Izvrstan članak iz New Left Reviewa o neoliberalizmu i usponu nove ljevice u 21. stoljeću u Južnoj Americi.

New Left Review 52, July-August 2008

The continent that once served as laboratory for the Washington Consensus now represents the most substantial challenge to its prescriptions. A survey of left strategies, from Buenos Aires to Mexico City, and prospects for counter-hegemonic regional integration.

EMIR SADER

THE WEAKEST LINK?

Neoliberalism in Latin America

The new century is off to a surprising start in Latin America. The continent that had been a privileged territory for neoliberalism, where it was first applied—in Chile and Bolivia—rapidly turned into the leading arena not only for resistance but for construction of alternatives to neoliberalism. Two faces of the same coin: precisely by having been the laboratory for neoliberal experiments, Latin America is now having to deal with their consequences. The 1990s and the 2000s have been two radically opposite decades. During the 90s, the neoliberal model was imposed to varying degrees in virtually every country on the continent—with the exception of Cuba. Clinton, who did not even cross the Rio Grande to sign the first North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta), was forced not long after to approve a super-loan from Washington when the first crisis of the new model broke out in Mexico. The us went on to press for a hemisphere-wide Free Trade Area of the Americas (ftaa), presenting this as the natural outcome of the seamless extension of free-trade policies.

At an Americas summit meeting in Canada in 2000, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez was the only leader to vote against Clinton’s proposal for an ftaa, while Cardoso, Menem, Fujimori and their colleagues fell meekly into line. On the occasion of his first Ibero-American Summit, Chávez reported, Castro passed him a piece of paper on which he had written: ‘At last I’m not the only devil around here.’ It was thus with some relief, too, that Chávez—himself elected president of Venezuela in 1998—attended the investiture of Lula in Brasilia and Néstor Kirchner in Buenos Aires in 2003, before moving on to that of Tabaré Vázquez in Montevideo in 2004, that of Evo Morales in La Paz in 2006, and in 2007 those of Daniel Ortega in Managua and Rafael Correa in Quito; followed in 2008 by Fernando Lugo in Asunción. Meanwhile the us free-trade proposal that had been almost unanimously approved in 2000 was dead and buried by 2004. Since that date, Chávez himself has been re-elected, as was Lula in 2006; in April of this year, Kirchner was succeeded by his wife, Cristina Fernández, and Lugo triumphed in Paraguay, putting an end to more than sixty years of rule by the Colorado Party.

What is the meaning of this radical reversal, faster than any the continent has experienced before, to give the largest number of progressive governments, whether left or centre-left, that it has seen in its entire history? It is true that the continent displays the highest levels of inequality in the world, an income gap aggravated by the neoliberal decade; and yet the hard blows that punished past popular struggles, along with the solidity of the neoliberal establishment, made such a rapid turn quite unexpected. In what follows we shall attempt to understand the conditions that transformed Latin America into the weakest link in the neoliberal chain.

Imposing the model

A precondition for the privatization programmes imposed across successive Latin American countries in the 1980s and 90s was the defeat and disarming of earlier movements of the left and organized labour. During the decades of development the emphasis was on import-substitute industrialization—in particular in Mexico, Argentina and Brazil, but also to a lesser extent in Colombia, Peru, Chile, Uruguay and Costa Rica. These developments were underwritten by broad politico-ideological projects that encouraged the strengthening of the working class and its trade unions, backed by local party formations and democratic-national blocs, in a context of nationalistic ideologies and identities. The potential this built up burst onto the political scene in the 1960s as a radical force, when the long cycle of growth petered out in conflicts over workers’ rights, at a time when the Cuban example was pointing towards alternatives that transcended the limits of capitalism and us imperial domination. The response to these struggles was an era of military coups, first in Brazil and Bolivia in 1964, in Argentina in 1966 and 1976, and finally in Uruguay and Chile in 1973.

