Re: South America
Posted: Wed Dec 15, 2021 3:07 pm
The US is at a Loss in Central America
December 14, 2021
By Stephen Sefton – Dec 11, 2021
In November 2008, while ambassador to Nicaragua, death-squad manager nonpareil John Negroponte’s long time torture and terror campaign sidekick, Robert Callahan, remarked to a reporter in Managua, “US foreign policy toward Latin America has not changed in 50 years and is unlikely to do so under President Obama”. Just months later, the June 2009 coup in Honduras against President Manuel Zelaya proved him to be right. In fact, the veteran US war crimes insider’s comment explained unwittingly why US and allied foreign policy lurches from one mass murdering catastrophe to another.
International context
Callahan and Negroponte, himself a veteran of the Phoenix Progam in Vietnam, were the enforcers in Honduras of the US war against Nicaragua in the 1980s. Back then, they facilitated death squads that disappeared over 180 left wing Honduran leaders of rural workers, student and labor organizations. To the end of his career, Callahan embodied the atrocious US foreign policy history whose continuity he affirmed back in 2008. Since then, only thirteen years have passed but the world continues changing at a vertiginous pace even more rapid than the notable acceleration of international instability following the disastrous Iraq war, in which Callahan also served, assisting yet another of Negroponte’s terror campaigns.
The North American ruling elite and their European and Pacific allies follow the same murderous, despotic unilateral policies they have always done. At home, they apply a woke, quasi-anti-racist, pseudo-feminist, false human rights gloss to pacify domestic liberal or social democrat qualms and progressive dissent. All the while they repress their impoverished lower classes with austerity, and, more recently, undeniably harmful, arbitrary public health restrictions. Overseas, Western elites continue to destroy or destabilize dozens of countries, falsely claiming to promote freedom and democracy, which even their own repression-drunk populations find ever harder to believe.
Central America
Recent events in Central America have underlined the malevolence, stupidity and incompetence of US foreign policy, especially in what US policy makers continue to view through their Monroe Doctrine blinkers as their exclusive sphere of influence. Last November 28th mass political resistance in Honduras made possible a coalition that has inflicted a truly humiliating electoral defeat on the US backed narco-terror regime fronted by President Juan Orlando Hernandez. Two weeks earlier, in Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista government won re-election with massive support from voters for their poverty reduction policies, economic democratization and defense of basic rights to food security, health care and education.
Honduras now looks forward to a government promising to follow the successful socialist-inspired policies which, prior to the ruthless campaign of US destabilization and aggression in recent years, transformed life for the impoverished majorities of Bolivia, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Among the measures president-elect Xiomara Castro has suggested she may take on assuming office is the rupture of relations with Taiwan, allowing Honduras to open full diplomatic relations with China. Over the last few days, following President Ortega’s re-election, Nicaragua has now recognized China’s territorial integrity. No one should be perplexed about why Nicaragua has opened up to China nor why Honduras may well do the same.
Reasons to recognize China
In 2008 prior to Honduras joining the ALBA regional bloc of countries, founded by Venezuela and Cuba, then Honduran President Manuel Zelaya visited then President George W. Bush in Washington asking for substantial development aid and investment. Bush told him there was nothing doing beyond the meagre assistance already on offer. So Honduras joined ALBA and began to get significant support facilitating Manuel Zelaya’s ambitious national development program. Unwilling to accept the regional implications of Zelaya’s advocacy of progressive poverty reduction policies, the US government and its European allies helped promote the coup and legitimize violent repression of protests and the subsequent elections, only making possible Zelaya’s return to Honduras after months of persecution and exile.
After that bitter experience and the experience of US and EU support for the electoral fraud of 2017, Xiomara Castro knows she can expect no useful economic aid or respectful political acceptance from either the US or its European Union allies. Nor is Venezuela in any condition to be able to help Honduras, after itself suffering a decade of North American and European economic aggression. So opening up Honduras to China is practically the only realistic option for Honduras to access the kinds and amounts of development support it needs to recover from over a decade of US inspired economic catastrophe that has left over 70% of Hondurans living in poverty.
The landslide electoral wins for Daniel Ortega and Xiomara Castro, along with the volatile unpredictability of President Bukele in El Salvador, have significantly complicated US policy options in the region. If Honduras does indeed open full diplomatic relations with China, only Belize and Guatemala of the eight Central American Integration System countries will still recognize Taiwan. Apart from purely commercial reasons for moving to recognize China, Nicaragua’s Sandinista government has effectively stymied current and looming overt and covert US economic coercion. The incoming government in Honduras could also likewise pre-empt potential US trade and economic aggression.
