Kirchner, Uribe, Morales, Fujimori… The past weighs heavily on today’s Latin America

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – An anchor keeps Latin America stuck in its most recent past. A retrospective look highlights how difficult it is for the region to turn the page, which is not about left or right. The script is, if not repetitive, very familiar.

There’s a businessman, banker, Guillermo Lasso, who became victorious in Ecuador in his third attempt, with proposals that don’t differ much from those he presented in the first try. Or a Fidel Castro nostalgic, Pedro Castillo, who will run for the presidency of Peru against the daughter of the autocrat jailed for human rights violations.

When the pink tide of the Anglo-Saxons, 21st century socialism, emerged with force in the first decade of the 2000s, it seemed that the progressive forces had buried the 1990s neoliberalism forever. But when the latter, with a more modern narrative, resumed power years later, there was a sense that the progressive dreams were fading.

And it starts again, as if it were a Latin American version of Italo Calvino’s “If on a winter’s night a traveler.” Much has been said about a pendulum moving from left to right, when what is really in dispute is a land of 650 million people in which the leaders and librettos repeat themselves. Inertia clashes with the need to confront global problems, such as the role of new technologies or green policies to tackle climate change, and with a pandemic that aggravated the reasons that triggered social protests two years ago.

This look to the past is reflected on both sides of the political spectrum. At the start of the century, the region turned to the left. At the best moment of this cycle, with guaranteed high commodity prices and a firm commitment from the governments of the time, poverty was reduced. In 10 years (2002-2012), 60 million Latin Americans left their poor status, from 44% to 28%.

Years later, the presence, if not the shadow, of the leftist leaderships that emerged then is still evident, although in very different ways: in Argentina, Cristina Fernández chose to stay in the background as Alberto Fernández’s vice-president; Evo Morales was prevented from being a candidate in Bolivia after his forced exile by the military, but few believe that, after the victory of ex-Minister of Economy Luis Arce, he will renounce some office in the future and not try to be president again.

The figure of Rafael Correa, in exile, represented a very high cost for the candidacy of Andrés Arauz in Ecuador; Lula is reborn after his time in prison and after the court system finally ruled in his favor in the proceeding that prevented him from running in the last election. The mythified figure of Chávez is a burden that transcends Venezuela, like that of Castro’s Cuba, which this weekend held another congress of the Communist Party to certify Raúl Castro’s departure from power at 89 years of age. It is also happening in Nicaragua under Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, which has become an autocracy, far from the revolutionary dream of the 1980’s that these same protagonists embodied.

For Luciana Cadahia, PhD in Philosophy from the Autonomous University of Madrid, any force, whether right or left, “needs to look to the past, needs to know what historical legacy it comes from.”

For his part, Vanni Pettinà, professor and researcher of Contemporary and International Latin American History at the Colegio de México, points out: “The personalization of politics around a charismatic leadership continues to be a place where a profound renewal of the ideas of the Latin American left is needed.”

Argentine journalist and historian Pablo Stefanoni adds a nuance: “Where it has returned, progressivism faces difficulties and fragilities that do not allow it to recover the refoundational discourses of the early years of the 2000s,” says the author of “La rebeldía se volvió de derecha?” (21st Century Publishing House).

In some cases, such as Mexico, to this presidential quasi-divinity status, there is also an extemporaneous vision of the world, from a more distant past, that bets on state-owned refineries and on a conception of foreign policy that responds to a vision of the world closer to the 1970s than to the transformation that is necessary today.

On the conservative side, the omnipresent figure of Álvaro Uribe has permeated Colombian politics in the last two decades, to the point of putting the two presidents who replaced him in power. If Uribism has not been diluted in Colombia, it can be inferred that fujimorism is more than latent in Peru.

However, on the blue side of the political chessboard, the libretto predominates more than the faces. The Latin American right-wing, that of the 90s and the one that, with a different narrative, governed decades later, maintains the same conception of the State. This involves guaranteeing an institutional balance that always ends up favoring the economic elites.

“On the right there is no nostalgia, but a very present happiness, of an era that, deep down, benefited it enormously and that, then, did not imply a deep review of the social and economic limits that it has defended in these decades,” says Pettinà, who, however, believes that it is a nostalgia for a present that doesn’t work, “that breaks societies and destabilizes them,” in the case of Brazil and Chile.