The combined and closely related processes of military dictatorship and the application of neoliberal models acted together to yield an extreme regression in the balance of power between social classes. It would have been impossible to implement the wholesale sell-offs of national industrial resources that unfolded most drastically in Chile, Uruguay and Argentina without first crushing the people’s ability to defend their interests. These three countries had been remarkable for their achievements, possessing advanced systems of social protection under states that assumed a regulatory capacity and a role in expanding the domestic market, guaranteeing the social welfare of the population, and providing public services. The most brutal repression they had ever known was needed to clear the way for neoliberal policies that privatized state functions—in the case of Argentina, transferring virtually all public resources into the hands of private capital—and abolished hard-won social rights. In short, three of the most enlightened states on the continent found themselves completely dismantled.

In the course of the 1990s, neoliberalism penetrated Latin America right across the political spectrum. The programme was originally implemented by the far right, in Pinochet’s Chile. It found other right-wing adepts—such as Alberto Fujimori in Peru—but also absorbed forces that had historically been associated with nationalism: the pri in Mexico; Peronism in Argentina under Carlos Menem; in Bolivia, the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement—the party that had headed the nationalist revolution of 1952 under Víctor Paz Estenssoro. After this, neoliberalism moved on to social democracy, gaining the adherence of the Chilean Socialist Party, Venezuela’s Acción Democrática, and the Brazilian Social-Democratic Party. It became a hegemonic system across almost the entire territory of Latin America.

Nevertheless, the neoliberal model failed to consolidate the social forces necessary for its stabilization, resulting in the early onset of crises that would check its course. The three largest Latin American economies were the theatre for the most dramatic crises: Mexico in 1994, Brazil in 1999 and Argentina in 2002; the programme crumbled without delivering on its promises. The ravages of hyper-inflation were checked, but this was only achieved at tremendous cost. For a decade or more, economic development was paralysed, the concentration of wealth grew greater than ever before, public deficits spiralled and the mass of the population had their rights expropriated, most notably in the domain of employment and labour relations. On top of this, national debt expanded exponentially and regional economies became highly vulnerable, helplessly exposed to attack from speculators, as these three countries each discovered to their cost.

It was neoliberalism’s poor economic performance in Latin America that in many instances led to the defeats of the governments that pioneered it. These include Alberto Fujimori in Peru, Fernando Henrique Cardoso in Brazil, Menem in Argentina, Carlos Andrés Pérez in Venezuela and Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada in Bolivia; also gone are the pri in Mexico, the alternation of the two traditional parties in Uruguay, and the politicians who tried to perpetuate neoliberalism even beyond its collapse, including Fernando De la Rúa in Argentina, Lucio Gutiérrez in Ecuador and Sánchez de Lozada in Bolivia. It is also important to note the isolation of those leaders who struggle to keep it going, such as Felipe Calderón in Mexico, Michelle Bachelet in Chile, Alan García in Peru, or Alfonso Uribe in Colombia. (Uribe, incidentally, lost recent local elections revolving around issues of governance; his prestige derives from the uncompromising deployment of ‘democratic security policies’ against ‘terrorism’, a position which earns him a steady 80 per cent domestic support.) A growing number of presidents have been elected, or in some cases re-elected, in response to the failure of the neoliberal economic model.

Political reversals

We can trace a series of cycles, upswings and downswings, triumphs and setbacks in Latin American politics since the victory of the Cuban revolution in 1959. Their rise and fall have come in quick succession, compared to the time-spans of the European left. The result has been a series of recalibrations in the balance of power, which itself reflected the prolonged crisis of hegemony that overtook the region when the import-substitution model that had held sway since the crash of 1929 finally ran out of steam.

The first cycle, from 1959 to 1967, saw the triumph of the Cuban revolution and the spread of the rural guerrilla movement to Venezuela, Guatemala and Peru, in emulation of those of Colombia and Nicaragua. The period saw mass mobilizations in several countries, including Brazil during Goulart’s 1961–64 government and broad resistance to the dictatorship that followed the military coup there in 1964. For the Latin American left this was a period of upswing, directly influenced by the success of Cuba, but cut short by the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967. The second cycle runs from 1967 to 1973. It saw the decline of the rural guerrilla movements and the rise of new urban guerrillas in Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina. Allende was elected president in Chile (1970–73); the same years saw the government of Juan José Torres (1971) in Bolivia, and nationalist governments under Juan Velasco Alvarado in Peru (1967) and Omar Torrijos in Panama (1968). In summary, this was a mixed period inaugurating an era of reverses, marked by military coups and dictatorships.