Nicaragua’s recognition of China also negates the US government’s boycott of loans from the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank or support from the IMF, whose resources pale beside the massive financial power of China’s state-controlled banking system. The US authorities recently deepened already existing measures attacking Nicaragua’s economy with the punitive Renacer Act. Nicaragua has countered that economic aggression by placing itself to benefit from the substantial bilateral support it can now expect from China. The same would appply in the case of Honduras. But beyond those reasons Nicaragua may share with Honduras for resuming full diplomatic relations with China, other related factors certainly influenced Nicaragua’s decision.
Its new relations with China also complement Nicaragua’s already strong economic and trade relations with the Russian Federation, and other member countries of the Eurasian Economic Union like Belarus. The move also enhances its trade prospects with member countries of the Asia-Pacific countries Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, apart from already longstanding trade partners, South Korea and Japan. In that context, Nicaragua is of strategic importance to both the RCEP countries and more particularly to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, especially given the advanced stage of planning and preparation for the country’s proposed interoceanic canal carried out since 2013 by China’s HKND company.
Underlying all these economic and trade reasons for Nicaragua to resume full diplomatic relations with China after a break of over thirty years, is also Nicaragua’s global moral and diplomatic commitment to peaceful negotiations for the resolution of international conflicts, Ever since taking office in 2007, President Ortega has encouraged Taiwan to reach a negotiated settlement with the People’s Republic of China.
However, especially since her re-election last January, Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen has pushed an implacable militarist agenda rejecting negotiation and dialogue in favor of provocative confrontation with China, cynically supported by the US goverrnment. Nicaragua could hardly have continued recognizing Taiwan in a context where Taiwan is counting on US military intervention in a potential war with China.
Consequences
For Honduras, any move to recognize the People’s Republic of China may possibly involve no more than the same low key disapproval on the part of the US that met the same policy decision by Costa Rica, El Salvador and Panama. But given increasing US desperation at losing its accustomed control of Central America, more high profile intimidation is probably more likely, certainly as regards Nicaragua. Back in 2005, then US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick made clear that the Central American Free Trade Agreemen was as much a political as a trade measure, in large part aimed at corraling countries into even deeper trade dependence on the US.
So it would come as no surprise if the US formally threatened to withdaw from CAFTA unilaterally, as it has done from numerous other treaties, most notoriously perhaps the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action over Iran’s nuclear program. When it comes to sadistic, vindictive, gangster-style menaces nothing is off the table as far as the US authorities are concerned. Consequently, wayward Central American countries like El Salvador, Nicaragua and perhaps Honduras can well expect all kinds of threats covering issues like migration rules and quotas, development cooperation, or even the family remittances so vital to the survival of millions of families in Central America.
On the other hand, however, Mexico should welcome the new development options for the region opened up by China’s growing influence in Central America. Mexico is a decisively important country for the region and prioritizes social and economic Central American regional stability as an imperative. China’s win-win cooperation philosophy offers new options for development cooperation, investment, trade, technology transfer and financial support, far preferable to the current US model of heavily conditioned neocolonial cooperation. Apart from Central America, should Nicaragua and China indeed go ahead with the proposed interoceanic canal, that project would diversify regional trade and shipping options not only for Cuba and neighboring Caribbean island nations but for Venezuela too.
Both Xiomara Castro’s electoral win in Honduras and Nicaragua’s recognition of China threaten US control in the region. Faced with a Chinese-built interoceanic canal through Nicaragua, the US will probably intensify its current diplomatic and economic aggression and also progressively devise more direct provocations. For example, it may encourage its ally Colombia to escalate its navy’s continuing violations of Nicaragua’s maritime territory which ignore the 2012 judgment of the International Court of Justice. More generally, the entrenched US military and naval presence across Central America and the Caribbean is a constant, menacing reality. Even so, recent events in the region mark a new phase of notably more resilient and savvy popular resistance to the most recent episodes of over 150 years of Yankee intervention.
Featured image: Foto: Twitter – @PDChina / Comandante Daniel Ortega y el presidente del grupo HKND, Sr. Wang Jing en 2014, al obsequiarle el libro de Xi Jinping “La Gobernanza de China”.
(Tortilla Con Sal)
https://orinocotribune.com/the-us-is-at ... l-america/
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Honduras’ Left-Wing Breakthrough
December 14, 2021
By Francisco Dominguez – Dec 10, 2021
Since a US-backed coup toppled Mel Zelaya in 2009, Honduras has faced a clampdown on democracy and serious human rights abuses. But the election of socialist Xiomara Castro is a chance to break the cycle.
