In this NACLA Report we look closely at two nations—Colombia and Brazil—that seem to be on very different trajectories as we head deeper into the 21st century. In Colombia, a four-decade-old civil war is on the verge of becoming bloodier and the country’s deep-rooted social problems are further from solution than ever, while in Brazil new President Lula da Silva has raised hopes that he will be able to spark some real social and economic progress.
It is not our intent here to draw explicit comparisons, but rather to examine the current state-of-affairs in these two Latin American countries as a means of glimpsing some of the best and the worst that the region’s future may hold.
This future, of course, will be partly shaped by a Latin American past that includes long periods of internal violence and dictatorial rule, as well as intense efforts to shape more just, equitable and democratic societies. The United States will surely have a role, as it long has: Since the 19th century, Latin America’s history has been played out in the shadow, and often enough under the thumb, of the United States. That continues to be true, though today U.S. pressure is less often wielded in the form of gunboats and more often in the form of IMF agreements. Ultimately, however, Latin America’s future will be shaped by its own people.
In Colombia, the picture is almost unremittently bleak. The economy is in a tailspin, and the country’s long-running civil war seems to grow more deadly every day. Adam Isacson reports that the Bush administration has managed to remove legal restraints that previously restricted U.S. aid to drug control. While the Colombian government, with rapidly-escalating U.S. support, takes an ever-tougher line against the FARC and ELN guerrillas, the guerrillas have responded by escalating their own violence, with the civilian population bearing the brunt of the widening war. Garry Leech gives us an eyewitness report from the town of Saravena, in Arauca department, where 70 U.S. Special Forces members are at work training Colombian troops even as guerrilla attacks continue to devastate the town and paramilitary forces freely roam the nearby countryside. There is now little talk about, and less money to support, the kinds of social and political reforms that would be needed to remedy the underlying causes of the conflict.
For a more auspicious view, many eyes have now turned to Brazil: Not since Chile’s Socialist President Salvador Allende took office in 1970, have so many placed so much hope in a newly elected Latin American government. Brazil is not as bitterly divided as Chile was at the time of Allende’s election. Whatever enemies Lula has among Brazilian elites, they are not yet roaring loudly for his downfall, as the same class did for Allende’s, until the Chileans achieved their goal with the 1973 U.S.-backed coup. In Brazil today, even if they did not vote for him, many members of the business class hope that Lula will be able to revive a national economy that not-so-long-ago was one of the most dynamic in the world.
Indeed, Lula’s economic program is radical only by comparison with the currently prevailing “Washington Consensus.” As Stanley Gacek and Sue Branford report in this issue, Lula’s is, for the moment at least, a basically Keynesian or New Deal-type program, aimed at job creation and pumping up the economy a bit with some government spending. A showdown may come if Lula decides he must violate previously agreed upon austerity plans in order to pay for his program and the United States or its surrogates in the IMF take umbrage.
But the real test—as Celso Furtado, one of the architects of Brazil’s 20th century program of nationalist industrialization, stresses in an interview here—is social and not just economic. The participatory budget process in Porto Alegre, reported on by Hilary Wainwright, is one example of how Lula might consolidate his electoral victory by providing new opportunities for popular participation and democratic expression. These will allow Brazil to finally overcome its own legacy of military dictatorship—and provide some real “light at the end of the tunnel” of the kind counterinsurgency theorists have long sought in vain in Colombia and elsewhere in Latin America.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JoAnn Kawell is the editor for the NACLA Report on the Americas.
