[Diana Raby, Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Liverpool, reviews The Battle for Latin America’s Soul by Michael Reid. Reid is the Latin America editor at the Economist. Click here to read the first chapter of Diana Raby's book Democracy and Revolution: Latin America and Socialism Today.]
Book Review - Forgotten Continent: The Battle for Latin America’s Soul by Michael Reid
By Diana Raby
Reid, a journalist for The Economist,
with extensive experience of Latin America, has produced an ambitious,
well-crafted but flawed study. He writes well and musters an impressive
range of sources, and is passionate about the region. But the cause to
which he devotes his massive knowledge and impressive analytical skills
is mind-numbingly prosaic: his aim is to save Latin America’s “soul”
for free trade, neoliberalism and global capitalism.
The book might well be sub-titled “an anti-Chávez manifesto”, for the
Venezuelan leader and those allied with his regional ALBA project are
the main targets of Reid’s critique. The issue in Latin America, for
Reid, is between the “populist autocracy” of Chávez and his ilk, and
the “democratic reformism” of Chile, Brazil and Mexico (p. xiv). The
great success story, in the author’s view, is Chile, and while
recognising that its neoliberal growth began with brutal repression
under Pinochet, he lavishes praise on the democratic governments of the
“Concertación” which have maintained the same economic policies.
In chapters 2-4 Reid provides a well-documented summary of the region’s
economic and political history since colonial times. He engages
effectively with those who attribute Latin American backwardness to the
Iberian Catholic heritage, recognising that this may have contributed
to such tendencies as clientelism, personalism and bureaucracy, but
pointing out that this cannot explain the dramatic recent progress of
Spain itself. He makes the standard liberal criticisms of dependency
theory, and analyses with some justice the failings of import
substitution industrialisation (ISI). He recognises the
heavy-handedness of US interventionism since the nineteenth century,
yet argues implausibly that national security doctrines (the rationale
of the military regimes of the 1970s and ‘80s) were “home-grown
products rather than American imports” (p. 116). And when it comes to
the Cuban revolution, he gives a highly tendentious interpretation
which whitewashes Washington’s role and minimises the revolution’s
achievements.
But the heart of Reid’s analysis is the thesis, argued repeatedly and
forcefully, that liberal reformism and free trade are the key to
solving the region’s problems, and have finally begun to triumph in the
last two decades. To maintain this thesis despite the apparent dramatic
failures of neoliberalism, he has to resort to ad-hoc explanations and
special pleading. Argentina’s successive crises were due to specific
errors such as currency convertibility, the Mexican debacle of the
mid-90s was due to corruption and governmental weakness, Ecuador’s
repeated catastrophes resulted from “poor management” and inadequate
reforms, Bolivia’s slide into crisis after an initially successful
stabilisation was caused by external factors, and so on: anything other
than the imbalances and inequalities produced by neoliberalism as such,
the one thing that all these countries had in common.
It would be unfair to brand Reid as a mere reactionary: he insists on
the need for some measure of social justice - “...if capitalism is to
thrive it needs to be underpinned by an effective state and social
policies, which have to be paid for with an adequate level of tax
revenues” (p. 313). The problem is that the free-trade, privatisation,
multinational-dominated agenda he advocates systematically prevents
Latin American states from pursuing such policies. Furthermore, he
accuses “rich-world leftists” of condescension in supporting Castro and
Chávez while themselves enjoying the fruits of liberal capitalism, but
fails to see that his own assumptions (that Latin Americans want the
same capitalist solutions as Europeans or North Americans) are also
thoroughly condescending.
Disappointingly also, for such a well-informed and meticulous writer,
Reid’s account of Venezuela reproduces some of the standard errors and
slanders of anti-chavista journalism: that Chávez ordered the
repression of opposition demonstrators on 11 April 2002, that poverty
rose under Chávez (only true for the period of unrest caused by the
opposition coup and strike from 2002 to 2004), that Chávez said he was
“a communist” when advocating 21st-century socialism, etc. A similar
bias afflicts Reid’s account of contemporary Bolivia, whose President
Evo Morales is patronisingly dismissed as “a cocagrowers’ leader and
socialist with a pudding-basin haircut and a stripy jumper” (pp 1-2).
And he is extraordinarily generous with regard to the Colombian
government, making light of its responsibility for military and
paramilitary repression; for Reid, Colombia’s main problems are the
FARC insurgency and the fact that “the democratic state still struggles
to impose the rule of law across the whole of the national territory”
(p 272), when many would say that what the Colombian state is striving
to impose is not the rule of law but the arbitrary control of a corrupt
oligarchy.
Reid is at times eloquent, even passionate, about Latin America. Much
of his analysis is thoughtful and perceptive, but it is ruined by his
glib assumption that liberal capitalism is “the only game in town” and
his refusal to take seriously the emergence of a radical alternative in
the ALBA group of countries.
Michael Reid, Forgotten Continent: The Battle for Latin America’s Soul (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. xv + 384. £19.99 hard cover.
This review was written for the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, where it will be appearing later this year. It is published in Red Pepper's Venezuela blog with the permission of the author.
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