What appeared impossible has been achieved: the people of Honduras have broken the perpetuation, through electoral fraud and thuggish violence, of a brutal, illegal, illegitimate, and criminal regime.By means of sheer resistance, resilience, mobilisation, and organisation, they have managed to defeat Juan Orlando Hernandez’s narco-dictatorship at the ballot box. Xiomara Castro, presidential candidate of the left-wing Libre party (the Freedom and Refoundation Party, in its Spanish acronym), obtained a splendid 50+ percent—between 15 to 20 percent more votes than her closest rival candidate, Nasry Asfura, National Party candidate, in an election with historic high levels of participation (68 percent).
The extraordinary feat performed by the people of Honduras takes place under the dictatorial regime of Hernandez (aka JOH) in an election marred by what appears to be targeted assassinations of candidates and activists. Up to October 2021, 64 acts of electoral violence, including 11 attacks and 27 assassinations, had been perpetrated. And in the period preceding the election (11-23 November) another string of assassinations, mainly of candidates, took place.
None of the fatal victims were members of Hernandez’s National Party. The aim seems to have been to terrorise the opposition, and particularly their electorate, into believing that it was unsafe to turn out to vote—and that even if they did, they would again steal the election through fraud and violence, as they have done twice already, in 2013 and 2017.
Commentators correctly characterise this as the ‘Colombianisation’ of Honduran politics—that is, a ruling gang in power deploys security forces and paramilitary groups to assassinate opposition activists. In Honduras, the most despicable act was the murder of environmental activist, feminist, and indigenous leader Berta Caceres by armed intruders in her own house, after years of death threats.
She had been a leading figure in the grassroots struggle against electoral fraud and dictatorship, and had been calling for the urgent re-founding of the nation, a proposal that has been incorporated into the programme of mass social movements such as the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH). Since 2009, hundreds of activists have been assassinated at the hands of the police, the army, and paramilitaries.
The Colombianisation analogy does not stop at the assassination of opponents. Last June, the Washington Post explained the extent of infiltration by organised crime: ‘Military and police chiefs, politicians, businessmen, mayors and even three presidents have been linked to cocaine trafficking or accused of receiving funds from trafficking.’
US Judge Kevin Castel, who sentenced ‘Tony’ Hernandez, JOH’s brother, to life in prison after being found guilty of smuggling 185 tons of cocaine into the US, said: ‘Here, the [drug] trafficking was indeed state-sponsored’. In March 2021, at the trial against Geovanny Fuentes, a Honduran accused of drug trafficking, the prosecutor Jacob Gutwillig said that President JOH helped Fuentes with the trafficking of tons of cocaine.
Corruption permeates the whole Honduran establishment. National Party candidate Nasry Asfura has faced a pre-trial ‘for abuse of authority, use of false documents, embezzlement of public funds, fraud and money laundering’, and Yani Rosenthal, candidate of the once-ruling Liberal party, a congressman and a banker, was found guilty and sentenced to three years in prison in the US for ‘participating in financial transactions using illicit proceeds (drug money laundering).’
The parallels continue. Like Colombia, Honduras is a narco-state in which the US has a host of military bases. It was from Honduran territory that the Contra mercenaries waged a proxy war against Sandinista Nicaragua in the 1980s, and it was also from Honduras that the US-led military invasion of Guatemala was launched in 1954, bringing about the violent ousting of democratically elected left-wing nationalist president Jacobo Arbenz. Specialists aptly refer to the country as ‘USS Honduras’.
So cocaine trafficking and state terrorism, which operates as part of the drug business in cahoots with key state institutions, is ‘tolerated’ and probably supported by various US agencies ‘in exchange’ for a large US military presence—the US has Soto Cano and 12 more US military bases in Honduras—due to geopolitical calculations like regional combat against left-wing governments. This criminal system’s stability requires the elimination of political and social activists.
Thus many US institutions, from the White House all the way down the food chain, turn a blind eye to the colossal levels of corruption. In fact, SOUTHCOM has been actively building Honduras’ repressive military capabilities by funding and training special units like Batallion-316, which reportedly acts as a death squad, ‘guilty of kidnap, torture, and murder’. ‘Between 2010 and 2016, as US “aid” and training continued to flow, over 120 environmental activists were murdered by hitmen, gangs, police, and the military for opposing illegal logging and mining,’ one report explains.