The years 1973 to 1979 saw the consolidation of military dictatorships across the Southern Cone. As in Brazil, juntas came to power in Bolivia in 1971, Chile and Uruguay in 1973 and Argentina in 1976. Velasco Alvarado was overthrown in Peru. The neoliberal model was rolled out in Pinochet’s Chile. This was a period of unmitigated downturn. By contrast, the long decade of 1979 to 1990 brought Sandinista victory in Nicaragua, revolution in Grenada and a nationalist government in Surinam. Castro was elected president of the Movement of Non-Aligned Countries, and guerrilla forces expanded in El Salvador and Guatemala. The 1980s were a period of overall progress.

In another switch, the years from 1990 to 1998 saw the Sandinista defeat, the start of the ‘special period’ in Cuba, and the entrenchment of neoliberal hegemony across the continent, with the collaboration of the pri in Mexico, Menem in Argentina, Pérez in Venezuela, Cardoso in Brazil, Fujimori in Peru and the continuation of Pinochetist economic neoliberalism in Chile under the Concertación coalition of Socialists and Christian Democrats. This was definitively a period of net regression. Yet from 1998 onwards, the wind turned in the other direction with the election of Chávez in Venezuela, followed by the launch of the World Social Forums in Porto Alegre in 2001, Lula’s election victory in 2002, and further gains for the left and centre-left in Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Ecuador and finally Paraguay. Mercosur was expanded to incorporate Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador while the Alternativa Bolivariana para las Américas—or alba, ‘dawn’—brought together a new left grouping of the Andean–Caribbean axis. So far, this has been a period of appreciable progress.

This rapid-fire succession of upswings and downswings testifies to the continent’s instability, and its poor capacities for consolidating alternative programmes; and yet it is also a sign of the left’s astounding ability to recover from its defeats, no matter how crushing these seem to be—Che’s murder, the coup in Chile, the rout of the Sandinistas, the tightening grip of neoliberal processes. Like a mole, the popular movement repressed in one country has popped up elsewhere. It tunnelled from the south to the north of the continent, from the country to the city, from the discourse of the old left to new forms of expression, from party structures to looser social movements, and from these to new political and ideological forces. In other parts of the world, defeats on the scale experienced here led to long periods of abeyance, for example after the loss of Germany and Italy in the wake of World War I, or the crushing of republicanism after the Spanish Civil War.

The brevity of the cycles is also surprising: only three years passed between the death of Che and the ebbing of the first guerrillero wave in 1967, and the election of Allende in 1970. Between the 1973 military coups in Chile and Uruguay, and that of 1976 in Argentina, and then the 1979 victory of the Sandinistas—six and three years respectively. And from the collapse of the Socialist world, the beginning of the ‘special period’ in Cuba, the 1989 overthrow of the Grenadan government and the end of the Sandinista regime in 1990, it was only eight or nine years until the election of Chávez. The neoliberal model was just beginning to put down roots when its first crisis erupted in Mexico in 1994—the year that nafta was signed and the Zapatista rebellion broke out, while Cardoso was taking office in Brazil. Notably, however, the three progressive cycles together add up to 29 years, encompassing the victory of the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions and the governments of Allende, Chávez, Morales and Correa. By contrast, the periods of retreat make up a total of 14 years, including the death of Che, the Chilean coup and the Sandinista defeat.

