The Pink Ebb Or how Latin America lost its Left

Hot Chile

The fall of the Berlin Wall left numerous orphans, including, first and foremost, communist parties’ cadres through the West. Aftershocks reached everywhere, particularly West’s own periphery: Latin America. Traditionally reformist, parliamentarian and petty-bourgeois, many communist bureaucrats in the Continent—once discarded by the sudden Soviet withdrawal—recycled themselves into Washington- funded NGOs, advocating human rights, democracy and feminism. It was the time when Moscow, plunged into its own crisis of legitimacy, had abandoned the international arena apparently for good. But the professional void should be filled somehow or other: so one day, out of necessity, scholastic Marxism gave way to glib postmodernism in official parlours and academia. The period in question roughly coincided with the end of neoliberal dictatorships in South America, especially Chile, whose return to democracy was marked by marathon-like waves of social protest in the second half of the 1980s.

Now fast forward thirty years.

Generations after Pinochet’s demise, Chile reenacted a similar cycle of popular insurgency precisely on the eve of the COVID-19 eruption: cities overrun by nearly two million demonstrators, some of them equipped with Molotov cocktails and Luddite fervour. Until then, electoral musical chairs had been divided between smooth-talking social democrats and draconian neoliberals, although trickle-down economics remained always the same. It was a game of shells successively played by Pareto’s foxes and lions, ‘left’ and ‘right’ modeled after the American fashion. All this whilst the Chilean economy—blending the GDP of Finland and GINI of Lesotho—dragged a backlog of hopelessness amidst the precariat. Eventually, Chile’s 2019 Colour Revolution led to a twofold process. It facilitated the future presidential victory of a half-baked leftist alliance, formed by both wokish progressives and plain-vanilla communists.

On the other hand, street mobilization ignited a Constitutional Assembly, originally planned by the establishment as a safety valve to mitigate citizens’ volatility. Yet, as it turned out, the Assembly gained a logic of its own, and so advanced the draft of a new constitution resembling a multiculturalist patchwork —though, one must admit, workers’ rights obtained some residual recognition in its last deliberations. At the present, the Constitutional Assembly and the novel administration represented by Mr Boric, a former students’ leader himself, seems poorly synchronised, partly because the latter, shrugging off campaign promises, embraced budgetary austerity and deflationary measures. In fact, one month passed since President Boric’s investiture, the usual honeymoon between electorate and new cabinet now portends a stormy divorce.

The cause is simple. Chile virtually monopolises copper mining worldwide, though the state fails—due to geopolitical arrangements dating back to the Dictatorship—to capture the rent generated by its own subsoil. On that account, taxation preys upon the working masses, whose retirement savings also end up sequestered by law-enforced Ponzi portfolios cascading into the labyrinth of American financial brokers —the infamous Pension Funds Administrators (PFAs).

Throughout the recent quarantines, public subsidies for the unemployed have been so meagre that people demand cashing in the pension ledgers, whence a tug-of-war ensued between PFAs and their aging, captive clientele. Presumably, investments are so illiquid and opaque that they verge on literal nonexistence. However, the current progressive-communist, ‘pink-red’ administration has sided strongly with the local financial lobby, umbilically linked to Wall Street. Thus, Boric’s own leftist constituency vacillates between stupor and rage, responding to the perceived betrayal with the threat of political defenestration. Common sense dictates that, once more, popular rebelliousness brews underneath. But this time it will be worse, since the government has nobody leftwards—no formal antagonist to confront or appeal to or negotiate with, except an amorphous, tidal, mostly juvenile mob thronging ubiquitous barricades and picket lines. Of course, an institutional enemy may well become a loyal ally, and therefore a source of legitimation. Sadly, this is not an option any longer. Instead, Mr Boric’s multicultural agenda purports to assuage material penury and social rancour by invoking and touting the mantra of sexual rights, boutique environmentalism and minorities’ rehabilitation. But perhaps the endeavour is rather otiose, and its topicality fairly passé. Why? Well then: the Constitutional Assembly, which runs in parallel with oblique complicity, has already appropriated all these themes beforehand. All in all, Chile is a political joke with no punchline thus far.

