The recent histories of Latin America and the Arab world share many features. But now, writes Gamil Mattar*, their paths are diverging Manuel Ortega of Nicaragua, Evo Morales of Bolivia, Lula de Silva of Brazil, Tabaré Vàzquez of Uraquay, Hugo Chàvez of Venezuela, Michelle Bachelet of Chile, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the Democratic Revolution Party candidate in Mexico's 2006 presidential elections, Olanta Humala, the Union for Peru candidate in Peru's 2006 presidential elections -- these are some of the names that are shaping the new reality in Latin America, a continent that, for two decades or more, was thought to have lost its self-confidence and sense of direction. The Cold War had cast a long shadow over Latin America, just as it did in the Middle East, and the left was fragmented, under constant attack and relentlessly suppressed. These were days when it took great courage for a leftist leadership or movement to refuse to obey the will of the US, for to do so would almost automatically seal its fate. In the early 1950s, for example, Guatemala's first stab at self-determination under a leftwing, democratically elected government, was struck down by the US with a brutality that remains the substance of stories. Guatemalans, particularly the indigenous Indian population, often relate these to their children. Chronic violence in small countries whose people, forests and mines were controlled by an American company or two, was one of the products of this phase in the relationship between the US and those Central American countries that American political commentators often sneeringly referred to as "banana republics". The left made another bid for power in Chile when Salvador Allende fielded himself for the presidency against Eduardo Frei. The latter represented the International Christian Democrats and, particularly, the ethnically German contingent of that party. Although the left lost that battle it, rallied its strength again and won the next elections. Washington refused to accept the results and soon conspired with the Chilean military to stage a coup. Allende was assassinated, and Chile fell under the control of a fascist government that implemented Chicago school laissez-faire economics and installed Augusto Pinochet as the new president. There followed a period of brutal repression after which the left was reduced to small pockets that would occasionally resurface in Latin America. Most Latin American countries then endured a couple of decades of neo-liberal economic regimes, planned and controlled by international economic institutions, major American banks and research centres in the US. Throughout the period reports filtered out of the kidnap and torture of political opponents accused of leftist leanings. In Chile and Argentina, in particular, the suppression of the left was pursued with systematic violence and the wounds from this period have yet to heal. One also read in North American, French and Italian periodicals of growing rifts in South American societies. More than one article observed that the gap between rich and poor in these countries had become larger than at any other time since the beginning of the 19th century when white Spanish colonists and their descendents ruled over the lives of millions of indigenous Indians and the riches of the continent were plundered to fill the coffers of Europe and the US. By the end of the Cold War these social rifts had expanded into vast fissures, an instrumental factor behind the resurgence of the Latin American left. Another major factor was Washington's preoccupation with laying the groundwork for its imperial project on the basis of new realities in the cornerstones of this empire, the Middle East and Central and South East Asia. In the American mind Latin America was little more than the US's backyard, a place to be secured with various types of fences, policing regimes and ultra-right policies. It had not occurred to Washington's strategists that the left would ever amount to anything after the fall of the communist order, when even the days of Cuba were numbered. But Washington was in for a surprise. Not only did the Latin American left rise up in force, it gave the starting signal to an international movement resisting the negative repercussions of globalisation. The transition began when the opinions of intellectuals and leaders of civil society across the continent converged on the need to place restraints on rampant capitalism and, simultaneously, halt the expansion of the rightwing alliance led by the triumvirate of big business, establishment officials and Catholic church leaders. The climate was reinforced by the growing confidence among leaders of grassroots and syndicate movements that the military establishment had lost either the ability or will to intervene. To describe the upsurge of the new left in Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Venezuela as exciting is to put it mildly, especially from the perspective of a citizen of an Arab country, such as myself, who has seen the socio-economic gaps in the Middle East, at both the domestic and regional levels, broaden so alarmingly. I believe that the Middle East and Latin America are bound by an invisible thread. Here, as there, we have had military coups that established military dictatorships, even if we have developed the experience a little further towards "hereditary" regimes. Egypt, and other countries in this region, followed the Latin American lead in adopting a centralised approach to economic planning and development, though Arab states developed a form of state capitalism. As