The legacy left by right-wing governments since the violent ousting of Mel Zelaya in 2009 is abysmal. Honduras is one the most violent countries in the world (37 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, with 60 percent attributable to organised crime), with staggering levels of poverty (73.6 percent of households live below the poverty line, out of which 53.7 percent live in extreme poverty), high levels of unemployment (well over 12 percent), and even higher levels of underemployment (the informal sector of the economy, due to the effects of Covid-19, grew from 60 to 70 percent). Its external debt is over US$15 billion (57 percent of its GDP), and the nation suffers from high incidences of embezzlement and illegal appropriation of state resources by this criminal administration.
The rot is so pronounced that back in February this year, a group of Democrats in the US Senate introduced legislation intended to cut off economic aid and sales of ammunition to Honduran security forces. The proposal ‘lays bare the violence and abuses perpetrated since the 2009 military-backed coup, as a result of widespread collusion between government officials, state and private security forces, organised crime and business leaders.’ In Britain, Colin Burgon, the president of Labour Friends of Progressive Latin America, issued scathing criticism of the British government’s complicity for ‘having sold (when Boris Johnson was Foreign Minister no less) to the Honduran government spyware designed to eavesdrop on its citizens, months before the state rounded up thousands of people in a well-orchestrated surveillance operation.’
To top it all off, through the ZEDES (Special Zones of Development and Employment) initiative, whole chunks of the national territory are being given to private enterprise subjected to a ‘special regime’ that empowers investors to establish their own security bodies—including their own police force and penitentiary system—to investigate criminal offences and instigate legal prosecutions. This is taking neoliberalism to abhorrent levels, the dream of multinational capital: the selling-off of portions of the national territory to private enterprise. Stating that the Honduran oligarchy, led by JOH, is ‘selling the country down the river’ is not a figure of speech.
It is this monstrosity, constructed since the overthrow of President Mel Zelaya in 2009 on top of the existing oligarchic state, that the now victorious Libre party and incoming president Xiomara Castro need to overcome to start improving the lives of the people of Honduras. The array of extremely nasty internal and external forces that her government will be up against is frighteningly powerful, and they have demonstrated in abundance what they are prepared to do to defend their felonious interests.
President-elect Xiomara’s party Libre, is the largest in the 128-seat Congress, and with its coalition partner, Salvador, will have a very strong parliamentary presence, which will be central to any proposed referendum for a Constituent Assembly aimed at re-founding the nation. Libre has also won in the capital city Tegucigalpa, and in San Pedro Sula, the country’s second largest city. More importantly, unlike elections elsewhere (in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia), the National Party’s candidate, Asfura, has conceded defeat. Thus, Xiomara has a very strong mandate.
However, in a region dominated by US-led ‘regime change’ operations—the coup in Bolivia, the coup attempt in Nicaragua, the mercenary attack against Venezuela, plus a raft of violent street disorders in Cuba, vigorous destabilisation against recently elected President Castillo in Peru, and so on ad nausea—Honduras will need all the international solidarity we can provide, which we must do.
The heroic struggle of the people of Honduras has again demonstrated that it can be done: neoliberalism and its brutal foreign and imperialist instigators can be defeated and a better world can be built. So, before Washington, their Honduran cronies, their European accomplices, and the world corporate media unleash any shenanigans, let’s say loud and clear: US hands off Honduras!
Featured image: Xiomara Castro celebrates during general elections on 28 November 2021 in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. (Inti Ocon / Getty Images)
(Tribune Magazine)
https://orinocotribune.com/honduras-lef ... akthrough/
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Juan Pablo Guanipa on the Dissolution of Venezuela’s ‘Interim Government’
December 14, 2021
Former opposition deputy Juan Pablo Guanipa confirmed that the goal of the Venezuelan and international far right is to remove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from the position to which he was re-elected in 2018. Guanipa did not exclude the possibility of discussing changes in the so-called interim government.
Guanipa is one of the opposition political leaders who was in parliament between 2015 and 2020. He currently supports the non-recognition of the government of Venezuela and other institutions of the Venezuelan state.
Regarding the proposal of Julio Borges—who fled Venezuela after the failed coup and now suggests that the interim government should dissolve, Juan Pablo Guanipa affirmed that it is an “idea that must be discussed by Justice First and by all of Venezuela’s democratic alternative.” He added that he is a supporter of the fake interim government being submitted to process of “reshaping and reduction,” with fewer ambassadors in those countries in which the Venezuelan far-right is strongly backed.
One must remember that recently, at the General Assembly of the United Nations, a vote took place in which the majority recognized the legitimacy of the Bolivarian government of President Nicolás Maduro, while only 16 countries voted against it in order to support Guaidó.