Strategies of the left

Cross-cutting these political cycles, three overall strategies of the Latin American left can be discerned. The first sequence, dating back to the 1940s, was one of major structural reforms contemporaneous with the hegemony of the import-substitution model. The left opted for an alliance with sectors of the national business elite in the name of economic modernization, agrarian reform and a certain autonomy with respect to Northern imperialism. This strategy was implemented by legendary nationalist leaders such as Getúlio Vargas of Brazil, Lázaro Cárdenas of Mexico and Juan Perón of Argentina, in concert with parties of the left or centre-left. In Chile, textbook cases of this approach were the Popular Front of 1938 and the Allende administration in 1970–73. But the programme failed at the same time as the industrialization effort, when the internationalization of economies pushed the corporate elites into solid alliance with international capital, laying the groundwork for the eventual neoliberal model. These same entrepreneurs also supported the military dictatorships of the Southern Cone, making no secret of their readiness to liquidate the popular movement for the sake of an export-centred economy geared to luxury domestic consumption by way of intense labour exploitation.

Allende’s government, based on the Communist and Socialist parties, with a programme that envisaged the nationalization of 150 leading corporations, constituted the most advanced example of the attempt to progress from reformist policies to a socialist overcoming of capitalism. Among the multiple reasons for its defeat, there can be no doubt that the fact that Allende started out with just 34 per cent of the vote, and that three years later his government’s share had only risen to 44 per cent, was a major obstacle for implementing such a radical programme. Unidad Popular also underestimated the class nature of the state. It neglected therefore to institute an alternative power outside the traditional apparatus, which ultimately cornered and smothered the executive. The Chilean and Uruguayan military coups were carried out in the year that marked the transition from a long, expansive cycle to a recessive one, triggered by the oil crisis of 1973. A page of history had been definitively turned, and with it one strategy of the Latin American left was now closed.

A second great strategy emerged with the Cuban revolution. Any revolutionary victory—above all when it is the first of its kind in a whole region—carries charismatic persuasive force, as we know from the Russian and Chinese experiences in 1917 and 1949. The Cuban triumph coincided with the end of the cycle of Latin American economic expansion under the popular governments and democratic regimes that had prevailed over much of the continent during the 1940s and 50s. The first Argentine coup was carried out in 1955, the second in 1966; the Brazilian and Bolivian coups took place in 1964, and already by 1954 Guatemala was in the throes of counter-revolution. It seemed that the cycle of democratic governments had run its course, in parallel with the economic crises.

It was then that Cuba unexpectedly presented an alternative route, in contrast to the impasse that popular struggles in other countries had reached under their traditional leaderships. Latin America was no stranger to guerrilla movements; it had known rural insurgencies such as those of Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 1930s, as well as the national-revolutionary struggles in Mexico in the 1910s, or in Bolivia in 1952. Yet events in Cuba radiated a special appeal, pointing the way to a new epoch for the left. Due to the similarity of levels of development reached at that period by most of the countries of Latin America, the Cuban revolution was immediately more influential in the region than the Russian revolution had been in Europe in its day. All the more so, thanks to the way it was presented by such—attractive, if misguided—codifications as Régis Debray’s account of the Cuban experience and how it might be replicated in other countries and continents. The massive congresses hosted by Cuba—Tricontinental (1965) and olas (1966)—were instrumental in giving huge momentum and worldwide publicity to the new strategy, which was also exemplified by the activities of Che Guevara in Africa and Latin America.

The guerrilla struggles played out in three distinct phases over the next decades. The first, in the 1960s, had a rural character, with hubs in Venezuela, Guatemala and Peru; it ended with Che’s death in Bolivia just as he was attempting to coordinate these with other movements that were beginning to appear in Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina. The second phase was that of the urban guerrillas in the three latter countries, which operated between the late 1960s and early 1970s. The third phase was once more based in the countryside, inspired by the victory of the Sandinistas in 1979, and centred throughout the 1980s chiefly in Guatemala and El Salvador. The Sandinista electoral defeat in 1990 coincided with the shift to a unipolar world under the imperial hegemony of the us, which put an end to the viability of guerrilla strategies. The impossibility of military victory in other countries forced Guatemalan and Salvadoran fighters to reinsert themselves into mainstream political institutions, and the heyday of guerrillero strategies was basically over.