“On the right, the process of reworking grief has not yet begun because, as William Faulkner said, ‘the past is never dead, it’s not even past.‘ To begin to renew oneself, one must experience the mourning and come out of it. In this respect, Ailynn Torres, a researcher at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, believes that “the new right is not fully nostalgic, although part of its contents and narratives are.”

This mind set puts into play strategies and references that are neither necessarily nostalgic, nor do they follow a script from the 90s. They use aggressive marketing strategies and innovative social media management, and they ally themselves with expanding religious sectors that are also quite new. They build new enemies, such as gender ideology, which did not exist in the 1990s.

However, Torres says that there are not only ruptures: “There are very important continuities, especially in terms of proposals for political economy, international relations, moralization of the public sphere, or the role of global apparatuses such as the IMF.”

Talking about nostalgia, however, is also polemical. Luciana Cadahia, for example, assumes that nostalgia is a reactive feeling. “It means wanting to relive a time that can no longer return. Since it can not return, nihilism and cynicism are reactivated. I don’t think that’s what happens in Latin America at all,” she says. “It seems to me that the political dispute is too alive to think that we have become nihilists. Keeping the memory of the past alive doesn’t necessarily make you nostalgic, but it can also serve as imagination for the future.”

The crossroads that arises in this battlefield called Latin America are capital. The region suffers from stagnation when it comes to thinking about global problems, both on the right and on the left.

“There is little public discussion of issues such as the impacts of new technologies, the transformations in labor markets, or climate change,” Stefanoni notes. Governments of all colors choke on environmental movements, while fighting racism is, in many cases, something chimerical. Added to this is the short-circuiting that women’s organizations and feminism have meant to the right and left, in a region where evangelical movements carry increasing weight, as seen in Brazil with Bolsonaro.

While conservative sectors have developed confrontational politics, for the left, as Ailynn Torres points out, it is an “unresolved problem, a nuisance or a resource to grab conservative votes.” This is the case, she points out, of Pedro Castillo, who will contest the presidency of Peru with Keiko Fujimori: facing the “caviar left”, he promotes a “provincial left” that wields the “pro-family” flag, rejects the decriminalization of abortion and gay marriage.

Conservative social views were also plausible in Evo Morales’ Bolivia or Rafael Correa’s Ecuador. They remain so in the Mexico of López Obrador, who celebrates being a progressive president, but refuses, among other social rights, to defend the decriminalization of abortion. The Mexican president has clashed with the feminist movement and has not hesitated to support the candidacy for governor of a politician accused of rape.

In this sense, Ailynn Torres emphasizes that “the feminist agenda is embedded in all spaces of politics.” Like it or not, she says, governments can not ignore the voices emerging from women’s and feminist organizations. The main example, without a doubt, is what is happening in Argentina, where a law on the interruption of pregnancy was passed at the end of December last year.

The challenge is even greater in a context like the present, where all the integration movements, both progressive and conservative, are in crisis, and the consequences that the pandemic may leave are still unpredictable.

At the moment, inequality and impoverishment, two of the reasons that led thousands of people, mostly youths, to the streets in late 2019, have been worsening. These mobilizations caused some societal earthquakes, which would have rattled further had it not been for the arrival of the pandemic.

The young people of Chile managed to get an election – called for next May – to change the constitution that the country inherits from the Pinochet era; in Bolivia, there was a radical turn in the political scenario; the new government of Ecuador, the first country engulfed in protests two years ago, will inherit this fuse that is still burning in neighboring Colombia and that will certainly spread throughout the region as the vaccination process advances and the pandemic gives way.

In “Forgotten Continent” (Crítica Publishing), journalist Michael Reid, one of the greatest experts on the region’s recent history, reminds us that the history of Latin America since independence “has oscillated between hope and despair, progress and reaction, stability and disorder.”

The resistance to turning the page, that anchor that political leaders seem unwilling to let go of, is once again putting the region to the test in a moment of acute crisis. Everything would point to a new turning point, but, as Luciana Cadahia also reminds us, “History doesn’t work like the news. The news works in moments of stability, because the new can be painted as a ruthless cosmetic. But when things really change, like now, our way of perceiving everything also changes; that is, our framework of understanding is in crisis, we are no longer sure of how we perceive and so, now that everything is changing, we believe that nothing is happening.”

Source: El Pais