What is in store for Guaidó?
As declared by Guanipa to a private Venezuelan media outlet, the countries in which the interim government is interested in maintaining its representatives are “the US, Colombia, Brasil, European countries, and the countries in the Organization of American States (OEA).”
Similarly, he commented that he still supports Juan Guaidó being at the front of the Venezuelan opposition and managing the resources and wealth which were stolen from the Venezuelan state.
However, when directly asked about the president of the interim government, Guanipa evaded commenting whether or not his support for Guaidó included recognizing him as the supposed president of the parallel government, which they are trying to sustain. For this reason, he affirmed that the concept of “unity” is not an end in itself and that neither is the interim government. With these remarks he evaded the question of what his comments on reshaping the far-right meant, which today is led by former deputy Juan Guaidó.
Featured image: Juan Pablo Guanipa. Photo: RedRadioVE
(RedRadioVE) by José Manuel Blanco Díaz
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
https://orinocotribune.com/juan-pablo-g ... overnment/
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The Defense of Humanity in the Global Crisis
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on DECEMBER 14, 2021
Daniel Martínez Cunill
On January 26, 2022, it will be 127 years since José Martí formulated a concept that acquires greater relevance in these complex times of global crisis: “Homeland is Humanity, it is that portion of humanity that we see more closely, and in which we were born”. As sons and daughters of the Patria Grande, of the Latin America that saw us being born and is our sister, we subscribe to the meaning of his thought, at the same time that we recognize ourselves in the class commitment contained in his immortal verse: “With the poor of the earth. I want to cast my lot with the poor of the earth”.
United in this notion of humanity that gives us Our America, committed to the fate of the poor of the continent, we understand that the defense of humanity passes today to face, all and all united, the multifaceted crisis that strikes our peoples. Although in the immediate term the crisis was triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic, in reality what came to light was a profound economic crisis and a crisis of democratic and civilizational values of the system, which had been accumulating for more than a decade.
The international panorama at this juncture is characterized by contradictory and conflicting signals, especially in our continent, where at the same time as we witness the emergence of progressive and leftist governments, we see setbacks in the social and political spaces previously conquered by the popular sectors and the resurgence of conservative currents, some of which do not conceal the retrograde nature of their thinking.
Faced with this disjunctive, faced with this contradiction, some currents of the left and progressivism suggest as a response to abandon the programmatic proposals with greater class content, that is, those that generate more dissent, and move to positions closer to the current conservative tendencies of the international system.
While we can respect this position and recognize the right of these currents to move towards the center, which progressively drifts to the right, our proposal is contrary to this strategy.
We think that the conservative tendencies must be confronted with strength and determination from the left, from a renewed, united and plural left, which finds in a solid policy of principles the strength to confront the fascist tendencies that hide in the false neo-liberal discourse, which defends a failed and anachronistic democracy.
The unavoidable complement to this left-wing position is the commitment to the specific demands of social movements and to join their mobilizations and protests. In this regard, the political parties of the left must leave behind the idea of leading the social movements. We must advance in a united way in sharing flags and lines of action, agreed upon in collective directions and with democratic decisions. We are challenged to overcome the historical tendency to think revolutionary change based more on the revolutionary party than on the class.
The common adversary, in this struggle in defense of humanity, is the North American empire that desperately seeks to recover its hegemonic position by modifying the tendencies of globalization and international rules, because the current ones not only do not serve it, but lead it progressively to a terminal crisis. That is why democracy is only valid for the empire when its results are favorable to it. Otherwise, it prefers coups d’état of all kinds, interventionist and destabilizing actions and extraterritorial economic sanctions.
It is for these same reasons that the hegemonic sectors of our countries are once again becoming national replicas of U.S. policy, accomplices to its violations of international law and instruments of its anti-democratic intervention. The imperial decadence, headed at this moment by Biden and the Democrats, is expressed with greater force in Latin America, converted into a zone of withdrawal of its geopolitical interests, and makes us foresee a worsening of its interference.
We believe that the most dissociative world tendencies will be expressed with intensity in Latin America. Contradictions will be exacerbated in our countries by the narrow margin of recovery of the neoliberal model within its normativity. In its imperious need for survival, neoliberalism, understood, more than as an economic proposal, as a project of domination, transcends its own legal boundaries, lies, transgresses rights, violates agreements and resorts to blackmail and the use of force in a re-edition of “the politics of the big stick”.