At the same time, the global realignment after 1990 had far-reaching consequences for the parties of the traditional left, both nationalist and social-democratic. Their adherence to neoliberal policies, and the effects of these policies themselves, disabled the trade-union movements and the broader gamut of left-wing forces. The collapse of the ussr and the socialist camp precipitated a conclusive crisis for Communist parties across the continent. Several changed their names and even their natures, as was the case with the Brazilian cp; others simply faded away, while those that survived were left in social, political and ideological quarantine.

The other forces of the left were variously affected by the new conditions. The Brazilian Workers’ Party (pt), the Uruguayan Frente Amplio and the Nicaraguan Frente Sandinista all evolved into parties of the centre-left, accepting when in power the economic models they had fought against in opposition. Of the former guerrilla groupings, only the Frente Farabundo Martí of El Salvador has managed to survive as a significant political force since laying down its arms. The mir in Chile, the Montoneros and the prt–erp in Argentina, the aln and the vpr in Brazil, and the guerrilla groups in Peru and Venezuela have all been dissolved, whilst the Tupamaros in Uruguay have reinvented themselves as a political force that bears no relationship to their past as a guerrilla movement.

A third approach

The entire framework of political and ideological struggle in Latin America has thus been remodelled under neoliberal hegemony. The radical reversal of the balance of power imposed by the dictatorships of the preceding decades was further reinforced by the new world order. The abandonment of popular forces by former nationalist or social-democratic allies, together with the harsh social consequences of free-market economics, have propelled social movements into the forefront of the resistance to neoliberalism—the third and latest strategy from below. The Zapatistas, the landless peasant movement (mst) in Brazil, the indigenist movements of Bolivia and Ecuador, the piqueteros or unemployed workers’ activists in Argentina—these are just some of the groups that have pioneered the new militancy. They have resisted to the best of their ability while neoliberalism stripped the state of its functions, pushed through the wholesale privatization of public enterprises and expropriated rights to formal employment, health and education. Opposition to nafta was the central plank of the Zapatista platform unveiled in 1994. Landless peasants in Brazil have taken action against sell-offs, and the resistance to water privatization in Cochabamba in 2000 was the starting point for a remarkable new phase in the history of the Bolivian left. Something similar took place in Ecuador, where indigenist movements demonstrated their power of veto against two neoliberal administrations—under Abdalá Bucaram in 1997 and Jamil Mahuad in 2001—forcing both presidents from office. Later mobilizations, this time led by urban movements formed to defend citizens’ rights, overthrew a third government, that of Lucio Gutiérrez, in 2005.

The difficulties experienced by the neoliberal model itself in Mexico, Brazil and Argentina, combined with the pressure of popular resistance to it, opened the door to a new phase, in which the left camp formulated urgent alternatives in the context of the crisis of hegemony across the continent. This posed dilemmas to which some movements responded positively, whereas others held back. A common position among the latter was to use their critiques of the traditional left, the neoliberal state and standard political practices to justify a sweeping repudiation of parties, state and politics in general, taking refuge in what they called ‘the autonomy of social movements’. At a time when neoliberalism was sharpening its assault on the state, in favour of the market; on politics, in favour of economics; and on political parties, in favour of corporations, a certain ambiguity crept into the distinction between movements that championed the ‘social’ dimension to the detriment of politics, parties and states, and those same neoliberal arguments. A new tendency arose within the left or the overall resistance to neoliberalism, embodied in social movements and ngos, and articulated around the dichotomy of ‘state versus civil society’. The World Social Forum reinforced this tendency by welcoming social movements and ngos but remaining closed to political parties, arguing that this space belonged to civil society.

There are two main problems with this position. Firstly, it blurs the boundaries with neoliberal discourse, since as we pointed out above, the latter likewise regards the state and party politics as its great enemies. Secondly, given that neoliberalism is characterized by the wholesale expropriation of rights, it can only be overcome in the political sphere: through the universalization of rights enacted by the governing authority of the state. Otherwise, the struggle against neoliberalism would remain perpetually on the defensive, having discarded the political instruments necessary for its own realization. Some movements have remained trapped in this paradox, ostensibly embodying hubs of resistance yet unable to move forward into challenging neoliberal hegemony, via a fresh articulation of the social with the political. Their critique of the state is subordinated to the terms of the theoretical discourse of neoliberalism, structured around the polarization of state versus private. This polarity is designed to demonize the state, take control of the private sphere (in which market relations are embedded) and abolish the indispensable framework for the democratization and defeat of neoliberalism: the public sphere.

