Forgotten and Misunderstood: Social Change in Latin America
Much of Latin America is in the midst of a period of profound transition and uncertainty. The end of the Cold War dramatically changed an important geopolitical calculation: the role and influence of the United States in the region. Throughout the 1990s, the Clinton Administration readjusted the U.S.'s long-standing approach by pushing for the restoration and consolidation of democratic governments, the neoliberalization of national economies, and the creation of robust civil societies often driven by an emerging human rights discourse.
The coming of the Bush regime and the events of September 11, 2001, brought a temporary re-militarization of the relationship between the U.S. and many Latin America countries for example, the expansion of the multi-billion dollar aid project known as "Plan Colombia," the passage of the heavily interdictive Andean Counterdrug Initiative, and the return of U.S. covert and conventional forces to the remote border regions of the Peruvian, Bolivian, and Brazilian Amazon but the shift in relations had proven irreversible.
As the price of oil rose through the mid-2000s, producer-countries like Venezuela and Mexico began to experience double-digit revenue growth, which (much like in Russia) created a new sense of economic security that in this case could be converted into political independence from the U.S. Suddenly it was the U.S., the world's largest consumer of non-renewable energy resources, that was disadvantageously locked into an involuntary "dependency" on newly resurgent Latin American countries. Even a country like Bolivia, which discovered and then finally began to actually exploit its natural gas resources, found itself able to dictate the terms of its relationship with the U.S. without having to consider the dire economic circumstances of provoking what the current president, Evo Morales, simply calls "the Empire."
Predictably, these profound economic, ideological, and social shifts both within Latin America, and in U.S.-Latin American relations, have been misapprehended and mischaracterized by U.S. government officials and members of the Beltway punditocracy alike. Leaders like Venezuela's Chávez, Bolivia's Morales, Ecuador's Correa, Brazil's Lula, Uruguay's Vázquez, and now Paraguay’s Lugo are widely lumped together as part of something that's described as a "new left" in Latin America. But as I have argued in a recent book, leaders like Bolivia's Morales have more in common politically and discursively with mid-nineteenth century liberal revolutionaries like Mexico's Benito Pablo Juárez, whose program for social change likewise revolved around the extension of what we would today call human rights to the broad swaths of the population that had been excluded from the promises of liberalism through which the Latin American republics—children of the Enlightenment all—emerged.
What the United States must realize is that with the exception perhaps of Cuba, both the ideology of global communist revolution, and the theory of history and dialectical conflict that structures it, have dissolved in Latin America. This is what will prove to be the most important legacy of the early post-Cold War, in which the language of social conflict was reinterpreted within a human rights framework that both paved the way for the rise of leaders like Evo Morales, and tightly circumscribed the models for social change available to them once they gained power. By siding with the anti-liberal revolutionary forces in places like Bolivia—which led to the mutual expulsions of both countries' ambassadors and a further deterioration in bilateral relations—the U.S. government has (for now) failed to realize the potential in a region whose countries are modeling themselves, explicitly or not, on the Scandinavia of the 1970s, in which redistributive state economic policies were coupled with a robust human rights-based democracy, the development of social services infrastructure, the eager embrace of international norms, and a willingness to promote and develop international and interregional institutions.