Although nowadays concepts such as “dialectic” are usually understood as obscene, the situation in our continent qualifies exactly as dialectic. On the one hand, there are all the attempts of the governments that want to overcome the pandemic crisis seeking that the cost be paid by the workers and the middle classes, and that predatory capitalism and its beneficiaries do not have to be affected in their interests. On the other hand, there are the broad sectors of the population that react with legitimate violence, pressured by the accelerated deterioration of their living conditions and the institutional incapacity to offer solutions.
In the electoral sphere this contradiction is expressed by high abstention rates and by the drift of depoliticized sectors towards frankly fascist positions. The growing generational refusal to participate in the traditional forms of political life and the search for other forms of militancy and/or influence in the life of society also deserve a more detailed analysis.
Youth sectors, of popular extraction or with a sense of class, instead of joining political parties, prefer to confront the media discourse of the right by resorting to the speed of digital technology to propose, reject or support specific demands. It is a kind of militancy that combines the intensive use of social networks with acts of street protest that are characterized more by a high degree of violence and rejection of the system than by an organization with a long-term vision.
Gramsci posits that the modern prince cannot be a person, or a personal hero, but a political party, a complex social organism in which the concretization of a recognized collective will is initiated, and whose history is not reduced to the history of restricted groups of intellectuals or the biography of a single personality.
In the current conditions of the class struggle, and because of the character it has taken on with the emergence of new social actors of change, the modern collective prince must be found both in political parties and in social movements, where it is the permanent feedback that provides the transforming and democratic character. In the long cycles of the historical process, the principles must be understood as provisional in their formulations, since they were designed for a stage of social relations that are modified over time. Ideological strength should not be confused with dogmatism. Ideological strength consists in being able to adapt the principles to the historical moment without betraying their essence.
The institutions and their leaders will have to answer for the institutional failures mentioned above. As far as the Latin American left is concerned, we must take responsibility for our inability to propose concrete policies, economic and social paradigms that give life to new models clearly alternative to those that fragment and destroy the social fabric because they refuse to disappear.
Latin American progressivism, for example, already gave what it could give and encountered its difficulties and failures precisely because the model it proposed had too many dependencies and similarities – political and economic – with the system it was supposed to modify, including its distancing from the social subjects that had brought it to government, who realized its limitations. Electoral defeats, such as those in Argentina, have their roots in this unresolved dilemma.
A brief analysis of the demands expressed in the streets of Chile, Ecuador, Colombia and Peru, among other countries of the continent, clearly indicates that the new generations are demonstrating against the deterioration of the environment, in favor of peace, against the degradation of Justice and the disrespect for Human Rights. Their slogans are expressed in favor of the specific rights of women and for the most unrestricted freedom in sexual, reproductive and gender matters.
The intensification of exploitation and the violence of the system that accompanies it, announce new explosions of popular rebellion and the angry demand for a new concept of democracy, which must be deliberative, decentralized and truly representative. A democracy that is not functional to the capitalist system and that is capable of listening to the demands of the new social actors, the generational, gender, Afro-descendants and native peoples. A democracy in which society is capable of self-governance, regulation and self-regulation.
It is true that we are facing a crisis, which in the Gramscian sense is expressed because “the ruling class has lost consensus.” That is, it is no longer a leader, but only dominant: holder of a pure coercive force. Bolsonaro, Piñera and Bukele facilitate the explanation.
The organic crisis of a class or social group occurs to the extent that it has exhausted all the forms of life implicit in its social relations, but, thanks to political society and its forms of coercion, the dominant class artificially maintains its domination and prevents the new dominant group from replacing it: “the organic crisis consists in the fact that the old does not die and the new cannot yet be born”.
If we agree with this diagnosis, the tasks of the Latin American and Caribbean left would consist in making an effort so that the old ends up dying, instead of accepting its promises of well-intentioned reforms, which only give it oxygen in its agony. As an unavoidable complement is to promote the birth of the new, understanding that “the new” is socialism adapted to the current characteristics of our historical moment: a socialism that fights bureaucracy and centralist tendencies and that has drawn the appropriate lessons from the failures that preceded it.
Having assumed this strategic task as an imperative, we ask ourselves the question: is the current democracy, in force in its letter, in its mechanisms and in its spirit, a sufficient instrument to move towards a new democracy and a new society? From our point of view, the answer is negative, because we consider that the prevailing democracy is part of “the old that will never die”.
We are in the paradox of aspiring to a new model of society and a new system by resorting to an anachronistic electoral instrument whose weaknesses are exposed every time there are elections. And even supposing that democracy would open a process of transformation, which includes it, disputing and appropriating hegemony is not a unique process to be solved once and for all, but a process that must be constantly renewed during the struggle and after the popular sectors gain access to power.