The real polarization is between the public sphere and the market sphere, in that the neoliberal project is committed to the infinite extension of market relations, whereas the state is not so much a pole as a space of hegemonic dispute between the two spheres. The construction of an anti-neoliberal alternative must begin with the reorganization or recasting of the state in favour of the public sphere, universalizing citizens’ rights while divorcing the state and general social relationships from the market. To democratize means to de-marketize, to recuperate for the terrain of people’s rights that which neoliberalism has delivered into the hands of the market. Limiting the field of action to the ‘social’ as opposed to the ‘political’, proclaiming the autonomy of social movements as a principle, means condemning oneself to impotence, and ultimately to defeat. The cases of Bolivia, Ecuador and Argentina provide instructive examples of these alternatives.

La Paz, Quito, Buenos Aires

In Bolivia, the new left was constructed upon a critique of the blind economism of the traditional left, which classified indigenous peoples solely as campesinos—peasants—because their means of subsistence could be defined as small-scale rural production. This economism had robbed the Aymara, Quechua and Guaraní peoples of their deep and ancient identity. The new critique—explicitly voiced by Alvaro García Linera, current vice-president of Bolivia—empowered the construction of a new political subject: the indigenous movement. In alliance with other social forces, the movement went on to found the mas—Movimiento al Socialismo—in order to unite the forces built up since 2000 towards effective action in the political sphere and hegemony at the national level, through the candidacy and presidency of Evo Morales.

Since 2000 and leading up to Evo’s election six years later, the militant activism of indigenous movements succeeded in preventing the privatization of the water supply that was to be exploited by a French company, and overthrew the neoliberal governments of Sánchez de Lozada and of his vice-president Carlos Mesa. Morales was elected on a platform that pledged to nationalize natural resources, undertake agrarian reform and convene a Constituent Assembly, charged with redefining Bolivia as a multinational, multi-ethnic, multicultural state. The indigenous movement progressed from specific issues—such as water—through a struggle against the national government, to the creation of a party rooted in social movements, and finally to the construction of an alternative anti-neoliberal project for Bolivia to be implemented by a state re-founded on new lines.

Similar events took place in Ecuador, where the resistance to neoliberalism spearheaded by indigenous movements brought down two governments. Movements such as Pachakutik and conaie now placed their trust in a military man, Lucio Gutiérrez, who had played a role in the fall of the second government and participated in the World Social Forum at Porto Alegre; there were to be several indigenous representatives in his cabinet. But even before taking office, Gutiérrez travelled to Washington to sign agreements with the Bush Administration, betraying his campaign pledges on economic policy and the military base at Manta, where us troops were stationed. The indigenous movements withdrew their support and pulled out of the government, but they were divided. Some leaders remained loyal to Gutiérrez until the end, and the indigenous forces were so weakened by the process that they played little part in the 2005 uprisings that led to his fall, which was the work mostly of urban movements.

During the 2006 presidential election, the left was represented by Rafael Correa, a young Christian economist who had briefly served in the government of Gutiérrez’s vice-president and campaigned on an anti-neoliberal platform which presented itself as the political continuation of all the grass-roots mobilizations of recent years. At first the indigenous movements did not stir, mistrustful of institutional participation after their experiences in the Constituent Assembly and Gutiérrez’s government. When they finally fielded a candidate in the shape of their leader, Luis Macas, the space of the left was already occupied by Correa and his largely urban followers, although Correa also attracted the support of the indigenous population. The movement in Ecuador proved unable to transcend the dilemma between the ‘autonomy of the social’ and the need to reconnect with the political sphere, remaining split between three options: the traditional form of supporting and participating in governments; withdrawal from the institutional political fray; and the belated fielding of an assertive but isolated candidate who took only 2 per cent of the vote. And so a movement with an extraordinary history failed to progress from the path of pure resistance to that of the construction of alternatives, and found itself excluded when the time came to plan for post-neoliberalism.

