The Latin American Left: A Painful Rebirth
UnpublishedMay
1992
Volume:
25
Number:
5
Report
IF OBJECTIVE SUFFERING WERE THE ONLY criterion, the 1990s would look good for the Left. Capitalism's failures could not be more evident.
Article
Margaret E. Keck
THE WORKERS PARTY (PT) OF BRAZIL IS THE most important new political party to form on the Left in Latin America in the last quarter of a century.' When the PT was founded in 1979, structural conditions in Brazil-egregious and growing inequality coupled with a significant increase in the size of the working class-may have appeared propitious for the formation of a mass-based party espousing radical forms of democracy and socialism, but political conditions were decidedly not.
George Vickers
Shortly before midnight on New Year's Eve, at the United Nations Plaza in New York City, Salvadoran Presi- dent Alfredo Cristiani and Comandante Leonel Gonzalez of the Farabundo Martf National Liberation Front (FMLN) reached agreement on a series of social and economic issues that for two weeks had blocked a final settle- ment of the decade-long civil war in El Salvador. As the two men were turning their notes over to a U.
Enrique Leff
WITH THE COLLAPSE OF SOVIET-STYLE socialism, the fall of dictatorial regimes and the discredit of armed struggle, a cycle of political tensions has ended in Latin America and the world. This has opened the way for new approaches to social change.
Juan Carlos Portantiero
TO IMAGINE NEW ALTERNATIVES FOR THE Left we ought to begin by recognizing that the current crisis is global and structural in nature. Crisis does not always mean catastrophe.
Circles of Madness: Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo by Marjorie Agosfn, with photographs by Alicia D'Amico & Alicia Sanguinetti, White Pine Press, 1992, 128 pp., $13.
José Arico
THE ENTIRE EXPERIENCE OF THE LATIN American Left grew out of the model for anti- imperialist nation-states established in the 1920s. The Left worked through all the limits and possibilities of that model, They thought that national autonomy could be achieved through class alliances with a nationalist bour- geoisie.
Jonathan Fox
THE LATIN AMERICAN LEFT HAS LONG BEEN an active ally of peasants and rural workers in their struggle for survival. But urban-based leftist parties have traditionally viewed peasants as unreliable partners in the worker-peasant alliance that would eventually bring a revolutionary vanguard to power.
Who's Smiling? The Economist April 18-24, 1992 Huh?!? [During an early morning visit to the Jefferson Memorial, President Bush comments about an inscription that it is an "eloquent plea for term limits."] REPORTER: You're misinterpreting Jefferson.
Mimi Hurd
One of the most wide-ranging po- litical battles unfolding in the wake of the Salvadoran peace accords concerns funding for post-war recovery. The Consultative Group, a coalition of 19 countries and 12 international organi- zations including the World Bank, the Inter-American Development bank, the United States, Canada, Japan, and a number of European countries, is the chief providerof aid.
José Arico
HISTORICALLY THE LEFT--THE WORLD LA- bor and socialist movement of the last hundred years--has always presumed the existence of an objec- tive, a program, an organized force capable of carrying out that program, and a theory that explained the logic of the system. The program may have been improvised, the objective unreal, and the organized force nothing of the kind, but this was how the Left thought about change, at least how it legitimized its activities.
Carlos M. Vilas
LATIN AMERICA WAS TRADITIONALLY AN area of marginal importance to the Soviet-bloc economy. The USSR and Eastern Europe developed sig- nificant trade relations with only a few Latin American countries: Cuba from 1959 on; Peru during the military regimes of Velasco Alvarado and MoralesBermtidez (1968- 1980); Chile during Allende's Popular Unity government (1970-1973): Argentina under military rule (1976-1983); Nicaragua during the 1980s; Brazil and Mexico to a much less significant extent.
MF
H. Ross Peru PERU'S PRESIDENT ALBERTO FUJIMORI closed down Congress and the Judiciary on April 5, in an auto-golpe, what some translators creatively called a "self-inflicted coup.
George Vickers
The peace accords, signed on Janu- ary 16, are 122 pages long. They in- clude agreements about the armed forces, national civil police, judicial system, electoral system, economic and social issues, political participation of the FMLN and cease-fire arrangements.
Carlos M. Vilas
IN THE "NEW WORLD ORDER" ANNOUNCED by George Bush the North-South conflict has dis- placed the East-West one at the forefront of international politics.' The ideological confrontation between capital- ism and communism was, apparently, easier to handle and eventually to overcome than the conflicts stemming from uneven access to productive, technical and financial re- sources and the ever-increasing imbalances in interna- tional development.
Virginia Vargas
For Maria Elena Moyano to which we felt so close for so many years, despite our differences? M ARIA ELENA MOYANO WAS MURDERED Despite our years of involvement with the parties, it by Shining Path on February 15-peppered with seems we were unable to change in any substantial way bullets and blown to pieces. It was a death foretold: for their authoritarian and exclusive character.