This hegemony must be expressed in a historical, national and popular project, understanding the people as the sum of all the new contemporary social subjects. It must also generate a democracy that represents all citizens. The new power will retain its legitimacy if it is able to represent the national collective will and to preserve this attribute in the various stages of the exercise of the acquired power.
Elections within a crisis of democracy in Latin America
In view of the above, we believe that the elections in Chile, as well as those in Argentina, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Honduras and others should be analyzed in a regional context. At present, elections are interrelated, either due to neighborhood effects, previous identities between countries or due to US interference, which tries to standardize its interests under a common parameter.
Latin American democracies, built to sustain and justify a global capitalist economic model, feel the crisis of the system in their functioning and structures. For this reason, they are going through a deep crisis: their institutions are incapable of identifying and giving space to citizens’ demands. On the contrary, imbalances and inequities are worsening.
Governments and large corporations, faced with an economic context of low growth or stagnation, resort to violating their own rules, encapsulating democracy in controlled electoral processes and abandoning and/or sabotaging any form of citizen participation in the direction of their governments and the use of the wealth produced.
As we have already pointed out, the deformations of Latin American democracies explain the emergence of new subjects and emerging social political forces, disappointed by the democratic model, who seek to change it for participatory systems and to put a stop to the excesses of the legislative and judicial powers, especially when it comes to progressive governments.
Under the banners of democracy proclaimed by the US, between 2000 and 2010 there was a marked shift to a neoliberal economic model and matrix that solved the problems of the oligarchies and consolidated a model functional to the interests of capitalism. This model did not solve the structural problems of the continent and progressively plunged the Latin American and Caribbean working classes into overexploitation, poverty, unemployment and, logically, anger and despair.
In almost two years of pandemic, pre-existing economic-social and political-institutional problems have deepened. The persistence of structural problems (fueled by the bad economic-social situation and accelerated by the pandemic) and the strategies of the new emerging political actors who have broken or moved away from the traditional political-institutional consensus and loyalty to the system, are highlighting the weaknesses of Latin American democracies.
In the absence of consolidated social or partisan bases, caudillos seek support from other organizations and institutions. Among these supports, the Armed Forces stand out, which, due to their level of organization and wide presence, are not only being used for classic functions such as citizen security, but in countries such as Brazil and El Salvador they are fulfilling another more political role.
Latin America was going through and continues to go through a period of high levels of criticism of the way democracy exists and performs, justified by the disappointment of its malfunctioning in each country. At the same time, social networks play a role of loudspeaker and amplification of tension and polarization.
As a consequence of this situation and the crisis of political parties, citizens are looking for other alternatives to solve their demands (corruption, economic problems and citizen security). This is where we are called upon to make an evaluation of the recent electoral processes in the continent.
When voting is not choosing and winning is not winning
Our intention is not to analyze the results of the elections that close in 2021, nor to make comparisons between the figures of each exercise. We have already pointed out that we consider that they are taking place within the framework of a democracy in crisis and where the rules of the game are not respectful of the majority will. In addition, in each particular case, the parties and candidates themselves have made public their assessments.
Our purpose is to insist on the lack of representativeness of those elected, on the adulteration of the electoral results through the propaganda that accompanies the candidacies, on the foreign interference that disqualifies candidates, and on the capacity of the media to turn the elections into a marketing duel where the truth turns out to be a collateral aspect.
We would like to call attention to certain regularities that occur in the electoral processes and that constitute a warning call.
One of them is that behind the candidacies we find political conglomerates, alliances or coalitions that presume plurality, but that, in my opinion, more than plural are multiclassist, that is to say, that their distinctive seal is not given by the sum of organizations with similar political projects, but because behind a candidacy are grouped tendencies of diverse ideological nature, that join forces in function of creating artificial majorities.
Rather than having a common program, they have a common objective: to defeat the adversary by accumulating more votes than him, to prevent the continuity of a government project to which they are opposed and/or to attain power in order to later distribute it according to the votes and the material support that each of their components carried to achieve the triumph.
Worse still, the defeated oppositions in the electoral processes refuse to recognize that they lost and resort to destabilizing methods to oppose the victors. Bolivia for a long time and Peru recently, show this regularity, where the concept of opposition is replaced by that of conspiracy. It is impossible not to recognize behind this behavior a continental project originating in U.S. imperialism, which refuses to lose presence and control over the traditional hegemonic sectors.