In Bolivia, by contrast, indigenous movements did prove equal to making this transition. The foundation of mas and the candidacy of its leader, Evo Morales, expressed a new way of linking social movements to the political sphere. Evo continued as president of the Coca Growers’ Federation of Cochabamba, his native province, at the same time as he became the leading candidate of the Bolivian left and won election as President of the Republic. This achievement is a milestone in the history of the Latin American left, and more specifically in the history of anti- and post-neoliberal struggles.

The piqueteros of Argentina also illustrate the dilemma facing the new movements. These groups sprang to prominence during the terminal crisis of peso–dollar parity—an extreme and radical example of financial neoliberalism—by organizing mass demonstrations and road blocks, attracting many who had been pauperized by the effects of the currency peg. There was also a proliferation of factory takeovers, in which workers successfully rescued concerns that had been abandoned or closed by their proprietors. This early conflict with the De la Rúa government—which had inherited the dollar-parity policy from the Menem administration, and stuck with it until it blew up in their faces—marked the beginning of the deepest crisis ever faced by the Argentine state. In December 2001, after angry demonstrations against his government, De la Rúa fled from the Casa Rosada in a helicopter. Over the following days, several more presidents came and went. The bankruptcy of the economic model was obvious, and the possibility of a non-neoliberal government openly discussed. When new elections were called, Carlos Menem came up with an even more radical proposal: full dollarization of the Argentine economy. This would imply severing the country from processes of regional integration, which might not have recovered from the blow, and would also be damaged by Menem’s plan to boost us free-trade ambitions by signing a bilateral treaty between the two countries.

Faced with this crisis of hegemony for the traditional political parties—the Partido Radical in disarray after De la Rúa’s resignation, the Peronists bitterly divided—the social movements coined the famous slogan, ¡Que se vayan todos!: Out with the lot of them! This amounted to a refusal to take part in the electoral process, yet without suggesting any way in which power might be rethought or reorganized. It was a quintessential expression of the ‘autonomy of social movements’, disdainful of politics but lacking any alternatives. From a position of strength, one can indeed get rid of ‘the lot of them’. Without organized political forces, the slogan is merely a way to bow out from the fight for an alternative hegemony. In the Argentine case, this enabled Menem to win the first electoral round in 2002 and a relatively obscure provincial governor, Néstor Kirchner, to win the second. Kirchner set out to project, from within Peronism, the image of a moderate alternative to Menem in the mould of Lula or Tabaré Vázquez. Thus the crisis of hegemony was overcome. Kirchner capitalized on the fury of the streets, and the contempt for the Menem and De la Rúa governments. From a centre-left position, he set about repairing the cracks in state legitimacy and winning over many sectors of the piqueteros, whose more radical wings were thus isolated and weakened.

In all these instances, the notion of the autonomy of the social served not to help the regrouping of mass forces intent on organizing new forms of political action, nor as a way to construct alternative forms of power, but rather as a refusal to confront the issue of power. The clearest theoretical expositions of such tendencies are to be found in the works of Toni Negri and John Holloway. They argue explicitly for the abandonment of power, of the political sphere, on grounds that power corrupts everything since its forms of representing the popular will are intrinsically tainted and distorting; the will of the people can only be legitimately represented within the social sphere. Furthermore, Negri portrays the state as a conservative brake on globalization. Yet neither makes any attempt to construct concrete anti-neoliberal strategies; their prescriptions lead only to the inertia of the social movements. The wsf, for its part, made the need to regulate flows of finance capital one of its founding theses; yet this can only take place—as, for example, in the case of Venezuela—through state action.