Latin America moved towards laissez-faire economics and curtailed the intervention of the state in favour of big business and foreign firms, we, too, shifted in the same direction with an enthusiasm that sometimes bordered on the savage. Socio-economic rifts began to threaten national stability and cohesion and to imperil whatever accomplishments in the field of human development that had been achieved either gradually or by planned projects. But then, it seems, our ways parted. They paused and decided to halt the slide towards chaos, violence and terrorism; we continued full steam ahead, allowing the gaps to broaden while failing to heed the messages conveyed as one disaster followed another. The Latin American left may have assumed diverse forms, but there are features in common in the discourse of the various leftist movements and leaderships. There is a nationalist component in that discourse, just as there is in the Arab world, though here it is dominated by a religious rhetoric that very quickly overshadows leftist counterpart. Perhaps leaders in both regions resort to evoking nationalist sympathies because of their inability to come up with a feasible and cohesive socio-economic alternative to neo-liberalist economics. They still need an idea that will rally mass public support. Morales, for example, has taken his fellow Bolivians back 500 years to the Inca kings and raged against the campaigns of the white colonialists to sully the image of the indigenous inhabitants and belittle their civilisation and achievements. Then, in order to underscore the legitimacy of his rule and discourse, his inaugural ceremony was held in Tiwanaku, an ancient Inca site, where he received the keys of power from indigenous tribal leaders. Afterwards, he went to the parliament in La Paz where, in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, he recited the oath of allegiance to the constitution. President Chavez also evoked the distant past in an appeal to national unity, harking back some 200 years to the Venezuelan national independence leader Simon Bolivar, whereas Mexico's modern leftwing rhetoric stresses the accomplishments of President Lazaro Cardenas in the 1980s, including his nationalisation of the oil industry and agrarian reforms. Simultaneously, though, it grounds these in the aspirations embodied in the Mexican revolution of 1910 and its legendary leader, Emiliano Zapata. In Chile no one could have been better suited to the purposes of Michelle Bachelet's rhetoric than Salvador Allende who, together with his father, was assassinated in 1973. Clearly, this tragic page in Chile's history enables Bachelet to draw attention to that central common denominator that binds all Latin American nations: US interventionism, which has been directly responsible for so many Latin American plights. Argentina's leftwing political rhetoric, too, appeals to the more recent past, notably to Evita Peron, wife of General Juan Peron. If Evita's social reform programme was cut short, it nevertheless succeeded in catapulting the Argentinean syndicate movement to the vanguard of the political scene, where it has remained from the 1940s to the present. Lastly, Manuel Ortega succeeded in returning to power in Managua on the strength of a campaign that played on the epic struggle of the Sandinistas against rightwing militias trained in the US and financed by Arab money. The Sandinistas were brutally crushed, in a war that wreaked massive destruction in Nicaragua. Twenty years later the Nicaraguans reelected its leader, Ortega, as president, in spite of Washington's desperate attempt to prevent his victory by sending in a delegation headed by Oliver North, former Reagan advisor, and the key figure in the Contra Scandal and the overthrow of the Sandinistas in the 1980s. Ortega merits some pause, both because he is the latest leftist to come to power in Latin America and because he sheds a little more light on the phenomenon of the "new Latin American left". In his electoral campaign, Ortega pledged to encourage foreign investment and not to nationalise private agriculture. But he also lashed out at the US and its threats of an economic boycott if they reelected Ortega. Evidently, Ortega is one of those Latin American leaders that fall into that category that writer and political commentator Alvaro Vargas Llosa labeled "the vegetarian left". The implication is that he, together with Lula de Silva, Bachelet and Vàzquez, for example, have a softer approach than "the carnivorous left", represented by Chavez and Morales. Although the nationalist element undoubtedly helped the new Latin American left into power, it may prove a disadvantage. In Venezuela, Bolivia and Mexico the question of identity has begun to pose itself forcefully. In Venezuela, heated debate now focuses over whether or not to change the national flag. The concept of Bolivian identity and who represents it has become a subject of controversy throughout Latin America. Across the region people are discussing new names for their nations. Not that we in the Middle East are short on experiences of that nature. Over the past 60 years we have ventured down many of the same political and economic paths as the countries of Latin America. Today both regions stand at a crossroads on the matter of political reform; what has left many political reform advocates in the Arab World stumped, though, is the inability to detect any shift to the left in public opinion given the alarmingly large rifts between poor and rich in their societies. * The writer is director of the Arab Centre for Development and Futuristic Research.