This is why we consider that voting is not choosing. A part of the population with the right to vote does not exercise it, either because none of the candidates represent their interests, or because by abstaining they want to express their rejection of the system as a whole, or simply because they are not interested in participating, as citizens, in the political destiny of the country through the ballot box. Those who vote, except for a militant hard core, choose “a product” presented in a wrapping of promises and good intentions that soon disappear. The biblical miracle then occurs, but in reverse, and the wine ends up becoming water.
The “agenda adjustment” is also very worrying. It has become a discouraging practice that, shortly after having achieved an electoral victory, the winners modify their campaign proposals, backtracking on points of democratic and popular content. The cases of Pedro Castillo in Peru and Xiomara Castro in Honduras regarding the call for a Constituent Assembly are particularly important.
In both cases, they supported it during their campaign and, shortly after their electoral victory, they eliminated it from their project, giving little or no argumentation to justify the backward step. The issue is very sensitive since, within the narrow margin of the institutional framework of current democracies, using the democratic bonus granted by an electoral victory to advance towards a modern Constitution with popular content would undoubtedly represent a democratic advance. It is to use the existing spaces of the old democracy to create a new institutionality.
Thus, abandoning the banners of a demand of broad sectors of the citizenry and renouncing to provide an updated Constitution, is to want to move towards a new society by resorting to old instruments, which casts doubt on the possible results.
Another element of reflection is that the recent electoral campaigns and their speeches express a distancing between the citizen contingents that proclaim their needs with street protests and the progressive and/or leftist candidacies. Several misunderstandings are contained therein.
On the one hand, the parties and organizations do not realize that the sectors mobilized in the street protests distrust them and the party system as a whole. On the other hand, when the parties propose that the demands be channeled through an electoral struggle, they make those mobilized feel that they are not represented and, rather, conclude that the parties are closing ranks and taking advantage of the system.
This sort of “disavowal” of the forms of street struggle and the imperative to support an electoral formula, explain in part situations such as the first round of the presidential elections in Chile, which surprised by a notorious difference in participation between the votes that led to the Constitutional Convention and the support for the candidacy of Gabriel Boric.
Just as progressive governments, beyond their good intentions and desires for change, distance themselves from their bases in the exercise of acquired power, there is also a mutual disaffection between the candidacies and the mobilized.
This leads us to some initial provisional conclusions:
*Transformative struggles in Latin America have to go beyond the search for electoral victories, for which it is necessary to transgress the existing democratic spaces, to walk at the pace that the popular majorities walk and to accompany their forms of struggle.
*To understand electoral battles as a tactical step and not as an end in itself.
*The future Latin American and Caribbean democracy will not emerge from the results of the ballot boxes. It will be the result of the left political parties meeting again in a common battle with the mobilized masses in the continent.
Political parties suffered a progressive crisis of representation, while losing contact with the citizenry. The disconnection between Latin American societies and the democratic system resulted in outbursts of social frustration: from the “let them all go” (Argentina, 2001), to the “outlaw” movement (Ecuador, 2005) and the “penguin rebellion” (Chile, 2011).
The negative economic context and the spiral of unmet social demands provoked in 2019 a wave of protests of regional scope and new episodes of social frustration, especially in the new middle classes, extremely vulnerable, which overwhelmed the weak democratic systems, with aging state apparatuses and fragmented party systems.
This leads to a moment we would call “asymmetric and obsolete democracies”: asymmetric because they respond to the needs of a minority sector of society, which seeks to maintain power at any cost and which distances itself from the majority of the population that produces wealth, but fails to question the hegemony; and obsolete, because they are democracies whose institutions and procedures were consolidated in a historical moment already surpassed and where their own progenitors, persuaded that they are no longer useful, only maintain them as a stultified electoral discourse, but in fact replace them with coercive mechanisms and authoritarian decisions.
Latin American democracies do not channel demands or find solutions to the growing social frustration. What they do is to develop demagogic and authoritarian political alternatives, with models far removed from, even contrary to, democratic values (respect for the adversary and acceptance of results).
The authoritarian drift is not the patrimony of any particular group in the political or ideological spectrum. The new caudillismos seek to demolish institutional structures, limiting the control capacity of other counterpowers, especially the judiciary and the legislature. Their strategy is expressed in various ways: strengthening of caudillista leaderships, attack on the media and growing contempt for institutions.
In addition to this, there are other mechanisms, increasingly active, such as control of information, especially on the Internet and social networks, to abort the protests of non-organized and non-aligned sectors.
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2021/12/ ... al-crisis/