Another approach to the crisis of hegemony besetting Latin America—with the exhaustion of the neoliberal model but the continuation of free-trade policies—can be found in Zapatismo. This movement was born of the demands of indigenous groups in Chiapas, and enjoyed a high national profile for a while, but it remained confined to the south-east of Mexico and the demands of a single sector. Rather than profit from the crisis of the pri, the Zapatistas took no part in the institutional jousting—which they condemned—and the pan stepped into the breach instead, as another right-wing option. Nor did they participate in the 2006 presidential elections, preferring to conduct the ‘Other Campaign’, parallel to the official race: an occasion for pouring more venom on the mainstream left candidate, the prd’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador, than on his rivals. Once more the winner was the pan, although by a tiny margin this time, and amid well-founded accusations of fraud. Felipe Calderón has continued with the neoliberal policies of his predecessor. He has also challenged the state monopoly of oil with a project that paves the way for the privatization of Pemex, while intensifying the crackdowns on popular protest.

Centre-left inflexions

A further response to the crisis of hegemony is that of the traditional left, embodied in governments like those of Lula, Kirchner, Vázquez or Ortega, which enjoy some form of critical support from the social movements of their countries—trade unions, rural movements, public-sector employees in health or education. These governments maintain the neoliberal model, but attempt to develop more flexible social policies—notably in Brazil, but also in Argentina, Uruguay and Nicaragua—that distinguish them from orthodox neoliberal administrations. Their foreign policies, moreover, are firmly committed to regional integration, with the accent on Mercosur and the more recently created Unasur, in preference to free-trade agreements with the us. This is the fundamental issue that divides Latin America today: the line that separates countries such as Chile, Mexico, Peru or Costa Rica, which have signed deals of this kind, from others such as Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua or Cuba, that are more interested in regional integration. This is a completely different distinction to that between a ‘good’ or ‘moderate’ centre-left, and a ‘bad’ or radical left, cultivated by the Western media and formulated by figures such as Jorge Castañeda, spokesman of the Latin American right, in order to divide the left, co-opting the moderates and isolating the radicals. It is reiterated yet again by the Economist’s Latin American editor, Michael Reid, who fulminates against left alternatives to neoliberalism in his Forgotten Continent (2007).

Meanwhile, four Latin American governments have taken the priority of regional integration a step further, aiming to break with the dominant model and begin the construction of what we might call the post-neoliberal alternative. Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Cuba are committed—Ecuador only unofficially so far—to building the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, whose integration process is more far-reaching; it now also includes Haiti, Nicaragua and Honduras. alba has attempted to combat the neoliberal model by creating de-mercantilized spaces and promoting what the World Social Forum has called ‘fair trade’, that is, exchanges not governed by market rates or wto norms of free trade. This experiment is unique for its practice of alternative modes of exchange, prefiguring what that ‘other possible world’ might look like. Here, each country gives according to what it has and receives according to its needs. Thus alba’s two founding countries, Venezuela and Cuba, swap the oil of the first for the second’s expertise in education, public health and sports, in line with their respective wants and possibilities. Thanks to these transactions, Venezuela has become the second country in Latin America to claim the status of an ‘illiteracy-free territory’, according to un criteria. This achievement was obtained in a public, de-mercantilized space, not under market conditions or subject to the educational budgets of traditional governments, even those of relatively more developed countries like Argentina, Mexico or Brazil; and it was not the product of a highly developed government-sponsored literacy method such as that of the Brazilian Paulo Freire.

Bolivia has announced that by the end of 2008 it expects to join Venezuela and Cuba as another illiteracy-free territory, thanks once more to the direct input of Cuban specialists. Other successes include ‘Operation Miracle’, a project that has restored the eyesight of hundreds of thousands of Latin—and indeed North—Americans by means of free operations in Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia; in the latter country, for example, thousands of Argentineans have benefited from the scheme. Meanwhile the Latin American School of Medicine is training the first generation of doctors from humble backgrounds, North Americans included, free of charge. Venezuela is using its oil revenues to construct a space of solidarity exchanges—Petrocaribe—that helps fund poor sectors in the us, just as alba runs solidarity programmes in Haiti, Bolivia, Nicaragua and elsewhere on the continent. Regional integration projects, like the Banco del Sur scheme, the transcontinental gas pipeline and Telesur, are other attempts to alter the relation of the region to the world market, by devoting financial resources and commodities to the fulfilment of its own objectives.