[NYTr] Democracy Rising in Latin America

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

YES! Magazine - Summer 2007
http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=1730

Democracy Rising in Latin America

Grassroots movements change the face of power.

by Nadia Martinez

As the people of Latin America build democracies from the bottom up,
the symbols of power are changing. What used to be emblems of poverty
and oppression—indigenous clothing and speech, the labels “campesino”
and “landless worker”—are increasingly the symbols of new power. As
people-powered movements drive the region toward social justice and
equality, these symbols speak, not of elite authority limited to a few,
but of power broadly shared.

The symbolism was especially rich last year in Cochabamba, Bolivia,
when the new minister of justice made her entrance at an international
activists’ summit. Casimira Rodríguez, a former domestic worker, wore
the thick, black braids and pollera, a long, multilayered skirt, of an
Aymara indigenous woman. As she made her way through the throng,
Rodríguez further distinguished herself from a typical law-enforcement
chief by passing out handfuls of coca leaves.

Throughout the region, marginalized people are rising up, challenging
the system that has kept them poor, and pursuing a new course. In
country after country, people are selecting leaders who strongly reject
the Washington-led “neoliberal” policies of restricted government
spending on social programs, privatization of public services such as
education and water, and opening up borders to foreign corporations.

Of course, there are exceptions, most notably Mexico, where
conservative Felipe Calderón claimed power after a bruising battle over
disputed election results. But the growing backlash has driven
old-guard presidents out of power in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador,
Nicaragua, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Bolivia. And, while there are sharp
differences among the new leaders, there is no question that what put
all of them in power was a growing outcry against economic injustice.
Over 40 percent of the region still lives in poverty, and the gap
between rich and poor is the widest in the world.

No longer willing to accept perpetual poverty, Latin America’s poor are
redefining their societies and, in the process, redefining democracy.
They are organizing large segments of society into strong, dynamic
social movements with enough power to drive national politics. The
challenge, of course, is to hold their new leaders accountable, to
maintain the strength of the grassroots democratic power, and to go
beyond symbolism to make real change.

Bolivia’s Indigenous President

In Bolivia, where indigenous people are the majority, there are already
some concrete signs of progress. Evo Morales, the country’s first
indigenous president, took office in 2006 with the strongest mandate of
any Bolivian leader. Catapulted onto the national political stage by
his struggles as a union leader defending the rights of coca growers,
Morales came to power on the heels of massive popular uprisings that
ousted three presidents in as many years.

Despite sitting on the region’s second largest natural gas reserves,
Bolivia is South America’s poorest country. In tandem with a wave of
privatizations that swept Latin America in the 1990s, the oil and gas
industry in Bolivia was opened for business to foreign oil companies,
which garnered 82 percent of the profits, while leaving a scant 18
percent for Bolivia’s coffers. Shortly after taking office, the Morales
government set out to rewrite contracts with private companies.
Negotiators increased the country’s share of the profits to 50-80
percent by renegotiating contracts with 10 different companies, which
will yield billions in additional revenue for the government to sustain
its new social agenda.

Spurred by his experience as a coca grower, Morales has introduced new
policies that challenge the U.S. approach to the “drug war.” Coca, the
base ingredient of cocaine, has special ancestral significance for
Bolivia’s indigenous people and in its raw form is widely used to treat
maladies such as stomach upset, altitude sickness, and stress, in
addition to being a part of many Bolivians’ daily routine. Under
pressure from the U.S. government, previous Bolivian administrations
tried coca eradication. Kathryn Ledebur of the Andean Information
Network in Bolivia, says that “local farmers who planted coca as a
means of subsistence would often face violent confrontations with the
military and security forces who were mandated to destroy their crops,
which in essence devastated their only means of livelihood.”

The Morales government has developed a farmer-friendly program that
allows small farmers to grow small amounts of coca for domestic
consumption, while also implementing a zero-cocaine policy that
includes interdiction and anti-money laundering efforts to prevent drug
trafficking.

In Brazil, a Metalworker is President

The political shift in Brazil is also steeped in powerful symbolism.
When Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, a metalworker with an elementary
education, rode a wave of popular support to the presidency in 2002, it
inspired working-class people around the world. He was re-elected with
a comfortable 60 percent of the vote in October 2006. Although his
first term was tainted by corruption scandals and accusations from many
on Brazil’s left that he acquiesced too much to the demands by the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) for strict fiscal policies, he
fulfilled some of his campaign pledges to the poor who form his
political base.

According to the Center for Economic Policy Research, some 11 million
families have benefited from the “bolsa família”—a monthly cash payment
made to poor families in exchange for ensuring that their children stay
in school. Signaling more pro-poor policies to come, one of the first
acts of Lula’s second term was announcing an 8.6 percent rise in the
minimum wage.

Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution

President Hugo Chávez is best known in the United States for his
overblown rhetoric against President Bush. But in Latin America, the
Venezuelan president is fond of conjuring up the symbolism of Simón
Bolívar, the “liberator” of South America from Spanish rule, who
dreamed of uniting the region in a strong bloc. And while it has
garnered little attention here, Chávez has used oil windfalls to
advance Bolívar’s dream. Venezuela has purchased big chunks of
Argentina and Ecuador’s debts to the IMF, for example, and sold
discounted oil to several of its neighbors and even to poor communities
in the United States. And Venezuela has signed trade pacts with several
countries that include novel bartering arrangements, such as
agricultural products in exchange for doctors and other technical
personnel. Chávez has devised a regional trade plan to counter the
Bush-favored Free Trade Area of the Americas. The Bolivarian
Alternative for Latin America (ALBA, for its Spanish acronym) aims to
benefit the poor and the environment, and to advance trade among
countries within the region.

