Latin America on the Move:
The Post-Neoliberal Transition
Latin America is receiving renewed attention. New political leadership in ten countries reflects growing dissatisfaction with political and economic performance over the past decade. The election of new leaders: Lula Da Silva in Brazil, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in Argentina, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Michelle Bachelet in Chile, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Tabaré Vázquez in Uruguay, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Álvaro Colom in Guatemala and more recently Fernando Lugo in Paraguay and Mauricio Funes in El Salvador, has highlighted the pressure for change.
The election of the first women and the first indigenous leader as presidents of their countries symbolizes the widening claims of democratic representation. The evident failure of neo-liberal economic policies to generate sustained economic growth and social development has led to extensive political debates and an intensive search for alternative approaches to improve the lives of the people in Latin America. These debates very much relate to the notion of “development” itself as a process of structural transformation of societies, recently well-articulated by José Antonio Ocampo, UN Under-Secretary for Economic and Social Affairs.
Six key features of these changes define the new environment for understanding Latin America:
- There is an active search for new ways to organize politics and the economy. The new leaders of Latin America are asking how social democracies can survive and prosper in a neo-liberal world. How can they develop effective new approaches to bring their peoples’ growth and development with social justice in a period of globalization? While many of these countries have recorded impressive rates of economic growth in the past three years, this performance is necessary, but not sufficient to also resolve key disputes on trade and a more equitable engagement with the global and regional economy.
- Central to these debates is the question of what is democracy. Many Latin American political leaders are discussing the difference between democracy and good government. While the values of free elections, human rights, and other democratic norms have been diffused throughout the region, there is a growing recognition that “democracy”, even if cherished and supported, is not the same thing as good government. After the disappointing results of privatization, there is broad agreement that government and the public sector are needed to play effective roles to lead and support economic and social progress. One of these medium-term challenges is the strengthening of governance.
- These debates are region-wide, reflecting the disappointing policy experiences of the last two decades. Regional awareness also has an important historical dimension: many of these countries share common historical origins and are slowly becoming aware of the coming of the Bicentennial of various countries in 2010.
- National and regional challenges are complicated by uneasy relationships with the United States which has largely ignored Latin America over the last three years. Five major issues have received public and U.S. Government attention of immigration, free trade, drugs from Colombia, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and Cuba. These subjects remain important “hot button issues”, which generate more heat than light and are usually considered within a short-term US foreign policy framework
- An important dimension of this situation is the lack of a plurality of informed narratives available to the United States media about change in Latin America. In the popular media, Latin America remains captured by a handful of reporters: Larry Rohter of The New York Times and Andres Oppenheimer of The Miami Herald who frequently seem to have specific political or journalistic perspectives which limit their analysis. There has been, for example, a shared characterization of the newly elected leaders as “populists”, which recognizes neither their differences nor the contexts in which they were elected.
- There are few real opportunities for the new Latin American leadership to communicate directly to audiences in the United States. The major exception is the Inter-American Dialogue, a longstanding NGO and think tank which has historically sought to foster a dialogue with Latin American leaders as well as to carry out research. The Dialogue, however, is based in Washington, is somewhat captured by the Washington political environment, and does not have the independence of analysis possible in a university setting. It is hoped that the OLA would provide a wider platform of interaction with Latin American leaders, institutions, and universities at all levels.
