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Latin America is finally free

October 3 2006

FIVE centuries after the European conquests, Latin America is reasserting its independence. In the southern cone especially, from Venezuela to Argentina, the region is rising to overthrow the legacy of external domination of the past centuries and the cruel and destructive social forms that they have helped to establish.

The mechanisms of imperial control — violence and economic warfare, hardly a distant memory in Latin America — are losing their effectiveness, a sign of the shift towards independence. Washington is now compelled to tolerate governments that in the past would have drawn down intervention or reprisal.

Throughout the region a vibrant array of popular movements provide the basis for a meaningful democracy. The indigenous populations, as if in a rediscovery of their pre-Columbian legacy, are much more active and influential, particularly in Bolivia and Ecuador.

These developments are in part the result of a phenomenon that has been observed for some years by specialists and polling organisations in Latin America: As the elected governments became more formally democratic, citizens expressed an increasing disillusionment with the way democracy functions and "lack of faith" in the democratic institutions. They have sought to construct democratic systems based on popular participation rather than elite and foreign domination.

A persuasive explanation for the decline of faith in existing democratic institutions has been offered by Argentine political scientist Atilio Boron, who observed that the new wave of democratisation in Latin America coincided with externally mandated economic "reforms" that undermine effective democracy.

The concepts of democracy and development are closely related in many respects. One is that they have a common enemy: loss of sovereignty. In a world of nation-states, it is true by definition that decline of sovereignty entails decline of democracy, and decline in ability to conduct social and economic policy. That in turn harms development, a conclusion confirmed by centuries of economic history.

The same historical record reveals that loss of sovereignty consistently leads to imposed liberalisation, of course in the interests of those with the power to impose this social and economic regime. In recent years, the imposed regime is commonly called "neoliberalism." It is not a very good term: The socio-economic regime is not new, and it is not liberal, at least as the concept was understood by classical liberals.

In the United States, faith in institutions has also been declining steadily, and for good reasons. A huge gulf has opened between public opinion and public policy, rarely reported, though people cannot fail to be aware that their policy choices are disregarded.

It is instructive to compare the recent presidential elections in the richest country of the world and the poorest country in South America — Bolivia.

In the 2004 U.S. presidential election, voters had a choice between two men born to wealth and privilege, who attended the same elite university, joined the same secret society where privileged young men are trained to join the ruling class, and were able to run in the election because they were supported by pretty much the same conglomerations of private power.

Their programmes were similar, consistent with the needs of their primary constituency: wealth and privilege. Studies of public opinion revealed that on a host of major issues, both parties are well to the right of the general population, the Bush administration dramatically so.

In part for these reasons, issues are removed from the electoral agenda. Few voters even knew the stand of the candidates on issues. Candidates are packaged and sold like toothpaste and cars and lifestyle drugs, and by the same industries, dedicated to delusion and deceit.

For contrast, consider Bolivia and Evo Morales’ election last December. Voters were familiar with the issues, very real and important ones like national control over natural gas and other resources, which has overwhelming popular support. Indigenous rights, women’s rights, land rights and water rights are on the political agenda, among many others. The population chose someone from their own ranks, not a representative of narrow sectors of privilege. There was real participation, not just pushing a lever once every few years.

The comparison, and it is not the only one, raises some questions about where programmes of "democracy promotion" are needed.

Given its new ascendancy, Latin America may come to terms with some of its severe internal problems. The region is notorious for the rapacity of its wealthy classes, and their freedom from social responsibility.

Comparative studies of Latin American and East Asian economic development are revealing in this respect. Latin America has close to the world’s worst record for inequality, East Asia the best. The same holds for education, health and social welfare generally. Imports to Latin America have been heavily skewed towards consumption by the rich; in East Asia, toward productive investment. Capital flight from Latin America has approached the scale of the debt — suggesting a way to overcome this crushing burden. In East Asia, capital flight has been tightly controlled.

Latin American economies have also been more open to foreign investment than Asia. Since the 1950s, foreign multinationals have controlled far larger shares of industrial production in Latin America than in the East Asian success stories, according to the UN Conference on Trade and Development. The World Bank reported that foreign investment and privatisation have tended to substitute for other capital flows in Latin America, transferring control and sending profits abroad, unlike East Asia.

Meanwhile new socio-economic programmes under way in Latin America are reversing patterns that trace back to the Spanish conquests — with Latin American elites and economies linked to the imperial powers but not to one another.

Of course this shift is highly unwelcome in Washington, for the traditional reasons: The United States has expected to rely on Latin America as a secure base for resources, markets and investment opportunities. And as planners have long emphasised, if this hemisphere is out of control, how can the United States hope to resist defiance elsewhere?

Noam Chomsky is a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author, most recently, of Hegemony or Survival Americas Quest for Global Dominance.