In January, Venezuela and Argentina took another step towards breaking
the region’s dependence on such neoliberal institutions as the World
Bank, IMF, and Inter-American Development Bank, which have conditioned
lending on “free market” policy reforms and harsh austerity measures.
They pledged more than $1 billion to jump-start a new “Bank of the
South.” Bolivia and Ecuador have since signed on.

Within Venezuela, Chávez has made impressive progress in boosting
literacy levels and providing health and other services to the poor. He
has teamed up with Cuba in cosponsoring a program called Operation
Miracle to provide free eye surgery to poor residents from Venezuela,
Panama, Jamaica, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and a growing list of other
countries. The Venezuelan government is also investing heavily in
creating a model of local economic development through cooperatives.

On the other hand, Chávez’s fossil-fuel-based development
plans—including a proposed gas pipeline from Venezuela to Argentina—are
hardly visionary. As currently planned, the 5,000-mile pipeline will
traverse areas of extreme ecological and cultural sensitivity. Several
possible routes are being evaluated, but all run through the Amazon.
Environmental and indigenous rights groups throughout Latin America
have voiced opposition to the behemoth project, and have asked the
Venezuelan government to halt all plans until they can be publicly
debated.

Social Movements Redefine Democracy

Some of the most hopeful democratic advances in Latin America are not
the result of official policies, but of social movements harnessing
their own power. The thousands of poor peasants who make up the
Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil have claimed the right to
settle on and farm close to 7 million hectares, or 43,000 square miles,
of unused land—a territory a little larger than the state of Ohio. For
millions of people who are largely outside of the mainstream economic
system, access to land is of paramount importance, as they depend on it
for subsistence.

Miguel Carter, of the Oxford-based Centre for Brazilian Studies,
explains that groups like the MST contribute to the democratic process
in important ways. “By improving the material conditions and cultural
resources of its members” he says, “the landless movement has fortified
the social foundations for democracy in Brazil.”

Indigenous movements, too, have gained ground. In the Amazonian region
of Ecuador, after witnessing multinational oil companies for decades
cut through the jungles of their ancestral lands in search of
petroleum, indigenous women put their bodies on the line against the
armed soldiers sent to escort oil workers. Known for fierce resistance
to oil exploitation on their lands, the remote community of Sarayacu
has so far succeeded in keeping the oil companies out.

Throughout Latin America, scores of indigenous peoples have
demonstrated that marginalized populations can organize and mobilize
effectively enough to topple governments—as they have done in Ecuador
and Bolivia—despite their lack of material resources and political
power.

A new characteristic of Latin American politics is greater
collaboration among countries with the goal of breaking dependence on
the North. In the past, countries were largely in competition for U.S.
markets and development aid. Now they increasingly focus on
complementing the strengths and weaknesses of one another, and seeking
common solutions to their shared problems.

One example is the newly formed South American Community of Nations
(CSN, in Spanish), an attempt by the 12 countries of South America to
create an “area that is integrated politically, socially, economically,
environmentally, and in infrastructure.” Because the initiative is new,
it is unclear whether it will simply become a trading bloc that
improves the region’s competitive position in international markets, as
is the case with the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). Alternatively,
it could establish minimum social and environmental standards and the
infrastructure not only to link to international markets but also to
trade within Latin America.

Similarly, in a radical departure from a traditional market-based
approach, the Morales government has developed a “People’s Trade
Agreement,” an innovative economic alternative based on principles of
fair trade, labor, and environmental protections, and active state
intervention in the economy to promote development.

Although still in an embryonic stage, “it is unique,” says Jason
Tockman of the Bolivia Solidarity Network. “It has both a strong
resonance with the alternative visions for social, economic and
political integration proposed by the region’s social movements, and
the weight of state authority.”

The response to President Bush’s visit to five Latin American countries
in March is yet another sign that Latin Americans are choosing their
own path, independent of the United States and its political and
economic interests. Along Bush’s route, thousands of people in the
streets carrying colorful signs and “Bush Out” banners sent a clear
message: people’s movements are alive and well in Latin America, and
they aren’t falling for the White House’s attempt to repackage the same
unpopular U.S. policies under the guise of poverty alleviation.

At the same time, Chávez was able to gather and rouse into a fervor an
estimated 40,000 people at an anti-Bush rally in Argentina, where he
announced that Bush was a “political cadaver”—alluding to the
president’s increased irrelevance in Latin America.

After two centuries of the United States treating Latin America as if
it were its backyard, organized popular movements across Latin America
are changing the dynamics of the hemisphere. By electing more popular
governments in eight countries and by organizing tens of millions of
people, they have put up strong resistance to the U.S. agenda of
corporate-led globalization, and they have created real alternatives on
the ground. These efforts, combined with the Venezuela-led effort for
alternative regional integration, not only provide the strongest
counter-weight to the U.S. agenda anywhere in the world, but also offer
multiple paths towards a better future for millions of people in the
Americas.


[Nadia Martinez was born and raised in Panama. She co-directs the
Sustainable Energy and Economy Network at the Institute for Policy
Studies (http://www.ips-dc.org) in Washington, D.C. Her focus is on
Latin America, where she works with environmental, development, human
rights, and indigenous organizations.]