Peru joined the leftist trend Latin America is steam rolling towards with the election of Dr. Michelle Bahelet as President and Alan García Pérez, a moderate Peruvian leftist. Bahelet becomes the second woman to be freely elected head of state in South America’s history.
Next in this trend could be Mexico, and then following that election is Nicaragua. It seems the “Domino Theory” of Communism rising in Asia during the Vietnam War has come home to roost in Latin America—in the form of growing Latin American Socialism.
Wall Street appears to have yet to take note of what is taking place in Latin America. United States’ corporations seem to continue to assume they can do business as usual. Soon however, American companies are going to get a rude awakening when they find that Central and South America has become a high risk business zone because of increasing political victories by Socialist political parties taking control of their resources and blocking free market agendas.
Already companies doing business in Venezuela and Bolivia are reporting that they are going to have to pay higher taxes, if they aren’t already.
In Mexico, Zapatista rebels have mounted campaigns in support of leftist political movements in Mexico. The efforts have led to the rise of the Democratic Revolutionary Party, now contending for power against Vicente Fox’s conservative National Action Party. In July, we will soon see if Mexico becomes part of this growing socialist movement now taking Latin America; leftist Andrés Manuel López Orador is ahead in many polls to win the Mexican Presidential election.
Evo Morales, the new President of Bolivia, visited China and established his nation a major economic player on the world stage. He has chastised the United States and has moved to nationalize the nation’s natural gas industry.
Bolivia, once a friend to IMF and the World Bank, now sees these two economic institutions as Bolivia’s nemesis. Fortune magazine suggests that "with a growing indigenous-rights movement sweeping Latin America, the indigenous of Bolivia, who make up 65% of the population, are determined to take back the natural resources they see as rightfully theirs."
Morales has visited Cuba, China, France, South Africa and Venezuela since his election. It’s clear Bolivia means to make dramatic changes to its economic make-up.
Leftists run Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Peru and Venezuela. If the PRD wins in Mexico, the list of growing leftist power in Latin America will bring more Chinese influence into the Hemisphere.
While the Bush Administration continues to try to repair the political damage they’ve done in the Middle East, Latin America continues to shift away from the United States and is becoming comfortable with its new found independence and friend China.
The Bush Administration is concerned about China's growing economic presence in Latin America. "They cite huge financial resources China is promising to bring to Latin America, its growing military-to-military relations in the region, and its clear political ambitions there all as potential threats to the long-standing pillar of U.S. policy in the hemisphere, the Monroe Doctrine," said Peter Hakim, President, Inter-American Dialogue in a recent Foreign Affairs article. Indeed, many political analysts believe that Latin American nations working with China do so as an economic and political alternative to a United States. The U.S. has had no economic initiative in the region during the past decade, this void left U.S. economic interest in Latin America vulnerable.
The United States’ budget is stretched with the rebuilding of New Orleans, tax cuts, and the Iraq War. Assistance to Latin American economic reform and social progress has melted away. U.S. policy regarding immigration is furthering the divide between the United States and Latin America.
- The United States is losing Latin America. Soon, it will have to contend with a region united against neo-economic campaigns and working in consort with the world’s largest Communist nation against Western global economic practices.
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- Robert Miranda, a frequent contributing columnist to HispanicVista.com (http://www.hispanicvista.com/) is a national award winning columnist, Latino community activist and Publisher of the Milwaukee Spanish Journal. Email at: rmiranda@wi.rr.com