[Hugh O'Shaughnessy gives his take on the visit of the leaders of
Argentina and Chile to London and UK policy towards Latin America. For O'Shaughnessy, Britain’s bad decisions in Latin America – including that of aligning
itself against President Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and other reforming
leaders – come from its unthinking alignment with Washington in
preference to the EU.]
FCO Minister for Latin America Kim Howells with troops of the High Mountain Battalion of the Colombian
Army, including head of the Colombian army General Mario Montoya (behind him and left of Howells). General Montoya is reported to have collaborated with paramilitary death squads and drug traffickers and to be linked with disappearances and killings in Colombia.
Monday March 31 - By Hugh O'Shaughnessy - The New Statesman
Two powerful Latin American presidents arrive in Britain this week. Both these women are shrewd so I fear it will not take them long to tumble to the facts about this country and Latin America. The British government, they will see, is ignorant and misguided about their nations. Just as it was about Iraq before Blair took Bush’s shilling five years ago, illegally invaded that country under his command and started the present bloody cataclysm there. With the Foreign and Commonwealth Office shaken and intimidated, Britain is today being lead by the nose by Washington around the Southern Hemisphere as easily as for the past five years it has been led around the Middle East.
Seen worldwide as the weak partner in a transatlantic relationship - the fifth wheel on the US motor car - and as a semi-detached member of the European Union, Her Majesty’s Government, thank God, presents no threat to President Cristina de Kirchner from Argentina and President Michelle Bachelet from Chile. But the legacy of Blairism and the continuing US connection mean there will be disappointment among who hoped that Britain would help Latin Americans with their principal problem, how to bridge the horrific chasm which separates the desperately poor majority from the minority of fat cats. Hopes for reform, effective democracy and the development of a market which would benefit the whole Atlantic world and boost international trade are not on the US agenda. Its past patronage of violent plutocrats such as Somoza, Videla and Pinochet confirms that.
In November, for instance, the FCO, the Department for International Development and the US-controlled Inter-American Development Bank held a conference in London on inequality in Latin America. But, bizarrely, the organisers had invited no-one from the governments of Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador or Nicaragua which had actually achieved something in combating inequality. When I ventured to ask why, the response was silence: no one found the courage to confess what I suspect which is they were absent because Washington did not like them.
Washington prefers the corrupt and murderous government of President Álvaro Uribe of Colombia. Consequently so does Britain.
(Click here to view entire article)
[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.
[Venezuelanalysis.com's Chris Carlson reports on statements made by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez who labeled Colombia the "Israel of Latin America" on his Sunday talk show Aló Presidente yesterday. Chavez's statements come in the wake of the assassination of Luis Édgar Devia Silva or "Raul Reyes" by the Colombian military on Saturday in Ecuador. Reyes was second-in-command in the FARC (Colombia's guerrilla group), and perhaps its most visible spokesperson.]
[Znet's Justin Podur reports on the assassination of Luis Édgar Devia Silva or "Raul Reyes" by the Colombian military on Saturday in Ecuador. Reyes was second-in-command in the FARC (Colombia's guerrilla group), and perhaps its most visible spokesperson. Click here for a Spanish version of this news.]