Andean Antinomies

Last year, after finishing ahead in the presidential ballotage, cowboy-hatted rural school teacher Pedro Castillo, alias El Profesor, had to improvise a pact with the representative of the academic left, anthropologist Verónika Toledo, in order to face the imminent electoral runoff. Castillo won at last, but not before suffering a judicial ordeal aimed at impugning the number of his votes, suffrages concentrated mainly in the indigenous backcountry.

Though putatively supported by Leninist party Perú Libre, Castillo remained a classic populist of the Latin variety, peasant-focused and fraught with ingrained Catholic ethos. Needless to say, such a profile embarrassed his progressive allies in Lima. Educated leftist urbanites frowned upon most of Castillo’s platform, and also looked askance at his own political persona, rustic and moralistic. Worse even, El Profesor’s hyperbolic back-to-the-land phraseology mismatched, among other things, the pro-abortion élan of the academic clique behind Toledo. Socialism-cum-familism stridently jarred on the ears of leftist conformity. But they should know better.

Peasant families were harshly decimated by neoliberal eugenics during Fujimori’s authoritarian régime (1990-2000), which perpetrated uninformed, nonconsensual sterilizations on dozens of thousands of indigenous women. The depopulating crusade, sponsored and financed by both NED and Japanese official charities (Fujimori himself was born in Japan), deeply traumatised young womenfolk, whose native milieu highly appreciates pregnancy and childbearing. Paradoxically, this punitive family-planning policy took place in a very low demographic density country, which raises suspicions regarding the real purpose of such an initiative.

However, the lowering of birth rates is presently pursued by the abortionist laundry list, starting with the postmodern purge of so-called patriarchy and working-class masculinity: first stick, then carrot... In truth, until recently, Peruvian governing bloc has had a bumpy, erratic trajectory, and it seems unlikely that the chimeric cohabitation between backcountry populists and college halfwits could function anyway. To begin with, the Finance Minister belongs to Verónika Toledo’s liberal entourage, whence the unabated continuity of raw materials capitalism.

Tango & Cash

After tortuous incubation, proletarian dissent in Latin America climaxed around the first decade of 20th century, a conjuncture that inaugurated modern class politics south of the Rio Grande. The famous Cananea Strike in México and the General Strike in Argentina, both occurred in the early nineties, hallmark the political ascent of the factory underdog—protagonist of arduous social struggles culminating respectively in Cárdenas’ and Perón’s redistributive experiments. As for the latter process, Argentina herself, despite the bulky Transatlantic immigration hurled onto her shores, never really developed European-style Marxist mass parties—which was the case in neighbouring Chile. Instead, Argentina’s paternalistic, plebeian fascism under General Perón (1945-1955) served as both ersatz and catalyst for working class contestation for years to come. Until now, Perón’s times vividly portray the golden age of import substitution industrialisation and vertical syndicalism.

Once defeated by a right-wing military Junta, Peronism soon converged with Guevarism, forming a subculture of revolutionary macho charisma, which later evolved towards urban guerrilla. This emergent context induced conventional Marxist parties to reformist introversion. The tropism was so intense that local Communist Party allied with landholding conservatives, and even briefly supported General Videla Dictatorship during the 1970s. Meanwhile, revolutionary Peronism degenerated into a series of putschist groupuscules, whose militants were in turn massacred by the Junta’s henchmen. Throughout this effervescent lapse, the revolutionary Left cultivated a nativist and sacrificial praxis. Therefore, it was not until the return of civilian governments that anti-capitalist movements acquired a sense of victimhood and passivity. To be sure, this was only possible thanks to the installation of human rights ideology—discourse whose epicentre was the Carter administration. Hence the tragic irony: Argentinian military repressors received instruction from Fort Benning and Pentagon whereas their victims were assisted and sermonized by the lay missionaries of American NGOs.

Simultaneously, Mexican default crisis of 1982—originally caused by Volcker’s interest rate coup—precipitated the final short-circuit of the Keynesian-Fordist paradigm in Latin America. Decidedly, this inflection opened up the grim bonanza of IMF’s structural adjustment programs (SAPs), which sapped theeconomic vigour of most countries in the hemisphere. In this respect, Argentina’s external debt constitutes a transparent object-lesson. The southern republic exhibited relative solvency until 1976, a point at which the Dictatorship sextupled the previous level of debt. Since then, red numbers have skyrocketed, subjecting Argentinian taxpayer to chronic debt peonage before international creditors. In hindsight, one might wonder if human rights ideology—and afterwards multiculturalism and its concomitant tropes— was only a Machiavellian consolation, a taming trick, to neutralise and depoliticise civil society, especially workers’ organizations.

