Latin America seems eerily calm lately. “Calm,” of course, is a relative term in this place of endlessly dramatic and sometimes incomprehensible developments. Yet considering the social and political changes underway—many of them historic—it would seem more appropriate for these to be happening amid intense uproar and raucous upheaval. Perhaps this is just the calm before the proverbial storm. Rarely, though, are things what they seem in this region, this home of “magical realism.”
But with an ear to the ground, a careful listener will hear the marching boot-slaps of change growing louder and louder. That’s the sound of 2006 coming, and it is already shaping up to be yet another watershed year for the region (of which, as our readers know, there have been several); so it would behoove us to listen, and listen well.
Appropriately, then, we should begin with those who are rightly considered by many to be expert listeners: the Zapatistas. After 22 years of sloshing through the Mexican jungles of Chiapas, and after several marathon plenary sessions this summer, Subcomandante Marcos will venture out—unarmed—on New Year’s Day to the far reaches of Mexico, laying the groundwork for “The Other Campaign.” To do what? Well, to listen, of course. After the July presidential elections, other Zapatistas will spread out across Mexico to, in Marcos’ words, “shake up this country from below, lift it, and turn it on its head.”
The launching of The Other Campaign elicited an almost audible groan from center-left presidential favorite Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who did not expect to be outflanked from the left, much less from a non-electoral movement. Still, if López Obrador wins, it will more convincingly prove that the 2000 defeat of Mexico’s 70-year, one-party dictatorship of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was no fluke.
Meanwhile, Bolivia, Chile and Haiti are scheduled to end 2005 with presidential elections, followed next year by several other momentous presidential elections throughout the region—Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guyana, Mexico, Nicaragua and Peru. So far, the posturing of political parties sounds a lot like politics as usual, with several parties embroiled in very public schisms. Both the PRI in Mexico and the Peronists in Argentina are in the throes of their perennial internecine party warfare between conservative and less conservative camps. (It’s no wonder the conservative wing historically comes out on top within both parties.) These two political machines might do as they’ve always done: bounce back in the form that best suits the opportunities at hand. But political inertia is pushing these parties toward the breaking point.
Similarly, in Nicaragua and El Salvador, the political party inheritors of these countries’ guerrilla movements—the FSLN and the FMLN—are fending off crises of their own resulting in mass defections to competing party offshoots for upcoming elections. But such intra-party rivalries have been ongoing for years and should be expected.
Yet few anticipated the massive corruption scandal emanating from the Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT), leading a friend of mine to lament, “If it wasn’t already, idealism in Brazil must be dead.” Left with pretty much a lame duck president, who has scant political capital to pass favorable laws or make concessions, the country’s combative social movements are likely to grow restless. Inside the PT, its more radical elements are fighting a fierce battle to take back the party or leave it.
Not even an inkling of such a leftwing takeover, however, stirs in Chile’s Concertación coalition in the run up to this December’s elections. Since taking power after the dictatorship, the Concertación’s obsession has been to not rock the boat of Chile’s supposed “neoliberal miracle.” The latest polls indicate that the coalition’s Michelle Bachelet is likely to become second female elected president in South America. Bolivia could possibly mark another landmark: although the presidential election has no clear frontrunner, a victory for Evo Morales would make him South America's first-ever indigenous president.
If there is one commonality between all these developments, then it’s the impossibility of predicting their outcome. It’s a familiar feeling: Latin America always seems on the verge of something historic, always teetering between possibility and failure.
[corrected – 11/10/05]
About the Author
Teo Ballvé is a NACLA editor and a contributing news editor for the Resource Center of the Americas: www.americas.org.
