Guest Column
How the left becomes the center
- By Fred Rosen
- The Herald Mexico
- January 26, 2006
Chile’s newly elected president, Michelle Bachelet, represents the “extreme center” of Latin America’s new generation of elected leftist leaders.
A socialist, she came to power as the candidate of the center-left coalition, the Concertación, on a platform committed to maintaining Chile’s policies of macro economic balance, encouragement of foreign and domestic private investment, and free trade (that’s the center). It also pushed for the state’s generation of non-poverty-level jobs, more effective public services, an overhaul of Chile’s privatized pension system, and a strengthening of the networks of Latin American integration and solidarity (that’s the left).
Tweak a phrase or two and we are not far from the platform of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the leading contender in Mexico’s current presidential race.
In fact, while the political, social and economic dynamics are very different in the various Latin American (so far, all South American) countries whose elected governments have recently taken a turn to the left, none of those governments has a policy orientation that is terribly different from the mix we have described above.
These are governments that have by and large accepted the role of markets in the allocation of resources and the distribution of private goods and services. They seek to expand the role of the public sector to promote equity and social justice (some much more than others), and to build infrastructure and produce public goods, but not to the degree that state activity replaces private trade and investment.
This is not an anti-capitalist left — not even in Bolivia or Venezuela — but an anti- neoliberal left, a left that has declared an offensive not against private property and capitalist production, but against the particular deregulated, sink-or-swim, discipline-the-poor, free-market form of capitalism that Latin America has lived through for the past two or three decades. (Neoliberalism was brought to Chile three decades ago by a group of U.S.-trained economists known as the Chicago Boys who worked for the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. It was brought to Mexico some two decades ago by the International Monetary Fund’s bailout conditions, following the country’s inability to make payments on its foreign debt.)
And while all — yes, all — of these new, leftist leaders would like to remain on good terms with the United States, all would like to change the balance of economic and political power in the hemisphere. All are therefore keenly interested in constructing a new process of Latin American solidarity and integration, not to confront the United States, but to negotiate with Washington from a position of greater, collective power. All have pledged to form an “integrationist” movement within the Americas based, to begin with, on participation in the South American Common Market (MERCOSUR).
Why is this regional solidarity linked to the left? Over the past 25 years, two kinds of inequality have grown within the Americas, that within countries and that between countries. The gap between the rich and poor has grown in every American country — including the United States — and the gap between the richest countries (the U.S. and Canada) and the less rich has also significantly widened. The self-identified left has always been concerned with equality, and so proposals for alternative forms of regional integration have been elaborated in an attempt to shift the balance.
In South America, this is producing a kind of regional solidarity not seen for well over a century. Bolivia and Chile, for example, have not had diplomatic relations since 1978, due to a land dispute that dates back to the nineteenth century, yet Bolivia’s newly elected indigenous president, Evo Morales, telephoned Bachelet to congratulate her on her victory, and the outgoing socialist president of Chile, Ricardo Lagos, will attend Morales’ inauguration. Mexico’s Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), should it come to power, would almost certainly link itself to this movement. Taken as a whole, the movement is a cautious one, though it contains its radical wing, led, for now, by Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, who has pushed the movement to go further and faster but who, for the most part, pursues the same sets of political and socioeconomic goals: the coexistence of vigorous public and private sectors.
Should Andrés Manuel López Obrador be elected president, it is hard to know where on this new, leftist spectrum he will stand, but he seems to have a lot in common with Bachelet. Both represent a “new left” that would like to become a “new center.”
In that context we can make sense of López Obrador’s remark to a U.S. reporter that he intended to “rule from the center,” all the while insisting that his PRD represents the best hope for the Mexican left. In the pursuit of justice, equity and long-term social stability, he and Bachelet represent an attempt to take the Americas a significant step or two away from the neoliberal right.
Contact Fred Rosen at: frosen@cablevision.net.mx
Article at: http://www2.eluniversal.com.mx/pls/impreso/web_columnas_sup.detalle?var=28155
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