A journalistic vignette is in order, if we want to clarify matters. In mid-2002, vulture bondholder Paul Singer successfully sued Buenos Aires for defaulting on her sovereign debt, whereupon he managed to legally sequester Argentina’s training vessel docked off Ghana, crewed with 22 young sailors. It was a virtual ransom mandated from afar, following a New Jersey court’s decommission order, whose extraterritorial effect today seems questionable. But the blackmailing got its way, and activist investor Singer finally squeezed 2.4 billions dollars from Argentina’s Treasure—four times his initial investment. In the interim, parliamentary debates in Buenos Aires were dominated by the cultural wars, allegedly gay rights or other controversy du jour, so only marginal voices discussed the crux of odious debt. Curiously enough, Singer himself is a mammoth funder for gay rights on a global scale, charitable venture that may be not as selfless as purported.

Upon reflection, a pattern gradually manifests itself. As noted earlier, the rhetoric of human rights and multiculturalism reinforces the inertia of debt discipline and economic extractivism, once the political actors in Latin America become institutionalised victims begging for accommodation. This course of things cannot be properly changed unless liberal hegemony in culture is defied and reduced to the banality it entails. The new, postmodern Left in Latin America, artificially grafted onto a rich populist tradition, whose memory the former parasites cunningly, may only bring forth disillusionment and anomie. Examples thereof abound.

Horses of Troy

As of today, it appears clear that Atlantic capitalism has chosen the progressive Left as a smooth pathway to control its traditional geostrategic raw-material backyard. In fact, the socio-liberal Left, bereft of any proletarian innuendo whatsoever, comes as perfect Horse of Troy for advancing the globalist agenda in its new extractivist incarnation. Recent developments confirm such suspicion. Petro, ex guerrilla fighter converted into Clintonian sycophant, has reasserted the role of Colombia within NATO, as well as extended the virtual American military occupation of the Caribbean country, with dozens of Pentagon-funded bases. Meanwhile, Boric in Chile has fasttracked the approval of Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP11), an initiative previously dumped by Trump but now spearheaded by Biden diplomacy. Interestingly, a more traditional Left, emerging from real revolutionary processes in Mexico (1910), Cuba (1959) and Nicaragua (1979), still maintains an antiglobalist élan. Lula’s Brazil is an object-lesson for the future of Left populism in the Continent. The Brazilian Party of Workers (PT) stems from the Christian trade-unionism and peasant cooperatives. Being so, its ideology tended to express itself in nationalistic, communitarian and developmentalist tropes. However, thus far, Lula's first government was still a neoliberal experiment with a veneer of inflationary tickle-down redistribution. No wonder, Lula’s finance ministers and central bank controllers always come from the IMF-GoldmanSachs revolving door.

Nevertheless, due to its demographic weight, Brazil boasts an internal market that allows for a minimalistic national bourgeoisie, stratum aspiring to consolidate its place inside the BRIC bloc. Hence the Bolsonaro neutralist stance towards Russia, whence Brazil obtains most of its fertilizers for the soybeans feeding China. Currently, Lula may or may not embrace the BRIC project. The crossroads lays between the real economy and the financial one: the growth engine for Brazil hinges upon Chinese demand for crops, whereas Anglo-Atlantic dollar-debt mechanisms still chains Brazil into hemispheric subordination.

Needless to say, international politics is more than a mere reflex of internal affairs, so the planned extraterritorialization and denationalization of the Amazonas basin, under the pretext of global environmental management, shall be a decisive moment for Lula’s new government. Another point in question is the future role of Petrobras, the oil public enterprise continually lagged down by clientelism and corruption events. Energy self-sufficiency is crucial for national development, Brazil being a net export of crude petroleum though exhibiting expensive local prices for domestic consumers. At this juncture, one only hopes Lula may approach some sort of economic resource nationalism, reinforcing the BRIC neutralist diplomacy.

Translated from English by Alexander Markovics

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